Cop killer Dezi Freeman not the first fugitive drawn to 'wild west'

The Upper Murray seems so silent and secluded in places, it almost feels like you could commit a crime there and get away with it.

In fact history says so too.

With the nation’s attention captured by the fatal shooting of cop killer Dezi Freeman this week, the forgotten and dark past of this otherwise idyllic borderland has also been dragged into the spotlight.

Freeman was far from the first fugitive to seek nearby refuge in the isolated bush of Victoria’s northeast.

“There’s skeletons in the closet on the Upper Murray,” says Walwa author Janice Newnham.

One belongs to Claude Valentine Batson, an eccentric local whose violent and unhinged demeanour, if not his eventual demise, eerily mirrored Freeman’s.

“He was a bit of a loner, considered an excellent bushman and a little different from everybody,” Ms Newnham tells AAP from her residence in Walwa, about half an hour from where Freeman was taken down.

“He was looked on a little bit askance and it all became too much for him.

“Both (he and Batson) were considered a bit odd, standalone from the community and having different attitudes,” she goes on.

Like Freeman, Batson sparked one of the largest manhunts in Victoria’s history after embarking on a shooting rampage targeting a group of picnickers in 1924.

He was dubbed the “Jingellic Killer” after ambushing the party-of-seven armed with a .303 rifle and a bandolier packed with bullets, as they enjoyed the summer afternoon on the river’s northern side.

The 23-year-old fled into the scrub, having killed the manager of Jingellic Butter Factory and wounding several others.

He was said to have been consumed by jealousy after being double-crossed by a mate and dumped by his fiancee.

Newnham, who recently published her account of the tale, A Sandwich Short of a Picnic, couldn’t help but notice the similarities after learning of Freeman’s demise just 40km from her home.

“Police came from all over the wider district to help in the hunt for Claude Batson,” she says.

“They actually armed the civilian population and sent them off into the hills to hunt him down.

“There’s interesting parallels between the Batson story, although Dezi played hide and seek for a bit longer.

“But the manhunts were of similar size ... and created the same sort of newspaper frenzy in the era.”

News reports from the time showed Batson looking “haggard from the chase” after being caught a week later.

He was “captured in an exhausted condition, after having been hunted through the bush near Jingellic by large parties of police and civilians,” according to a story featured in The Age.

Batson was charged with murder and three counts of attempted to murder. He also took aim during a running firefight at two police sergeants who were pursuing him.

Some 60 years after the rampage, violence found the same stretch of the Murray River again, when Andrew Joseph Medlock, 25, terrorised Holbrook, about 50km to northwest of the border.

He held two youths captive on a farm at Woomargama, with a major police operation launched following their escape.

Toting multiple firearms, Medlock fled in a four-wheel-drive into forest south of the Upper Murray town of Corryong.

Father and son crime duo Gino and Mark Stocco, Australia’s most wanted men for nearly a decade until their 2015 arrest, were also known to have navigated the area’s secluded roads to evade detection.

“We’ve had a run of those (crimes),” according to one local resident asking to remain anonymous for privacy reasons.

“It seems to be a nest for something.”

In 2019, Neil’s Reserve, about 7km from Walwa, became the centre of a murder investigation after Port Macquarie woman Ruth Ridley, 58, went missing without trace.

She was last captured on video filming husband Gary Ridley as he reeled in a fish while camping.

He was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in a car days later, while Ms Ridley’s body has never been located.

Locals chat willingly of other crimes perhaps motivated by putting the river border between the perpetrators and authorities: a drug syndicate caught at a small family-run bed and breakfast; a cache of guns buried in the hills.

“In the early years of the Upper Murray, it was a little like the wild west, as was probably a lot of country towns in that era,” Ms Newnham says.

“There were a few untidy murders or accidents that occurred and that’s what I mean about skeletons in the closet.”

The revelation Freeman had been hiding in a shipping container in Thologolong, near Walwa, no doubt brought it all tumbling out again.

The 56-year-old was killed in a hail of bullets on Monday by Special Operations Group police on the rural property, raising questions about who may have aided him while on the run.

Freeman was wanted for shooting dead officers Neal Thompson and Vadim de Waart-Hottart, who were among a team serving a warrant at his Porepunkah home in late August.

Little is known about why the fugitive, like the others, ended up in the Upper Murray, though its obscurity may hold a clue.