Ansell's luck ran out at 44. On Aug. 3, in a weird sequence of events that Australian authorities are still trying to sort out, the man who many believe inspired actor Paul Hogan's two hit movies died in a gun battle with police after shooting an officer to death on a remote highway in the Northern Territory.
Although the details are as murky as the Fitzmaurice, where Ansell once shot crocs and drank buffalo blood to stay alive, police hope to learn more from his companion of two years, Cherie Anne Hewson, 28, who fled the scene but later surrendered in Brisbane, Queensland. "She is our best lead with regard to the identification of Ansell's mental state leading up to the shooting," says John Daulby, a Northern Territory police representative.
The night before the bloody showdown, police responded to a call reporting a man firing shots at a house in a rural area about 30 miles south of the city of Darwin. When a passing driver stopped to investigate, bullets sprayed his windshield, blinding him in one eye. The resident of the house emerged, only to have a finger blown off.
Overnight, police erected roadblocks near the area (known as Humpty Doo), but by the next morning a team of 30, including members of a SWAT team, had failed to turn up any gunman.
At 10:30 a.m., two officers, Glen Huitson, 37, and James O'Brien, 27, were manning a roadblock. Five minutes later, when a civilian stopped to ask for directions, an unidentified sniper shot from the bushes, striking Huitson in the pelvis near an unprotected seam in his flak jacket. (He later died.) O'Brien returned fire, killing a man later identified as Ansell.
In his heyday, the once-hunkish hero—whose exploits were chronicled in a 1980 memoir, To Fight the Wild—seemed at times to relish the fame the Dundee movies heaped upon him, though he also felt burned by its glare. In 1986, when the first film was released, Ansell basked in the publicity, calling it "pretty funny." But he became bitter after a dispute with Hogan, who refused to give Ansell any royalties and denied him the use of the Dundee name for a fledgling adventure-tour business. "I really can't understand their position," Ansell told PEOPLE in 1988. "I explained very carefully that I was willing to sign a piece of paper saying I had no rights to royalties." An associate of Hogan's responded simply, "The idea for "Crocodile" Dundee came from Paul Hogan's head."
After the fanfare died down, Ansell, his wife Joanne, 39, a teacher, and their two sons, Shaun and Callum, now 19 and 20, returned to their cattle and buffalo ranch about 70 miles east of Darwin, 10 miles from the closest phone. In 1988, he was nominated Territorian of the Year and cited as "an unassuming achiever."
But things went sour when disease blighted his buffalo herd and he was required by the government to kill them. Embittered by the edict, he came to the U.S. to protest the slaughter. Later he and Joanne divorced and, in 1991, he lost the ranch. In 1992, he was convicted of stealing $7,000 worth of cattle from a neighboring ranch.
As for the cause of the shooting, police are looking into the possibility of a drug deal gone wrong. Others, though, are struck by the fact that Ansell, a storied bushman, made no effort to elude the roadblocks but appeared to want a showdown. Ansell may have provided a gloss for this final rash act in a chilling passage in To Fight the Wild: "Unfortunately," he wrote, "people seem to have mobs of evil in them—myself included in lots of ways. Call it the fault of human nature.... We're a very murderous species."
Alec Foege
Chips Mackinolty in Darwin
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