217 DAYS

A limited documentary series · 3 × 60′

The hunt for Dezi Freeman

It should have been over within days. It lasted two hundred and seventeen.

Two officers dead. One man in the high country. Seven months of questions.

An elevated view over the township at first light, a fog bank lying on the river flat, forested ranges behind.

26 August 2025 · Porepunkah, Victoria

A cold, overcast morning in the Victorian High Country.

The Rayner Track road sign against dark bush.

Mid-morning

Ten police officers walk up a remote farm track to execute a warrant at an isolated property.

Four tactical officers on a ridge line beneath the snowbound face of Mount Buffalo.

Minutes later

Two officers are dead. A third is seriously wounded. The gunman has escaped into the Victorian High Country.

Bare granite ranges and windswept alpine wilderness under low cloud.

217 days

The hunt begins.

This is what he walked into. Granite walls, snowgum, cloud closing over the gorge. Country that does not give people back easily.

Series pitch · logline

How does an obscure bushman become the most wanted man in Australian history?

A routine police warrant becomes a national tragedy, triggering Australia's largest manhunt. Over 217 days, a nation follows the search as an extraordinary story of family, community and unanswered questions slowly unfolds.

Genre · Premium true-crime documentary thriller.
Format · 3 × 60′ limited series.
Engine · A real-time investigation, told through the people who lived it.

Series synopsis

Australia's largest manhunt should have been over within days, if not hours. Instead, nothing went to plan.

Dezi Freeman fled on foot into the Victorian High Country carrying little more than a handgun stolen from the constable he'd just killed. Police threw every available resource at finding him, yet every search ended the same way. Nothing. As days became weeks and weeks became months, the questions only grew more unsettling. He had survived the freezing winter. Then summer arrived, bringing bushfires. Still, there was no sign of him.

Eventually, police reached what they believed was the only possible conclusion. Dezi Freeman had to be dead. The manhunt had become a search for a body. Then everything changed. When Dezi Freeman was finally found alive after seven months on the run, just twenty minutes from his brother's home, Australia was left asking a different question. How was this possible? Was he an extraordinary survivalist, or did Australia's most wanted fugitive have accomplices helping him stay alive? And what finally changed after months without a breakthrough?

217 Days unfolds in real time through the eyes of the people living the manhunt. As each episode uncovers new evidence, fresh intelligence and unexpected revelations, the investigation builds towards the dramatic final siege that ends Australia's largest manhunt, while exposing new questions about the seven months that came before it.

An armoured police vehicle on a country road beneath the granite walls of Mount Buffalo.

The largest police operation in Australian history came to a valley of orchards and caravan parks.

The Chief Commissioner walks through bushland trailed by a media pack.

Why now

The headlines told Australia what happened.

217 Days reveals what happened next, and what the public never saw.

Built on exclusive access to the people who lived it, the series brings together family members, neighbours, journalists, searchers and key witnesses for the first time, uncovering the human story behind Australia's largest manhunt.

The officers

Two men went to work and did not come home.

Two lights. Touch each one.

Senior Constable Neal Thompson was eight weeks from retirement. Senior Constable Vadim De Waart-Hottart was 35, with most of his career still ahead of him. Their deaths changed families, colleagues and an entire community.

While 217 Days follows Australia's largest manhunt, it never loses sight of the people whose lives were forever changed on 26 August 2025. Their families now carry this story forward.

Neal Thompson on the water in his boat, his dog beside him. — Neal Thompson. He loved this country too.

Vadim De Waart-Hottart smiling in police uniform on an alpine ridge at sunset, snow on the ranges behind him. — Vadim De Waart-Hottart. A career of service, half lived.

A growing threat

Thirty-two months before Porepunkah, there was Wieambilla.

In December 2022, Australia was confronted with one of its deadliest acts of anti-government violence when two police officers and a neighbour were murdered at Wieambilla, Queensland. The attack brought sovereign citizen ideology into the national spotlight and fundamentally changed how police viewed the threat.

As Australia's largest manhunt unfolded, comparisons were quickly drawn between the two cases. Rather than accepting those comparisons at face value, 217 Days examines the evidence, the competing perspectives and the events that shaped one of Australia's most significant national tragedies.

A grainy black and white frame of Gareth and Stacey Train staring up into their own camera at night. — Gareth and Stacey Train, in the video they posted on the night of the murders. Archival.

The eyes of Dezi Freeman, years before the manhunt.

Years before the manhunt, he was on national television, pleading that the system was against him. Everyone changed the channel.

The world of the series

A valley of orchards, WWOOFers and quiet arrangements.

