Audio Excerpt – Police officers walking and talking, body camera audio

SARAH:

So the four officers arrive at the property. They are constables Rachel Macrow, 29, Matthew Arnold, 26, Keeley Brough, 28, and Randall Kerr, 28. Very young junior police officers. They find that the gate is locked. They jump the fence and they start walking up the fairly long driveway towards the house.

Audio Excerpt – Police officers walking, body camera audio

RUBY:

The property these four officers are walking to is owned by Gareth Train and his wife Stacey. The police are responding to a routine welfare check for Gareth’s brother Nathaniel.

SARAH:

They didn't see the two brothers, Gareth and Nathaniel, lying on the ground in full camo aiming rifles at them. And so what followed has been described as both an ambush and an execution.

Audio Excerpt – Police officers running, body camera audio

SARAH:

As Arnold was stepping over the fence, the brothers shot and killed him.

Audio Excerpt – Gun shots, body camera audio

SARAH:

They shot Macrow three times. Kerr managed to run behind a tree and from there get back to the police cars, which were under heavy fire. He was shot in the hip when he was getting in, and then he managed to get away and drive for help.

Audio Excerpt – Randall Kerr:

“I’m in the car driving the car…”

SARAH:

Gareth took Arnold's handgun off him, and as she pled for her life, he killed the wounded Macrow who was on the ground

RUBY:

With two officers down, the Trains continued their ambush.

SARAH:

Brough was hiding in the long grass while all this was happening. And then the brothers set fire to the remaining police car, and also that long grass in which she was hiding, they were trying to drive her out into the open.

RUBY:

A neighbour heard the noise of the gunfire and saw the smoke - and came to help. He's shot dead too. The remaining two police officers managed to get away and call for backup

Audio Excerpt – Randall Kerr:

“There is two of them, I think I’ve been shot, I don't know”

SARAH:

And over the next six hours, a siege ensued. They refused to negotiate or surrender, and eventually, all three Trains were shot and killed by the police.

Audio Excerpt – Randall Kerr:

“I had to drive away a bit…”

RUBY:

This siege – where six people - including two police officers – lost their lives has been labelled Australia’s first fundamentalist christian terrorist attack.

The Train family believed the end of days had come.

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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am

Today, journalist and author of The Believer Sarah Krasnostein on what the Trains believed – and, what the inquest into the killings can tell us about extremism in Australia.

It’s Monday August 5.

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RUBY:

Sarah, the first question I think everyone had after this attack was – why? Why had these three people shot and killed police, and their neighbour? And it became clear, very quickly, that they held strong religious and conspiratorial beliefs. Tell me about what was reported about that, initially.

SARAH:

So understandably, there was a huge volume of coverage.

Audio Excerpt – News reader:

“This lonely dirt ride was the only way in of Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey Train's sovereign state, as they called it, remote, isolated and heavily fortified so they could protect it with deadly, murderous force.”

SARAH:

Much of that reporting emphasised the bizarre quality of where the Trains lived in Wieambilla, and it's an area known as the blocks. So we heard about how this place where they lived was, quote, harsh and isolated and the perfect place for this devastating crime. There were ‘keep out’ signs on the gates. They lived on isolated bush blocks with no electricity or running water or sewerage, and that this was kind of a Mecca for people with alternative lifestyles, again, very distancing, putting all of this fear and kind of this freaky coding on the crime that could only happen in this one exceptional place.

Audio Excerpt – Newsreporter:

“The area where the shootings took place is known to the Wieambilla locals as ‘The Blocks’. A bit of a mecca for people looking for alternative lifestyles, it is littered with ‘keep out‘ signs. Harsh. Isolated. The perfect scene for the most devastating crime”

SARAH:

And all of that dovetailed with what we were learning in the reporting that was uncovering rapidly, the online activity of the Trains.

Audio Excerpt – Journalist:

“One of the offenders, Garreth Train, was heavily involved in the online conspiracy community. Is that an avenue you with be investigating?”

Audio Excerpt – Police officer:

“Yes, definitely”

SARAH:

So we heard that Gareth had had an increasing obsession with conspiracy theories, and that they had also been voiced, to a certain extent, by Nathaniel and Stacey. During the siege and following the murders, Gareth and Stacey posted their online video, under their middle names Daniel and Jane. And Gareth said that they came to kill us and we killed them and referred to police as demons and devils. We know that Gareth had espoused very strong anti-government, anti-police, anti-vaccine views. Gareth was described as a doomsday prepper, that he was getting ready to live out the apocalypse on his property. He supported the sovereign citizen movement, and he made a number of claims about everything from the need to build an ark, to the fact that Princess Diana had been killed in a blood sacrifice and that Port Arthur was a false flag operation. Covid, however, seems to have triggered for all three of them, an increasing fixation on various extremist beliefs and conspiracy theories. Initially, Queensland Police did not label these killings as domestic terrorism. But after looking a bit more into the Train’s preoccupation with fundamentalist Christian pre-millennialism, they did change that assessment and they labelled this as Australia's first religiously motivated terrorist attack and also its first fundamentalist Christian attack.

RUBY:

Yeah, it's interesting, as you say, this attack, it's been described as Australia's first Christian fundamentalist terror attack. And I wonder when you think about that, to what extent do you see Gareth and Nathaniel and Stacey as Christian, and to what extent were they conspiracy theorists? How do you unpick those two parts of their motivations and their psyche?

