Image: Ed Dunens/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Police raids reopen the hardest question in the Dezi Freeman case: who helped him run?
By Wednesday morning, the Dezi Freeman investigation had moved well beyond the story of one armed man hiding in the bush.
Victoria Police now say they believe Freeman crossed between Victoria and New South Wales during the seven months after he shot two police officers dead at Porepunkah, and that he received help from other people before he was finally cornered and killed by police near the border in March.
That is the weight behind Tuesday’s raids. Detectives from Taskforce Summit, working with NSW Police under Strike Force Namberta, executed seven warrants just after 6.20am on 16 June. Three were at rural Victorian properties in Buckland, Stanley and Lucyvale. Four more were in New South Wales, at Greenwich Park, Tarlo, Wombeyan Caves and Umina Beach.
A 64-year-old Lucyvale man was arrested in Wodonga, interviewed, and released pending further investigation. A 47-year-old Wombeyan Caves man was arrested in Greenwich Park on unrelated outstanding warrants. Police said no further arrests had been made, but officers were speaking with a number of occupants at the searched properties. Electronic devices were seized.
It is a dry police release on paper. In plain terms, it means investigators are still trying to map the road Freeman took after the killings, the hands that may have fed him, housed him, moved him, or kept quiet, and the gaps that allowed one of Australia’s most wanted men to stay out for more than 200 days.
Freeman, 56, fatally shot Detective Leading Senior Constable Neal Thompson and Senior Constable Vadim de Waart-Hottart at a Rayner Track property in Porepunkah on 26 August 2025. A third officer was seriously wounded after being shot in the lower body. Police were at the property to execute a search warrant linked to an investigation by the Wangaratta Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Team.
After the shooting, Freeman disappeared into country he knew. The search stretched through the alpine scrub and beyond it. Police had long warned that, if Freeman was alive, he would probably need help to get out of the area and survive for months. Tuesday’s warrants show that theory has not gone away. It has sharpened.
Freeman was found on 30 March at a rural property in Thologolong, near Walwa, close to the Victoria-NSW border. Victoria Police say a stand-off ran for several hours before a confrontation shortly after 8.30am. Freeman was fatally shot. No police were physically injured and nobody else was present at the property, according to police.
Both fatal incidents, the killing of the two officers in Porepunkah and the police shooting of Freeman in Thologolong, are now before coronial investigation. That matters. It means the public version of this story is still incomplete, and the families of the officers killed are still waiting for the harder answers: not only how Freeman pulled the trigger, but how he stayed gone for so long.
Detective Inspector Anthony Gasparini said police were working to piece together Freeman’s movements and identify anyone who may have helped him before he was found. He said the aim was to provide answers to the families of the officers, to police affected by the attack, to the Porepunkah community, and to the coroner.
The latest appeal is focused on the months between August 2025 and March 2026, and particularly on areas where Tuesday’s warrants were carried out. Police want anyone with information about Freeman’s movements, or anyone who may have assisted him, to contact Crime Stoppers Victoria.
For Porepunkah, this is the long tail of a violent morning that never really ended. The gunman is dead. The investigation is not. What police are chasing now is the network, if there was one: the quiet lifts, the spare beds, the phones, the messages, the people who may have helped a wanted man stay in the dark while two police families buried their own.
