Tom Phillips' campsite was hidden in deep bush but not far from the main road.
Supporters painted him as an off-the-grid folk hero, but his violent death revealed a different story. Cherie Howie traces the downfall of runaway dad Tom Phillips, from his Marokopa home to an early morning shootout on a Waikato country road.
Four shots rang out suddenly.
It was dark, it was cold, and it was all coming to an end for Tom Phillips, almost four years after he disappeared into the western Waikato bush with his three young kids in a brazen bid to keep them from their family and their community.
The father-turned-fugitive, with 12-year-old daughter Jayda seated behind, had swung his getaway quad bike from the gravel Waipuna Rd into the sealed Te Anga Rd after ram-raiding a Piopio farm supply business early on Monday morning.
But this time, the gig was up – a resident had called 111, telling police two people were breaking into PGG Wrightson, and an officer was soon on their trail after the pair and their loaded-up quad bike were spotted travelling north about 2.45am.
At 3.20am the officer, after figuring out the pair’s likely route, had laid spikes near where Waipuna and Te Anga roads meet, just 11km west of the Waitomo glowworm-filled cave systems that have long lured tourists into their gleaming chambers.
Now, Phillips’ quad bike’s wheels were losing air fast. In 200m the bike would be on its side in a ditch below a scrubby bank; a lone policeman on the fugitive’s heels, as more officers raced through the night to a man described as “absolutely motivated” to evade capture.
Just over a week earlier, after CCTV footage allegedly showed Phillips breaking into a Piopio superette – one of multiple acts of crime allegedly committed in his time on the run – Detective Senior Sergeant Andy Saunders had told media no one should underestimate Phillips’ ruthlessness.
“Tom will pose a risk to anyone that tries to stop the way he’s living his lifestyle with his children.”
From above, the rural landscape of the farming and bush country west of Waitomo Caves looks lumpy and green; the splotchy grey and white pattern of towns and cities doesn’t have a home here.
Neither do many people.
The closest residents are the Morgan family, whose farm stretches down to where Phillips’ quad bike came to rest about 300m away on Te Anga Rd, and who – in a typically rural New Zealand twist – previously employed the mother of Phillips’ three kids to spray gorse.
“Bang, bang, bang, bang”, Maya Morgan would later tell reporters of the moment she was woken by gunshots in the night.
Across the Morgan farm and down the bank to the road, a desperate situation was unfolding.
“Shots fired, shots fired”, shouted a police officer over his radio to the police communications centre, in audio obtained by Stuff on Thursday.
Phillips hadn’t given himself up peacefully, as police had repeatedly pleaded for him to do since the 38-year-old vanished with Jayda, Maverick, 10, and Ember, 9, almost four years earlier, when the siblings were aged 8, 7 and 5.
Instead, the fugitive had ambushed the first police officer to arrive at the scene. The married dad-of-two was critically injured after Phillips opened fire at close range, striking the rural cop in the head and shoulder, Acting Deputy Police Commissioner Jill Rogers said hours later.
The officer fell to the ground and took cover in the shelter of his patrol car, later shown to have been struck by multiple bullets, including four dotted across its windscreen.
Police sources later told the Herald the laminated windscreen probably saved his life by changing the trajectory of the shots fired at close range from Phillips’ powerful .308 calibre hunting rifle.
“Millimetres from death”, said one of the outcome, which caused a severe injury to the officer’s skull after he suffered a glancing blow to his head from one bullet, a second significantly damaging his right shoulder.
Rogers said Phillips was then shot by a second police officer who arrived as back-up immediately after, with immediate first aid given.
“The offender died at the scene.”
After 1358 days on the run it had come to this: Phillips – off-the-grid folk hero to some, control-obsessed criminal to others – lying mortally wounded on the bitumen after nearly killing a cop, forcing another officer to take a life, and leaving his 12-year-old daughter to witness it all.
Up the hill, Maya Morgan wasn’t the only one now awake.
It was the bellowing noise of police and rescue helicopters landing on an old farm air strip across the road that disturbed the slumber of her parents, Clive and Sandra Morgan.
“It was a quarter to four in the morning”, Clive Morgan would tell the Herald. Police later told media the injured policeman was flown to Waikato Hospital about an hour later.
“I wondered, ‘What the hell is going on?’”
