‘Oh my God, it’s Uncle Des’: The spiralling descent of an alleged police killer

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Long before the deranged ranting and raging began, Luke Filby knew his uncle simply as the man who could make life feel electric – renting Terminator 2, blasting Metallica, and mucking around like a fun older brother while they played Super Mario Kart.

Now, those memories are tainted by another set: a Christmas lunch filled with rants about religion and the end of the world. Hours at a hospital deathbed drowned out by angry tirades from his uncle Dezi Freeman against police. A frightening descent into violence and conspiracy theories.

The nephew of the alleged Porepunkah police killer has described his descent into “gibberish” conspiracy theories.

“I tuned it out in the end,” Filby recalls. “It didn’t even make sense to me. It was just like gibberish.”

Somewhere along the way, the uncle who once listened to songs like Metallica’s Enter Sandman began insisting the music was satanic. It was one of the first steps in a long, spiralling collapse that would plunge his entire family deep into his vortex of fixation and paranoia, culminating in the horrific events in Porepunkah.

Filby mourns the man he lost years ago – long before his uncle chose a new life and a new name, before the shootings and the headlines, before Dezi became a fugitive.

“He went through so many different groups in his life phases,” Filby says.

“It was like he always tried to find a place, a group, where he could fit.”

“Everything that has unfolded has completely devastated us. It has broken our hearts for the innocent lives lost, and their families involved.”

The last Christmas

The last time Freeman saw his extended family was Christmas 2018, and he spent the day erratically regurgitating his fanatical views to weary relatives on everything from religion and doomsday theories to the impending apocalypse.

During his sudden bursts of rage over lunch, he spewed out vitriol about his hatred of police, his disdain for authorities.

Only months before the family gathering, Freeman was ranting and raving about the government and bracing for the end of the world at his father’s deathbed.

“He was just going on and on about authority and politics,” Filby recalls.

Dezi Freeman and his wife, Amalia (Mali) Freeman.

This particular Christmas was a final tipping point for many of the Filbys, splintering an already fractured family, who say they have been estranged from the alleged double murderer for years by both name and ideology.

Freeman, a self-proclaimed “sovereign citizen”, changed his surname from Filby and has been on the run for 10 days after allegedly blasting Detective Leading Senior Constable Neal Thompson, 59, with a home-made shotgun through the door of a bus the weapons enthusiast was living in near the township of Porepunkah on August 26.

He is then alleged to have opened a window of the bus and shot Senior Constable Vadim de Waart-Hottart, 35, who also died at the scene. Another detective seriously wounded in the attack is understood to have hidden under the bus for up to an hour until paramedics arrived.

Police say officers were at the property to execute a warrant related to historical child sexual abuse offences.

Freeman has not been sighted since, despite hundreds of specialist officers trawling the dense forests, snow-laden mountains and deep valleys of Victoria’s High Country, about 210 kilometres north-east of Melbourne.

The many faces of Desmond Filby

By all accounts from family, friends and acquaintances, Dezi Freeman has had many incarnations over his life.

In his 20s, he was a tree-hugging environmentalist. A heavy metal fan with unkempt long dark hair who loved to play Nintendo. A devout Christian. Luke Filby recalls his uncle obsessively going to church youth groups and then destroying all his Metallica cassette tapes in the 1990s as he plunged deeper into Christianity and suddenly began to describe the band as “satanic and evil”.

He recalls his uncle bizarrely using a magnet to erase the music from the cassettes in a process known as tape degaussing, which works by using a strong magnetic field to erase data.

Those who have known the 56-year-old for decades say he has always struggled to hold down a job, living off welfare payments and a disability pension for years, and exhibiting what they describe as “narcissistic, racist and misogynistic” traits.

Locals say he has also worked sporadically as a freelance photographer, a diver and an abseil instructor at “The Gorge” near Bright.

He was also an avid churchgoer, going to mass weekly at the Our Lady of the Snows Catholic Church in Bright – attending for the last time just days before the double shooting.

“He always wanted something for nothing,” one acquaintance, who knew Freeman for years, says.

“Huge ego. A real jealous streak. He always wanted what others had but was not prepared to work for it.”

Another family member says he was the type of person “upset with everybody else having something better than him”.

