How my friend turned from tennis prodigy into an unhinged killer
- by Admin
- July 26, 2024
The news headline told of cold-blooded murder, but the face staring back at me was that of my childhood friend.
I woke up on December 13, 2022, and scanned the news headlines in bed.
A story had captured international attention. Two police and a neighbour had been murdered on a remote property at Wieambilla, three hours west of Brisbane. Their three killers died in a shootout with police.
When I clicked on the story, I saw a face I recognised instantly. Fair skin, freckles and red hair. Time froze. Then memories came flooding back.
The more I learned from the newsroom, the more surreal it became.
The killers were two brothers and the older brother’s wife. They ambushed police, executing a constable as she lay pleading for her life. The property was set up for armed assaults on intruders, with sniper hideouts, CCTV and an escape hatch in the house.
Police deemed them religious extremists who believed officers were demons coming for them at the “end of days” before Jesus returned to the earth.
But to me, they were my childhood friend and his family.
Nathaniel had been in my home. I’d expected to see him one day playing the Davis Cup or Wimbledon — not as Australia’s first Christian terrorist.
For 20 months since, I’ve brooded over the question: how did my gifted, well-adjusted friend become an infamous killer?
Early glimpses of Christian ideals
This is me at 12.
And that’s Nathaniel.
This was our class photo at Eagle Junction State School in 1988. It was in Clayfield, a dress circle suburb of Brisbane — kids of doctors and lawyers with big houses.
David Norris remembers being “in awe” of Nathaniel, the new kid in town — and one of the best tennis players in Queensland for his age. “He was an extremely talented sportsman.”
Robert Tam remembers a “very well-behaved … normal kid”.
“Maybe a little bit too nice, in the sense that he went through all the motions of wrapping a present, giving a card, going for the conventions, if you like.”
James Rossiter remembers going to Clayfield Baptist Church, where Nathaniel’s dad was a student pastor, and the Train family lived. He recalls it as the kind of place where “it is drummed into you [that] the world is a wicked place … full of evil and full of, I guess, traps”.
“And unless you stick by the code or the morals … of the ‘good book’ … you’ll be heading in the wrong direction … you are doomed … you’re ‘not one of us’.”
At my 12th birthday sleepover, Nathaniel showed us a glimpse of his conservative Christian values.
When someone pulled out one of my big brother’s dirty magazines, everyone gawked and laughed, except Nathaniel, who said: “That’s disgusting.”
Still, he was happy to join us as we rented horror movies and snuck out to rock people’s roofs at night for thrills.
“Being the little 12-year-old bastards that we were at the time … I remember him sort of tagging along with our stupid activities,” says another mate, Andrew Burge.
The origins of brothers’ deadly bond
We all lost touch with Nathaniel after primary school.
His family moved to regional Queensland where his father took appointments as a Baptist minister, settling in the bible belt of Toowoomba.
Ron Train was a postal worker who became a born-again Christian in 1980 and sold the family home to enter bible college.
He remembers discussing theology with Nathaniel, a “studier of the scriptures and very black and white [in interpretation] — not much grey for Nathaniel”.
Nathaniel was one of four children, but closest to his brother Gareth, who was a year older.
Ron says Gareth was “more aggressive, controlling” with a “short fuse” and a problem with authority.
Gareth had learning difficulties and his mother later suspected undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder.
“If Gareth flew off the handle, Nathaniel would be there to quieten and talk to him and help him to work through issues.”
As a student at an agricultural college at Dalby, Gareth was expelled for putting a bully through plate glass.
The brothers learned to handle guns as teenagers, hunting and skinning kangaroos.
But Gareth’s interest in weapons went beyond those used for hunting.
He once asked his father to move a pistol hidden in the roof of the family home, after being detained by police on a buffalo hunting trip with friends.
After high school, Nathaniel and Gareth both applied to join the army.
Ron says Nathaniel was earmarked as officer material, but Gareth “failed the psych test”.
Nathaniel opted out in solidarity, and studied to become a physical education teacher instead.
By then, Nathaniel had given up on his tennis dreams, despite spending his mid-teens hovering around Queensland’s top four for his age.
At around 15, he’d asked his parents if they had $1 million, because that’s what his coach said it would take to get him to Wimbledon.
