GONE TROPPO- NT CRIMES: BILLY Benn was once a tracker, but when he fatally shot former colleague Harry Neale he became a hunted man.

In our continuing series of the crimes that shocked the unshockable NT, Meagan Dillon looks at the two-week Outback trek in search of man who in later life became a celebrated artist.

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RETIRED policeman Terry O'Brien put on his reading glasses as he looked down at his 46-year-old notes which detailed a two-week mounted trek through the Outback looking for a killer with a gun.

It was the search for Billy Benn.

"I remember the headlines in the Sydney newspapers, it was `the hunters become the hunted','' Mr O'Brien said.

Former tracker Harry Neale had been sleeping in his swag when he was shot 14 times near the Harts Range racecourse on August 5, 1967.

Then-Constable O'Brien was asked to speak to the severely injured Neale about what happened to him.

"When I got there he was alive and quite lucid and jovial about the whole thing and then he took a turn,'' he said, sitting at his dining table at his Wagaman home.

"Neale died before I could get a deposition from him.

"I never found out the reason for the shooting, but there was talk it was over the sale of some sacred churingas - or stones.''

After the brazen shooting, Billy Benn took off with 16 family members deep into the middle of the range.

Senior Sergeant Len Cossons and Constable Blake Jobberns, of Lake Nash, were walking along a gully when Benn ambushed them wielding a .22 shotgun.

He put a bullet into the back of Sen-Sgt Cossons and shot Constable Jobberns in the chest.

Both police officer survived, but the need to capture Benn became essential.

"We went out on horses looking for them,'' O'Brien said.

"We were looking for any sign of a camp or any sign about which way Benn had gone but we couldn't find that.''

Renowned Aboriginal tracker Teddy Egan, along with Sonny Woods and a lad known only as William, led five police officers through the tough terrain in the search for Billy Benn.

"When we left, we though the only way we would find Benn was that he would start shooting at us,'' O'Brien said.

"That was a bit scary - nobody wanted to be at the front and nobody wanted to be at the back of the line of horses.

"We went through the mountains and had to walk the horses most of the way.''

O'Brien, aged 26 at the time, said the nine men were in the middle of nowhere with no way of contacting the outside world.

They relied on the horses to show them where to dig up water and were always at risk of being shot.

Benn was a former tracker for the Harts Range Police Station and knew how to elude capture - he and his group bandaged their feet with blankets so they wouldn't leave prints.

"That caused a problem for a while,'' the former policeman said.

But it was a mind game.

Teddy Egan used his knowledge to try and out-track a fellow tracker and soon discovered that Benn had a dog with him.

If he could track the canine, he could track the man.

"We had people on guard to make sure Benn didn't ambush us,'' O'Brien said.

"We knew they were running out of water because they had these paddy melons that they were cooking on the fire to get water out of them.

"We were going into deep ravines and you could tell where Benn and his party had been.''

The search party came across a warm campfire, indicating they were most likely a day behind their fugitive.

"When we came to the top of a ridge, we could see them all lying out among the rocks in the sun and we tried to get down there without being seen, but they saw us and scattered,'' he said.

The capture of Benn's mother and wife was the beginning of the end.

As Harts Range descended into darkness, Teddy Egan saw Benn approaching, rifle in hand, and volunteered to go and speak with him.

O'Brien, 67, recalled Teddy walking behind a large rock before a shot rang out, echoing around the range.

"We thought, 'oh sh*t, something's happened. He's shot the tracker','' he said.

"What had happened was that Teddy fired the gun to let us know he had captured him and it was all over.''

Officers O'Brien, Laurie Kennedy, Bluey King, Peter Haag, Ross Kerr and Les Perry spent 16 days hunting Billy Benn.

"It could have ended a lot worse,'' O'Brien said.

"And no matter what the circumstances would have been, if we had shot Billy Benn out there, if he had attacked us and we shot and killed him, we would have been accused of executing him.

"That was foremost in our minds - not to get in that situation because the stigma would stick with you for the rest of your life.''

Billy Benn was later acquitted of murder on the grounds of insanity. He served 15 years in jail and two years in a mental health institution in Adelaide.

During his time in prison he began painting his country as a way of connecting with the landscape and people he missed. He became a successful Central Australian artist.

Friend and author Catherine Peattie said his art became his saving grace.

"Through painting he found stability, it anchored him to the world, it was a bridge to those memories and to that life, and to those feelings, that connection that is so important to his identity and aboriginal culture," she told the ABC in 2011.

Billy Benn died on October 15, 2012 some eighteen months after he and Beattie launched a book on his landscape art.