This is not a compound story. It is a farm that took in volunteer workers, the way farms here have since 1981. A couple who gave a struggling family a place to park a bus. A tourist valley under Mount Buffalo where everyone waves on the road. The horror of the series is how ordinary all of it was, right up until the morning it wasn't.

Aerial view of the farm at Porepunkah, tracks winding between sheds and gardens. — The farm that took them in

The bus and its corrugated annexe on the terraced hillside, tarps and camp life around it, chickens by the steps. — He called it his castle

Inside the annexe: the kitchen shelves, a guitar, and the family sign reading Buckland. — Inside, it was just a home

The red-roofed farmhouse under the tree line at Porepunkah, autumn colour around it.

The farmhouse under the tree line. The valley kept living around the search.

Evidence & timeline · the signature graphic of the series

Two hundred and seventeen days.

The dial winds as you scroll. Every tick is a day he is still out there.

Scroll to wind the clock

The clock stops at 8:30 a.m. The questions start.

The ground · interactive terrain

Time was on his side. So was the ground.

Every place the story touched, in one living relief map: the valley where it began, the escape theories of the first week, the plateau that hid him, the fires that moved him, and the container where it ended. Built in the show's own graphics language.

He fled into the one place in Australia built to keep a secret.

Drag to look around · select a marker

The theories · the first week

Within days, the escape theories were national news. The sequence below ran as the country argued about it: the river, then the trails, then the neighbours.

Published satellite map of the Rayner Track property showing the river escape theory, upstream and downstream.

The same map with the back country trail theories added.

The same map with the adjoining property theories added.

Theory one · the river

The first week · the theories at ground level

Three ways out. Every one of them searched.

Satellite view of the Rayner Track property at the forest edge above Porepunkah, the river junction below it.

Police vehicles and officers half-hidden in a dark tree line.

The investigation · the questions

Seven months of searching. Seven questions that survived it.

The warrant

The decision not to send a tactical team, for a man whose fear of police was on file for years, will be the inquest's first question.

The tips

1,700 pieces of intelligence, a command post in Bright, cadaver dogs, caves, mineshafts, ropes into gorges. Nothing.

The echo

One gunshot, heard minutes after he vanished. Suicide, warning, or misdirection: the acoustic reconstruction is a set piece of the series.

The container

How does a man survive an alpine winter alone, and surface 150 kilometres away beside a shipping container? Locals ask a harder question: did he do it alone?

The search · seven months on the ground

Mineshafts cleared one by one. Boot prints followed through snow. A dog carried across the Buckland on an officer's shoulders. This is what looking for one man in 1,900 square kilometres actually looked like.

A tactical column ascending a snow-covered ridge in single file.

An officer kneeling at the fern-hung entrance of an old goldmine, weapon raised toward the dark.

Two officers following boot prints along a snow trail through alpine ash.

An officer carrying the search dog across a river on his shoulders.

An officer prone in the rubble at a red-earth mine adit, pistol trained into the opening.

A barred and padlocked mineshaft entrance cut into the rock, leaves banked at the gate.

The property from the air. It began under those trees.

Court case files stacked beneath a desk lamp.

What the record will show: the warrant, the risk assessment, the final three hours. Nothing asserted before the coroner rules.

Tactical officers and a police dog moving through a garden.

Episode one

Day One

A cold morning, a routine warrant, and twenty minutes that end with two officers dead and a man walking into the bush. As the largest manhunt in Australian history erupts around Mount Buffalo, the episode asks the question the sirens drown out: who is Dezi Freeman? A farmer who saw it happen, a neighbour who spent years afraid, and the former outlaw biker raided on Day 6 begin an answer nobody expects.

Episode question

How does an obscure bushman become the most wanted man in the country overnight?

Out on

"He didn't need help. He only needed the bush."

Freeman is taken down by police at a rally, a camera strapped to his chest.

Episode two

The Gathering Storm

While the search grinds through spring, the episode walks back down the years: a doctrine that arrived with the lockdowns, a tribunal that "indicted" a premier, a massacre at Wieambilla that should have been the warning, and the man locals call the puppet master, who wound Dezi up and let him go. The funerals. The million-dollar reward. His wife's plea for surrender, broadcast into an empty valley. And in the bush, dozens of calibrated gunshots, fired to reconstruct a single echo.

Episode question

Who winds a man like this up, and who lets him go?

Out on

Gunfire, echoing off canyon walls, into empty country.

Aerial view of the Thologolong property: shipping containers, tarpaulins and an armoured vehicle.

Episode three

217 Days

A brother opens the family album and a harder question: was Dezi broken, or built? Then summer: lightning, fire, and a cloaked figure beside a shipping container on the Murray. Three hours of negotiation. Eight rifles. And a valley, a family and a force left holding everything the helicopters never found. And a country splits him into martyr and monster, while the people who actually knew him hold the harder middle.