Thomas Callam Phillips, the runaway dad who rejected all legal and social expectations, is now known in New Zealand and around the world.
But he was just another new name in the media when four years ago his ute was found in the surf at Kiritehere Beach – about 10km south of the tiny coastal settlement of Marokopa, where Phillips grew up and his parents still farm.
A major search and rescue operation – including by volunteers – followed on land, sea and in the air, amid fears Phillips and his three kids had been swept out to sea.
Nineteen days later, the quartet showed up at the family farm, where Phillips told a relative they’d been living in a tent in the bush because he’d needed time out to think.
Police, unmoved by claims of a mindful mini-break, charged him with wasting police resources.
Phillips was at the time living with Jayda, Maverick and Ember at the family farm, amid an ongoing custody dispute.
And then, just before Christmas and a month before Phillips was due in court, they were gone.
Some of the children’s relatives responded by offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to their safe return.
Police and Ōtorohanga Mayor Max Baxter also repeatedly called for Phillips to hand the youngsters over.
And in June last year another reward – this time from police, and totalling $80,000 – was offered, without success.
Meanwhile, Phillips made sporadic appearances across the western Waikato, mostly related to crime.
The first came in May 2023, when Phillips allegedly robbed a bank and shot at a supermarket worker in Te Kūiti before he and an unidentified person escaped on a motorcycle, prompting police to lay several charges and issue a warrant for Phillips’ arrest.
Three months later, Phillips was seen wearing a facemask, hat and glasses, shopping at Bunnings Warehouse stores in Hamilton, then driving south of Te Awamutu and eventually getting into a fight in Kāwhia with the owner of a ute he’d pinched.
In November, Phillips landed in the headlines again when he allegedly stole a quad bike from a rural Waikato property and – under the cover of darkness – broke into a Piopio shop with one of his kids.
Eleven months later, teenage pig hunters filmed an armed Phillips and his kids, clad in camouflage clothing, walking in the remote Marokopa farmland.
The last sighting came just 12 days before Monday’s final confrontation, when Phillips and a child were captured overnight on CCTV breaking into a Piopio superette.
Last year, the ongoing separation of her children from friends, family and community also prompted their mother, Catherine (Cat) Christey, to speak publicly – calling Phillips a “criminal” using their children as “pawns in his game”.
“They shouldn’t have to be worrying about where they’re going to sleep that night or whether they’re going to be warm.
“It’s like every day [I’m] grieving ... the loss of three childhoods, the loss of innocence, the loss of my babies. They deserve better.”
Soon after Phillips’ death was confirmed, Christey told RNZ that while she was sad at “how events unfolded today”, there was also relief that “for our tamariki this ordeal has come to an end”.
“They have been dearly missed every day for nearly four years, and we are looking forward to welcoming them home with love and care”.
Police Minister Mark Mitchell said he sympathised as a parent, but the children’s care was a “complex situation”.
“We have to put trust in the fact that the courts and Oranga Tamariki now, and the experts, are evaluating and doing the best thing for those children.”
Hours after Phillips was shot dead, Christey was in court on a drink driving charge laid after being stopped by police last month.
But amid a mother’s relief on Monday, fears initially remained – yes, Jayda was safe, having escaped physical harm at the scene of the shooting, but where were Maverick and Ember?
“We are making urgent inquiries to locate Tom Phillips’ other children, who we hold serious concerns for,” said Rogers early on Monday afternoon.
Jayda held the key, first pinpointing the bush camp 2km from the scene of the shooting where her siblings remained, and then being “very, very helpful” by giving advice on the best way for police to speak to Maverick and Ember so they didn’t feel threatened, Police Commissioner Richard Chambers would later tell media.
The girl was kept “not far away but far enough away that her safety wasn’t compromised”, Chambers said.
Police were right to be cautious – sources told the Herald 10-year-old Maverick was holding a rifle when members of the police special tactics group arrived at the hideout, but was persuaded to drop the gun.
Saunders, the top cop in charge of the operation, would only say that police had negotiated with the children before the pair came out.
The firearm – with ammunition – was recovered from the campsite, joining three other firearms, including a shotgun, found with Phillips after he was fatally shot.
Saunders later described the wait to hear Maverick and Ember were safe as “nerve-racking”, given he knew there were guns at the campsite as his colleagues searched through dense bush for the missing children.
