The former wife of Tom Phillips and mother of his three children worked at a Waitomo farm in the past 12 months less than 300m from where her former partner was shot.
Te Anga Rd farmers Clive and Sandra Morgan said the fugitive’s ex-wife, Cat, was employed at their property gorse spraying – some 200m from where Phillips lost his life in a deadly stand-off on a road with police earlier this week.
The Morgans, who were woken by the sound of a helicopter, unaware at the time of the nearby shootout, had nothing but praise for Cat and the difficult years without her children.
“She’s a good lady, very strong, physically, very normal and intelligent,” said Clive.
He said she was a talented sheep shearer, forced to live with the fact that her kids had been taken and missing for more than three years.
“I hope things between her and her kids can get amended.”
Clive and Sandra said their daughter Maya Morgan woke to the sound of several gunshots on Monday, followed by the bellowing sound of a helicopter landing on an old air strip at a farm across the road.
“Usually when guns go off, they don’t go off at that time of the day,” Clive said.
“We know exactly what we heard. It was helicopters, and it was a quarter to four in the morning. I looked at my clock and I knew what time it was that carried on for about 15 minutes.
“We thought, ‘Oh, this is unusual, something’s happened,’” Sandra said.
“When the chopper came, I wondered, ‘what the hell is going on?’” Clive said.
“[Our daughter] heard three or four shots before that.
Fleeing after robbing a farm store, Phillips hit road spikes on his quad bike, shot a police officer in the face and then was fatally wounded by the next officer on the scene.
“Well, Monday, in the very early hours of the morning when it happened, we didn’t really know what had happened and then as the day went by, we found out,” Sandra said.
“They put road spikes down at the bottom, probably just around the corner from where the cordon is, so he would have came around the corner and didn’t see them, and ran straight over them, and his quad would have been totally un-steerable.
“Where the shooting took place was 200 metres further along, pretty much straight over there,” Clive said.
“It surprised me a wee bit that he came this far.”
After falling back asleep, Clive woke up to the news that Tom Phillips had critically injured a police officer and been shot dead just down the road.
Clive said they have only had one detective visit them since the incident, who didn’t ask them many questions.
Having lived in the area, Clive has known the Phillips family for most of his life.
“We know his parents quite well ... I’ve known Neville [Tom’s father] since I was a kid”.
Clive described Neville as a “lively bloke for his age” who has been very involved in the Marokopa community, or as they call it, ‘the coast’, for years.
“[Neville] took over the family farm. It’s one fairly large farm, it’s maybe one of the biggest in the Marokopa region.
“Neville is very, very passionate about everything he did. He played very much by the book and interesting, almost rather extremely sober,” Clive said.
They said Tom Phillips was a “born hunter and survivalist” and “would have no trouble finding food out in the bush”.
“He sort of became a bit bold, if anything, didn’t he, and it undid him in the end,” Sandra said.
When asked about how it feels to see people you know involved in such a huge investigation, one of New Zealand’s biggest manhunts, and then have a police shoot-out unfold outside your house, Clive said: “This particular situation, it’s a bit unusual.”
“It’s very unfortunate it had to finish this way.”
“It would be good if he’d given himself up and just come to his senses, really,” Sandra said.
“I hope that the children are all right. You know, we’re all thinking of the children.”