In a remote patch of Australian scrub, Gareth Train was building his “ark”.
“The name given to me is Gareth,” he wrote, introducing himself to an online forum for conspiracy theorists and survivalists in January 2021.
“I currently live on my rural property in western Queensland were [sic] I have been building an ‘ark’[,] homesteading for the last five years preparing to survive tomorrow. I am not interested in indoctrinating or convincing anyone of anything.”
Train, 47, was paranoid and harboured conspiracy theories. He believed the 1996 Port Arthur massacre – which led to an Australia-wide crackdown on guns – had been a “false-flag operation”. He said tactical police targeted people who were “conspiracy talkers” or “truthers”.
And he was convinced his online posts were being placed in an “intelligence file” by the spy agency the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
But police were largely unaware of his online activity when four young constables, all aged under 30, were sent to his property at Wieambilla, about three hours west of Brisbane, on Monday afternoon. The officers were looking for Gareth’s brother Nathaniel, who had been reported missing.
The brothers, along with Gareth’s wife, Stacey, were waiting. The officers were ambushed and came under sustained gunfire.
Constables Matthew Arnold, 26, and Rachel McCrow, 29, were shot dead. Randall Kirk – whose wife is pregnant with their second child – was grazed by a bullet as he turned and ran back up the driveway. Keely Brough fled into long grass.
To flush Brough out, the Trains lit a fire. Brough, who had only been a police officer for eight weeks, kept still, moving only to use her phone. She texted information to colleagues about the shooters and told loved ones that she thought she was going to die.
“She did not know whether she was going to be shot, or she was going to be burnt alive,” the president of Queensland’s police union, Ian Leavers, told ABC news.
Leavers said Arnold and McCrow had been felled by the first volley of gunfire before their attackers stood over them and “executed” them “in cold blood”.
The fire was noticed by a neighbour, Alan Dare, who came to investigate. He was also shot and killed. Locals say he and his wife were well known in the nearby town of Tara, where the two slain officers were stationed.
About six hours later, after heavily armed specialist police arrived at the scene from Brisbane, the Trains were shot dead.
The chaos in this remote part of Australia was at an end, but police will spend weeks investigating why the Trains committed the attack and whether the officers could have known they were walking into a trap.
The state’s police commissioner, Katarina Carroll, said the officers did not stand a chance and “the fact that two got out alive was a miracle”.
She said a risk assessment, conducted before they arrived, considered the visit as “business as usual”, meaning four officers were to attend what was seen as “a standard job”.
“They were quite comfortable about going out to the property and in fact, from what I understand, quite jovial and having fun with each other,” Carroll told the ABC.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said that all Australians were shocked and saddened by the tragic loss of life.
“Two Queensland police officers, their lives cut short by this atrocity,” he said.
“I pay tribute to them. I pay tribute to a neighbour driven by the instinct to help, Alan Dare. Three lives cruelly cut short. This is, indeed, a devastating day for everyone who loved these Australians.”
Gareth Train’s online posts – now deleted by the particular site – contain fragments of an origin story. He explains he grew up in Sydney and worked as a stockman and farmhand, and then later for the Queensland child protection and education departments.
“I live in this world, but I am not of this world,” he says.
The founder of the website did not respond to a request for comment.
Nathaniel Train lived a much more conventional life until last year. He had carved out a career as a teacher, becoming a school principal and winning accolades for his approach to working in tough areas of north Queensland.
In 2020, he moved to Walgett in outback New South Wales – a town with a large Indigenous population. He was at the school for less than a year when he suffered a heart attack at his desk and, according to reports, had to be revived by staff.
The next year, as his mental health deteriorated, he began to agitate for better conditions at the school, raising concerns about “problems” in a series of emails asking for more resources.
Nathaniel Train left his wife in NSW and headed back north. According to a missing persons notice issued by police, he was “last seen” in NSW on 16 December 2021. He was reported missing on 4 December this year, after he stopped answering his phone in October.
The Train brothers were raised by their father, a Christian pastor, and mother, who died about six years ago.
Few details have emerged about Stacey Train, Gareth’s wife. Documents show she and her husband jointly owned the property at Wieambilla, and that she had been the head of curriculum at the Tara Shire state college until the last couple of years.
It is unclear what involvement Stacey had in the shooting, but Carroll said all three were suspects. Police sources also say that Gareth and Nathaniel were wearing camouflage gear and ambushed the arriving police officers.
Online, Gareth Train said he used his full name in his posts because there was “no such thing” as anonymity on the internet.
But paranoia is knotted through each of his posts: he was convinced that governments ran re-education camps, that vaccines were part of a government conspiracy, and that he was under surveillance by authorities. Gareth was convinced that spam phone calls were covert monitoring, that drones and surveillance aircraft were being flown over his Wieambilla property.
Guardian Australia understands the gate to the property was locked when the four constables arrived on Tuesday and that they had to jump over to walk up the driveway to the house, where they were “exposed” to the gunmen.
Gareth’s posts online speak about previously directing police to leave his premises and “to remove their hands from their weapons or pull their pistols and whistle Dixie”.
“Fortunately for me they have all been cowards.”
Carroll said the online presence of the Trains, going back years, would form part of the police investigation.
Police will also investigate if the call for officers to come to the house was part of a plan. Carroll did not comment about whether any of the suspects had previously been known to police.
“[We’re] definitely investigating every avenue – whether it [was] premeditated, some of the stuff that’s been online from these people. We will investigate what they have been doing, not only in recent weeks but in recent years,” she told the ABC.
“We will get to the bottom of this. I need that for family, for community and for the colleagues of these officers.”
