The waves were already crashing over the Toyota’s hood when they found it.
It was a blustery September Sunday in 2021, and the Hilux pickup sat far down the gray sand in a remote cove on the wild west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. The Māori men who noticed the car live in mobile homes and cabins up by the road, on ancestral land near Kiritehere Beach. The truck was parked below the high-tide line, facing the sea, and was nearly swamped by the waves pummeling the shore. The men found the keys, tucked under the driver’s-side floormat, and backed the car up the beach. They couldn’t help but notice empty child seats strapped into the back. If any kids had gotten close to the sea on a day like this, they were long gone.
The truck, it would turn out, belonged to Tom Phillips, the son of a prominent Pākehā—white—family with a farm nearby in Marokopa. Phillips, 34, spent much of his time on the farm, where he home-schooled his three kids, Jayda, 8, Maverick, 6, and Ember, 5. He’d separated from his wife three years before and had custody of the kids. Locals heard she was down on the South Island, struggling with her own problems.
Now here was his truck, marooned. The next morning, Tom’s brother Ben drove down to the beach. He’d last seen Tom and the kids on Saturday, Sept. 11, when they’d left the farm, heading, everyone thought, back to Ōtorohanga, the inland town where Tom kept a house. Now it was Sept. 13. Ben inspected the Toyota, then called the police.
Soon photos of the missing father and his three smiling children were in every newspaper and on every TV channel in New Zealand. Police and volunteer searchers fanned out over the area, knocking on doors. Helicopters, planes, and heat-detecting drones flew over the deep bush surrounding the beach. Rescue boats and jet skis buzzed through the roaring waves, looking for bodies. On days the sea was calm, swimmers from surf rescue teams explored caves along the shoreline. The local hapū, or Māori clan, cooked hot meals for the searchers in a shed near the beach. Three days into the search, Phillips’ ex-wife released a careful statement through the police, thanking the searchers for their efforts. “We are holding out every hope that my children Jayda, Maverick, and Ember are safe,” she said.
But the stark facts—the lonely car on the beach, the 8-foot waves, Tom and the children vanishing completely—were daunting. “I do fear the worst,” Tom’s sister, Rozzi Pethybridge, told a reporter. “I am worried a rogue wave has caught one of the kids and he’s gone in to save them.” Phillips’ uncle seemed to be hinting at something even darker when he told another reporter that in some ways he hoped it had been a rogue wave: “If something has happened to the children, the best-case scenario is that they were washed out to sea,” he said. “That way it’s an accident.”
September in New Zealand, the height of Southern Hemisphere spring, is whitebaiting season, when locals set up nets at the river mouth to capture the shoals of immature fish headed back to their freshwater home. But during the search operation, authorities placed a rāhui, a ban, on fishing. Some Marokopa residents grumbled about halting what had been a boom season. But others put things in perspective. “That’s the end of the whitebaiting,” one local told a reporter, “but that’s small-time compared with losing a family.”
On social media and on Reddit, observers seized on rumors of a custody dispute and spun out dark theories of an abduction or staged disappearance. Phillips was an experienced bushman, camper, and hunter. In passing, locals told reporters that if Phillips had taken the kids out into the wild for some reason, they were confident he could last for weeks or months out there, even with three children in tow. A week into the search, family members seemed to be pinning their hopes on this idea. “We’re looking on the bright side,” the uncle told Radio New Zealand. “We’re hoping he’s just gone and hidden in the bush.”
After 12 days of active searching, the police stood down. The whitebaiting rāhui was lifted. Emergency services personnel moved out of the Marokopa community building on the banks of the river. Other than the Toyota, not a single sign had been found of the four missing Phillipses. The media continued covering the case, but there wasn’t much to say—everyone understood that until bodies washed up somewhere, it was unlikely there would be any further news.
No one knew that the disappearances were just the beginning of an ordeal that has not yet ended—a case that has only grown stranger and more ominous in the two and a half years since, prompting pleas from family, increasing public astonishment, online speculation, a shocking crime, and a community’s closing ranks around one of its own.
Back in September 2021, the real mystery started when the first one was solved. Because 17 days after they had been reported missing, Tom Phillips and his three children walked through the front door of his parents’ farm.
