Dezi Bird Freeman, pictured outside a court in Victoria, had previously called police officers ‘scumbags’.
Perhaps Desmond Filby – to use the name he was given at birth – always had a Mr Hyde lurking beneath the Jekyll-like persona he presented to the world.
If so, he hid it well, at least from most of the locals.
Those who remember him before he became Dezi Bird Freeman, the conspiracy theorist and alleged police killer, recall a reserved man who was unfailingly polite when he came into town to pick up his post.
With two children and a charming wife who taught music and worked shifts at the local supermarket, he seemed to fit neatly into small-town Australia: an unremarkable man living an unremarkable life amid the trout streams and mountains of Victoria’s high country.
His alter ego, however, was anything but. Desmond Filby the landscape photographer was the kind of man who helped his children with their prep and doted on his wife. Dezi Freeman the “sovereign citizen”, by contrast, was a paranoid conspiracy theorist who allegedly shot dead two police officers, wounded a third, and then, it is presumed, dragged his family into the bush as hostages.
Victoria Police said late on Tuesday that Freeman’s partner and children “attended a police station this evening”.
When Freeman became a crank, and what turned him from a crank into a suspected killer, remain unknown and perhaps always will. Yet, as in so many recent cases in Australia and beyond, the coronavirus pandemic seems to have played a decisive role in tipping him over the edge.
His conspiratorial streak predates Covid. In 2019, he tried to place a magistrate under citizen’s arrest during a dispute over public access to a nearby national park, an act that suggested at least a passing flirtation with the “sovereign citizenship” ideology, which casts representatives of the state as enemies of the people.
But it was Covid that transformed him into a full-fledged adherent of a movement whose violent fringes are causing growing concern across the English-speaking world.
“He went from being just a pretty ordinary country bloke, a normal dude you’d see at the local footy club all the time, to quite a strange bloke,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted a local as saying. “He fell down a bit of a rabbit hole and sort of disappeared and went off radar.”
It began, acquaintances say, with his refusal to wear face coverings in shops and a rejection of lockdowns and vaccinations. It culminated in 2021, when Freeman took a leading role in an attempted private prosecution of Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, for treason.
Arrested outside the courthouse – where a magistrate later ruled that Andrews’ lockdown policies did not, in fact, amount to treason – Freeman could be heard denouncing the police officers taking him away as “scumbags” and “criminal filth”.
Freeman, who is 56, appears to have developed an abiding hatred of the police, with whom he had had repeated run-ins over a string of parking and driving offences. During a hearing last year to appeal the suspension of his driving licence, he told a court that “even the sight of a cop or a cop car [was] like an Auschwitz survivor seeing a Nazi soldier”.
Such outlandish language is common in sovereign citizen circles. Its adherents may not exactly see themselves as above the law, but they certainly believe they are exempt from it.
The movement, a particular phenomenon of developed English-speaking countries rooted in common law, rests on a misinterpretation of jurisprudence: the supposed right of individuals to declare themselves independent or “sovereign” of the state.
It is not new. It first gained traction in the United States in the 70s and later in Canada under the “Freeman of the Land” movement, a name that may even have inspired Freeman’s own.
Adherents, often drawn from far-right or fundamentalist Christian backgrounds, have long resorted to violence. Terry Nichols, the co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995, was a self-confessed sovereign citizen.
The ideology’s violent side has grown in Australia in recent years, however.
In 2022, three self-proclaimed sovereign citizens - Gareth, Nathaniel and Stacey Train - ambushed and killed two police officers and a neighbour at their remote property near Wieambilla in Queensland before being shot dead themselves.
All three subscribed to extremist Christian beliefs that appeared to intensify over Covid, when Nathaniel and Stacey Train lost their jobs at a local school for refusing to be vaccinated.
As in Freeman’s case, there was little in Nathaniel Train’s background to suggest he might turn killer. He was not just a teacher but the school’s headmaster.
Like the Trains, Freeman was expecting a visit from the police, in his case over a sexual abuse investigation for which he had already been questioned. So erratic had his behaviour become that his wife confided her fears to a neighbour just days before the attack.
Whether it could have been prevented is a question for another day. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that the sovereign citizen movement – as inchoate as it is – poses a growing threat to police officers and public servants in Australia and beyond, as Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister, acknowledged after the shootings.
“This ideology of not seeing themselves being subject to our laws and our society… is of real concern,” he said. “This threat is very real and we need to be very vigilant about it.”
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