Ashley Aldridge

ABC Listen.

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Hello.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, as you can imagine, there were a lot of unanswered questions and unanswered questions always sort of lead to many theories, but there were mostly two camps.

Many people thought that he had gotten away after that initial shooting in Pawpunka and

And others thought that he had perhaps died in the Mount Buffalo National Park in the days following that shooting on August 26.

We know that the weather following that day was terrible.

It was cold.

It was raining.

And, of course, it had been seven months since he had last been seen.

Victoria Police had confirmed that there had been absolutely no sightings of him.

Mm-hmm.

And so there were really those two theories that people thought he had either gotten out or that he was dead.

And I arrived at that scene in Pulp Unca very early as that situation was unfolding.

And there, it wasn't cordoned off.

So I can understand why people did think that perhaps he had gotten away on that day.

Yeah, absolutely, particularly in regard to the incident in Thologalong.

We had received details from Victoria Police on the day that Desi Freeman was shot dead, but in terms of how it all unfolded, it was certainly new information that had come through, particularly the dialogue between police and Freeman over those few hours when they began to negotiate with him.

We hadn't heard any of those details before.