“I said, ‘No, son, I’m sorry. We can’t help you there’,” Ron says.
I wondered if that crushed Nathaniel — to have his dream snatched away because he wasn’t a rich kid.
But Ron says his son was stoic by nature.
And he found a new love which eclipsed tennis.
The woman he’d live and die with
“It wasn’t long after that he met Stacey,” Ron says.
“She distracted him from his tennis. [But] you can’t deny young love. So we just realised that.”
Stacey Christoffel and her family were members of the Toowoomba Baptist church where Ron Train was minister.
She was beautiful and clever, and raised with a “similar belief system” which “would have attracted Nathaniel”, Ron says.
Stacey was also prone to “obsessive-compulsive” behaviour, according to Ron, with Nathaniel a “calming influence”.
She was happy to challenge Ron as her pastor, telling him in Church one day, “I don’t believe a word you said today”.
Stacey got an OP1, the top academic score in high school.
But it seemed “her ambition was to be married and to have children with Nathaniel”, Ron says.
They got engaged in 1995 when Stacey was working in the law office of future Queensland attorney-general Kerry Shine.
Stacey’s parents, who’d left the church, weren’t happy with the engagement and asked her to leave home.
Ron says his decision to marry the couple in his church “didn’t go down well with Stacey’s parents” either.
When the couple signed their wedding certificate, Gareth looked on as best man.
The allegations that bonded the trio
Eight members of the cash-strapped Train family, including Nathaniel, Stacey and Gareth, pooled resources to buy a property near Toowoomba.
Soon, Nathaniel and Stacey had a daughter, Madelyn, and a son, Aidan, on the way.
Then straight out of university, Nathaniel was headhunted to teach at a high school with an elite sports program at Kooralbyn, near the Gold Coast.
Meanwhile, Stacey had made a discovery that “deeply troubled” her, Ron says.
She learned her parents hadn’t told her a relative they’d invited to her wedding was suspected of historical sex abuse. Stacey’s father, Philip Christoffel, declined to comment when contacted by Background Briefing.
Ron says he refused to support Stacey’s push to have her parents admonished in church, or to reveal what he’d been told about the abuse “in confidence as a pastor”.
Soon after, Nathaniel, Stacey and Gareth stopped paying their share of the family mortgage, and in late 1998, the trio “disappeared”.
They showed up again, uninvited, for a family wedding in January 1999.
Afterwards, Stacey “flew off the handle” and confronted the boys’ late mother, Gwen, with accusations that “bewildered” her.
The boys then alleged to their uncle that Ron and Gwen had abused them when they were under the age of seven.
A relative who was there says the rest of the family thought the claims were absurd, especially when Nathaniel reproached his mother for walking around home in her underwear.
Ron says years later, a Queensland Police detective on the Wieambilla case told him: “We’ve investigated all that stuff. There’s nothing in that at all.”
Queensland Police declined to comment.
But Nathaniel, Stacey and Gareth cut all family ties and Ron would not see his grandkids again for two decades.
The trio became their own family unit.
Their fateful bond was forged.
Gareth tests Nathaniel’s ‘loyalty bond’
Estranged from their families, the bond between the trio became stranger.
Gareth joined Nathaniel, Stacey and their young family in north Queensland, where the married couple both became primary school teachers.
Soon the trio formed a triangle completely at odds with their conservative upbringing.
Gareth replaced Nathaniel as Stacey’s husband.
By 2004, rumours among fellow teachers were that the trio were living as a “threesome” at Charters Towers.
All of them were there when Ron and his wife went to try to mend the rift that year.
“It was Nathaniel who greeted me at the door … but Gareth and Stacy were inside somewhere.
“I said, ‘Can you speak to Mum and I, mate?’ And he said, ‘No Dad.’ He said, ‘Off the property, please.'”
Ron and Gwen left “crushed”.
Later that year, Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey bought a house together on the Atherton Tablelands.
But Nathaniel’s children were primarily raised by his brother and his ex-wife.
It was always Gareth’s dream “to be head of his own family, [and] he achieved it at the expense of Nathaniel and Stacey’s marriage”, Ron says.
Ron says Nathaniel probably kept ties to preserve contact with his kids.
He also views it as a sign of Nathaniel’s loyalty to his closest brother, despite “an absolute betrayal”.
