The lost childhoods and lasting scars of the Tom Phillips tragedy

Sunday, 14 September 2025

In a case that has captivated the world, fugitive Tom Phillips’ four-year flight from authorities came to an explosive end on a quiet gravel road deep in the King Country earlier this week. Senior crime journalist Katie Ham reports from Waitomo on the human cost of the tragedy that has rocked back block New Zealand.

It’s the colours you notice first.

In photos of the Phillips children - taken just weeks before they were swallowed by the Waikato wilderness - the world bursts with technicoloured joy.

On a picnic blanket, the siblings cuddle close to their mum, bucket hats shading their dimpled smiles, their clothes a kaleidoscope of bright patterns as pounamu hang proudly from their necks.

By a waterfall, the girls glow in rich tulle princess dresses as they struggle to keep still, cheeky grins stretched from ear to ear.

At the eldest’s seventh birthday, a rainbow sign blazes ‘happy birthday’ across the wall behind the Phillips siblings, every felt-tip marker in the packet pressed into service.

But on December 12, 2021, the three Phillips children - then aged 8, 7 and 5 - disappeared into a secret, sunless world hidden deep in the bush.

For nearly four years, their colourful childhoods were displaced by the dull browns and gloomy greens of life off-grid.

Pink jandals replaced with black gumboots, technicolour tights swapped for camouflage gear, a once vivid world supplanted by a bleak and monochromatic reality.

Now 12, 10 and 9, the trio re-emerged from the bush on Monday amid a dramatic confrontation with local police. Their father and abductor, Tom Phillips, was shot dead, leaving his children to rebuild lives overshadowed by his choices.

The night that ended it all

It was around 3.30am when gunshots cracked through the crisp spring air of Waitomo. Minutes later, the heavy whir of the police Eagle helicopter cut across the hillsides, blue and red flashing lights slashing through the thick darkness.

From her cabin nearby, Natalie Smit stirred awake. At first, she thought it was just another chopper spreading fertiliser across the farmland, but this one was “too slow and too low”.

Sleepy curiosity gave way to unease as the blades thudded overhead.

“I could see the helicopter above the treeline. It then went down Waipuna Road and landed,” Smit recalled.

Only with daylight did whispers of what had unfolded just metres from their home in the bush begin to filter through.

All roads surrounding Smit and her partner had been blocked off: “there’s been a shooting”, a worried friend messaged her. It was only when Smit read the news the next day that she realised it was Tom Phillips who had been killed.

Just up the hill, another neighbour, Maya Morgan, was lying awake with a “crook leg” when she heard four gunshots pierce through the silence. Whether it was Phillips shooting at police, or officers shooting back, she doesn’t know.

Hours earlier, the fatal chain of events had begun in unassuming Piopio.

At 2.30am, a resident reported two people breaking into the PGG Wrightson farm supply store on Moa St - a man in farm gear with a head torch, and a second person also wearing a head torch.

The pair were, it’s now understood, Phillips and another person. They loaded a quadbike with stolen goods - mostly maize, a PGG Wrightson worker said - before heading north around 2.45am.

Suspecting the man was long-standing fugitive Phillips, police ramped up their response.

As the Eagle helicopter lifted from Auckland, Phillips was heading through the backroads on the 20km route towards his bush camp near Waitomo Village. It’s a longer route but more inconspicuous, locals agree.

In what was later described as “officer intuition”, a lone local police officer correctly guessed their route and laid spikes at the intersection of Te Anga and Waipuna Rds shortly before 3.30am.

Minutes later, the quadbike rolled through, skidding to a halt on the side of Te Anga Rd. A shootout ensued.

The first responding police officer was hit by multiple rounds from a high-powered rifle, leaving him with serious injuries to his head and shoulder. “Shots fired, shots fired,” the officer is heard calling over his radio in audio published by Stuff.

Within seconds, the next tranche of police officers arrived and returned fire, fatally wounding Phillips.

Although first aid was provided to Phillips, he died at the scene in rural Waikato, firearms scattered across the shingle road around him.

And with that, a manhunt that spanned nearly four years ended in a flurry of gunfire on a quiet country road.

The frantic 12-hour search for the remaining Phillips children was only just beginning though.

By 3.30pm, police issued a desperate update: the children were in “very rough, very rugged” terrain with only three hours of daylight left and temperatures due to drop to one degree overnight.

An hour later, news 1358 days in the making: the children had been found safe.

Police were guided to their location 2km from the shooting site by a child who had been at the scene and taken into police care; warned to expect firearms, specialist negotiators moved in.

For now, all children remain in the care of Oranga Tamariki, their futures uncertain.

Life in the shadows

For one Waipuna Rd resident, who asked not to be named, her first encounter with the Phillips children came in September 2021.

It was just before Phillips disappeared into the bush with his children for the first time. That excursion sparked an extensive police search and rescue effort that was eventually called off. Two and a half weeks later, Phillips turned up back at his parents’ farm in Marokopa and said they’d been on a “camping trip”.

He was later charged with wasting police time, and was due in court the following January - but vanished again a month before.

