The police officers who went to Dezi Freeman’s remote home in Victoria’s high country to serve a warrant a year ago today say they didn’t know what they were walking into. But they knew they had two of their best officers with them.
Veteran detective Neal Thompson was on his last proper job just days away from retiring while rising star, 35-year-old Vadim de Waart-Hottart, had recently arrived from Melbourne’s Public Order Response Squad.
In the ambush that followed, Freeman shot both officers dead, and injured another, before disappearing into the wilds of Mount Buffalo in Porepunkah. The murders sparked Australia’s biggest-ever manhunt, ending in Freeman’s death in a shootout seven months later and more than 100 kilometres away at the New South Wales border, and left a community – and two police families – devastated.
On Tuesday, hundreds gathered outside the pair’s station in Wangaratta as police unveiled two memorials for Thompson and de Waart-Hottart, hewn from rock side by side. A dog fountain is coming too, for Thompson the dog-lover. And another plaque will be unveiled, further up the mountain in Bright, a year on from the killings on Wednesday.
Police Chief Commissioner Mike Bush said it would be “a solemn day for every single member of Victoria Police”. Ten officers went to Freeman’s off-grid property that day to “hold an alleged paedophile to account” as part of a child sexual abuse investigation, Bush said.
“Over the last 12 months I have witnessed our organisation unite in times of utter shock and grief, all while remaining steadfast in finding answers for our beloved colleagues.”
Many of those answers are still to emerge, ahead of inquests into both the August 26 shootings and Freeman’s final shootout with police when he refused to surrender in his shipping container hide-out near the border. The hunt is still on too for those who helped him on the run, after all those long months of searching and hundreds of police raids across the high country.
But this week is not about Freeman, the sovereign citizen lionised by conspiracy theorists online. Nearby towns are heaving with loved ones of de Waart-Hottart and Thompson travelling up for the memorials.
Both men – two toweringly tall cops known for their love of adventure and compassion on the job – were adored not just by friends, but by former partners, as family. WhatsApp groups of ex-girlfriends, united by the tragedies, have been pinging with old photos and favourite memories.
In one photo, Vadim holds a painting created for him by someone he helped on the job through a mental health crisis; tall Vadim in a swirl of chaos, listening with his hands clasped.
Since his death, some of his former squad mates have taken to wearing a uniform not strictly police-issue: Batman socks and badges. De Waart-Hottart once joked he’d get thrown out of the police academy for wearing Batman socks, but he loved the caped crusader. His little brother Sacha, back home in Belgium where they’d grown up, had always said Vadim was his hero, his Batman, protecting him and now Vadim was out protecting his community.
De Waart-Hottart did it all with a smile, acting commander Peta Barrett said Tuesday. In fact, he could never quite believe his own luck. He was brimming with tales of unexpected opportunities, she said, travel disasters that turned into kind offers of hospitality. His family sometimes joked that whenever they encountered their own good luck, they were “doing a Vadim”.
Last August, Vadim, the gentle giant who leapt out of aeroplanes, skied mountaintops and dived in the deep sea, had been excited to explore the Alpine wilderness on his new secondment in Porepunkah.
In a cafe just down the road from Wangaratta in Moyhu, a nondescript gold plaque by the bench on the left now reads “Neal’s corner”. This was Thompson’s favourite cafe, run by his close friend Anita Cook. Most mornings, Thompson, or “Thommo” as he was known around town, would slip in early, by the side door, for eggs on the way through from his farm to work, his wire-haired pointer Jimmy at his heels.
“He’d always sneak in to surprise me,” says Cook. “He’d have my staff here all intimidated, you know ‘the detective’s in’, but he’d have that smirk. He was a big softie and if you were in, in his circle of trust, he’d do anything for you.”
His sisters Dianne Thompson and Lois Kirk, who joined de Waart-Hottart’s aunt at the Wangaratta memorial on Tuesday, said their big brother had followed their grandfather into the police force, and “truly loved his job”. He was “fiercely loyal, a natural leader”, as tough as he was soft.
Thompson’s girlfriend Sergeant Lisa Thompson said every day since losing him had felt surreal. “Nothing will fill the hole Neal’s loss leaves behind, but his stoic words, ‘C’mon, get on with it!’, and the lessons he shared with us, give [us] the strength to keep going,” she said.
Thompson was an experienced bushman, who knew the beautiful but treacherous terrain of the wet Alpine valley well. While he was going to miss the job in retirement, he had grand adventures planned too, alongside his best friends Andrew “Crouchy” Crouch and Dirk Wendt.
He had some Steve Irwin in him, Wendt says, or perhaps it was the accident-prone Russell Coight – known for his fascination with wildlife and fast MacGyver fixes (including the more-than-occasional stuff up) out in the bush.
