A fugitive father who vanished into the rugged bushlands of the Waikato region of New Zealand with his three children has been shot and killed by police. Tom Phillips’s death marks the end of a case that has gripped the country for nearly four years.
Phillips first disappeared from his small Marokopa community with his homeschooled kids, Jayda, now aged twelve, Maverick, ten, and Ember, nine, in September 2021, but was nabbed by police shortly afterwards and charged with their abduction, apparently stemming from a custody dispute. A member of Phillips’ family later said the episode had to do with the father needing to ‘clear his head’.
Before the case could be heard in court, however, he vanished again with the children, this time managing to elude investigators until this week’s dramatic shootout.
Phillips died on a remote back road after police received a tip-off he may have been on a motorbike travelling on the same highway and laid spikes across it. One officer was ‘confronted by gunfire’ at the scene, according to police, reportedly sustaining severe eye injuries before another officer arrived and shot Phillips dead.
Paying tribute to the injured officer, prime minister Christopher Luxon said the incident marked a ‘sombre day’ for the country.
The case was as puzzling as it was dramatic. Aggrieved parents disappearing with their wards are hardly unknown in New Zealand, whose gloomy hinterlands offer good opportunities for people not wishing to be found – but hardly with three youngsters in tow. The country’s dark and often dangerous rural expanses are hardly the bucolic English countryside.
No convincing explanation was ever given as to why Phillips’ absconded in the first place. Interviews with the mother of the children, identified simply as Cat, failed to shed much light.
‘My babies deserve better,’ she told the public broadcaster RNZ, ‘it’s beyond time that they come home and supporting Thomas is essentially supporting child abuse because that’s what it is. There’s no beating around the bush.’
Investigators appeared to beat around the bush, however, in a nation where international visitors lost on hiking trails are routinely found within days.
Helicopter searches, apparently with heat-sensor equipment able to spot human heat in the freezing dark, weren’t any help. A £40,000 reward for Phillips’ capture went unclaimed.
As the saga dragged on, the suspicion grew that he was receiving local support in the tight-knit rural community of Piopio, located 130 miles south of Auckland. ‘He’s not a bad bugger,’ a local farmer told reporters early on in the manhunt. ‘He won’t be getting dobbed in from me.’
Members of the same community, however, also supplied police with hundreds of pieces of information over the years, including the tip-off leading to this week’s denouement.
Until today, Phillips successfully managed to play cat and mouse with those investigators, intermittently getting spotted on remote farmland or else in heavy disguise on CCTV wandering the aisles of supermarkets. Yet always he managed to put the slip on his shadow. He was periodically suspected of being involved in other property crimes, including a bank robbery at the nearby town of Te Kuiti.
One of Phillips’ children was with him at the scene of Monday’s shootout. She was not hurt during the confrontation. With only a few hours until nightfall and teeth-chattering winter conditions cloaked the region again, searchers fanned out to find the other two siblings, who were quickly spotted at a nearby campsite a mile or so away. The speed of the discovery, and the earlier violence of the day, only underscored the mystery of why investigators failed to unriddle the case a long time ago.
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