Fugitive Maddison led police pursuers onto property

THE 4WD hid in the dust from its tyres as it bumped along the ruts and ridges of Wallers Rd.

Behind, three police cars pursued Toowoomba’s most wanted man at low speed.

They’d been following Ricky Maddison for about 20 minutes when he suddenly veered from the Warrego Hwy onto a side road, before taking them down the narrow, rough track.

But something wasn’t sitting right. Maddison was not trying to evade them.

Senior Constable Brett “Bretty” Forte, driving the lead vehicle, turned to his partner and said: “It’s like he’s leading us somewhere.”

“I just thought the exact same thing,” Senior Constable Cath Nielsen said.

In another part of town, Brett’s wife Susie, a specialist domestic violence officer who knew Maddison well, pulled her own police car to the side of the road.

Her gut told her it was an ambush. She pulled out her phone and called her husband, twice. He didn’t answer.

Then, at 2.18pm on May 29, 2017, the police radio came to life.

“Automatic gunfire! Automatic gunfire!” an officer from Helidon yelled.

“269 urgent! Automatic gunfire! A police car has rolled.”

That was the moment Senior Constable Susie Forte heard over police radio her husband being murdered.

The hunt for Ricky Maddison, a violent domestic violence offender, began in March of 2017.

Maddison and his ex-partner had argued and he’d pulled out a handgun, firing a round into the air before pointing it at her.

In the weeks that followed, police from Toowoomba tried to find Maddison, including by running checks with Centrelink and Medicare. But Maddison, they believed, had gone “off grid”. Meanwhile, police from Gatton had been running another investigation.

Locals had reported hearing a noise that sounded like a machine gun being fired in the bush, on the outskirts of the Lockyer National Park.

Officers had thought them mistaken at first – until one resident produced a recording of the noise.

The noise was eventually isolated to a property on Wallers Rd, a bush block owned by the Byatt family. Police hid a camera by the gate hoping to gather more information.

They didn’t know it, but they had stumbled across the very place where Toowoomba’s most wanted was hiding.

Maddison, friends with Adam Byatt, had been staying in a makeshift hunting shed on the Wallers Rd property. Byatt, unaware that Maddison was the target of a manhunt, had provided his unemployed and homeless mate with a mobile phone and somewhere to stay.