Former soldier Bruce Evans once considered Australia’s most wanted man Dezi Freeman a close friend.

Evans said he last spoke to Freeman just days before he shot dead Victoria Police detective leading senior constable Neil Thompson and senior constable Vadim de Waart-Hottart.

The officers had turned up at Freeman’s home to arrest him on historic child sex offences in August last year.
Dezi Freeman’s close friend Bruce Evans said he was surprised Freeman was living in a shipping container, surrounded by squalor, on a vacant property tucked hundreds of metres from the main road. (A Current Affair)
“I wasn’t actually surprised that it ended like that because I know him and I don’t think he would have wanted to spend the rest of his life in jail,” Evans said.

The so-called sovereign citizen vanished into the bush after the police shooting at his Porepunkah home, which borders the treacherous Mount Buffalo National Park.

He was eventually found in a tiny town called Thologolong this week, on the doorstep of the Murray River on the Victorian-New South Wales border.

The isolated town with just two dozen people seemed like the perfect place to go off-grid.

Freeman was living in this shipping container, surrounded by squalor, on a vacant property tucked hundreds of metres from the main road.

“I was surprised that it was out in the open,” Evans said.

“I would have thought someone that was Australia’s most wanted wouldn’t be out in the open like that.

“You know, in a container and having deck chairs out like that. I saw the video and I was like, that’s the last thing I’d do.”