Madness and murder: how the Trains brought terror to Wieambilla

Gareth Train was, by many accounts, a deeply unimpressive and unpleasant person.
He was arrogant, prone to anger and had low self-esteem. He was paranoid, narcissistic and emotionally primitive, the Queensland coroner’s court heard this week. One witness described him as a “keyboard warrior”; he believed in baseless conspiracy theories so strongly they took over his life, the inquest heard.
On 12 December 2022, he added killer and terrorist to the list.
The unemployed 47-year-old also dragged his school teacher brother, Nathaniel Train, and wife, Stacey Train, into his spiral of delusion and death.
How Gareth became radicalised and passed those beliefs on to Stacey and Nathaniel before they jointly chose to ambush and murder police at their property outside Wieambilla that day is the mystery at the heart of a coronial inquest held this month.
The Queensland state coroner, Terry Ryan, heard this week that Gareth was the “primary” instigator in a “folie à trois” which “shared paranoid delusions”.
Stacey and Nathaniel, the “secondaries”, came to develop exactly the same mental illness, in what a psychiatrist diagnosed as “shared psychotic disorder”.
But Gareth had such low intelligence he couldn’t do the sums to work out the exact date of the apocalypse of his extremist “Christian premillennialism” religion. His wife did the intellectual heavy lifting: it was due in April 2023.
They never made it to that date. They instead died in a hail of police bullets, after shooting constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold and neighbour Alan Dare.
Forensic psychiatrist Andrew Aboud and Deakin university associate professor Josh Roose independently analysed hundreds of text messages, online communications, witness statements and scores of other sources of evidence to assess the mental health and ideological roots of the attack. Each presented his own unique research perspective to the inquest – but didn’t always come to the same conclusions.
Aboud testified on Monday that shared mental illness is rare, but it is also probably under diagnosed.
“Delusions are not contagious,” he said.
“It’s about a very unique set of dynamics based on the relationships between the three people, in this case, their vulnerabilities, the proximity in which they’re living, and in particular, isolation and stress.”
Aboud noted that Gareth Train looked up to his younger brother, who was better than him at everything. His theory is that Gareth suffered a brain injury as a child, possibly while being born prematurely. By adolescence, he had become preoccupied with guns and bodybuilding.
“I do see them as compensatory for a man who was in fact feeling quite inadequate,” Aboud said.
“I believe that he had developed a paranoid personality disorder, and there were also some narcissistic traits.”
He also started to fixate on conspiracy theories.
As a young adult he struggled with romantic relationships. Twice he invited girlfriends into ‘“some kind of suicide pact”.
Not much improved in his adulthood.
Gareth worked at the bottom rung of the education system – a relief cleaner, a groundsman, a teacher’s aid and an administration officer. Meanwhile Stacey and Nathaniel were at the top, serving as principals. He tried to join the army; it rejected him.
Aboud recounted a time when Gareth came to live with Stacey, Nathaniel and their two children. Gareth wound up in a relationship with Stacey and they all lived together. Nathaniel divorced Stacey in 2000, and then Gareth married his brother’s ex-wife.
Associate professor Josh Roose testified that it was during the Covid-19 pandemic that Gareth’s descent into true radicalisation began.
He tried sovereign citizen ideas and contacted an anti-vaccine political party, but found them too boring and was again rejected.
Then, in 2020, he finally found answers, in an online meeting with an American calling himself Geronimo’s Bones.
“He starts to feel like that connection that he’s been looking for, all those boxes are ticked. He’s not only talking, in a conspiratorial sense, about the role of government, a corrupt, evil government behind the scenes, but also the End Times,” Roose said.
“In all the material that I’ve reviewed, that is the key moment.”
The man, Donald Day Jr, told him he needed to resist violently.
Crucially, Day, a charismatic and “eloquent” individual, treated him as an equal.
“It offered Gareth a sense of belonging that he had been searching for, and a sense of significance and status,” Roose said.
On 6 January 2021, Stacey and Nathaniel gathered at 251 Wains Road Wieambilla for an event they called “church”.
“It’s most likely that this was Gareth revealing the grand opus and how everything came together,” Roose said.
“World events, weather events, the worsening situation of the world, the various paranoid beliefs about Asio, monitoring, hacking, poisoning, chemtrails, people being abducted, being turned into non-humans … wearing meat suits, police and authority figures being agents of evil.”
He probably laid out his theory about the end of the world, Roose testified.
Meanwhile he continued to work on his brother.
The court heard Gareth repeatedly emphasised the importance of a poem from a film to Nathaniel, which concludes: “Live and die on this day, live and die on this day.”
Even Nathaniel’s closest family had no idea of the rabbit hole he had been dragged down.
After a heart attack later that year, Nathaniel quit his job over vaccines and joined Stacey and Gareth at Wieambilla.
By this point the trio believed that any law enforcement crossing their front gate signalled the start of a war between good and evil, the court heard. When four police crossed their gate, which they named “the Rubicon”, they opened fire.
Roose, an expert in radicalisation and extremism, was very clear: the ambush was an act of terrorism.
This was a point of contention for many of the parties represented at the inquest, including members of the Train family, and police.
But Roose argued it fulfilled the definition under the Commonwealth Crimes Act: an act causing death or serious harm intended to coerce the government or public to further a religious, political or ideological cause.
“They were motivated by a religious ideology in which the police – public state actors, as they framed it, were devils and demons, and they were in a war,” he said
Aboud was asked the same question.
“What happened between these three individuals was a psychotic process, a shared psychotic process, and it involved them developing increasingly extreme views about the world,” he said.
“It was a psychiatric problem.
“For [the term] terrorism to be applied, surely, there needs to be a message, an impact, an agenda. This agenda was deeply personal. It was about religious salvation.”
The inquest continues.