The Tom Phillips disappearance captivated New Zealand. But the incident never reached the 24/7 fever pitch of blanket coverage that would have characterized the story if it had happened in the United States. In part that’s because there’s no CNN-style 24-hour news channel in New Zealand, though pretty much every outlet in the country sent a reporter to the west coast in hopes of digging something up. But no one had much to say. Phillips’ uncle spoke to press during the search, but other members of the Phillips clan stuck to the farm and stayed away from television cameras. The police delivered a daily briefing most afternoons, which never offered any new information. The children’s mother remained unnamed. Reporters were unable to reveal details of the couple’s custody disputes, because family courts in New Zealand strictly prohibit media from reporting on their proceedings.
Even after Phillips and his children returned, there was no footage of the happy family waving from the front porch, no soft-focus newsmagazine interviews, no morning-show feature. Phillips never spoke to the press. The family issued a statement—“Tom is remorseful, he is humbled, he is gaining an understanding of the horrific ordeal he has put us through”—and Pethybridge gave a brief interview to the New Zealand Herald in which she seemed shell-shocked by the situation. “Hope dwindled and we became more and more resigned and sad,” she said. Now, she added, she could “smile and laugh for the first time in three weeks, and not feel bad if you have a little smile.”
She did not, however, smile once in the entire interview. The family closed ranks, and reporters were stuck combing social media for clues. (“Pethybridge also shared a song titled ‘Hey Brother’ by Swedish DJ Avicci,” one report noted.)
The residents of Marokopa, too, had little to say once the children were safe, one reporter told me. “After he was found, no one wanted to talk,” said Karen Rutherford of Newshub. “He has put people through the wringer, to be honest.” After all, what had all that work been for? They’d served meals to rescuers, opened the community center 24/7. Many residents had tramped along the shoreline, looking for bodies. Even after the police had called off the search, members of the local hapū went out every day. Then it turned out that Phillips simply had not bothered to tell anyone he was taking the children to the deep bush, pitching a tent 15 kilometers south of the beach where his car was found. “He’s done this before. It’s not the first time,” a local farmer said. “We’re glad to have him back, but he should be held accountable. What was he thinking?”
And why had he left the car there, anyway? Though one friend suggested that the pickup had been stolen by joyriding kids, most everyone assumed that Phillips had parked on the beach to throw searchers off the trail. But for what purpose? Some noted Pethybridge’s comment that Phillips was in “a helpless place” and wanted to “clear his head.” A Reddit user mused: “It’s one thing for him wanting to clear his head but what about the kids? Hope they’re OK, might need some therapy stat.” Others leaped in to assure everyone that a trip to the bush was just what any kid needed: “Going camping with dad and forgetting about the rest of the world would be pretty sweet.”
Indeed, there’s a long tradition in New Zealand of valorizing backcountry adventure—getting lost in the bush for a while—shared by parents and children. “It’s a Man Alone thing,” the Auckland education researcher Stuart McNaughton told me, referring to the 1939 novel by John Mulgan still viewed by many as essential to understanding the “Kiwi character.” “Getting on with stuff, taming a difficult environment, getting hurt in the process.” To many New Zealanders, a proper father figure is a guy who knows how to handle the wilderness, a place where increasingly citified Kiwi kids seem less and less comfortable. McNaughton summarized the attitude: “If they’re gonna have an accident, they’re gonna have an accident—it’ll probably do them good.”
The modern urtext on this subject is Taika Waititi’s 2016 comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople, still the most successful locally produced film in the nation’s history. In the movie, a troubled Māori kid from the Auckland streets bonds with a brusque Pākehā outdoorsman in the deep bush. The movie’s villain is a maniacal child protection officer who hunts them down—the overweening nanny state, in the flesh. It’s based on a book by the late Barry Crump, famous for his reputation as a rugged bloke; New Zealanders know him best for his long-running ads for the Toyota Hilux ute, the official truck of bushmen—unsurprisingly, the truck Tom Phillips owned and parked on Kiritehere Beach.
After he returned, Phillips was charged with wasting police resources and ordered to appear in court. He was “reckless as to whether wasteful deployment of police resources would result,” the charges read. He “behaved in a manner that was likely to give rise to serious apprehension for the safety of himself, Jayda Phillips, Ember Phillips and Maverick Phillips, knowing that such apprehension would be groundless.” The charges carried a maximum penalty of three months in jail or a $2,000 fine.
