That yet Kelly Rachel announce her.
She's on us first year.
So the four officers arrive at the property.
They are Constables Rachel Mcrowe twenty nine, Matthew Arnold twenty six, Keeley Broth twenty eight, and Randall Kerr twenty eight, very young junior police officers.
They find that the gate is locked.
They jump the fence and they start walking up the fairly long driveway towards the house.
The property these four officers are walking to is owned by Gareth Train and his wife Stacy. The police are responding to a routine welfare check for Gareth's brother Nathaniel.
They didn't see the two brothers, Gareth and Nathaniel lying on the ground in full camo, aiming rifles at them, and so what followed has been described as both an ambush and an execution. As Arnold was stepping over the fence, the brothers shot and killed him. They shot mcrow three times. Kirk managed to run behind a tree and from there get back to the police cars, which were under heavy fire. He was shot in the hip and then he managed to get away and drive for help.
I'm in the car.
Gareth took Arnold's handgun off him, and as she planned for her life, he killed the wounded mcrow, who was on the ground.
With two officers down, The trains continued their ambush.
Roth was hiding in the long grass while all this was happening, and then the brothers set fire to the remaining police car and also that long grass in which he was hiding.
They were trying to drive her out into the open.
At this point a neighbor he's the noise of gunfire and sees smoke. He comes to help, shot dead too. The remaining two police officers managed to get away and call for backup.
Yeah, well, these two of them, I think I've been shot at cut.
And over the next six hours a siege ensued. They refused to negotiate or surrender, and eventually all three trains were shot and filled by the.
Police had to drive away a bit.
This siege, where six people, including two police officers, lost their lives, has been labeled Australia's first fundamentalist Christian terrorist attack. The train family believed the end of days had come from Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM Today. Journalist and author of the Believer, Sarah Krasmastin on what the trains believed and what the inquest into the killings can tell us about extremism in Australia. It's Monday, August five, Sarah.
The very first question I think that everyone had after this attack was why why had these three people shot and killed police and their neighbor. And it became clear very quickly that they had held very strong religious and conspiratorial beliefs. So tell me about what was reported about that initially.
So understandably there was a huge volume of coverage.
This lonely dirt road was the only way in of Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacy trained sovereign status. They called it remote, isolated and heavily fortified so they could protect it with deadly murderous force.
Much of that report emphasized the bizarre quality of where the trains lived in Wimbilla, and it's.
An area known as the Blocks.
So we heard about how this place where they lived was quote harsh and isolated and the perfect place for this devastating crime.
There were keepout signs on the gates.
They lived on isolated bush blocks with no electricity or running water or sewerage, and that this was kind of a mecha for people with alternative lifestyles. Again, very distancing, putting all of this fear and kind of this freaky coating on the crime that could only happen in this one exceptional place.
The area where the murders took place is known by Wyambilla locals as the Blocks, a bit of a mecha for people seeking alternative lifestyles. It's littered with keepout signs, harsh isolated, the perfect scene for the most devastating crime.
That dovetailed with what we were learning in the reporting that was uncovering rapidly the online activity of the Trains.
One of the offenders, Gareth Train, was heavily involved in the online conspiracy community.
Is that an avenue that you'll be investigating, Yes, definitely, definitely. So.
We heard that Gareth had had an increasing obsession with conspiracy theories and that they had also been voiced to a certain extent by Nathaniel and Stacy. During the siege and following the murders, Gareth and Stacy posted their online video under their middle names Daniel and Jane, and Gareth said that they came to kill us and we killed them and referred to police as demons and devils. We know that Gareth had espoused very strong anti government, anti police,
anti vaccine views. Gareth was described as a doomsday prepper that he was getting ready to live out the apt acalypse on his property. He supported the Sovereign Citizen movement, and he made a number of claims.
About everything from the.
Need to build an arc to the fact that Princess Diana had been killed in a blood sacrifice and that Port Arthur.
Was a false flag operation.
COVID, however, seems to have triggered for all three of them an increasing fixation on various extremist beliefs and conspiracy theories. Initially, Queensland Police did not label these killings as domestic terrorism, but after looking a bit more into the train's preoccupation with fundamentalist Christian premillennialism, they did change that assessment and they labeled this as Australia's first religiously motivated terrorist attack and also his first fundamentalist Christian attack.
Yeah, it's interesting as you say this attack, it's been described as Australia's first Christian fundamentalist terror attack, and I wonder when you think about that, to what extent do you see Gareth and Nathaniel and Stacy as Christian and to what extent with a conspiracy theorists, how do you unpick those two parts of their motivations and their psyche.
That's the key question, and to a large extent, the work of the inquest over the next five weeks, and I think it's also to sub extent unanswerable.
It's useful to explain a.
Bit about the brother's childhood and their background. They were raised in a conservative Christian family. Their father, Ronald Train, had a spiritual rebirth and founded his own fundamentalist evangelical church, where he was the pastor.
For nearly thirty years.
When the brothers were in their twenties, both Nathaniel and Gareth stopped any contact with the parents. This has been explained in terms of the way in which allegations that the brothers made about childhood's sexual abuse were received by the family. Stacy also became increasingly estranged.
From her family.