Episode question

Was Dezi Freeman broken, or built? And who gets to answer?

Final image

Not the container. Fog on Mount Buffalo, and two lights that stay lit.

Visual language · filming approach

Alpine cold. Ordinary rooms. No re-enacted violence, ever.

Anamorphic photography across the seasons the manhunt actually spanned: winter snowgum, spring searchlines, summer fire, autumn endgame. Vérité with the valley as the inquests unfold. Interviews lit like the kitchens and sheds people actually live in. A deep bench of archive: news, aerials, court audio, body-worn material as released. Violence is never staged. Absence is staged instead: an empty track, a cold gate, a bus with the door open.

Searchers in high-vis moving through a gully.

The view from a police helicopter over snow-dusted ranges.

The red-roofed farmhouse in the bush at Porepunkah, autumn colour around it.

CGI & graphics

A living terrain system carries the geography: the relief map you flew through two chapters ago is the show's own cartography, built from the real ranges. A 217-day evidence clock structures every episode. Acoustic-echo visualisation turns one gunshot into a set piece. This deck is built in the series' graphics language: what you are reading is the pilot for how it will look.

A luminous contour survey projected across the High Country ranges.

The contributors · development access

The people who were actually there are already talking to us.

Development access by Last Word Entertainment. Extensive pre-interviews are complete.

Inside the hunt

The people who lived, understood and led Australia's largest manhunt.

Cassie Zervos

The Reporter Who Lived the Hunt

As Seven News' Chief Crime Reporter, Cassie Zervos was on the front line of Australia's largest manhunt. She spent months covering the story from the Victorian High Country, often finding herself just steps behind the search.

Through her first-hand reporting and personal experiences, Cassie takes audiences inside the emotional toll of a manhunt that gripped the nation and reveals what it was like to cover a story where nobody knew how, or when, it would end.

Richard Sutherland · The Story Nobody Has

Despite relentless media attention following the final siege, Richard Sutherland has never spoken publicly. Until now.

The owner of the remote property where Dezi Freeman spent his final days, Richard reveals for the first time what he discovered after police left: his own shipping container had become Dezi's refuge. Inside were a transistor radio, camouflage clothing, handmade bedding and everyday items that raise extraordinary new questions. What was Dezi's last meal? Who brought it to him? How did Australia's most wanted fugitive survive for 217 days?

Exclusive to this series

Richard Sutherland in his paddock with a pitchfork, a fire-scarred hillside behind him.

Steve Mallett

The Bush Had the Answers

Bushman, former outlaw bikie and survival expert Steve Mallett challenges everything Australia thought it knew about Dezi Freeman. Dezi wasn't a sovereign citizen, Steve says: he was a prepper. Drawing on decades in the Victorian High Country and his experience leading the prepper group Dezi joined, Steve reveals the hidden trails, bushcraft and survival mindset that made 217 days on the run possible. "They were looking in the wrong places," he says. "This is Kelly country."

Andrew Stamper

Inside the Police Mind

Former Head of Homicide and a 36-year veteran of Victoria Police, Andrew Stamper led some of Australia's most complex homicide investigations. As the Senior Investigating Officer on the Russell Hill and Carol Clay investigation, he understands the challenges of policing the Victorian High Country better than almost anyone.

Andrew takes audiences inside the operational thinking behind one of Australia's largest manhunts, revealing how police assess intelligence, adapt search strategies and pursue an armed fugitive across some of Australia's most unforgiving terrain.

The making of a fugitive

The people who witnessed the relationships, conflicts and beliefs that shaped Dezi Freeman before the shootings.

James Filby

My Brother Dezi

No one knew Dezi Freeman longer than his brother, James Filby. Drawing on exclusive family videos and never-before-told stories, James reveals the man behind Australia's most wanted fugitive: their complicated relationship, the warning signs he witnessed, and the brother he struggled to understand.

His extraordinary access provides an intimate portrait that exists nowhere else, while confronting the devastating consequences of Dezi's actions.

Bruce Evans

The Road to Radicalisation

Long before the shootings, Bruce Evans was one of Dezi Freeman's closest friends. Arrested alongside Dezi during COVID protests, Bruce filmed many of the defining moments that were later broadcast across Australia and spent years debating law, government and justice with him.

Drawing on his personal archive and first-hand experience, Bruce reveals the grievances, beliefs and influences that shaped Dezi's worldview. His extraordinary insider perspective traces the path from activist to armed fugitive, providing a rare window into the radicalisation that preceded one of Australia's largest manhunts.