In neighborhood Facebook groups and on playgrounds across New Zealand, parents debated the news. How dare this screw-up risk the lives of searchers and terrify his family because he hadn’t bothered to tell anyone where he was going. Shouldn’t he at least pay the government back for what it spent on that search plane? Or: How dare the government charge a parent for going camping with his children! Wasn’t he the kind of throwback dad we didn’t see enough of anymore, as modern kids become coddled and soft?
I was certainly sympathetic to this second argument. I’d taken my own family to New Zealand to live for a period in 2017, specifically to capture that spirit of adventure, something that felt sorely lacking in our suburban American lives. Our daughters—just a little older than Phillips’ kids were when they disappeared—rarely left their comfort zones, and no one we knew let their children roam our neighborhood freely. We hoped that New Zealand might help shake us up. I was no bushman like Tom Phillips, but the four of us did go tramping across graywacke streams, into the forest primeval, even along a remote shore that looked quite a bit like the Marokopa coast. Unlike Phillips, I told my friends where we were going, but still: Were the police really charging this guy for giving his kids what might have been a wondrous adventure?
Reporters, struggling to advance the story, asked experts what they thought about it all. One family lawyer admitted he knew nothing about the children’s custody arrangement but said, “If there was no parenting order, and he was just going on holiday, legally he’s done nothing wrong.” The same outlet asked a “human rights lawyer” what she thought about a parent taking children out into the deep bush without letting anyone know. “It’s not best practice,” she replied, in a tone I could almost hear from the page.
Then, in December, as summer vacation season began, the New Zealand Herald found a Facebook post—seemingly from someone close to the children’s mother—stating that Phillips had once again taken his kids on walkabout. “He notified family of where he was going,” the local police commander said in response. “In terms of current court restrictions of what he can and can’t do, he’s doing nothing wrong.” Commenters online were aghast that the paper had pursued the story. “So this is just literally a man taking his kids camping?” one wrote. “Correct,” replied another. “His ex-missus has gone to NZH and they’ve run with it.”
Phillips’ scheduled court date was Jan. 12, 2022. That morning, reporters packed the tiny wooden courthouse in Te Kūiti, lured by the chance to finally ask questions of the enigmatic father who had made news and driven debate across the country for months. More media spilled onto Queen Street outside, pacing in the warm summer sun.
Tom Phillips never showed up. Appearing via video, his lawyer told the judge that he’d informed his client of the appearance date and never spoken to him again. He also asked to withdraw as counsel in the case.
The judge issued a warrant for Phillips’ arrest. But the police couldn’t locate Phillips or his three children. They had disappeared into the bush. And this time, they didn’t come back.
When I spoke to New Zealanders in the months after the second disappearance of Tom Phillips, it was clear that some in the country still viewed him as a kind of quirky folk hero who’d taken his kids out into the wilderness to avoid the oppressive, overreaching government. “There was a lot of talk like that,” said Max Baxter, the mayor of Ōtorohanga, where Phillips’ house sat empty, weeds growing over his fence. “He felt that his personal protection of the children was paramount, and the result was that he was opening them up to experiences that kids nowadays don’t get. He’s teaching them to be bushmen.” He laughed. “My grown children probably couldn’t survive two weeks in the bush!”
“A lot of people are like, ‘Leave him alone, those kids are probably having the time of their lives,’ ” said Karen Rutherford, the New Zealand reporter who got the only on-camera interview with Phillips’ ex-wife. But others, she told me, felt that “now he’s skipped court he’s stuffed all his chances of being a good dad.”
In the United States, I felt my admiration of Phillips wash away like the road to Marokopa as heavy rains swept through the region. Was he really hiding his kids in the bush during this kind of weather? The children’s mother made a public appeal for assistance in May, as New Zealand winter approached. Other relatives on the mother’s side launched an online petition urging police to do more. They complained that Phillips’ parents were refusing to let anyone onto their enormous Marokopa compound to search the wilderness around the farm—or the baches, the guesthouses the family used to rent out to tourists.
The Phillips family remained silent objects of fascination for the news media. On the day of Phillips’ courthouse no-show, his mother had told reporters assembled outside the gates of the family farm, “I am trespassing all media from this property.” According to one outlet, asked if she knew where her son was, “Julia Phillips simply answered with a shrug and a smile.”
“They’re real sort of rugged, coast-y people who don’t come into town much,” a local reporter told me. “They’re kind of unusual. You’d call them rednecks, I think.” (Being “coastal” has a very different connotation in New Zealand than it does in the U.S.) Tony Wall, a reporter for the newsmagazine Stuff, told me that Phillips’ parents have been “very uncooperative. If you read between the lines, it definitely seems like they know something but they’re not telling us.”