Thompson’s ex-partner and friend Ange Creighton recalls with fondness the disaster of one of their early dates, a camping trip, when Thommo nearly sank the boat. “Then he wanted me to go rock climbing with him and I thought hmm, maybe not.
“But he had this incredible focus with it, like he had with gun safety and especially with his work, too, for all the silly stuff he did out of hours.”
Thompson knew Freeman, and had gone along that day to help keep him calm.
“He’d have been so careful,” says Creighton. “He was great at building rapport. Quite a few of the local crooks were sad when he died.”
His favourite crook even had a nickname for Thommo: “The Don”. As a surprise for his last shift the week of the shooting, Thompson’s police station had made special beer stubbies: Thommo immortalised as ‘The Don’ from The Godfather, with the slicked back hair and a better suit than he’d ever worn himself.
“As soon as I heard about the shooting, I knew it’d be him,” says Cook, who had served Thommo as usual on his way through her cafe before work that morning. “He was always, you know, send junior to the back, ‘I’ll go in first’.”
”He was, kind of, the man that I’d call on, if I needed anything. Even when he died, he had my steel on the back of his car to take to the wreckers for me. So to not have that … because you know I’m just on my own.”
Bush said that Victoria Police will now “carry forth Neal and Vadim’s legacies for the rest of time”.
De Waart-Hottart’s mother Carolina and father Alain said the love for Vadim in his new home of Victoria had brought them immense comfort, including in Porepunkah – a place named for an Aboriginal word meaning the meeting of two rivers.
“Here, at this meeting place, we honour both rivers,” they said in a tribute published in full below. “The river of grief for the life we have lost, and the river of love for the life Vadim gave us.”
With John Silvester
The Two Rivers
Grief is a river that now runs through all our lives, unmapped, shoreless, the nature of mourning. The death of Vadim, our son, Sacha’s brother and your brother in this noble family of blue has brought us together today. For there are now two rivers flowing in our lives connecting us forever.The river of loss and grief and the river of life and love.This river of life is always flowing forwards to join with the vastness of the eternal ocean. So too are we all destined to return to the eternal. No energy is ever lost; it is simply transformed. Death is the only promise held. The transient moving towards the eternalWe have the capacity to hold both emotions:Grief and joy.Sorrow and gratitude.Sadness and happiness.Absence and presence.While we are grieving the trauma of a young life that was taken from us, we simultaneously hold in our hearts our happy memories of his life lived with passion, enthusiasm, generosity and pure love of life with his trademark ever present infectious smile. We also feel gratitude for the life we still have the grace to live now.
Grief is not something we can simply choose to leave behind.
It is a powerful and overwhelming emotion, and we need to find the grace to flow with it; to allow ourselves to be carried by its current when we need to.
But there are moments when we can choose which river we wish to turn towards: the river of grief, which can drag us down into the muddy depths of sorrow; or the river of life, where we can consciously harness the winds and fill our sails with all that is joyous.
We cannot stop the river of grief from flowing through us.
But we can learn to flow with it, and, when we are ready, to lift our eyes towards the river of life and allow ourselves to be carried forward.
When two rivers meet, they merge, blending their distinct waters, each carrying different stories. There are times when the rivers join, as we experience both emotions of grief and love simultaneously.
There are times the rivers will part travelling over new terrains.Just like a confluence where two rivers collide, the initial meeting of deep grief is turbulent and churning before it finds a broader, steadier flow.
The river does not become wider by forcing one current to disappear. It becomes wider allowing both currents to coexist.As we too must embrace the grief and the love.For I have learnt to see that grief is the mirror of love.We are living in two realities: the physical and the cosmic.It is said that this grief is love with nowhere to go.So let us all give it somewhere to go, let it sense gratitude for what we have. Let the river teach us that we can hold both stillness and storm, flexibility and strength, become a rapid or a quiet reflecting pool.Let the stars remind us that light is revealed in the darkness.To have known the light that is Vadim has brought us all much laughter and kindness. We all now walk the banks of the river of life hand in hand.
Our family feel a deep connection and gratitude to all of you here today, one year after Vadim’s departure. We are especially grateful to those who were with Vadim in his final moments on earth, at Porpunkah, the aboriginal word for the ‘meeting of two rivers’.
Here, at this meeting place, we honour both rivers: the river of grief for the life we have lost, and the river of love for the life Vadim gave us.
And so, as we continue along the river of life, we carry Vadim with us — in our memories, in our love, and in the light he left behind.
Two rivers, meeting in one place, flowing together towards the eternal.
–De Waart-Hottart family
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Sherryn Groch is a journalist at The Age covering crime. Email her at s.groch@nine.com.au or contact her securely on Signal @SherrynG.70Connect via X or email.From our partners
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