Today marks one year since fugitive father Tom Phillips was shot dead in a confrontation with police, nearly four years after taking his children into hiding in King Country bush near the remote settlement of Marokopa. Reporter Simon Mercep returned to the district to see how the community is faring, and what questions they still want answered.
In the King Country, you don't have to be in Marokopa to find someone connected to the settlement.
'It's absolutely gut wrenching'
On Te Kuiti's main street, we meet Tennille Kete. She's an ambulance officer, a district councillor up in Otorohanga to the north, and someone with strong family connections to Marokopa, more than an hour away on the west coast. It turns out I'd interviewed her aunty there, three years earlier.
Twelve months after Tom Phillips' death, and after the serious wounding of a local police officer, the saga remains close to home.
"Especially for myself, with family from the coast. This is family. These are friends. It's no joke and it's absolutely gut wrenching," she says.
When Tom Phillips first went into hiding with his children over a ruling in the Family Court, we found some in the district who backed him. They saw him as a father protecting his children.
As time passed, and the welfare of the children became a bigger concern, that support faded. And while much of the circumstances surrounding the case remain suppressed, Phillips' conduct prompted police minister Mark Mitchell to call him a "monster".
Watch more on TVNZ+: Simon Mercep in Marakopa one year on
For all that, Kete's support of the wider family remains strong.
"The Phillips are really good people. Christian people."
She says an apology from the parents, addressed to the whole district and published in the local newspaper, was well received.
"Absolutely. They're good standing citizens."
'No winners'
Otorohanga's Mayor Rodney Dow is less than a year into the job. He wasn't leading the district for most of the time Tom Phillips was on the run. But he knows his patch. Born and raised in the region, he leads a second generation trucking business which operates in the King Country and beyond.
He believes the tragedy is not one people want to dwell on.
"No winners out of this ordeal. It's just a matter of just leave them alone, and let things move on really. That seems to be the feeling I get in the community."
That said, he'd like to understand how the custody dispute spiralled out of control.
"How did it get into the mess it got into? If you could find some answers for that, for the future, it would be awesome."
And that means tracing the saga back to its beginnings.
"Going way back to actually what triggered all this, that's probably a good thing to do."
It's far from certain that Dow will get the answers he's after from the Government-commissioned inquiry into the disappearance of the Phillips children, which is expected to be released in the coming days
Justice Simon Moore KC was directed to focus on whether government agencies like police and Oranga Tamariki took all practicable steps to safeguard the welfare and safety of the children.
That includes how the agencies engaged with the Family Court, and whether they could have done so more effectively.
But Justice Moore has also been told not to comment on or inquire into judicial decisions concerning the children.
As the inquiry's terms of reference lay out, the children's care was subject of Family Court proceedings as far back as 2018. The terms of reference also note that after Tom Phillips' first disappearance with his children, in September 2021, he faced a criminal charge of wasting police time. A parenting order was then varied so that Phillips was to reside at a specified address.
How the Family Court approached a decision about Phillips' fitness as a parent would appear to fall outside the remit of the inquiry.
Dow says the workings of the Family Court is "above his pay grade", but he says the aim of any inquiry is straightforward.
"Hopefully we can learn some lessons. And gain a better future for other people."
'Something might go wrong'
Twenty minutes south of Otorohanga, we meet Waitomo District mayor John Robertson in his Te Kuiti office. Like Rodney Dow, he's a King Country native. He's also kept a close eye on the Phillips' saga throughout, and tracked the waning support for the fugitive father.
"Over time, it turned from the focus on the custody issues to the fear that the children were exposed and something might go wrong."
In the year since Phillips' death, police have hit the pause button on their investigation into who may have supported Phillips over the years.
Robertson has become a media go-to man to reflect community views on the case over the years.
"I can honestly say I was never told that so-and-so was helping Tom," he says. "So whatever was going on through those years, we never knew, and what the police knew was kept to themselves."
Robertson considers the terms of reference of the Government inquiry to be too narrow.
He'd have liked the government "to encourage the inquiry to talk to local communities, talk to those outside of government agencies, to get a view as to whether things could have been done differently".
He says he was happy to let the police take the lead at the time, but now reflects a different approach could have been in the mix.
"To bring the community together, or bring leaders in that part of the community (the Marokopa area) and family together, to talk about how Tom might respond to various options to bring the children out again safely."
The aim?
"To break through the issues that were the root case of all this."
And to try to end the standoff, he suggests what he calls an "outside facilitator", independent of police, would have been worth a try. Someone to negotiate Tom Phillips' custody concerns. And to break through those "root causes", such a person would have needed to know the rulings of the Family Court.
Court suppression orders mean that aspects of the children's disappearance are not in the public domain.
But many people in the King Country district have heard rumours.
'Don't know what to believe'
One of those who's heard the chat is Nev Wells, whose spent years living and working around the Marokopa district, and still runs an adventure bike race in the back country.
"You just don't know what to believe. And I don't think anyone really knows what to believe," he says. "It would just be nice to know, number one, that the kids are OK."
How the police dealt with the search for the children will be addressed shortly in the inquiry. Wells says in considering how the police handled the job, you can't lose sight of Phillips himself, who grew up in the district and knew the terrain.
"There's a lot of thick, thick bush up there and it's quite remote. Not a lot of people, so you can definitely move around without being seen fairly easily."
And what does he say about staying in those conditions for nearly four years, with young children?
"It amazes me that he did what he could do. He was obviously very very onto it in the bush. And he had time. He had time to build and time to make things as good as he could. Getting bits and pieces from wherever. Stole some, whatever."
Wells says the intense spotlight on Marokopa has been unwelcome and uncomfortable to deal with. It remains, he says, a great place, with a great community.
"We don't particularly want to be in the limelight. We like being out in the remote west coast," he says.
'What the mother may be going through'
Just before leaving the district, we catch up with Kane Wharepouri. We met Kane a few months earlier, when Otorohanga was hit by a freak weather bomb. It flooded rivers and roads, and one person died in the deluge. Kane and his whanau had to evacuate their home, and found shelter at the Te Kohitanga marae.
Now in a new home, Kane says many the Phillips case is still on the minds of many.
"People talk about the impact of what he went through and his family went through."
He believes it was a polarising issue, especially in the early days.
"It seemed to be a more male demographic that was backing what Tom Phillps was going through, and that the females were backing and understanding of what the mother may be going through as well."
And not everyone took it seriously to begin with.
"Jokes of 'the world's greatest hide and seek player' were going around," he says. "It almost became like a meme, like a running joke."
Kane grew up visiting Marokopa. He remembers the Phillips family, and exchanging a friendly wave with them.
"If you were lucky enough and they'd gone fishing, they might give you some. They were just all round normal Kiwi people."
And he understands why some may have supported Phillips.
"Perhaps it became a matter of, 'I know this person, I perhaps understand what he's going through, perhaps I could help him out'."
But he also has sympathy for the children's mother.
"I wouldn't like to be separated from my kids for a long period of time.The stress that she must have been under at that time would have been huge."
After another visit to Marokopa, to Otorohanga and to Te Kuiti, it's clear many want to move on. But they're not likely to forget.
Wharepouri puts it like this: "Because when you hear the sirens go off, you still think, I wonder if that's him? Because they were chasing him for such a long period of time."
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