As the weather turns, a dark question surfaces: Is alleged gunman receiving help?

Brooding clouds wreathed the cold granite of Mount Buffalo, a suitably sombre backdrop to a tragedy and unfinished business playing out below.

Up and down the valleys, freezing rain and thunderstorms assailed hundreds of law enforcement officers facing yet another frustrating day searching for fugitive alleged gunman Dezi Freeman.

Residents of the alpine valley towns of Porepunkah and Bright locked their doors.

As the High Country communities hunkered down, talk of Freeman’s disappearance into the mountain’s cold mists exposed not just widespread revulsion at the killing of police officers, but an alternative undercurrent of weird sympathy among a small number of High Country residents for Freeman’s extreme “sovereign citizen” views.

Police, having apparently failed to find any physical trace of the fugitive since he vanished into the forests at the foot of Mount Buffalo after allegedly shooting dead two police officers and wounding a third on Tuesday morning, began to shift focus to the suspicion that he could be receiving help from supporters.

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Mike Bush appeared to imply just such a suspicion when he warned Freeman’s associates not to provide the alleged killer with any assistance.

“If he is being aided in his escape, whoever is considering aiding him in this escape or avoiding apprehension, they are committing a criminal offence,” Bush said on Friday.

“This person does not deserve to be aided in any way.”

Meanwhile, thermal imaging equipment on police helicopters and drones apparently has not detected any movement of Freeman through the heavily forested area into which he disappeared on Tuesday morning.

Speculation grew that he had either taken shelter in a bunker or cave he had prepared for the purpose, or had escaped from the search area.

A committed survivalist, he is known to have intimate knowledge of the High Country bush, particularly around the Mount Buffalo area, where he has hunted deer for many years.

However, serious exposure from the extreme weather conditions would be his fierce enemy if he were still in the mountains without shelter. Snow was predicted down to levels of just 700 metres as the weather closed in towards the end of the week.

The valley along the Buckland River at the foot of Mount Buffalo is dotted with old mine shafts from the gold rush era, leading some theorists to suggest Freeman might have converted one of the shafts into a deep bunker.

The bleaker truth was that theorists simply did not know what had become of him.

Bush’s warning to those who might be willing to help Freeman escape came hours after police raided a house in the centre of Porepunkah village on Thursday night, when an officer dramatically shouted over a bullhorn for everyone inside to “come out with nothing in your hands”.

Two people – Freeman’s wife, Mali, and one of his sons – were subsequently arrested, questioned and released. Bush declined to elaborate on reasons for the raid, or to say whether charges might yet be laid.

A resident of the popular tourist town of Bright, about seven kilometres south-east of Porepunkah, said the events of the past few days had caused his family and their friends to reassess their sense of security.

He and his family, like a significant number of others from Melbourne and Sydney, had moved to the town’s clear mountain air seeking relief from big-city constraints during the COVID pandemic, and had found the move to be “the best thing we have done in our lives”.

But their sense of tranquillity was shaken deeply when news of the killings of police broke, and the search for Freeman swamped local conversations.

“We hadn’t bothered locking our doors since we arrived,” he said.

“People on a chat group we belong to began to express concern this week, and I think we’re all locking our doors now.

“We hadn’t even drawn the blinds in our house, but we did that for the first time this week, too.”

But while the alpine villages gave a sense of freedom and pleasure for some who moved there and bought houses during the pandemic, the opposite effect sent Freeman spiralling into rejection of government and police authority.

He had long harboured anti-authority views, according to those who knew him, and some observers believe his decision to change his surname from Filby to Freeman was an extension of it: one of the names for the broad “sovereign citizen” movement is Freemen of the Land.

A number of locals said they witnessed Freeman’s behaviour becoming increasingly erratic during the pandemic.

He refused to wear face masks in shops, voiced his refusal to get vaccinated, and loudly voiced his distaste for government restrictions and lockdowns.

“He was anti-everything to do with it,” one local said. “He went from being what seemed like just a pretty ordinary country bloke … a normal dude you’d see at the local footy club ... to quite a strange bloke. He fell down a bit of a rabbit hole and sort of disappeared and went off the radar.”

Meanwhile, a number of other people who spoke to reporters from this masthead either expressed quiet sympathy for Freeman and his views, or said they knew of people in the district who shared his anti-authority attitudes.

All refused to be identified, declaring they had to continue living in their alpine communities after the drama finally reached its conclusion, and didn’t want to experience a backlash.

A man who entered a shop in Bright and found a reporter speaking to the storekeeper angrily accused the media and the government of forcing Freeman into the position of lashing out.

A long-time resident of Porepunkah proposed one of the more surreal scenarios.

He refused to believe Freeman could have committed murder, and suggested he had escaped from what he considered a “police ambush” by collecting his wetsuit from a hideout in the bush and swimming down the Buckland River.

A woman who described herself as a friend of Freeman’s wife, Mali, said she believed others who shared some of Freeman’s views had lived at the Rayner Track property where Freeman allegedly shot the police officers.

The woman, agreeing to be interviewed only on condition of anonymity, described those living at the property as a community, some of whom were “squatting” or pursuing a homesteading arrangement focused on self-sufficient living. She rejected the word “compound”.

She said Mali had also confided in her that Freeman believed he had been mistreated by police, including during an arrest, from which he claimed he had been left with spinal injuries.

“There is a feud going on with the authorities and him, and this is how it’s played out,” the woman said. “She said his physical injuries took a toll on his mental health.”

The group at Rayner Track was one of a number of such off-the-grid gatherings.

“There’s a lot of people now around here joining their own little communities because they’re finding their tribe,” the woman said.

“I can see why, based on what happened during COVID, and I know that they’ve [the Freemans] been involved in the protests and stuff like that. So yeah, that’s led them to remove themselves from society. You don’t get the truth from the mainstream media, so you have to go searching for it yourself.”

A man who lived near the Rayner Track property said people were regularly coming and going, though he did not know who they were.

A substantial house backing onto the Mount Buffalo forest sits on the bush block, plus several sheds and a number of vehicles. Freeman and his family had been living in a bus not far from the main house.

All the buildings and vehicles sat abandoned after the shootings this week.

On Wednesday, explosions could be heard around the property.

It is understood police used “flash bang” stun grenades to ensure sheds were clear before they began searching.

As the bitter late-winter weather deteriorated even further on Friday afternoon – thunder rolling, heavy rain falling and the mountains disappearing within heavy cloud – more than 450 police continued their search, vowing not to give up until Freeman was found, dead or alive.

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