Updated ,first published
Two associates of Dezi Freeman have been arrested as part of the investigation into how the police killer managed to evade capture for months.
Five days after Freeman was shot dead by heavily armed officers, a man and a woman were arrested at separate properties in north-east Victoria about 7am on Saturday.
Victoria Police issued a statement late Saturday afternoon that said the pair had been released without charge pending further inquiries.
Police confirmed the pair were not family members of Freeman, with a spokeswoman instead describing them as his associates.
“The investigation remains ongoing and, as such, we are not in a position to provide further details at this immediate time,” the spokeswoman said in a statement.
Police would not confirm where in the state’s north-east the pair were arrested.
Freeman had been on the run since August 19 last year, when he killed Neal Thompson and Vadim de Waart-Hottart at a Porepunkah property when they arrived as part of a group of 10 officers to carry out a search warrant in relation to child sexual abuse allegations against him.
In February, police said they strongly believed Freeman was dead.
But it emerged on Monday that Freeman had been hiding out in a shipping container on a remote bush property in Thologolong, near the border town of Walwa.
After an hours’-long stand-off, Special Operations Group members shot dead the 56-year-old, having repeatedly called for him to surrender.
No officers were injured, despite Freeman firing the semi-automatic pistol he had stolen from one of the police he had killed in August.
The shootout brought to an end Australia’s longest and most expensive manhunt.
Speaking on Monday, after Freeman was killed, Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Mike Bush repeatedly said he must have had help while on the run for 216 days.
“[It is] very important for us to understand how long he’s been here and who else was complicit in getting him here, and then caring for him or providing him with food and other things to this point,” Bush said.
“We will be speaking to anyone we suspect has assisted him to avoid detection and arrest.”
Four police sources, not authorised to speak publicly about the case, told The Age that the force was led to the Thologolong property by a tip-off from someone close to the country’s most wanted man.
Two burner phones were found at the scene – more than 150 kilometres away from Porepunkah – which police spent the week examining to try and establish who was assisting Freeman.
Police offered a record $1 million reward for any information leading to Freeman’s capture last year and warned that anyone caught harbouring or assisting Freeman would face severe penalties.
Criminal law specialist Melinda Walker previously told this masthead that in a case such as this, any charges would fall under section 325 of the state’s Crimes Act.
This includes cases where a person has committed a serious indictable offence and another person, who knows or believes them to be guilty of this “principal offence”, acts with the purpose of assisting with their escape from authorities or impeding their apprehension, prosecution, conviction or punishment.
“Where the principal offence is the most serious offence, being life imprisonment, then that person [who assists them] could be liable to a penalty of a maximum of 20 years if they are found guilty,” Walker said.
Walker said that for someone to be found guilty of helping a criminal, it must be proved they had done something “absolutely positive” with the knowledge of the accused offender’s crimes.
This could include deliberately misleading police, hiding the accused or providing them with food, transport or money to escape, she said.
Another senior legal source, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to speak publicly, said there was a cascading series of possible offences a person could face, from “moderate to very, very serious”.
“If the facts suggest that with the knowledge that a very serious crime’s been committed, and you do something to assist the offender, that’s a serious indictable offence that usually attracts jail,” the criminal lawyer said.
“If you don’t have a belief that it’s a murder, the maximum is around five years.
“But if you have a belief that it is murder, you could be facing 20 years in jail. We’re talking about very serious offences that are heard in the Supreme Court.”
The Age reported earlier this week that the task of building a case against anyone who had helped Freeman evade capture would face “serious obstacles”, according to officers familiar with the use of mobile phone data as evidence.
One police source, who was not authorised to speak on behalf of the force, described any proof of conversations between Freeman and his associates as “handy intelligence, but not great evidence”.
Last month, Victoria Police conceded it could not proceed with charges against Freeman’s wife Mali Freeman and a 56-year-old man from Porepunkah over obstructing their investigation.
The Office of Public Prosecutions reviewed a brief of evidence against the pair and found it was insufficient to support a conviction, which is understood to have rankled several investigators involved in the case.
The briefs against Mali Freeman and the Porepunkah man were independently reviewed by a barrister, who also determined a prosecution was unlikely.
Mali Freeman was arrested and interviewed by police in August before being released. She subsequently released a statement via her lawyer in which she urged her husband to surrender and for anyone helping him to come forward.
Police finished examining Freeman’s Thologolong hideout on Wednesday night, with photos taken by The Age on Thursday detailing his temporary camp around a shipping container with apparently newly fitted spinning air ducts to make it habitable in the summer heat.
Officers found camp chairs, an open box of beer, gas bottles and cooking appliances.
The property is owned by Richard Sutherland, 75, who has been in Tasmania for months and has not yet returned. He was unaware Freeman was staying on his land, with his brother Neil Sutherland, who owns the neighouring property, saying he was shocked to learn that that was where Freeman had been hiding out.
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Tom Minear – Tom is the state topic editor of The Age.
Melissa Cunningham is a health reporter for The Age. She has previously covered crime and justice.Connect via X or email.