I think chance played a big part in it all.
Police took the chance they were working with a normal crim and they could simply barge into Dezi's private space by people who Dezi hated the most.
The whole family scattered and just by chance their exit wasn't covered by any of the remaining 7 police officers.
Mali was able to take two children to a place and just by chance nobody saw them or knew where they went.
And Dezi happened to find probably a pre-planned hiding place that by chance out of all the searches in the bush and likely buildings he found one that police are yet to discover.
I don't think the family had thought about what to do if police came knocking on the door.
If Dezi found himself one day in a whole heap of bother and had to disappear for a while, then he would surely have a great little hiding spot picked out and stocked with supplies so he could sit it out for a while.
But I wouldn't think he planned for anything as big as 450 people to come out looking for him.
If you're right
@Warshawski and he's not dead, then IMO he will be pretty close to it.
I would say that the risk to officers looking for his hiding place, if he is in the bush, would be significantly less now after 4 weeks.
Instead of halving their crew, now would be a good time to use all those 450 officers and conduct a thorough search of bushland around Mt Buffalo, which will take a week or so. They only did one big search, with about 150 officers, on one day.
Potential hiding places would have to be entered only by skilled officers, dogs and special services army people would be best.
Police have been standing around at the airfield wasting time, those officers should now be involved in conducting a huge search instead of going home because now I think would be a very good time to find Dezi with a lower risk factor.
I would have thought police really had it in them to find Dezi and I very much doubt there will still be more than 200 officers still on the ground searching for him.
All the money spent on finding him so far has been wasted because they haven't found him and they are now scaling back their efforts without completing the job of searching bushland where he is most likely to be hiding.
Of course, if they find him in someone's shed in Goomalibee then that's my theory down the drain.
JMO