It is eerie standing in Tom Phillips’ hideout. He holed up his three young children in makeshift campsites like this for four years. What did they eat, what did they do, what did they talk about – what did their father fill their heads with?
The only sounds are birdsong and rushing water from a stream down the valley. From time to time, a car whooshes by on the nearby road. The ground is sodden and muddy. The trees are damp and rotting. Fern fronds litter the ground and tracks have been well trodden between different areas of the site.
Looking around, the surroundings are disorientating; the pine trees all look the same. It turns into a blur of dark tree trunks, brown earth, greenery and a white light shining through the canopy. One wrong step and you’re falling through a rotten tree trunk, or slipping in the mud.
But Phillips was a skilled bushman. So say the police and so say family friends. He had worked as a farm hand in his younger years. He was reliable and hard-working, his old employer says, and there was no indication he would “go like that”.
But like that, he did go. During Phillips’ time on the run he robbed a bank with one of his children, likely his eldest, Jayda, shot at a witness of the robbery, robbed a dairy twice, and stole farm supplies and vehicles from properties around the King Country. And in his fatal last stand he shot a policeman in front of his daughter in a desperate attempt to keep the act going.
It all came to a head early Monday morning. Phillips tried breaking into another store. Police were called, and the caller’s description of the offender prompted quick action. Road spikes were laid on the route he was likely to take back to his camp; he hit them on his quad bike and the vehicle careened off the road. A policeman trailing him found his bike out of action and Phillips shot him with a high-powered rifle at close range. The constable’s back-up arrived and shot Phillips down. He died at the scene.
It’s even eerier standing on the stretch of road where the fugitive died in those early hours. The Herald visited as soon as the police cordons were lifted at the end of the incident’s fifth day. The light had faded completely. There are no streetlights. There are no houses in sight, just dark patches of scrub and bush. Blood still stained the road. Two ruts in the bank that Phillips’ getaway quad hit were still visible.
The spot where Phillips met his fate, near the corner of Waipuna and Te Anga Rds, is about 28km away from Piopio, a 35-minute drive along a winding, metalled road.
Piopio is best described as a village. Locals are extremely proud of their restored Ford Model T school bus, one of the main points of conversation with the Herald. The cosmopolitan club is one of the more prominent buildings, along with the Piopio Superette, some cafes and a branch of farm supply store PGG Wrightson.
Its nearest town is Te Kūiti, which is about 20km and a 19-minute drive along State Highway 3. Te Kūiti itself is about 30km, or a 30-minute drive, from Waipuna and Te Anga. The popular tourist destination of Waitomo Caves is about a 13-minute drive away. Te Anga Rd also leads back to Phillips’ hometown of Marokopa, about a 40-minute drive.
Phillips’ last trip was the one from Piopio. It’s a road best suited to a four-wheel-drive vehicle. The gravel is still loose in places and the tight turns make for a white-knuckle ride. The road loosely follows a ridge above Piopio. The changing terrain on the roadside as it continues towards Te Anga and Waipuna goes from valleys and rolling meadows to sheer cliffs and limestone outcrops, with the odd letterbox revealing the location of a long driveway up to an isolated farmhouse, shed or stockyard.
Phillips had, that Monday morning, robbed the PGG Wrightson store and then high-tailed it back along this road. Jayda was with him. She, only 12, saw the shooting. The police found her and throughout the day she helped lead them to her siblings, who were still waiting in the bush, armed.
Police cordoned off the road and area around the crime scenes for four days, finally opening it on Friday evening. In this time, they conducted scene examinations at the site of the standoff and combed through the makeshift campsite.
And at first light Saturday, the Herald visited the site of Phillips’ camp. Its location makes it seem he was close to getting away.
His campsite, remarkably, was only a 15-minute walk from the main road. It was hidden in the bush off a service vehicle track and was barely a four-second walk off the beaten path. The trek there could hardly be described as such; it was like a walk in the park. How could the police not find him?
Police Commissioner Richard Chambers says they have covered this area in previous searches and it was “highly likely that we’ve been very, very close” to the site found on Monday.
This part of New Zealand, deep in the heart of the King Country, is like the land that time forgot. It’s one of those bastions of a society where people trusted one another; doors go unlocked, keys stay in the ignition. Cellphone service is spotty, and news from the outside comes only from the papers, telly or word of mouth.
A lot of locals here have lived on their land for generations. Their land is their lifeblood, whether it be from farming or the tourism trade. They all know each other. They look out for each other. Crucially, many knew Phillips, or they knew his parents.
It was no wonder most did not want to “stick out too much” by being quoted in the paper, as one man explained. But most of them still wanted to talk. They wanted to share their reckons, their opinions on the police response and their theories on the man. They were as saddened by the tragedy and the ordeal of the children as the rest of the country. They were as relieved as everybody else the youngsters had been found safe.
And they were as hungry for information on Phillips, his motivations and his children’s lives in the bush as everyone else. Many said they were relying on news reports to learn of it all.
However, there is a certain undercurrent of distrust in the area; a distrust of authority, a distrust of city folk, of the media, of police. It has bred a particular defence of Phillips, but from what the Herald heard it was more nuanced than hero-worship.
Some do not believe the police when they say Phillips robbed the bank. They do not believe he robbed a shop. “Anyone could go on to a farm and take stuff,” a woman living near his campsite told the Herald. The belief they hold to their hearts is that Phillips was hard done by. And that opinion gets muddled with feelings of frustration, some of it is frustration with the police for taking so long to find him and for spending so much time on the case.
Some of those who believe Phillips committed all those crimes defend him on the basis that he must have gone stir-crazy alone in the bush with his kids, or became increasingly desperate as police continued to hunt him down. For these people, they defend him until the crimes.
One of Phillips’ friends once told the Herald, when he first went missing in September 2021, that Phillips had simply taken his kids on a holiday: “What do people do with their kids at this time of year? They go camping.”
Wellington-based private investigator Chris Budge, who once devoted his time trying to find Phillips, says people defending him “are wrong and need to take a really big chill pill”.
Chambers says he is “sure there are some in the community who may defend him” but pointed to the crimes he had committed to say he was “no hero”.
Police Minister Mark Mitchell says Phillips had “no regard” for the safety of his three children.
“He seemed to be solely motivated in terms of what he wanted to do and how things were impacting him. He has quite literally put his children in harm’s way. They have seen and been exposed to things that children in our country should not be.” The minister then called Phillips a monster.
There are still a number of locals who won’t defend him at all.
The policeman Phillips shot, whom Chambers calls a “dedicated and caring constable”, will need a number of surgeries to recover. He was shot in the head and the shoulder, and bullet holes riddled his car. There is “no doubt” Phillips tried to kill him, Chambers says.
Phillips’ three children are now in the care of Oranga Tamariki. They are now away from the campsite, which only days ago was stocked with a box of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, bottles of iced coffee, jerry cans and gas canisters. Police have cleared the site, leaving only flattened foliage and hollows in the ground where the children likely slept.
Raphael Franks is an Auckland-based reporter who covers business, breaking news and local stories from Tāmaki Makaurau. He joined the Herald as a Te Rito cadet in 2022.
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