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As beers are poured at the Bright pub, and cyclists pedal down the side of Mount Buffalo, grief, anger and a conspiratorial sense of disbelief is bubbling over.

Many in the alpine region are celebrating the death of Dezi Freeman, who was shot by police on Monday after seven months on the run after allegedly killing two police officers in cold blood and injuring a third. Others are more sympathetic to the fugitive – and some refuse to believe he’s dead.

On Monday, at a press conference in the even smaller high country locality of Thologolong, where Freeman had been shot dead hours earlier, the chief commissioner of Victoria police, Mike Bush, told a waiting throng of reporters that police believe the 56-year-old must have had help to survive for seven months in the bush.

It’s 100km overland through impossibly rugged country from where Freeman disappeared in Porepunkah to where he was found in Thologolong. Much of the alps have been on fire all summer. There has been snow and severe storms. The resulting manhunt was one of the biggest in Australian history, involving hundreds of police officers and help from the army. And yet one man, on foot, got away.

He must have had help, police say.

“We will track backwards from here to work out how long he’s been here, and who helped him to be here,” Bush told reporters. “If anyone was complicit, they will be held to account.”

Sitting in the middle of a park in Myrtleford as the sun beats down, Sarah* – a friend of Freeman’s who only spoke on the condition her real name was not used – told Guardian Australia what she told police officers when they came knocking several months ago.

“[Detectives] came to interview me twice,” she says. “I live on 100 acres … they never searched it.”

When the police asked if she would tell them if she saw him, she says, she answered honestly.

“My answer was no,” she says. “I wouldn’t call them.”

She says that if she had seen Freeman, she would have given “a great big hug” and told him “that we love him” before asking him to ask God the right thing to do.

“Now that is not telling Dezi to hand himself in. I can tell you that right now,” she adds.

“A lot of people” in the area would not have called the police, she says. He had friends and allies – many of whom, including Sarah, share his pseudo law beliefs, which mean they do not accept the authority of the state.

“What they’re saying now [that he is dead] is bullshit,” she says. “A lot of people are of the same opinion.

“People that knew him, would say a lot of things. He knew the mountains, knew them like the back of his hands.”

The state coroner formally confirmed Freeman’s death on Wednesday.

Freeman and Sarah belonged to the same circles, believed the same things. Both believed Covid was a hoax and opposed the lockdowns – she was with him when he was arrested outside Myrtleford magistrates court in 2021, when anti-lockdown activists pursued a treason charge against the then premier Daniel Andrews. The case was later struck out by the court.

This too is a conspiracy, she believes. “Same as with Covid, what we saw and what was real are two different things.”

The conversation loops around, touching on Freeman then back to the views they shared, views that have proliferated online. Sarah doesn’t believe the constitution is legal or that viruses exist. She didn’t get the Covid vaccine, and she sees the government and law enforcement as illegitimate corporations. These views weren’t just shared with Freeman but a large community in the area. This community looks out for one another, she says. People “who know Dezi, know he’s a great bloke and will say so”.

Others knew Freeman before his descent into those beliefs, and find it hard to reconcile the man they once knew with his later actions. Writer Beth Knights, who lives in Bright, knew Freeman in the 1990s when they would attend Rainbow Gatherings – off-grid events where hundreds of people come together to build a village and live together for a week or several months.

She says the events are “not a breeding ground for extremist ideologies” but “optimists and idealists cooking food around a campfire together, ultimately”.

“He was a good human, as far as I had the capacity to tell at that time,” she says. “But he obviously just went further and further into a place that I don’t relate to.”

Kelly country

Ten police officers arrived at the Porepunkah property where Freeman and his family were living at 10.30 on 26 August 2025 to serve a search warrant. They were a mix of local officers and members of the sexual offences and child abuse investigation team. Among them were Det Leading Sen Const Neal Thompson, 59, a local police officer on the verge of retirement who had past dealings with Freeman and was reckoned to know how to handle him, and Const Vadim De Waart-Hottart, 35, who was new to the area. Both Thompson and Waart-Hottart were shot dead.

It was the worst shooting of police in regional Victoria since the Kelly gang shot dead three police officers at Stringybark Creek in 1878.

The bushranger Ned Kelly comes up with surprising frequency when discussing Freeman. North-east Victoria is Kelly country; the freeway turnoff for the Snow Road, which leads to Porepunkah, is just past Glenrowan, where Kelly held his last stand. Allusions to Kelly are in the water up here.

Ray Kompe, a Porepunkah bushman who was a mentor to Freeman before the latter fell in “with the wrong crowd”, draws a comparison between Freeman’s shooting by police on Monday and Kelly’s 146 years ago.

The bushranger is a mythologised anti-authoritarian hero. Experts have warned that to pseudo law adherents and other sympathisers, Freeman could become the same.

“It definitely seems that some people within the broader pseudo law community don’t believe the police, and they’re folding it into their previous narratives about state corruption and tyranny,” the University of NSW criminologist Harry Hobbs told AAP. “There is a risk that he will be seen within some circles as a martyr or heroic figure.”

Kompe hadn’t seen Freeman in more than 10 years before he went missing. Standing in his small home in Porepunkah, he explains that there are two different groups of people in the area. Those who have been here for several generations, don’t have much money, and may hold sympathetic views to the sovereign citizens or pseudo law adherents are in one camp. In the other are the tree changers who have moved in with new money from the city, who will be more supportive of the police, he says.

The attitude of many in Porepunkah to the overwhelming media presence, which has descended on the town again after Freeman’s death, has noticeably shifted this week, compared with the cautious welcome offered in August. Locals who were previously happy to chat have sent reporters out of their shops with threats. Others are exhausted at having the town’s name attached to a fugitive and worried about the impact on their businesses.

“It really polarised the population around here,” Kompe says.

As we speak, he looks over at the hills, where he first taught Freeman bushcraft. It’s Kompe who taught him how to walk around Mount Buffalo without using tracks – the origin of the skills that had some believing he could have survived in the wild on his own.

But Kompe does not think that would have been possible.

“To do that, we’re talking a long, long distance, and you’ve got to feed yourself,” Kompe says. “You’ve also got to be in the public domain at a certain point.”