‘Never going to find me’: How Dezi Freeman dodged the cops for so long
Dezi Freeman is one of the few Australians who managed to evade police for almost a year before being caught and killed.
A double cop killer hid in Victoria’s dense and challenging bushland for more than seven months, raising significant questions about how he was able to evade police officers for so long.
At around 8.30am on Monday morning, the massive manhunt for the self-proclaimed “sovereign citizen” came to an end.
Officers from the Special Operations Group (SOG) attacked a shipping container at a property in Thologolong on the Victoria-NSW border.
SOG officers tried to negotiate with the fugitive for three hours.
However, when he failed to exit peacefully, officers aboard the BearCat used a “claw” to throw flash grenades into the structure, forcing Freeman to exit with only a blanket and a gun believed to have been stolen from one of the officers he killed in August.
He was later shot more than 20 times and looked like “Swiss cheese”, a police source told the Herald Sun.
Freeman’s death marked the end of a seven-month saga that shook the country.
One of the most wanted men in Victorian history, he was one of four notable fugitives who managed to evade police for long periods.
Lack of digital footprint hindered police search
Macquarie University criminologist and former police officer Vincent Hurley told NewsWire Freeman’s regional location made it “incredibly difficult” for police to find him.
“If it was in this city then there would be lots of CCTV,” he said.
“He would be using public transport, so he might have to use his (Myki) card or equivalent to get around. Shopping malls would have automatic facial recognition.”
“Or the fact that he went into the woods means there’s no electronic footprint to follow, which means it’s incredibly difficult for the police to actually try and find him.”
Dr Hurley said police would have to resort to old-school tactics to try to catch him.
“(Detectives) were falling back on basic search skills like a search, a grid search, or a spiral search, or whatever search method they used to contain him, which he clearly missed,” he told NewsWire.
“So this actually goes against the grain of what police have traditionally been used to.”
How did Freeman evade the police for so long?
While catching Freeman required a lot of old-school police work, new technology was used to locate the fugitive in hard-to-reach places.
However, Dr Hurley said changes in seasons would affect its effectiveness.
“During the summer months, police would use drones or aerial surveillance tools that take a thermal image of a person’s body temperature,” he told NewsWire.
“So if it had been outdoors in the winter it would have been pretty easy to find, but if it had been in the cave they wouldn’t have been able to find it because of the thermal imaging.”
Dr Hurley said the fugitive had probably “found somewhere to go” in the cave or somewhere else on the ground that thermal technology could not capture.
Dr Hurley said Freeman’s move of nearly 200km was not that surprising given his “sovereign citizen” ideology.
Generally speaking, sovereign citizens exclude themselves from the rest of society in almost every respect.
They don’t feel like they have to follow the same rules and laws that other Australians follow, like registering a car or paying taxes.
Others become “preppers”; They proactively prepare for disaster by hoarding stashes of food and supplies, equipping themselves with survival skills, and sometimes hiding in shelters.
“If he had been a ‘prepper’ as they say… that would have lasted him an extra period,” Dr Hurley said.
Freeman’s “drive to survive” would take him even further.
“His greatest motivation for survival was to become a sovereign citizen because he adhered to the political ideology that the state, police, courts and government would ‘never find me,'” he said.
Did the police know he was alive?
In early 2026, Victoria Police said they had a strong belief that Freeman was already dead.
“We firmly believe he died in this area,” Detective Inspector Adam Tilley said in January.
Clearly this was not the case.
Dr Hurley believed the police were under the impression that Freeman was dead due to a lack of confirmed sightings and did not attempt to use this message to get Freeman out.
He said it was unlikely police would lie about this evidence lest it undermine public trust.
“I truly believe they thought so, too, because there was nothing else we knew at this point anyway,” he told NewsWire.
Instead, he argued, Freeman probably believed he could “outwit” the police by staying underground for as long as possible.
Freeman joins list of infamous fugitives
Freeman is not the first person to evade police after a heinous crime in Australia.
Bank robber Brenden Abbott, nicknamed the “Postcard Bandit”, made headlines when he escaped from Fremantle Prison in 1989 and remained on the run for more than five years before being recaptured in 1995.
He made another escape from Sir David Longland Prison in Queensland in 1997 and remained on the run for six months until he was discovered.
Darko Desic was a Grafton prison inmate who escaped incarceration in 1992 and has been on the run for almost three decades.
He was homeless and living in the sand dunes on Sydney’s Northern beaches when he handed himself in to police in 2022.
Another long-known fugitive is Malcolm Naden, who killed two young women, attacked another girl and attempted to kill a police officer in NSW in 2005.
Naden evaded police by hiding in woodland in Gloucester and Scone for seven years before he was caught by authorities in 2012.
John Bobak fled police after allegedly killing two men at a Gold Coast unit in 1991.
Although more than 30 years have passed since the murder allegations, Bobak has not yet been caught by the police.