Loretta Quinn

Her Neighbour From Hell

For years, Loretta Quinn lived next door to Dezi Freeman. Through exclusive home videos and first-hand testimony, she reveals the campaign of intimidation, legal warfare and escalating behaviour that made her fear violence long before the shootings. Her account raises one of the series' central questions: if the warning signs were so visible, why was nothing able to stop what came next?

Zar Rosario

The Story Behind the Headlines

Millions of Australians heard Dezi Freeman's version of his dispute with neighbour Zar Rosario on A Current Affair in 2018. This series gives Zar the opportunity to finally respond.

His first-hand account debunks Dezi's claims, exposing the reality behind one of Australia's most publicised neighbourhood disputes and revealing the tensions that preceded the shootings.

The human cost

The families forever changed by the tragedy.

Diane Thompson & Lois Kirk

The Cost of Duty

When Senior Constable Neal Thompson was murdered, his sisters Diane Thompson and Lois Kirk lost a beloved brother. Their deeply personal account reveals the devastating impact of that day on Neal's family and honours the man behind the uniform.

As the series reaches its emotional conclusion, Diane and Lois ensure the story never loses sight of those who paid the ultimate price.

Jeremy Dellanova

Remembering Vadim

As Senior Constable Vadim de Waart-Hottart's cousin, Jeremy Dellanova offers an intimate portrait of the man behind the badge. Through his family's memories, he reveals Vadim's warmth, dedication and commitment to serving the community, ensuring he is remembered not only as a police officer, but as a son, cousin and friend.

His deeply personal account honours Vadim's life while revealing the lasting impact his death had on those who loved him most.

The bigger picture

The voices that place the story within Australia's broader social, cultural and policing landscape.

Don Watson

The Australia That Made Dezi

Award-winning author, historian and former Prime Minister Paul Keating's speechwriter, Don Watson has spent decades exploring the changing character of regional Australia. In the aftermath of the Dezi Freeman manhunt, he asks a deeper question: what social, political and cultural forces gave rise to the anger, alienation and distrust that shaped this story?

Drawing on a lifetime studying Australia's history, politics and rural identity, Don places the series within a broader national context, exploring how isolation, resentment and anti-government sentiment can create the conditions in which radical beliefs take hold.

Ariel Bogle

Understanding Radicalisation

Award-winning investigative journalist and co-author of Conspiracy Nation, Ariel Bogle has spent years investigating Australia's growing conspiracy movements, including sovereign citizens, QAnon and anti-government extremism. Through extensive reporting and interviews, she examines why ordinary people become drawn into these belief systems and how they can reshape lives.

Drawing on her investigations, Ariel places the Dezi Freeman story within the broader rise of conspiracy culture in Australia, exploring how distrust of authority, online communities and personal grievance can contribute to radicalisation.

Senior Constable Randall Kirk

Surviving Wieambilla

You walk up a driveway expecting a routine police job. Within seconds, you're being hunted.

Senior Constable Randall Kirk survived the Wieambilla ambush after being shot while wearing a body camera that captured one of the deadliest attacks on police in Australian history. His extraordinary first-hand account reveals what it feels like to become the target.

Randall's story places the Dezi Freeman manhunt within a broader national context, confronting the growing reality that routine police work can become a deadly ambush without warning.

Access pending

Victoria Police access

Formal interview requests have been lodged with Victoria Police for investigators and key personnel involved in the Dezi Freeman investigation. Access is pending the conclusion of the coronial inquest and is expected to be granted once the inquest has concluded.

Gloved hands opening an archive box of photographs and tapes.

Court files, family albums, chest-camera tapes, seven months of news archive: a record waiting to be read properly.

Comparable titles

Proven appetite. Unwritten ending.

Netflix

American Manhunt

The anatomy of a nation-stopping search, told from inside it. DEZI brings that scale to a story no one outside Australia has heard end to end, with the ending still being written.

Netflix

Waco: American Apocalypse

Anti-government belief, a siege, law-enforcement loss and archive that puts you in the room. The closest tonal relative to the Thologolong endgame.

Hulu · 2026

#SKYKING

One man, one impossible act, and a country that turned him into folklore in real time. Proof that audiences will follow a fugitive story all the way to its ending, and keep arguing about him afterwards.

A national obsession, reopened from the inside: exclusive access, an unseen exhibit, and an ending Australia is still arguing about.

A police AW139 low over the tree canopy, a flight officer at the open door.

Australia remembers the helicopters.

Evening light breaking through cloud over the ranges, rays falling across the valley.

This series remembers Neal Thompson and Vadim De Waart-Hottart.