Someone, everybody assumed, was shopping for supplies and ferrying them out to Phillips, wherever he was hiding out. “It’s almost unfathomable to think a father could survive with three small children without someone buying them supplies,” Baxter told me. “But what’s the endgame? I’m looking out my window now, and it’s pouring down rain.”
The lack of urgency on the part of Waikato police was often commented upon. “It’s very strange,” one reporter who’s been covering the case said. “The cops are not pouring any resources into looking for him and those children. I think they are of the view that he’s not going to hurt them and he’ll eventually come out.” The department responded to press requests with a not-particularly-inspiring statement: “Police continue to make enquiries to establish the whereabouts of Tom Phillips, who we believe is currently with his three children. While Police understand the ongoing interest in this matter, we will not be disclosing the details of the enquiries that are under way.”
Whatever enquiries were under way, that cold and wet winter passed with no sign of Tom Phillips. As 2022 turned into 2023, Phillips and his children had been missing without a trace for more than a year. Then came the bank robbery.
The two figures were dressed in all black—motorcycle helmets, puffer jackets, and boots—when they walked into the ANZ bank branch less than half a mile from the courthouse in Te Kūiti, just before noon on May 16, 2023. When the bank’s anxious staff asked them to take their helmets off, the pair displayed guns and demanded money. Tellers quickly gave them cash and, within moments, the pair ran out the front door.
As the robbers hurried down Rora Street, one witness later said they were dropping cash out of their pockets, “heaps of $50 notes.” The street was strewn with money. The confused passerby asked one of them, a slight figure whom they described as “a girl,” if she needed help picking up the money. Up ahead, the girl’s companion—a man, it seemed—turned back to look at what was happening. Right then, he was tackled to the ground by the owner of the SuperValue supermarket they’d been hurrying past.
Suddenly, the girl brandished her gun. The passerby backed away. Someone called, “Fire the gun!” No one’s quite clear who did what, or whom they were aiming at, but someone did fire, more than once. The passerby froze in their tracks, and the supermarket owner retreated.
The robbers ran past a vape shop and around a corner to a parking lot, where they climbed onto a motorbike and rode off to the north. Behind them, bank notes littered the pavement, 20s and 50s—as much as $1,000, one witness estimated.
The armed robbery shocked the town, which bills itself as the nation’s sheepshearing capital. A week later, the robbery led a Waikato Times feature about growing youth crime concerns in Te Kūiti, full of nervous quotes from residents and shop owners about meth, burglary, and car thefts broadcast on TikTok.
Yet on the subject of the bank robbery itself, one Maōri warden had only to say that he reckoned locals already knew who did it. It wasn’t some wayward Te Kūiti youth or a more organized criminal element. Even in those early days, speculation was running rampant among residents that the bank robbers were, in fact, Tom Phillips—and one of his children.
It took four months for police to officially name Phillips for the crime, charging him with aggravated robbery, aggravated wounding, and unlawful possession of a firearm. They believe that he was the larger of the two robbers, the one who seemed to be leading things, and have not identified the second, smaller robber, other than to say that they think she is “female.” At the time of the robbery, Jayda was 10.
The September 2023 charges in the Wild West–style bank robbery—guns blazing, bank notes blowing in the wind—eliminated any residual goodwill Phillips had accumulated in his long months on the run. They capped off an eventful winter, Phillips’ second on the run with his children.
The month before, Phillips had stolen a truck—naturally, a Toyota Hilux—and driven to Hamilton, the biggest city in the Waikato region, about 40 miles north of Ōtorohanga. An acquaintance recognized him in the parking lot of Bunnings, a Home Depot–type home improvement store, where Phillips, wearing a surgical mask and a woolen hat, used a large amount of cash to buy headlamps, batteries, seedlings, buckets, and gumboots.
That evening, Phillips got into an altercation on a road about an hour up the coast from Marokopa. The owner of the Hilux—who had also realized that winter clothing had been stolen from his property—fought with Phillips, then chased him along the winding highway, reportedly attempting to run him off the road. Eventually multiple vehicles were pursuing Phillips, who switched off the Hilux’s headlights and turned sharply into the parking lot of the Te Kauri Lodge, driving through a gate and into a paddock. “He went in there and he hid,” a lodge custodian told Radio New Zealand. “These fullahs drove straight past.” The police sent out a search helicopter, to no avail. A few days later, the Hilux was found deep in the undergrowth, about 25 meters off Marokopa Road, not far from the Phillips farm.
