Cassie Zervos

So it's really hard to just vanish.

Desi Freeman, as the state's chief commissioner said, Mike Bush, at the time, he came out and said...

This is a man who knows the area like the back of his hand, which is an added element of difficulty for the investigators.

But to disappear and go from property to property, which I've since been told is what happened, for seven months, that's a long time.

At the start of the year, police actually came out and brought in cadaver dogs.

Now, these dogs are specifically trained to sniff out human remains.

So my contacts told me, no, we think he's dead.

We think, you know, at the time...

He vanished into the bush and something happened and it's almost become not a manhunt but a recovery operation to find his remains.

And those dogs came in from New South Wales and we've seen them for missing persons stories before.

And that was their fresh lead at the start of the year.

And then it obviously took a huge turn March 30, just recently, that it's just gone.

And I was told that Tipkoff only came to police a week prior to them moving in to that property and finding Desi there and shooting him dead.

Yeah, so I was at home.

It was a Monday, another day, mat leave life, trying to clean the house, feed bub, clean myself up, go to a gym class.

Like, you know, it was just chaotic as usual, mat leave.

And my Apple Watch just kept vibrating and I thought, oh, that's unusual.

Like,

a lot of notifications coming in.

And then I sort of tried to find my phone, couldn't, and I looked down and it was just this one little sentence that said, DF found, there was another ping, DF dead.