Whatever feelings he had about seeing his first love take up with his erratic, domineering brother, they were the only family support base Nathaniel had left.
Nathaniel breaks free
Eventually, Nathaniel went his own way and rose through the ranks as an educator.
He still played a role in his kids’ lives, once taking a day off to march into his son’s school with Gareth to face down teacher complaints about Aidan’s behaviour.
But having sold off their Atherton property and living apart from his brother and his ex-wife, Nathaniel’s career began to blossom.
Nathaniel hit his stride as principal at Innisfail East State School, attracting national media attention in 2013 for helping dramatically lift NAPLAN scores at one of Australia’s most disadvantaged schools.
He seemed to approach the school like a sports franchise: telling teachers and parents to “lift your game”, appointing a “coach” for curriculum and staff training, and overhauling his roster to assemble a “dream team”.
Gordon Herbertson says Nathaniel was “highly regarded by other small school principals” like him.
“Very ordinary, normal person. Good sense of humour. He was a good listener,” Gordon says.
“His contributions were always intelligent and reasoned and all the rest of it.”
His parents watched proudly from afar: “This boy, this man, is on track to help people,” Ron thought.
Nathaniel also met a new long-term partner, which Ron thought was “wonderful”.
In 2020, Nathaniel scored a challenging but highly-paid job as executive principal at a remote school in Walgett, NSW.
Many of the students were Indigenous and the school was in Wailwan country. This was significant for Nathaniel: he’d discovered that he too had Indigenous family from this area.
Kylie McKenzie’s son Xander is non-verbal and uses a wheelchair, which put her constantly in touch with Nathaniel as his school principal.
“He was really approachable and it was good for me, especially in a small town, having somebody that would actually listen and help with my son’s development.”
She says Nathaniel even consulted her on new playground equipment.
“The kids loved him. He used to go out and play soccer with them. You’d see him out there and he’s handing out ice blocks and stuff like that.”
The day that changed Nathaniel
Kylie remembers the day in August 2021 when everything changed.
She drove past the school and saw ambulances and police.
Worried about her son, she called the office, but no one answered.
“We found out later that’s when Nathaniel had had the heart attack,” she says.
“We heard that it was actually office staff that got him revived before the ambulance got there.
“Never saw him again.”
Nathaniel was 45. The source of his heart disease is no mystery: his grandfather died of the same cause at 54.
But the heart attack was pivotal for Nathaniel, who became noticeably more religious, according to Queensland police.
And Nathaniel’s partner, who cannot be identified because of a suppression order ahead of the coronial inquest next week, saw other changes.
He became concerned about his medical treatment, ignoring doctors’ advice.
The same month he had a heart attack, the NSW government announced a vaccine mandate for teachers.
Nathaniel had a choice: get the jab or lose his job.
He tried to get an exemption but was denied.
On December 16, 2021, Nathaniel and his partner had packed up their black LandCruiser 4WD to go camping together when he suddenly changed his mind.
He told her he had to go off alone for a while, camping and hunting, like he’d done before.
He revealed he’d stopped taking his heart medication.
And he dropped her off in Dubbo to get a rental car.
That was the last time she ever saw him.
The same day had brought upheaval for Nathaniel’s first love, his ex-wife up in Queensland.
As the head of curriculum at a school in Tara on the Darling Downs, Stacey faced the same choice as Nathaniel.
She quit that day, one day before the Queensland government vaccine mandate took effect.
And Nathaniel made a beeline north.
The COVID crackdown pushed him back to his brother and ex-wife, the trio reunited by distrust of authority.
The final crossing
Around 4pm the day after Nathaniel left his partner, a farm worker near the Queensland border town of Talwood came across a black LandCruiser bogged in floodwaters.
A well-groomed, fit-looking guy in black jeans, T-shirt and leather shoes introduced himself as Nathaniel Train and said he was travelling into Queensland to visit his kids.
The farm worker realised the unvaccinated Nathaniel was breaching Queensland’s COVID border lockdown but that’s not what worried him.
What caught his eye were the firearms attached to Nathaniel’s camouflage backpack, his crossbow and arrows, and the big “Rambo”-style knives on his hip.
After towing the LandCruiser back to his workshop, he agreed to give Nathaniel a lift towards the highway to be picked up by someone on the other side of the floodwaters.