His relatives say he refused to pay parking and speeding fines, and was embroiled in road-rage incidents and countless disputes with neighbours as he became a radicalised anti-authority conspiracy theorist who adhered to pseudo-legal beliefs in line with sovereign citizens, who believe they are not subject to the law.

His volatile and often violent temperament caused him to constantly fall out with his family. Filby claims members of the family fell out with Freeman after he had an altercation with his own brother.

Mali and a new life

Freeman disappeared to the Philippines soon after this altercation, and Filby says he remembers his uncle suddenly re-emerging in the early 2000s with his wife Amalia, known as Mali.

He says it was Mali who helped him to temporarily reconnect with his frayed family before they became estranged again.

Amalia Freeman with her three children with Dezi Freeman, taken in 2022

“She’s such a wonderful, spirited person,” Filby says. “We are very worried about her and the kids. He’s gone on the run from police and has basically thrown them under a bus.”

Filby still mourns the uncle who he says was like an older brother to him as a boy.

“He would rent Terminator 2 from the video store and play Super Mario Kart with me,” he says. “That’s what I loved about him, and so it was just sad that he had this weird anger inside of him, almost like a mental illness. This kind of rage where he constantly threw tantrums.”

He always wanted what others had but was not prepared to work for it.”

Acquaintance

But like much of Freeman’s family, Filby had distanced himself from his uncle for years as his behaviour grew more erratic and terrifying.

“My grandparents, Dezi’s mum and dad, were some of the loveliest, Good Samaritan Christians ever,” he says. “They never swore or anything. Always tried to do the right thing. They would just be absolutely heartbroken by this.”

Pandemic paranoia and a new tribe

As the years went on, Freeman’s extremist views only hardened. Those who knew him say he became paranoid, setting up surveillance cameras wherever he was living and meticulously researching technology devices as he joined online forums for conspiracy theorists, including a Facebook group dedicated to preparing for the apocalypse.

One family member also recalled him increasingly watching online videos of police brutality, and grotesque terrorism and beheading footage from the Middle East.

Freeman refused to abide by the law, believing it did not apply to him. He frequently spent extended periods in the bush and was known to be an expert hunter. His fixation with firearms and making his own guns intensified, too.

Former landlord Jamie King told this masthead last week that Freeman had a long-running fascination with home-made arsenal dating back more than decade. King recalled his former tenant showing him sketches of guns that he had found on the internet.

“He looked at me, and he said, ‘How hard do you reckon it would be to make them?’” he says.

Freeman had told the farmer he wanted to make his own guns, but had also asked his wife, Mali, to get a firearm licence so he could buy more weapons.

“I said, ‘Why would Mali want a gun?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve got assault charges.’”

Jamie King at the house in Nug Nug he rented to alleged gunman Dezi Freeman.

His intense hatred for police is well-documented in online posts, video footage and court documents.

During a hearing last year appealing his suspended driver’s licence, Freeman told a court that “even the sight of a cop or a cop car … it’s like an Auschwitz survivor seeing a Nazi soldier”.

He came to public attention for his anti-government stunts during the pandemic, making headlines in 2021 when he helped lead an attempted private prosecution of then-premier Daniel Andrews for treason.

Freeman has for years displayed contempt for police and the justice system, and is known among anti-authority extremist groups for his public stunts.

He has described police as terrorist thugs and Nazis. In the days before the police killings, his wife confided in a neighbour, fearing for his mental health.

In 2023, he posted online “the only good cop is a dead cop” and called for the “extermination” of politicians. These views appear to have only deepened when he was drawn to the so-called freedom movement during the coronavirus pandemic.

During the pandemic, his behaviour became increasingly erratic. He refused to wear face masks in shops, voiced his refusal to get vaccinated, and told people about his distaste for government restrictions and lockdowns.

“He was anti everything to do with it,” one local said. “He fell down a bit of a rabbit hole. It was all a bit unhinged.”

A friend of Freeman’s wife, Mali, says Freeman began to change during the pandemic, believing the Victorian government had mishandled its COVID response.

She says Freeman had begun to mobilise with a group of people in the community who were also opposed to lockdowns, restrictions and vaccines.

King says Freeman considered himself to be “a bit of a Geronimo” – a reference to the famed Native American leader who resisted both Mexican and American forces in the late 19th century.

“He’s probably wanting to go down in a blaze of glory so he gets written to history,” he says.