“Our biggest concern was we never wanted a child hurt”, Saunders told RNZ.
Then came a three-word text: “We’ve got them.”
The moment was the end of more than two years dedicated to finding the family under the designation Operation Curly, said Saunders.
“I can tell you this case invaded my dreams.”
As others framed the search as being about finding Phillips, the focus of the investigation team – who pinned photos of the missing kids inside the operation’s headquarters – was “actually always finding the children, getting them out safely”, he said.
With Jayda, Maverick and Ember now in the care of Oranga Tamariki, Saunders said on Wednesday, the investigation had shifted to Phillips’ accomplices.
“Aside from the burglaries we are now able to link to Tom, it is apparent that he had outside help.”
That’s left mixed feelings across the community, with some in the remote corner of Waikato admitting to supporting – at least in spirit – Phillips’ decision to go bush with his kids.
In his home turf of Marokopa, longtime bach owner and new resident Cheryl Frederickson wasn’t among them.
But she had sympathy “for everyone, because everyone’s lost out”.
“Yes, even him, because he’s lost out too. You don’t know what the mind does.”
Another resident said the fugitive’s story was always going to end one way.
He backed police, the man said.
“I’ve got no complaints. He shot a cop – end of story.”
For police, the search to find those who helped Phillips began right where his life ended, and his toppled red quad bike that was piled with animal maize feed, Red Band gumboots and boxes of John Bull brand shoes – which sell for up to $379 each.
An orange Mitre 10-branded bucket, a fixture in many of the robberies Phillips was charged with, sat in the quad bike’s footwell, packed to the brim.
The bike and a covered vehicle, likely the shot-up police car, were removed from the scene on Tuesday night, and a 21km stretch of Te Anga Rd west from the Waipuna Rd junction to where it meets Taharoa Rd was closed all week as cops combed the countryside for clues.
Likely the greatest physical evidence of Phillips’ time on the run has come from the bush camps police believe he’d set up throughout the bush.
Photographs showed a quad bike and motorbike relevant to the police investigation parked next to a pile of rubbish.
The Herald also spotted white metal containers deep in the bush and almost completely disguised from the air by the dense tree canopy, with power cords, wires and what appeared to be a generator inside.
Details of two of Phillips camps have been released so far, including one where Maverick and Ember were found and a sleeping and eating camp a further 200m away.
Photos supplied by police showed the harsh conditions the children had to live in, with multiple wheels, a jerry can, mechanical parts, large glass bottles and cans of Sprite scattered within one of the makeshift sites.
At the second camp, a makeshift kitchen with a propane camping stove and a gas canister sat below a bench, made out of a large black carry case, holding bottles of iced coffee and a Jack Daniel’s whiskey box, a silver mug at its side.
On a hillside, a large bivouac had been built and trenches dug for sleeping, with Saunders describing the tent as “well covered and dry”.
But there was little doubt the conditions were tough, especially in the cold and wet of a western Waikato winter.
“[It’s]very grim, dimly lit and surrounded by dense bush.”
As police begin the long task of unpicking Phillips’ years-long escapade, others are left to pick up their lives.
In Waikato Hospital, the shot police officer is continuing his recovery, which police have said will involve multiple surgeries.
He wasn’t able to open his eyes when Chambers, the police commissioner, and Police Minister Mitchell visited on Tuesday.
But he was up to cracking jokes, and had a “resilient attitude”, Mitchell said.
“He worked really hard to get into the police. His family are proud of him, and we’ll do all that we can to support them and support him, so that he can come back and do the job that he loves as a frontline police officer.”
The family of Phillips were “absolutely gutted” he’d shot a police officer, and hoped he’d make a full recovery, a spokesperson told RNZ yesterday.
The family had always feared the almost four-year saga would end with Phillips being shot by police, and the spokesperson said they had no knowledge of any members of the Phillips family helping him while he was on the run.
Their sole focus was helping Jayda, Maverick and Ember.
After their late afternoon rescue, the two younger children were reunited with Jayda that evening.
Oranga Tamariki Bay of Plenty regional commissioner Warwick Morehu said this week that all three were doing well under the circumstances, and engaging with the staff.
“They are settled, they are comfortable. They are together.”
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