Dezi Freeman manhunt: The four months I spent talking to accused cop killer as search continues in Porepunkah

The saying, “you never know what someone’s capable of”, never rang truer for me than yesterday afternoon.

I spent months talking to alleged police killer Dezi Freeman — still at large in Victoria’s rugged and remote high country — when his irate email landed in A Current Affair’s inbox some time around mid-2018.

I was a budding TV producer, fresh from papers, eager to explore, and always willing to travel to the four corners of Victoria from our bureau in search of a story, on a moment’s notice.

I phoned Dezi and he supplied a Dropbox link with footage showing his neighbour, Zar Sacutelli and his friend Robin, abusing Dezi and his wife Mali, while Zar’s visitors tear up the paddock adjacent to his with motorbikes, taunting him, spoiling the unique serenity that came with living in the valley beside Victoria’s Mount Buffalo.

In the manner of his taunting, it was obvious that Zar — who owned a property beside the one Dezi, his wife, and young son lived in as renters — believed Dezi was a nuisance, and deserved very little respect.

My boss said it wasn’t enough: Dezi would need to keep shooting videos.

We needed more moments of uncivilised dirt bike baiting to nail the neighbour for his behaviour.

So, every couple of days for the next four months, I checked in with Dezi to collect more footage.

To get to the point where he would send over footage, I had to listen to Dezi’s endless theories on why his neighbours taunted him, which he muttered under his breath in phone calls where he would spiral into rants.

It was the unofficial currency of mine and Dezi’s relationship: he would trade in videos of his neighbours taunting him; I would lend him my ear to absorb his ranting.

He found it cathartic.

In each message Dezi sent me mentioning Zar over the four months, he lost his relaxed, country-bumpkin demeanour, as if his larynx had seized up and all he knew was spiteful, exaggerated language.

August 30: “This is a picture of the malicious hateful sow.”

August 31: “Now the police are looking for me to serve an application for an intervention order when I have done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING wrong.“

September 4: “Hi Luke. The police just delivered the abomination claim and summons. Did you hear from your boss yet?” he asked, ever-desperate to shoot a story.”

November 2: “Four hours (court ordered) mediation for nothing. Come up this weekend Luke. Let’s get this done. We’ve had enough.”

There was no doubt Dezi had a few screws loose, but with that, he had an extremely gentle nature.

A calm temperament.

Mali, his wife, was even gentler.

Locals told us she was known as “the Mother of Myrtleford” — a music teacher and much-loved member of the local Filipino ex-pat community.

Dezi could rattle off a list of names and phone numbers, which he sent me and insisted I call, of locals willing he claimed would be willing to wade into the middle of this dispute.

When I arrived at Dezi’s weatherboard house in the valley below Mount Buffalo — it was a 10-minute drive out of Myrtleford to the start of his driveway and a 15-minute drive up a dirt road to Dezi’s cottage — the most striking sight was seeing Mali standing on her verandah to greet me between a row of hanging venison carcasses, salted and drying out in the crisp morning air of spring in the high country.

Dezi told me he had shot them and Mali was now preparing them for the plate.

The Freemans lived a little further off-the-grid than I had first expected.

Despite Dezi’s beautiful family and his idyllic life occupying a weatherboard house at the base of Mount Buffalo, it became more obvious as I spent time with him in person that this was a man with endless gripes.

As we toured his home, he complained he wouldn’t be there much longer: his landlord was evicting him, and he put forward an unsubstantiated conspiracy of people he believed had convinced his landlord to remove him.

This is when it clicked that Dezi was a man endlessly pre-occupied by a battle to protect his world, even when he had no solid proof to legitimise his fears, and he was so obsessed with protecting it, he would resort to airing his dirty laundry on national TV.

For this story today, I told him, we need to stay focused on the one issue: the neighbours.

It’s why I wasn’t surprised that for years after, Dezi would inundate my inbox with emails and text messages about stories that overtime became nuttier.

He had decided to prosecute a magistrate who hadn’t ruled in his favour; he was bringing charges against Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews; the vaccine roll-out was a sinister plot of population control; he wouldn’t be seen dead in a mask, nor abiding by lockdown laws.

Before he emailed the program, Dezi felt he had lost his voice in the fight against his neighbours, and we were his last hope at justice.

“Sometimes you want to go Braveheart on them and wring their neck, but my camera is my machine-gun and it shoots 24 frames a second,” he told our reporter Martin King at the time, with the somewhat haunting machine-gun reference.

Then during COVID, he felt he’d lost his voice to the state of Victoria, and I gather now, in his mind at least, he felt he had no hope.

When our story went to air, Dezi was generally happy — except for the fact it neglected to reference another character on the periphery, who lived in town and who Dezi had a gripe with.

“That was a great edit Luke. But very disappointed that (the person) got off scot-free when (they) are the real problem now. I will be pressing multiple charges against the scum for fraud, perjury, and making false reports to police,” he wrote.

A month later, Dezi was back in court trying to settle one of his feuds.

At the time, I believed it was another inconsequential update to the life of Dezi Freeman.

But now, it’s perhaps the most consequential decision a Magistrate has ever made in the Wangaratta Courthouse.

“Hi Luke. Yesterday we had a victory in Wang Court. The Magistrate rejected (the) application to take my firearms ... The tide is turning.”