AARON PATRICK: Cop killer Dezi Freeman is dead but the sovereign citizen threat survives

Dezi Freeman was meant to be dead.

Instead, months after the police told the public they suspected the murderous sovereign citizen might have committed suicide, Freeman was hiding on a remote property an easy drive from Albury, a major regional city in southern New South Wales.

The Victoria Police’s investigation into the murderer of police officers Neal Thompson, 59, and the Belgian-born Vadim de Waart-Hottart, 35, last August will focus on the central question raised by Freeman’s seven-month long escape from justice: was he protected by a cell of anti-authority sympathisers?

Chief Commissioner Mike Bush said he was “sure” people helped Freeman get from Porepunkah, where he lived and killed the police, to where he was found about 150km away near the border village of Walwa.

Members of the force’s Special Operations Group — a military-style unit used to arrest criminals likely to be armed with guns — approached what Mr Bush described as “cross between a container and a very long caravan” around 5.30am.

The hideout was a rubbish-tip like set up in the middle of an eight-sided paddock, surrounded by trees. Three shipping containers were located near a small awning fashioned out of a tarp and a few poles on the middle grey container.

Outside the containers, plastic barrels and junk were scattered around, along with tarps, rusted metal, a wheelbarrow, a metal water tank, plastic tanks, an upside-down boat and a tractor.

For three hours the police sought Freeman’s surrender. Then, around 8.30am, he left his shelter, wrapped in a blanket carrying a gun, according to Mr Bush. The police shot him.

“Everything I know tells me this shooting was justified,” Victoria’s top policeman said at a press conference this morning. “There was an opportunity for him to surrender peacefully but he did not.”

Too dangerous

Although Freeman’s death is not official — the formal identification process will take one or two days — the police believe their manhunt is over.

Among the first to be told were detective Sen. Const. Thompson’s and Sen. Const. de Waart-Hottart’s families. Their deaths, while investigating allegations of child sexual assault, triggered one of the biggest police operations in the state’s history.

When they arrived at the bus Freeman and his wife used for a home on August 26, the police knew he was dangerous. They did not appreciate how dangerous.

Ten police officers were part of a search party looking for evidence and guns. Some worked in the area. Others were dedicated investigators into child abuse and sexual assault.

Freeman refused to let them in. While a relative filmed the confrontation on camera, Sen. Const. Thompson broke in through a window. He and Sen. Const. de Waart-Hottart were shot dead. A third policeman was shot in the leg. He hid under the bus for an hour waiting for help.

Freeman vanished into the bush. With a substantial portion of the state’s police participating in the search and pursuing 2000 leads, a $1 million reward and a hostile local community, Freeman might have been quickly caught.

‘Coward’

Somehow he escaped. The search’s failure led the police to seriously consider two months ago that Freeman had either killed himself or died in the rough country.

“I am not saying he is 100 per cent confirmed dead,” Detective Inspector Adam Tilley said then. “I am saying there is a strong possibility he is deceased on Mt Buffalo.”

That day some 100 police officers and volunteers began a five-day search of the mountain for what was essentially a search for a corpse.

Ms Bush said Freeman’s death, deep the bush, would have made it difficult for his victims’ families to experience “closure”.

The police union rejected the word, although it had another for Freeman: coward.

“This represents a step forward for our members,” it said. “It doesn’t lessen the trauma, give back the futures that were callously stolen or lessen the collective fear and grief that this tragic event has event has instilled in police and the wider community.”

The danger of sovereign citizens

How the notorious 56-year-old was able to travel across the state and find a shelter is already being investigated by Taskforce Summit.

The work is likely to take them into the world of sovereign citizens, an American-inspired movement that spread to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere during the pandemic.

Sovereign citizens oppose government control, do not accept authorities’ legitimacy and believe big business works with the state to monitor and suppress individuals. They are deeply hostile towards law enforcement and often refuse to cooperate when stopped while driving by police.

Freeman’s surname was an example of his commitment to the philosophy. His legal name was Desmond Filby. In 2023 he wrote on Instagram “the only good cop is a dead cop”. Police are “the new Gestapo” who should be “preferably incinerated” and have “declared war on Aussies”, he wrote, using all capitals.

Within hours of his death, Freeman was being celebrated by sympathisers. “The sovereign citizen ‘movement’ now has its first martyr,” one person wrote on X. “Well done, VicPol!”

His 21-year-old son, Koah Freeman, expressed anguish on Facebook at the celebration of his father’s death.

“Just bear in mind that to you’s my father was a cop killer, but to me that’s still my father who raised me to be the man I am today,” he wrote. “And for the people who know me well they know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“This is news that I’ll be grieving about while some of you disgusting humans celebrate online for me to watch.”

Fighting the law

While few sovereign citizens resort to violence, they are clogging courts with “pseudo law” that asserts the legal system has no jurisdiction over them, according to retired magistrate David Heilpern.

Last month he described spending 45 minutes on a traffic charge that should have taken two minutes.

He asked a defendant his name. The man said: “I am known by that name but do not identify. I challenge the jurisdiction of this court as the Queen did not personally appoint you. The Magna Carta states that I am a ‘freemen of our realm for ourselves’ and have ‘distrained to do more service for a knight’s fee or for any other free tenement than is due’.”

Other examples have emerged, including a former senator, One Nation’s Rod Culleton, who is fighting the Australian Federal Police over a court-declared bankruptcy that he argues is not legally binding.

Even if the movement’s Australian branch is small, that does not mean it is incapable of great violence, as last year’s Bondi Beach massacre demonstrated.

Freeman is a hero to some in a movement emerging as a national security threat, according to Lydia Khalil, an extremist expert at the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney.

“His death at the hands of law enforcement will likely perpetrate the sovereign citizen narrative that the state is illegitimate and oppressive,” she said in an email.

The police commissioner said it would have been “very difficult” for Freeman to reach his hideout without assistance — an indication there were supporters prepared to risk long prison sentences to help him.

So while the families and police officers involved may take comfort from today’s events, the threat posed by the sovereign citizen movement lives on.