> Graeme Burton was killing (or attempting to kill) everyone encountering him on that mountainous trail. No mystery there.
I can see where the point hasn’t been made: the moment-by-moment reference you cite is a timeline released by the NZ Police shortly after Burton was shot and captured. It is factual, but it is missing in detail.
When Burton shot Kuchenbacher dead on his quad-bike, his intention was to swipe the quad-bike and effect his escape. He was interrupted by the two mountain bikers. And so he pretended to have come across a quad-bike accident, telling the mountain bikers “There has been a terrible accident”. He nearly had them fooled.
My point is that with Burton you had an armed sociopath who *did* kill somebody and then pretend to be on the side of the “good guys”. Far from being an unlikely thing to do, it was the most natural thing in the world for him.
(Not exactly on topic, but there was another bit of info that was missing in this preliminary Police sequence of events. For some reason the police did not take their Bushmaster or shotgun with them out of the boot of the police car — so they were only armed with their Glocks. Burton made his way back to the parking lot, broke into the boot of the police car, and retrieved the Bushmaster and shotgun. The police returned and, seeing Burton with an armful of weapons, drew down on him and demanded he drop the weapons. He didn’t, and in the ensuing firefight, Burton was shot in the leg. This leg was subsequently amputated.)