Eventually her marriage to Nathaniel ended and she married Gareth. This was, especially in the early reporting, described as a bizarre love triangle or a love tryst. It evoked a huge amount of interest in the general public, so the evidence that led to this being labeled as religiously motivated violent extremism was the premillennialist nature of a lot of the beliefs that Gareth had expressed online and that had been found in Stacy's diary. I hadn't heard of it
before I researched the story. But premillennialism is based on a literal interpretation of certain verses of the Book of Revelation that describe a period of apocalypse that will be followed by the second coming of Christ. So the Trains understood COVID as a sign of those end times, and they also understood premillennialism as requiring and even sanctioning violence against certain devils and demons in order to bring about
this kind of transformational period and eventually perfect utopia. So because of the nature of those beliefs, which again I should say are not common to Christianity is typically practiced, their offending was labeled as religiously and not ideologically motivated. But now that the inquest is underway, we might get a little bit more understanding of what was ideological, what was religious, and what was pathological.
After the break.
Was this attack caused by a shared delusion Sarah. The coronial inquest into the Wimbilla killings. It's been set up to understand the fundamentals of the police response and what happened in that six hour siege, but tell me a bit more about its scope and what else we might actually learn by the end of this So to.
The extent that it's possible, the inquest is going to be looking at everything that coalesced on that day as it hears from about sixty different witnesses in her overview, which kind of set out the roadmap for how the inquest is going to run over the next few weeks. Counsel assisting the court, Ruth O Gorman Casey, provided fresh details about you know, the trend's beliefs and introduced in particular future witness doctor Andrew aboud who's a clinical forensic psychologist.
And she explained that doctor Aboude will testify and that be on the twelfth of August, that the trio we're experiencing delusions and other symptoms consistent with shared psychotic disorder follia twat so three people sharing the same delusion, and that's characterized typically by a close relationship where one person's.
Delusion or delusions are transmitted to.
The others and kind of set off a similar psychotic state of mind. So, according to doctor Aboud, Gareth's behavior was connected to a genuine psychiatric condition, and we'll hear more about that.
Okay, So in your reporting, what views have you come to about the dynamic between Nathaniel and his brother, Gareth and his wife Stacey. Does the idea that they were all sharing a delusion? Does that tally with what you understand of them.
We'll have to wait and see what the psychiatric evidence is. My first impression, knowing.
What I do know now about the physical domestic violence and the coerce of control that Gareth had exercised over Stacy during the course of their marriage, complicates the picture of her participation and perhaps would extend to I guess the legitimacy of the claim that she was operating under
psychosis rather than out of compliance or fear. We might not get a clear answer to that, but I think it's important in any assessment of her mental state to put it in the context of the marriage that she had and what's known about the coerce of control in that situation.
And just finally, Sarah, we know that conspiratorial thinking spiked during COVID and that was actually a trigger for the trains. So knowing that they are very much not alone in this type of thinking, how should we judge the risk of an attack like this happening again and should we be looking at it less as a one off event in rural Queensland and more of an ongoing threat.
Well, I'm hopeful that over the next five weeks that's something that the Inquest is going to consider, because we are so lucky to have a huge amount of research in this field addressing exactly that question. The nature of the problem is that a lot of that radicalization to violence occurs online in isolation. It happens rapidly and is happening to increasingly younger people, and so it's in terms of detection, it's very hard to find what's happening before
it explodes. But because the problem is multifaceted, so are the solutions. Again and again, the solutions seem to cluster around increasing social cohesion.
At every level of society.
So it would require all of government, bipartisan support that we would have a reduction in this of exclusivist, populist politicking that paints people our marginalized groups as other or outsiders, and inclusion kind of at every level, from not just those kind of ways in which national political debates are framed, but in the way our local.
Neighborhoods are run.
The effect of that would be to make people a bit more resilient to the ways in which these radicalizing, extremely dangerous forums are meeting needs in vulnerable people for self worth and dignity and connection and control over their lives. And I think that might be one of the scariest things about this event, and not necessarily something that an inquest can answer, because it indicates that the content of
the extreme belief is less important than the feeling it generates. Here, the beliefless premillennialism, but it could have just as easily been something else here. The offending happened in the Western Downs, it could have happened in any Australian city or neighborhood. Here three people died, and while that's a tragedy, it
could have very easily been many many more. So there's value in not just stigmatizing and distancing this as an exceptional event that happened out there about some freaky belief system, but looking more broadly at our vulnerability and brittleness as a society, because this can.
Affect any of us at any time.
Sarah, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for having me.
Also in the news today, Northern Territory Police Commissioner Michael Murphy has apologized to First Nations Territory for past harms and injustices caused by members of the Northern Territory Police. In a speech at the Gama Festival in northeast Arnham Land, Commissioner Murphy acknowledged that police have abused their powers and said he would make every effort to eradicate racism in
the police force. His apology comes after it was revealed that a unit of anti police had given out racist awards and shared racist text messages among officers and Karmala Harris has accused Donald Trump of trying to back out of a presidential debate. The US broadcaster ABC News was set to host the debate, but Donald Trump has instead proposed the debate happen on rival network Fox News. Ads released by the Democratic National Committee taunt mister Trump, claiming
the convicted felon is afraid to debate. Miss Harris, I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM. Thanks for listening.