A few weeks later, a private investigator—he tells reporters he “follows the case on his own time”—tipped off Tony Wall, the reporter at Stuff, that the property to which the Hilux was returned had hosted Phillips for a visit the year before. (The P.I. says he reported the sighting to the police but nothing came of it.) According to an informant, Phillips had been receiving help from a network of local residents “since day one.”
Wall chronicled his visit to the steep, densely wooded property near Ōtorohanga in a hair-raising story published last August. A neighbor, who was reportedly also present when Phillips visited the property in 2022, launched into a coy, taunting conversation about the disappearance. “I can’t say if I have or haven’t seen him in the last few years,” the man said. “It’s like a good game of hide-and-go-seek. He’s fucking good at it. Never, ever play hide-and-go-seek with him because you’ll give up, and he won’t come out.” When Wall asked the man how someone like Phillips could simply vanish, the man scoffed. “It’s easy in New Zealand. The justice system is shit, the court system is shit, the police are shit, the media is shit. That’s the facts of it.”
As Wall drove away, his car was overtaken by two other drivers, who boxed him in and forced him to pull over to the side of the road. One of the vehicles was driven by the owner of the stolen Hilux, who accused Wall of “snooping around” and “causing havoc.” “You’re in the wrong fucking place for this, man,” he said. “You want to come and harass us out here, on my own turf?” He tried to force open Wall’s car door, telling him, “I’m gonna fuck you up, mate.”
Wall finally managed to drive away, but the ute’s owner had one last thing to say. “You’re fucking lucky we’re letting you out of here, cunt. You want the truth about the whole fucking scenario, mate, you’d better be on your game, ’cause you’re pushing shit uphill now.”
After the police named Phillips in the bank robbery, residents phoned in more than a dozen sightings, but the police could never seem to catch him. Late one night in November, Phillips and one of his children rode a stolen quad bike to the town of Piopio and smashed the window of a superette in an attempted burglary, police say. Security footage showed a pair dressed in full camo gear approaching the store’s camera with a spray can. When an alarm sounded, they fled south.
This January, the two-year anniversary of Phillips’ second flight passed with just another wan police announcement—this time that they had narrowed Phillips’ hiding place to the Marokopa area, a development that surprised absolutely no one who’s been following the case. Yet I feel for the police, who are looking in an area spanning hundreds of square miles, where a number of residents clearly still have no desire to share information with them. (The owner of the stolen Hilux—a guy who disliked Phillips enough that he tried to run him off the road—nevertheless referred to the police as “fucking pigshits.”) “If a plane crashed in this bush, you’d be fortunate to find it,” Max Baxter told me. “It’s really, really hard to begin somewhere, unless there’s someone who knows and decides it’s time to come forward.”
Few New Zealanders still believe that Phillips and his kids—now 10, 8, and 7—are roughing it, stalking game in the deep bush like the wilderpeople of old. Most everyone thinks that he’s hiding on or near his family farm, aided by a network of friendly locals that may or may not include his parents. (That’s certainly what Wall, still trying to crack the case, believes.) On social media, it’s been a long time since anyone has called Phillips a good dad merely fighting authority. “He’s just a piece of shit human being with anger and control issues who is subjecting his children to child abuse,” went one typical comment.
And few anticipate any ending to this story that feels happy at all. In the worst-case scenario, Phillips and his kids are injured, or killed, robbing another bank or battling it out with the cops. But even the best-case scenario at this point feels grim. Phillips’ children have spent the past two and a half years with a father who’s surely told them that everyone is out to get them, that they can trust no one but him, that the only way to stay safe is to hide out far from the rest of the world. He’s relayed to them that their future depends on smashing windows, stealing cars, waving guns.
Someday those children will be found, and their father will almost certainly be sent to jail. Every news report about the case—a dwindling number, as the months go on—features the same photos of the children: the girls in fairy dresses, all three of them grinning widely. In the next photos we see of Jayda, Maverick, and Ember, they won’t be smiling. I once thought perhaps their father was giving them a gift, the adventure of a lifetime. Instead, he stole their childhoods. When it’s all over they’ll be as alone as that truck was, parked on the gray sand, the implacable sea rushing up to meet it.