SARAH:

That's the key question and to a large extent, the work of the inquest over the next five weeks. And I think it's also, to some extent, unanswerable. It's useful to explain a bit about the brothers' childhood and their background. They were raised in a conservative Christian family. Their father, Ronald Train, had a spiritual rebirth and founded his own fundamentalist evangelical church, where he was the pastor for nearly 30 years. When the brothers were in their 20s, both Nathaniel and Gareth stopped any contact with the parents. This has been explained in terms of the way in which allegations that the brothers made about childhood sexual abuse were received by the family. Stacy also became increasingly estranged from her family. Eventually, her marriage to Nathaniel ended and she married Gareth. This was labelled, especially in the early reporting, as a ‘bizarre love triangle’ or ‘love tryst’. It invoked a huge amount of interest from the general public. So the evidence that led to this being labelled as religiously motivated violent extremism was the premillennialist nature of a lot of the beliefs that Gareth had expressed online and that had been found in Stacy's diary. I hadn't heard of it before I researched the story, but premillennialism is based on a literal interpretation of certain verses of the Book of Revelation that describe a period of apocalypse that will be followed by the second coming of Christ. So the Trains understood Covid as a sign of those end times, and they also understood premillennialism as requiring and even sanctioning violence against certain devils and demons in order to bring about this kind of transformational period and eventually perfect utopia. So because of the nature of those beliefs, which again, I should say are not common to Christianity as typically practised. Their offending was labelled as religiously and not ideologically motivated. But now that the inquest is underway, we might get a little bit more understanding of what was ideological, what was religious and what was pathological.

RUBY:

After the break – was this attack caused by a shared delusion?

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RUBY:

Sarah - the Coronial Inquest into the Weimbella killings, its been set up to understand the fundamentals of the police response and, and what happened in that six hour siege. But tell me more about its scope and what else we might come to learn by the end of this?

SARAH:

So to the extent that it's possible the inquest is going to be looking at everything that coalesced on that day as it hears from about 60 different witnesses. In her overview, which kind of set out the roadmap for how the inquest is going to run over the next few weeks. Counsel assisting the court, Ruth O'Gorman KC, provided fresh details about, you know, the Train’s beliefs and introduced in particular a future witness, Doctor Andrew Abood, who's a clinical forensic psychologist. And she explained that Doctor Abood will testify, and that'll be on the 12th of August, that the trio were experiencing delusions and other symptoms consistent with shared psychotic disorder, Folie a Trois. So three people share the same delusion. And that's characterised typically by a close relationship where one person's delusion or delusions are transmitted to the others and kind of set off a similar psychotic state of mind. So according to Doctor Abood, Gareth's behaviour was connected to a genuine psychiatric condition. And we'll hear more about that.

RUBY:

In your reporting – what views have you formed about the dynamic between Nathaniel, his brother Gareth, and his wife Stacey. Does the idea that they were sharing a delusion – does that tally with what you understand about them?

SARAH:

We'll have to wait and see what the psychiatric evidence is. But my first impression, knowing what I do know now about the physical domestic violence and the coercive control that Gareth had exercised over Stacey during the course of their marriage, complicates the picture of her participation, and perhaps would extend to, I guess, the legitimacy of the claim that she was operating under psychosis rather than out of compliance or fear. We might not get a clear answer to that, but I think it's important in any assessment of her mental state to put it in the context of the marriage that she had and what's known about the coercive control in that situation.

RUBY:

We know that conspiratorial thinking spiked during Covid – and that this was actually a trigger for the Trains – so knowing they are not alone in this type of thinking - how should we judge the risk of something like this happening again, and should we be looking at it less as a one off event in rural Queensland and more as an ongoing threat?

SARAH:

Well, I'm hopeful that over the next five weeks, that's something that the inquest is going to consider, because we are so lucky to have a huge amount of research in this field addressing exactly that question. The nature of the problem is that a lot of that radicalisation to violence occurs online in isolation. It happens rapidly and is happening to increasingly younger people. And so it's in terms of detection, it's very hard to find what's happening before it explodes. But because the problem is multifaceted, so are the solutions. Again and again, the solutions seem to cluster around increasing social cohesion at every level of society. So it would require all of government bipartisan support that we would have a reduction in this kind of exclusivist populist politicking that paints people which are marginalised groups as other or outsiders, and inclusion kind of at every level, from not just those kind of ways in which national political debates are framed, but in the way our local neighbourhoods are run. The effect of that would be to make people a bit more resilient to the ways in which these radicalising, extremely dangerous forums are meeting needs in vulnerable people for self-worth and dignity and connection and control over their lives.

And I think that might be one of the scariest things about this event, and not necessarily something that an inquest can answer, because it indicates that the content of the extreme belief is less important than the feeling it generates. Here the belief was premillennialism, but could have just as easily been something else. Here the offending happened in the western downs. It could have happened in any Australian city or neighbourhood. Here three people died and while that's a tragedy, it could have very easily been many, many more. So there's value in not just stigmatising and distancing this as an exceptional event that happened out there about some freaky belief system, but looking more broadly at our vulnerability and brittleness as a society, because this can affect any of us at any time.

RUBY:

Sarah, thank you so much for your time.

SARAH:

Thank you so much for having me.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Northern Territory Police Commissioner Michael Murphy has apologised to First Nations Territorians for past harms and injustices caused by members of the Northern Territory Police. In a speech at the Garma festival in North-east Arnhem Land, Commissioner Murphy acknowledged that police have abused their powers and said he would make every effort to eradicate racism in the police force. His apology comes after it was revealed that a unit of NT police had given out racist awards and shared racist text messages among officers.

AND…

Kamala Harris has accused Donald Trump of trying to back out of a presidential debate. US broadcaster ABC News was set to host the debate, but Donald Trump has instead proposed the debate happen on rival network Fox News. Ads released by the Democratic National Committee taunt Mr Trump, claiming the “convicted felon is afraid to debate” Ms Harris.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. Thanks for listening.

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