AFL matriarch says she stored Dezi Freeman’s guns as police keep digging into fugitive network
By The Times of Australia
The Dezi Freeman investigation has pushed back into the hills of north-east Victoria, this time through a blunt admission from Kay Reid, the mother of AFL premiership players Ben and Sam Reid: she says she once stored Freeman’s registered guns at her Buckland property.
Reid told the ABC her family ties to Freeman went back about two decades. She said she also helped bring Freeman’s wife, Malia, to Australia through her travel agency work. Her home was searched this week as Victoria Police continue trying to map how Freeman survived seven months on the run after killing two police officers at Porepunkah in August 2025.
Detective Leading Senior Constable Neal Thompson and Senior Constable Vadim de Waart-Hottart were shot dead when police attended Freeman’s bus-home to execute a warrant. A third officer was injured. Freeman vanished into the bush and was not found until March, when police shot him dead during a standoff at Thologolong, near the NSW border.
Reid has denied helping him while he was a fugitive. She told the ABC the guns had been kept earlier in a safe inside a locked shed, and said her husband later contacted police about them. Her line is simple: friendship, not harbouring. Investigators appear to be testing whether anyone around Freeman crossed that line.
That is why the story matters. It is not just about a familiar football surname landing in a grim police file. It is about the support circles that can sit around violent men: old friends, ideological fellow travellers, neighbours, people who say they were only helping out, people who may know more than they first let on.
ABC reporting says police believe several people arrested and released since Freeman’s death are loosely linked through sovereign citizen beliefs. Detectives have been seizing phones and other devices, looking for signs of material help: money, lifts, shelter, supplies, warnings, anything that might explain how Australia’s most wanted man kept moving for 216 days.
Reid and her husband were not among the five people arrested and released. No charge has been laid against them. But their Buckland home was one of several properties hit in a cross-border search effort this week, with police still asking the same hard question months after Freeman’s death: who helped him stay gone?
The two slain officers’ deaths are now before the coroner. Freeman’s death will also face a separate inquest. In between those two processes sits the unfinished part of the case: the network, if there was one, that kept a double police killer alive and hidden long after Porepunkah was left carrying the damage.
Sources: ABC News reporting published June 19, 2026; earlier Victoria Police and NSW Police-linked reporting on Taskforce Summit searches across Victoria and NSW.
