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When Desmond Filby – self-styled as “Dezi Freeman” – died in a hail of gunfire on Monday, he was already a kind of ghost.
The sheer remoteness of the Victorian wilderness into which he fled after murdering police officers Neal Thompson and Vadim de Waart-Hottart near Porepunkah in August last year, and the persistent suspicion that he might have taken his own life soon after, gave his brief and doomed reappearance the power of a revenant.
“Days like today offer a sobering reminder that policing happens while you sleep, when the media spotlight on an investigation dims and when everything seems lost and forgotten,” was how Police Association secretary Wayne Gatt put it.
More than 450 police officers had been involved in the fugitive’s pursuit, and well over $1 million was spent on the manhunt itself, with a further $2.5 million set aside to compensate residents of Porepunkah and surrounding Alpine communities for the disruption caused. All this is before we find out what will happen to the $1 million reward for information leading to his location.
The Age believes such a heinous crime and its effect on the community fully justified that commitment of resources. Still, serious questions remain about the initial decision to send non-specialist police to arrest a man with a known hatred of the force and a history of gun use (though at the time of the attempted arrest, he did not have a firearms licence).
In the end, it was the Special Operations Group, whose presence had been deemed unnecessary in August, who caught up with the killer. The police work will not end there. As Chief Commissioner Mike Bush pointed out, Freeman’s ability to travel some 150 kilometres undetected suggests assistance from “a wide network of friends and associates within that sovereign citizen group”.
As was the case after the 2022 killings at Wieambilla in Queensland, there are nagging questions about the size and shape of the “sovereign citizen” movement – and most importantly of all, where it is going.
Immediately after the Porepunkah shootings, a placard supporting Freeman appeared at an anti-migration protest in Adelaide. There is no question that he was part of a community of anti-authority sentiment, whose networks police are struggling to penetrate.
It is unsurprising, but still deeply concerning, in this environment that Paul Sakkal reports today that politicians are seeking much closer protection as threats have spiked over the past four years.
It should not take another such tragedy to concentrate the efforts of Australian Federal Police, state and territory forces and our intelligence services on countering this movement and others in its orbit.
Dr Vincent Hurley, a former police officer and now a criminologist at Macquarie University, worries that Freeman had “given [police and the government] the middle finger for seven months … sovereign citizens and extremists will use him as a yardstick”. Perhaps so, and all the more reason to ensure that we have visibility into these groups.
It is also important to remember that having changed his name and characterised himself as a rebel against established authority, the charges which led police to Porepunkah – and two officers to their deaths – on that fateful August day in 2025 related to serious child sex offences. He could surely be no one’s hero outlaw.
Those who loved Neal Thompson and Vadim de Waart-Hottart deserve our sympathy and our attention today. They should not have to compete with glorification of a self-aggrandising and rage-filled extremist described by one member of his own family as an “incredibly narcissistic, aggressive, dangerous and scary man”.
We can only hope that once police have completed this investigation, the lessons they learn can help prevent others descending into the darkness that claimed Freeman, and give the authorities better tools to protect all of us from the violence that caused such loss and grief to flow from a tiny country community.
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