KEY POINTS:
Jayden Headley may have spent the five months he was missing living in a multi-coloured house bus on a rural property in Northland.
The 6-year-old Hamilton boy was reunited with father Chris Jones last month after vanishing from outside Hamilton public library last August.
Northland couple Jeremy Daly,
38, and his partner Tania Thomasen, 36, were charged with his kidnapping on Thursday at Kaikohe District Court. Daly is also facing drug charges. The couple have been remanded on bail for two weeks.
Daly and Thomasen live in a dilapidated, but well-kept, rented bungalow in the Far North farming settlement of Otoroa, which neighbours popular camping spot Matauri Bay. They have a toddler daughter and a baby under 1.
The house bus is parked in front of the bungalow.
Chris Jones does not know if they have a connection to Jayden's mother, Kaye Skelton, and grandfather Dick Headley, who have also been charged with the boy's kidnapping.
Jayden had been seen in Kaeo, about 20km away, and around the area's spectacular bays.
Police were still trying to establish who knew he was there and making further inquiries in the area. They have not yet ruled out further arrests.
A nearby neighbour, who would not be named, said she had seen Thomasen and her baby out walking with a young boy, who was also seen playing beside the house bus. She said she didn't recognise the boy.
She first saw the boy in late October, or early November. "We just thought, oh they've got another kid who's come to live with them. He didn't look out of place. No one would have noticed; he didn't seem upset, he wasn't starving or anything."
She said it wasn't unusual for children to be kept from playing on the road during summer when it gets busy with holiday traffic, and because some local children are home-schooled, a boy not being at school didn't raise any alarms either.
Many locals spoken to were shocked to discover their community may have been harbouring New Zealand's most famous missing boy.
The couple are known as good parents who keep to themselves and lead a "hippy lifestyle".
The house, situated on the crest of a hill at the end of a stretch of road locally known as the Mad Mile, isn't connected to a telephone.
A handpainted sign is attached to the gate, reading 'Please shut gate kids'.
Neighbours remarked on how the couple had smartened up the property since they moved there over a year ago.
Thomasen, who makes herbal medicine, also repainted the letterbox bright blue and wound fabric flowers around it, and decorated the recycling shed at White Hill transfer station with more fabric flowers.
The neighbour said: "I feel a bit sorry for them... hopefully their family won't be broken up because of (what had happened). They've never caused no one any trouble."
Daly, who was at the property late last week, fears for his own family's safety, after Jayden's Hamilton relatives received death threats last year.
Daly was agitated when the Herald on Sunday approached him yesterday morning at White Hills Refuse Transfer Station, which serves the bays in the Northland region. "Nothing has been proven, I'm innocent until proven guilty," he said. "I've got kids as well. You know about the death threats around this case in Hamilton."
Nikala Taylor, an associate of Jayden's mother Kaye Skelton, who was believed to have taken the boy, had a threat of "dramatic action" against her and her family posted on a website discussion forum last month.