Nathaniel asked to borrow a phone to call his brother, with whom he spent about three minutes talking in Morse code: “Dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash.”
He was last seen lugging his weapons through floodwater towards a rendezvous point several kilometres away.
Later, when the floodwaters receded, the farm worker found what else Nathaniel left behind and took a photo.
Nathaniel never came back for the guns, ammunition or his $100,000-plus 4WD.
Left “suspicious” and “uneasy”, the farm worker eventually made a statement to Queensland police in Goondiwindi on April 29, 2022.
Could Nathaniel have suffered a brain injury?
When our old schoolmate David Norris heard this story about Nathaniel, something clicked for him as an occupational therapist.
“I’ve seen heart attacks ruin lives,” he says.
When someone’s heart stops, and their brain is starved of the oxygen it needs, they can suffer a brain injury.
David speculates Nathaniel experienced a “pervasive effect across the board where it’s affecting his insight, reasoning and judgement”.
When someone has “lost the compass … he’s going to lean on trusted sources” around him for support, David says.
And if those trusted sources were feeding him bad information, “that makes it very hard for him to hold on to a sense of what is true or not true”.
Nathaniel’s trusted sources were living as recluses in a place known for attracting those wanting to live off the grid or drop out of society.
One of them had already shown public signs of being deeply disturbed, and spreading wild misinformation.
The trio radicalise each other
Nathaniel lived his final year in hiding from everyone except his older brother and his ex-wife.
They owned an isolated 43-hectare property at Wieambilla. Ron believes Nathaniel was living in a tent and “trying to get close to God”.
Gareth’s own career in rural schools had ended years before. He’d worked in support roles as Stacey’s overbearing sidekick, alienating her colleagues with noxious behaviour from chaperoning school visitors on trips to the toilet, to dragging his wife by the hair.
In the COVID pandemic, Gareth had become a prolific poster online, spouting a patchwork of conspiracy theories about evil elites controlling the population with a hand in everything from the Port Arthur massacre to vaccines and the child protection system.
Gareth was particularly venomous towards Queensland police.
He claimed to have been threatened by corrupt police who were complicit in child abuse when he was working in child protection for Queensland’s Department of Communities.
When Gareth and Stacey were working in a remote town in north-west Queensland, a police sergeant was jailed for corruption — it’s possible the isolated case reinforced Gareth’s delusions.
They were certainly reinforced by a kindred spirit he met online, a gun-packing Christian extremist living in rural Arizona.
In his online videos, Don Day called followers to arms against “Evil”: “[If] violence isn’t the answer, then what is? Voting? Praying? What has either of them achieved for you?”
Day described Gareth as “my only brother that I could ever find in the last 15, 20 f***ing years … in another part of the world, and I have no one here to fight alongside in this bulls*** f***ing country”.
Nathaniel was also now seeing conspiracies where he didn’t before.
He contacted MPs including Mark Latham, and an ABC journalist, alleging a state government cover-up of concerns he raised in Walgett about the school.
The education department says he didn’t allege any wrongdoing at the time.
The trio come face to face with authority
Ultimately, it was Nathaniel who brought police to his brother’s door.
Acting on the report of his unlawful border crossing and dumping of guns, police turned up at the Wieambilla property in August 2022, and left a note on the locked gate.
A warrant was issued for Nathaniel’s arrest.
Nathaniel soon cut off phone contact with his partner back in NSW, who worried about his health after a year living rough without heart treatment.
She raised the idea of a missing person’s report with his son, Aidan.
This prompted Gareth to threaten Aidan with violence if police were contacted, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Despite this, Nathaniel’s partner reported him missing and NSW police issued a public appeal in December 2022.
Gareth posted an online video suggesting a conspiracy to stop Nathaniel blowing the whistle on corruption involving police and an ASIO agent posing as an ABC reporter.
The next day, December 13, 2022, at about 4.30 pm, four constables returned to Wieambilla looking for Nathaniel.
They jumped the fence.
The property was ready for them.
So were Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey, who had camouflage clothing, radios, ammunition and two guns each.
They shot dead officers Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold, along with neighbour Alan Dare, who came to investigate the brushfire from a burning police car.
