Could wanted man Tom Phillips be on or near his family farm?
Saturday, 10 February 2024
Tom Phillips has been on the run with his three children for over two years**. **He’s a suspect in a Te Kūiti bank robbery and there’s a warrant for his arrest. But despite a significant investigation and sightings of him, police remain unable to find Phillips. Could he be hiding on or near his family’s North Island farm? Rachel Moore and Tony Wall report.
The Phillips family sheep and beef farm at Marokopa is sprawling and hilly - 551 hectares of paddocks, native bush and caves.
It backs onto a large area of native forest where there are huts - the perfect place to hide out and store gear.
Could this be the main base of operations for fugitive father Tom Phillips and his three children?
Could he have been under everyone’s nose the whole time?
Some people think so.
Phillips and his children, Jayda, 10, Maverick, 8, and Ember, 7, have been missing since January 18, 2022.
He is thought to have robbed a bank in Te Kūiti in May last year and broken into a shop in Piopio in November, possibly with one of his children.
There’s no suggestion Phillips’ parents, Neville and Julia, or brother Ben - who live in separate houses on the property - are helping him, but locals reckon Phillips has stayed close to country he’s familiar with.
A man who lives nearby says someone could easily hide in the high country above the farm - coming and going down a narrow, gravel road running alongside the property.
That’s exactly what he thinks Phillips is doing.
The man says recently-installed cameras on a wool shed are pointed at the road, capturing anyone who passes by.
He reckons he spotted Phillips a few times in the early days, and reported it to police, but that was a couple of years ago now.
“Things have been pretty quiet for a fair while.”
Private investigator Chris Budge, who has volunteered his time and expertise in the hunt for the missing family, says: “I don’t think he’s very far away from the family farm.
“All the sightings that we’ve published are around the Te Anga area, within line of the farm. There’s a hut up there, and it’s close to a back road as well.”
Budge says he was alerted by a source that Phillips had been seen, with a couple of mates, at a woolshed on or near the family farm in mid-December. They had a wild pig.
Budge says he didn’t tell police because the information was third hand and came some time after the sighting.
Police refused to comment on what level of access they have to the farm, and the extent of any searches of it.
Julia Phillips isn’t shedding any light on the situation. “We don’t want to engage with journalists, I’m afraid,” she says. “There’s no point.”
Asked if she thinks Tom was behind the Te Kūiti bank robbery, she says: “I’m not talking about it”.
Budge says his inquiries indicate police have been infrequent visitors to the family farm and neighbouring properties.
“I think a helicopter goes down there every couple of months, as a result of information rather than just a standard search,” he says.
Police have searched the area on quad bikes, he says, but word quickly gets around when that happens.
“The jungle network, as soon as anything is out there, there are people that are commenting around, whether that’s just gossip or warning Tom, I’m not sure.”
Budge believes it’s possible someone else, perhaps with children of their own, is helping to look after the Phillips kids.
“There’s a whole lot of dynamics in this jigsaw puzzle.”
While police are not commenting on whether Phillips could be on or near the family farm, in January they confirmed they believe he and the children are hiding out in Marokopa or the surrounding area.
The resident who believes Phillips is on or near the farm says police are in Marokopa regularly, and more so on the holiday weekends.
“They’re pretty good, and pretty supportive around the district. They can’t be here all the time.
“I think they’ve visited most people in the district.”
He’s lived in Marokopa for quite a few years, and while he knows of the Phillips family, he didn’t have a lot to do with them.
“They’re a bit different”, he says.
Marokopa is the kind of sleepy, but reclusive town on Waikato’s west coast, where wild horses roam the beach.
On the hot summer’s day when Stuff visited, only a handful of people could be seen out and about.
A few teens were taking shelter under the veranda of the town’s only, but empty, store. Another few people were fishing.
One man who’d come to spend half the day in the small, rural town with his son before school started had caught 12 kahawai in a few hours.
The road into the town of less than 100 people, snakes around the hilly terrain alongside the Marokopa River.
It’s a windy, possibly car-sick inducing journey past the world famous Waitomo Caves and through native bush - an hour’s drive from Ōtorohanga, and almost two from Hamilton.
It all started on September 11 in 2021, when Phillips’ grey Toyota Hilux was found unlocked, below the tideline and facing the waves.
The community rejoiced after the family re-appeared at the family farm safe and well after 17 days.
They’d been in Marokopa’s dense bush, but weren’t found despite an intensive police-led land, sea and air search.
But less than three months later, Phillips and the children were gone again.
Phillips left his family’s home in December of that year, and didn’t reappear for Christmas or for his court appearance – on a charge of wasting police time and resources after the first search.
Police found his ute abandoned in late January, but officers searched the area and found no signs of the family.
Phillips returned to a family member's home in the middle of the night to take supplies in February.
He did not have the children with him, but reassured his family they were well.
And then it went quiet.
That was until August of 2023, when Phillips’ was spotted around Waikato in a stolen ute before boldly wandering into Bunnings in central Hamilton.
He bought camping items with a large amount of cash, and was later spotted in Pokuru near Te Awamutu, and involved in an altercation in Kawhia.
But before the police could apprehend him, they found the ute dumped in the bush not far from the Phillips’ family farm in Marokopa.
We were then told Phillips and likely one of his children were the black-clad offenders who robbed a bank in Te Kūiti on May 16 in 2023.
In November, CCTV video showed what was believed to be Phillips and one of his children breaking the front glass of a store in Piopio - near Te Kūiti.
Police appealed for sightings of the stolen red farm-style quad bike, with no registration, the pair fled on.