The local resident was working in an op shop in Ōtorohanga when the eldest Phillips child walked in alongside her father, asking for “camping equipment”.

“The little girl did all the talking and she was running around the shop looking for stuff while he just stood there. She asked for anything to ‘heat stuff’. I told her we don’t have that kind of thing. She took off around the shop, but he never said a word,” she recalled.

The pair left without buying anything.

For most of the four and a half years they were missing, Phillips and his children are believed to have been living in the King Country bush, traversing its valleys, ridgelines and river flats, shifting from camp to camp.

Earlier this week, police released photos that offered the first real glimpse into the children’s hidden lives. Near where Phillips was killed, officers found two camps - one temporary, where the children were located, and 200m from there a “basecamp” of sorts, stocked with more supplies.

It’s a life chiselled into a steep slope, with a taut tarpaulin marking the divide between the Phillips children and the outside world.

Kindling neatly sawn and stacked. Blackened frying pans swinging from a post. Gumboots tossed in haste. A tent sagging with worn holes and a broken zip. A knife in a leather sheath abandoned in the dirt.

Among the debris details jarred: a 24-pack of Jack Daniel’s premix balanced on a shotgun case, bottles of Mammoth Iced Coffee and Chocolate scattered in between.

There wasn’t a toy in sight - just two empty Sprite bottles balanced on a tyre, a faint echo of the life they once lived.

For Clive Morgan, who has farmed the land for decades, life in the hostile conditions was hard to fathom.

“Years of living like that would be pretty tough. And then imagine that with three kids in tow. He’s clearly very capable when it comes to hunting, and there is no shortage of meat out there - pork, goats, possums.

“But he’d have to have help from elsewhere. I can’t imagine he didn’t spend time under a proper roof at some point. It’s rugged country out here.”

Smit’s partner, Brian Cotton, agreed: “He’s a very experienced bush guy, and you’d have to be to come out of there healthy after four years. It’s very wet. It’s very cold. You’ve got to have the right clothes”.

The King Country can drop well below zero on winter nights, even if the ridges sit just above the frost line. Locals described Phillips as a 'survivor” - until, of course, he wasn’t.

For the children, four years of life had been reduced to the shadows, a world hidden from view, now suddenly laid bare for the world to see.

But perhaps the steepest battle is yet to come. As their half-sisters’ father told the Sunday-Star Times: “Getting them integrated into society is going to take a bit. The psychological damage is going to be the hardest part”.

The whole week had been “pretty crazy”, he said. Like the rest of the country, he woke on Monday to the news - a call from his eldest daughter telling him the children had finally been found.

Of Phillips, he reflected in an understatement: “He seemed like a nice enough guy, but I guess you can’t judge a book by its cover”.

A battered but resilient police force

But there is another silent victim of Phillips’ choices - the Ōtorohanga police constable who came face-to-face with him in the dark of Te Anga Rd. Like the children, he now begins his own long and uncertain road back to normality.

Known publicly only as Officer A, he suffered injuries described as survivable but devastating. At least four bullet holes peppered the windshield of his abandoned police car, its doors left ajar in panic.

Already, he has begun the first of many surgeries - on his eye and shoulder - and remains at Waikato Hospital, where he’s been moved from the high-dependency unit to a ward.

When Police Commissioner Richard Chambers visited on Tuesday, the officer's eyes were still closed but he could speak a little: “It’s very confronting, but he knows we’re there. He was able to share a couple of laughs, and that’s good, but it’s pretty hard.”

For the investigation team the toll of the week has been heavy too. Nearly four years of their lives have been given to the case - chasing dead ends, following sightings that slipped from their grasp, and enduring public criticism when Phillips once more vanished into the bush.

In an exclusive interview with the Sunday-Star Times at Ōtorohanga police station, where Monday’s painful saga began, Chambers spoke candidly about the impact the case had on staff.

“People forget we’re human beings and we always want a good outcome. It’s always disappointing when we don’t quite get there.”

For now, staff continue to balance their shock with relief.

“They’ve got a colleague seriously injured, of course that weighs on them. But there’s also relief that three children are safe. The support from the community has been significant, and that makes us in policing feel good about who we are and what we do, because it’s tough work.”

As if on cue, “Auntie Helen” from the Waitomo Caves came in with a plastic container of homemade biscuits for the station - ginger with lime marmalade. A small gesture to symbolise her thanks for keeping the community safe.

From disillusioned dad to cop-shooting vigilante

In June last year, the public heard Phillips’ words for the first and last time in an undated letter he reportedly wrote to his former wife. Here, he promised to do better, to make things right.

Scrawled in pencil on crumpled exercise-book pages, it was both clumsy and heartfelt. At times, letters were missing: “I’m sory…” At others, they were added: “You have a beautifull personality…”

But for all of its errors, the letter carried both sincerity (“I have a good heart and I mean well”) and regrets (“I know there was a better way, and I have to live with that for the rest of my life”).

What changed between the man who wrote those words, embroiled in a custody battle, and the one who opened fire on a police officer may never be known.

And so, police file 211218/5611 can now be closed.