The trio responsible for the Wieambilla massacre believed they were “fighting alongside Jesus” in a battle of good and evil by gunning down police and a neighbour in 2022, a coronial inquest has heard.
Deakin University associate professor Josh Roose testified on Tuesday that Stacey, Nathaniel and Gareth Train called their front gate “the Rubicon”, a reference to the river crossed by Julius Caesar and his army that precipitated a Roman civil war.
Roose said the Rubicon “adopted symbolic significance” for the Trains.
“The moment that threshold was crossed they were at war and they considered themselves to be in a battle against demons,” he said.
On 12 December 2022, constables Rachel McCrow, Matthew Arnold, Keely Brough and Randall Kirk jumped over the fence of the property at 251 Wains Road, Wieambilla, in western Queensland to make a missing person’s search. The Trains opened fire, killing McCrow and Arnold, and later neighbour Alan Dare.
Roose said that their ambush constituted an “act of terrorism” under the definition under the commonwealth criminal code.
That means an act causing death or serious harm intended to coerce the government or public to further a religious, political or ideological cause.
“They were motivated by a religious ideology in which the police – the public state actors – were devils and demons and they were in a war.
“That’s not different to other forms of terrorism.”
Roose completed a report more than 350 pages long, after reviewing hundreds of emails, texts, handwritten notes and online posts and communications by the Trains, with other conspiracy theorists including American Donald Day Jr.
They held beliefs Roose described as “premillennial dispensationalism” and “Christian premillenialism” stemming from a fundamentalist understanding of the religion, he said.
Psychiatrist Andrew Aboud testified on Monday that the Trains acted as a result of a mental illness and shared paranoid delusions.
Those stemmed from Gareth, who long held a number of conspiracy theories as a result of paranoid personality disorder which developed into delusional personality disorder, according to Aboud. Stacey and Nathaniel developed their own identical mental illness as part of a “folie à trois”, he said.
But Roose said a person could be mentally ill while also holding an ideological view, and instead understood the process as gradual radicalisation of their ideas.
He said early 2021 was a “particularly important” moment for that process of radicalisation.
In May, Gareth started daily communications with American conspiracy theorist Donald Day Jr.
“He starts to feel like that connection that he’s been looking for, all those boxes are ticked,” Roose said.
“He’s not only talking, in a conspiratorial sense, about the role of government, a corrupt, evil government behind the scenes, but also the end times. And for me, in all the material that I’ve reviewed, that is the key moment. He found what he was looking for.
“Throughout the material, particularly the material between Gareth Train and Geronimo’s Bones, or Donald Day Jr, you can see them having that discussion about the return of Christ.
“Particularly Gareth fighting alongside Jesus, fighting alongside Geronimo’s Bones to bring about salvation.”
Day Jr is “an incredibly charismatic individual. He’s eloquent. He’s got a writing style that is quite powerful” and treated Gareth like an equal, Roose told the court.
Roose said Day Jr had encouraged the Australian in the direction of violent extremism, speaking about a “final battle” and the need to prepare for the “end times”.
Donald Day Jr has since been arrested by US police.
The trio posted dozens of videos online aiming to encourage others to join them in the final confrontation, and also tried to convince their children to join them on the property, the court heard.
The efforts at recruitment continued until the day they died. That morning they tried to convince someone from overseas to move to Australia, Roose said.
They believed the world was months away from the second coming of Christ, which would be in about April or May 2023.
“Stacey had created a very detailed timeline in her notebooks. Making sense of it was pretty challenging … she was spending hours and hours working out precisely when this was going to occur,” Roose said.
“ I believe that they thought – with Covid as a starting point … that they were about a couple months off, at most, hitting the end times.”
All three of them were killed by the Queensland police special emergency response team on the night of 12 December.
The inquest continues.