A man stole three children, and people cheered

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Twice she picked up the phone and rang the police, and twice he took it out of her hand and hung it up. She thought they would come anyway. Two abandoned emergency calls from one address would surely bring someone. Nobody came.

Years later, a good part of New Zealand had decided that the man who took the phone out of her hand was a folk hero.

The tributes went up before the two younger children had been found. Tom Phillips had been dead a few hours, shot on a gravel road, his twelve-year-old daughter sitting behind him on the quad bike and then standing in the dark watching it happen. Her brother and sister were still somewhere in the bush waiting for a father who was not coming back, and the internet had already made up its mind. He taught those kids to live off the land, people wrote, and he should be proud of that. What crime did he really commit, other than removing his children from the insane world we live in. He never hurt anybody, wrote one man, on a morning when a constable was going into the first of several surgeries on his head and shoulder.

Marokopa is a settlement of a few dozen houses on the west coast of New Zealand's North Island, backed by steep hill country and dense native forest. Tom Phillips lived there, and in December 2021, following a dispute with their mother, he took his three children, then aged eight, six and five, into the bush and disappeared. He had already done it once, that September, vanishing with them for nineteen days and returning to face a charge of wasting police resources.

Years of near-invisibility followed, punctuated by crime. In May 2023 he was alleged to have robbed a bank and shot at a supermarket worker. He was photographed with an accomplice believed to be one of his children. The first confirmed sighting of all three children came in October 2024, filmed by a teenage pig hunter.

The abduction ended on 8 September 2025, when a burglary at a farm supply store was reported at half past two in the morning and police spiked the road back towards Marokopa. Phillips, riding a quad bike with one child, was met by an officer he shot in the head at close range. Officers arriving behind killed him. Jayda, then twelve, was with him; her brother and sister were found alone at a campsite hours later. The saga was over and the children went into state care. Throughout all of it, a good part of the New Zealand public had treated him as an off-grid folk hero.

This week, Cat Christey, the children’s mother, gave her first interview since they were recovered. Asked what the relationship had been like, she described a man who “liked to be in control”. He held the money and he decided who she saw and when she saw them. There was violence, though she said that he “wasn't extremely violent” in the same sentence in which she mentioned slaps and the time he strangled her. Non-fatal strangulation is one of the strongest predictors available that a man will later kill a woman. Separately, children in households where the mother is being beaten are roughly four to nine times more likely to be physically abused themselves.

But what frightened her most, she says, were the guns, and the way he was about them, which is what the two calls to the police had been about. He ordered her out of the house afterwards, and when he asked her to come back and she refused, he was in court against her within days.

This is a sequence with a known direction, and it ends at the point where the children become leverage. He could not keep her, so he kept them.

And then the children: four years without going to school or seeing a doctor. They didn’t get to see their mother or play with other children. They lived in campsites the police photographs later showed to be dim and squalid, raised on a story in which the outside world was the enemy and the man rationing the food was the one person they could depend on. People keep offering, as a defence, that the children seemed well and never ran. But attachment to the person controlling you is not evidence of good treatment.

After the shooting, Cat went to Victim Support, the government-funded agency that pays for counselling for victims of crime, hoping for a few sessions with a psychologist. Her request was declined because police would not make a referral, on the basis that she was not a victim of a crime. What had been done to her did not qualify as domestic violence. Carrie Leonetti, an associate professor of law at the University of Auckland, put the counter-argument plainly: taking a woman's children and holding the question of whether she will ever see them again is violence done to her as surely as it is abuse done to them.

Victim Support declined to comment on her case, but noted that the Victims Assistance Scheme, which it administers on behalf of the Ministry of Justice, has specific eligibility criteria that support workers consider when assessing what assistance is available. Even the government minister in charge of the police, put on the spot, managed to agree that most right-minded people would probably regard her as a victim, before declining to comment on the police response beyond noting that in his experience police are "very, very good at making sure they identify, communicate and support [victims]".

A woman who had watched a decade of control end with her children being driven into a forest was told by the state that nothing criminal had happened to her. She also learned where she sat in the order of things when the children were found, because police told a documentary crew before they told her. She had said, when informed that the project existed, that she did not consent to it, and was told by the officer in charge that her permission was not required. Some months later Cat found out from the news that the investigation into whoever had been helping him during all this time had been closed. It ended with no charges, police maintaining that a small group of people assisted Phillips at various stages.

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Meanwhile their mother was being trolled by strangers who had concluded she must have done something to deserve all this. Hours after Phillips was shot, with two of her children still missing in the bush, she appeared in court on a drink-driving charge, three times the limit. Phillips’s fans ate it up as proof that she was a bad mother. She pleaded guilty and the offence should not be diminished. I would only point out that years of not knowing whether your children are alive tend not to produce a woman in excellent working condition. And a public capable of extending limitless sympathy to a man in a tent could spare none at all for the woman the state had already declined to call a victim.

None of this is exotic in a country where police attend a family harm episode roughly every four minutes, and where around half of all homicides involve violence inside a family. The Family Violence Death Review Committee counted eighty-eight women killed by their partners between 2009 and 2018, just over half of them within three months of leaving them, a finding repeated in every country that counts these deaths. Leaving is not the end of the danger. It’s the most dangerous moment of all.

None of this is a New Zealand problem. The man who takes his children off-grid to save them from a corrupt world is a story told in every country, and it is always told about the father and never about the woman he took them from. We are fluent in coercive control at a distance. We can pass a law about it and someone can run a campaign. What we cannot do is see it in a particular man, because the story of a father who loved his children so much that he stole them is so much better than the story of a man who could not stand that a woman had walked away from him.

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