At 6:34pm, Gareth sent the trio’s daughter, Madelyn, a final text message saying Nathaniel’s partner “sent people to kill us”.
Later that night, Gareth and Stacey posted a chilling video online.
Shrouded in darkness, Gareth said: “They came to kill us, and we killed them.
“If you don’t defend yourself against these devils and demons, you’re a coward.”
Stacey added a farewell message to Don Day with an apparent reference to heaven.
“We’ll see you when we get home … love you.”
Nathaniel was nowhere to be seen.
‘It can’t be the boys’
That very day, Ron Train had published a book called The Truths of Revelation, a commentary on the bible’s depiction of the apocalypse.
That night at home in Toowoomba, he was watching the news about a siege at Wieambilla when a warning bell went off in his mind.
“So I went to bed and just prayed … ‘It can’t be the boys, can’t be the boys.'”
He opened the door in his pyjamas to two police at 6am the next morning.
“I said, ‘Are you here about my two boys?’ And they said, ‘Yes’. They said, ‘Gareth and Nathaniel are dead.’
“I sat here. I sat down. That’s all I could do.”
Ron says police told him the trio were all shooting at police.
Exactly who pulled the trigger on their three victims is a question for the coroner.
Ron understands Nathaniel died away from Gareth and Stacey, from police gunshots to the head and chest. He says an autopsy revealed Nathaniel’s heart was so badly diseased that any gunshot would’ve been fatal, and the coroner urged Ron’s other children to have their hearts checked.
So, why did Nathaniel become a cop killer?
Police have concluded the attack was religiously motivated, saying the trio were devotees of Premillennialism, which claims a period of destruction will take place before Jesus returns to the earth.
They’ve cited references the trio made in bibles, emails, calendars, and Stacey’s diary, including “a lot of rhetoric around the ‘End of days'”.
Ron, who’s given his life to evangelical preaching, disagrees: “This is not religiously motivated.”
“This is a reaction by three people to COVID, to isolation, to authority — because the police are seen as authority — particularly by Gareth.”
Ron has trouble imagining Nathaniel falling prey to conspiracy theories, but finds the theory of a heart attack-induced brain injury compelling.
Plus, there was being “under the influence of Gareth and Stacey” and Nathaniel’s “loyalty bond” to his brother.
To me, that self-destructive loyalty was the key to my friend’s demise.
Unravelling physically and mentally, buying into his brother’s paranoid delusions, Nathaniel turned his back on the distinguished role in society he seemed destined for, and followed his chosen family into the abyss.
I asked Ron if there was a biblical story that could bring sense to what happened to his sons.
He brought up the Old Testament story about King David, who sent an innocent man to be murdered so he could commit adultery with his wife.
“Here was this guy who committed this murderous act, and yet God forgave him,” he says.
“How do I forgive my two boys? It’s not up to me to forgive them, actually. It’s up to God to forgive them.”
Now his sons are dead, Ron Train says it’s the families of the victims that “my thoughts and my heart go to, as a parent and as a pastor”.
I’m a non-believer. But I know this about my friend’s end of days: if he believed he was fighting evil, he became what he set out to destroy.
This two-part investigation is part of Notorious: a special miniseries from Background Briefing that explores what we can learn from infamous Australians. Follow on the ABC listen app.
Credits:
Reporter: Josh Robertson
Photographer: Nathan Morris
Editor: Annika Blau
Digital producers: Brigid Anderson and Annika Blau
Executive producer: Fanou Filali
The Latest News
-
January 2, 2025When is the Australian Open 2025? Schedule, format, and how to watch tennis
-
January 2, 2025Lleyton Hewitt responds when asked if Alex de Minaur could reach the Australian Open final this year
-
January 2, 2025‘Iga Swiatek will be even better in 2025… I just don’t know if she can bring it at Australian Open’
-
January 2, 2025Nick Kyrgios updates on his wrist injury on social media ahead of the Australian Open after exit from Brisbane
-
January 2, 2025‘Who is that guy?’ young fans asked after seeing Australia’s newest Test cricketer
/origin-imgresizer.eurosport.com/2024/11/30/image-b61b0abd-450f-4886-9401-047ce7d68838-85-2560-1440.jpeg "Where will Djokovic be seeded for Australian Open and what will it mean for his chances?")