A prominent Bright community figure close to Dezi Freeman’s wife says if police find someone in the town had helped Dezi Freeman evade capture, it will bring “another level of trauma” to those in the town.
As holidaymakers swarm to the region for the Easter long weekend, those in the area are on edge after police released two people without charge on Saturday evening following arrests at separate properties in north-east Victoria.
Police have not provided any further information on those arrested, and say their investigations are ongoing, leaving locals wondering who had been questioned and whether someone known to them had helped Freeman.
“If it turns out that there is somebody in Bright, what will happen is that will divide the town … it would be another level of trauma,” said Leanne Boyd, a friend of Freeman’s wife, Mali Freeman.
“We hope it’s no one we know. Because that’s more traumatic, it means someone lied to you.”
It emerged last 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 a three-hour stand-off, police shot dead the 56-year-old, having repeatedly called for him to surrender.
Freeman had been on the run since August 26 last year, when he killed Detective Leading Senior Constable Neal Thompson, 59, and Senior Constable Vadim de Waart-Hottart, 34, 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.
Neil Sutherland, whose brother’s property was where police found Freeman, said the release of those arrested had not brought any closure after a whirlwind week of learning the fugitive had been hiding out in a converted shipping container a kilometre from his own property.
“If someone is proven to have aided this bloke, I’d take it as closure,” he said. “From last Monday, there has been just questions and no answers.”
He said his brother, who had been in Tasmania for months, had been unaware Freeman was on the land. Neil has tried to work out on a map what route Freeman could have taken – a trek that if taken through the bush would be up to 100 kilometres and possibly three to four days’ hiking.
“I don’t know whether he’s stumbled on the place or whether people have told him,” Sutherland said. “I wouldn’t rule out him walking here.”
Meanwhile, Leanne Boyd hopes one outcome of the events is mental health reform after it emerged Freeman’s closest family had convinced him to book a mental health appointment in the weeks before he murdered the two officers.
“I think, in all of it, as angry as he appeared at the police, he was also fearful of them,” she said.
“I hope there’s reform in dealing with people with mental health, so there are no more police deaths in this way, and you don’t have the ensuring tragedies that occurred like they did [last Monday].”
Father Tony Shallue at Our Lady of the Snows Catholic Church delivered an Easter service on Sunday that did not mention the case that has engulfed the region for the past seven months.
He said Mali Freeman was a member of the church but had not attended since the two police officers were killed by Freeman last year.
The effects had been felt widely, he said.
“There’s no good in it. You start with the family, then those who knew him, then you’ve got the community, the businesses, and it went on for so long.”
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Jackson Graham is an education reporter at The Age. He was previously an explainer reporter.Connect via email.