King says his former neighbour owned a ghillie suit, an elaborate type of camouflage clothing, that he would wear in the remote bushland when he disappeared into the High Country for weeks on end.

“I reckon he actually thought he was Native American,” King said, adding that Freeman had a tipi, a conical tent of indigenous American tribes, on the property when he lived there.

King still vividly remembers when Freeman came to his house one afternoon holding sketches and drawings he got online about how to make home-made guns.

Looking back now, that moment is chilling.

“I never would have thought it would come to this,” he says.

But another of Freeman’s former neighbours, Gary French, is not shocked by the alleged brutal double murder.

“He’s always been dangerous,” French says. “Anywhere Dezi has lived, he has brought chaos. He’s created a multitude of problems for a lot of people.”

French and his family found themselves embroiled in a bitter land dispute and then a drawn-out civil court case when the suspected gunman began hunting for deer and continually trespassing on their land.

French says Freeman used drones and surveillance technology to spy on, threaten and torment his family when they lived next door to him in Myrtleford between 2017 and 2019.

“We took a civil case against him … It was a two-year process,” French says. “He was defending himself in court. He attempted to arrest the magistrate involved. It was just an absolute circus.”

It cost the family $100,000 in legal fees. French says he often felt police were powerless to stop him.

“He lost his gun licence at that time,” French says. “So I was dumbfounded that he actually got a gun licence back.”

“But he has also been convicted of firearm offences previously, so I just couldn’t believe he even had a firearms licence to begin with.”

Police arrested Dezi Freeman outside the Myrtleford court in 2021.

The making of a mountain man

King says he always felt that Freeman was envious of him because he owned a sprawling block of land in the remote hamlet of Nug Nug, about 20 kilometres west of Porepunkah.

“He was a little bit jealous of me because I own property,” King says.

“He’d say, ‘It’s not fair that you own all this’, and I would say ‘Dezi, I’ve had a job since I was 14 years old’. I’ve never been on Centrelink. I purchased this property.”

He remembers Freeman as a person who was self-absorbed and arrogant. He says he once pretended to be a photographer employed by the Country Fire Authority, wearing a firefighter uniform with the word media sewn on it, so he could take photos at close range as bushfires tore through the High Country.

Early one summer’s day, when the two were still neighbours, Freeman told King to come outside his house after midday.

When King went outside, he saw Freeman had climbed a nearby mountain and was standing on top of it holding a tiny mirror in his hand, illuminating the vast countryside below with sunlight.

“You could see this light reflecting from the mirror kilometres away,” he said. “It was incredible. He was just standing there on top of this mountain like he was the king of it.”

Their relationship soured in 2012 during a dispute, when King discovered a vast marijuana crop growing on the property and told Freeman to dig it up within 24 hours.

“He [Dezi] flipped out. I mean this guy went f--king nuts … He was in my face screaming that he’s going to shoot me dead,” King says, his eyes flashing wildly as he recounts the encounter.

“It was like a flip switched. This went on for five or 10 minutes,” King told this masthead earlier this week.

“I have thought a lot about what has happened these last few days, and I didn’t think he had it in him,” King said.

“He’s always been dangerous.”

Gary French, neighbour

“But is he a doomsday prepper? F---, yeah. I reckon he’s built an underground bunker somewhere or hiding down a mineshaft.”

Exit light, enter night

Filby was outside his home in the regional city of Albury-Wodonga tending to his birds when his mother, Freeman’s sister, called last Tuesday afternoon.
While they were chatting about their day, another call came through from Filby’s uncle, Freeman’s brother, and his mother hung up abruptly. Minutes later, she called him back.

“She said, ‘Google Porepunkah shooting right now’,” Filby says. “So I googled it, and mum said, ‘Who do you think that is?’ And, I was like ‘Oh my god. It’s Uncle Des’.”

“My mum has been crying her eyes out about it for days,” Filby says.

“We are absolutely heartbroken for the two police officers who have died, their families, and the third guy that was injured.”

Now, Filby is left haunted by two versions of the same man: the uncle who once felt like a brother, and the alleged murderous fugitive accused of killing two police officers.

“I always felt something like this was going to happen,” Filby says. “But I wasn’t sure precisely what would be the thing to finally tip him over the edge.”

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