Trudging single file through rough terrain, a heavily bearded man in camouflage gear carrying a backpack and rifle is followed by three smaller, similarly dressed figures.

As they traverse the hillside in Te Anga, on New Zealand's North Island, they are spotted by two teenagers out hunting wild pigs on their farm.

Believing them to be poachers, the 16-year-olds film them on a phone then challenge them. One of the foursome, a girl, her face covered with a mask, replies.

'I said, 'This is private property' and she was like, 'Yeah... duh',' the boy recalled of the dusk encounter.

'Then I asked, 'Does anyone know you're on here?' and she said, 'No, just you guys'.'

It was only when the teenager sent the video to his grandfather that he discovered the true significance of that exchange.

Namely, that they had just crossed paths with New Zealand's most famous fugitive family – Tom Phillips and his three children Jayda, 11, Maverick, nine, and Ember, eight. Theirs is a story that has gripped the nation for the past three years.

The sighting last week was the first time all three children have been seen since they disappeared in late 2021.

Since then, 38-year-old Phillips has played a game of cat and mouse with the increasingly embarrassed authorities.

While on the run, the experienced hunter and outdoorsman has been captured on CCTV a number of times, including while allegedly taking part in the armed hold-up of a bank in May last year. He and a second, smaller, female individual, fled the scene on a black motorbike.

But despite posting a £37,000 reward this summer, police are no nearer to tracking the Phillips family down. Not even after the latest close encounter.

Although officers were alerted soon after the sighting, scrambling a helicopter with heat-seeking cameras, no trace was found, with the hunt called off after three days. The continued failure to find them has seen police face growing criticism.

Some have called for indigenous trackers or even Special Forces to join the hunt, others for Phillips to be offered an amnesty from prosecution. At the same time, suspicion is mounting as to the level of support he must be receiving from misguided sympathisers, some of whom see him as a 'hero' battling against the authorities to raise his children as he sees fit.

'What I think has been happening is that Tom has a little bit of a network of people who think he's Robin Hood,' private investigator Chris Budge told the Daily Mail last night.

Budge, a former military policeman, has visited the area on his own initiative on half a dozen occasions and spent more than two weeks in the bush searching for the family using thermal imaging equipment.

'The girls are now heading into their teenage years and they are going to need stuff,' he says. 'I don't believe that's going to be all happening in the bush.

'I don't think he's just a kidnapper but I think he has taken his kids because he wants to keep hold of them and there's probably a bit of Stockholm Syndrome, a bit of brainwashing, where he is telling them, 'If we go back you'll be taken away from me and I'll never ever see you again'.'

Budge adds: 'I think the only two or three ways that it will end is if someone is in trouble with the police and they use their knowledge of Phillips as a bargaining chip or, secondly, they get accidentally seen like they have been last week or, thirdly, one of the kids gets sick. I don't think Tom would let one of his kids die.'

Speaking this week, the children's mother, Cat, said she has little faith left in the authorities and now feels that finding her three missing children is 'out of the police's league'.

'It was like Christmas come early and I really thought they would be coming home this time,' she said. 'It's a confirmed sighting and yet nothing has come of it.'

She speculated that her daughter's interaction with the pig hunters may have been her trying to get a message out to the public. 'Is that a cry for help?' Cat said on a podcast produced by Radio New Zealand.

'Is that, 'Does anybody know that we're here? Is anyone coming for us?' We don't get to hear the tone of her voice but to me, that's what I think.

'It's like she's trying to say something without actually saying something because her father is right there and she's worried if she says the wrong thing and words it the wrong way, there's later repercussions.' 

As for the support Phillips may be getting from the rural community, where his family has lived and farmed for generations, Cat pulls no punches. 'One hundred per cent somebody is helping them. Somebody is supplying them or just inadvertently leaving things in an accessible place,' she said.

'My babies deserve better. It's beyond time that they come home and supporting Thomas is essentially supporting child abuse because that's what it is.

'There's no beating around the bush. None of this is okay.

'Those people need to stop. They need to think seriously about it and they need to question themselves. Why do these children deserve any less than any other child in New Zealand?'

The extraordinary saga began three years ago when Phillips and the children first went missing in the most dramatic of circumstances.

Separated from his wife for several years, he had reportedly been awarded custody of the children, whom he was home-schooling. Full details of the couple's domestic arrangements have not been published because in New Zealand it is prohibited to report on family court proceedings.

Much of their time was spent on the Phillips family farm at Marokopa, in a remote part of the country's Waikato region.

Then, one Sunday in September 2021, Phillips' 4x4 truck was found abandoned on the shoreline. The vehicle was facing the sea, with the waves lapping at the bonnet. Empty child seats were in the back. 

Police were alerted and a huge land and sea search followed. Soon photos of the missing father and his three smiling children, then aged just eight, six and five, were in every newspaper and on every TV channel in New Zealand.

'I do fear the worst. I am worried a rogue wave has caught one of the kids and he's gone in to save them,' said Phillips' sister, Rozzi Pethybridge, at the time. After 12 days of active searching, the police search was wound down.

Five days later, Phillips and his three children walked through the front door of his parents' farm. All were safe and well and it emerged that he had spent the time trying to 'clear his head' while camping in dense bushland ten miles from where his vehicle was found.

Little further explanation or apology was given for his behaviour, though there is much more of a tradition of spending time in the countryside in New Zealand than in the UK.

His family issued a statement: 'Tom is remorseful, he is humbled, he is gaining an understanding of the horrific ordeal he has put us through.'

Amidst a public outcry over the cost of the search, Phillips was charged with wasting police time and resources.

But in December 2021, a month before he was due in court, he left the family farm with his children for a second time.

It wasn't until he missed his hearing that police issued an arrest warrant. Approached at home, his mother Julia was unforthcoming and when asked if she knew where her son was, answered with a shrug and a smile. Initially, there was a certain amount of support for his actions, with some seeing him as a father trying to bring his children up in the manner that he wanted to.

'There was a lot of talk like that,' said Max Baxter, the mayor of Otorohanga, where Phillips owned a house. '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.'

But as the months passed, few truly believed that the family could be living off the land. Not least because, as the children's mother has pointed out, her daughter Ember suffers badly from asthma. 'You need a prescription to get inhalers, so either [Tom] is neglecting her health, or somebody's giving him inhalers,' Cat has said.

In May of last year, Phillips seems to have roared back into sight on a stolen motorcycle when he and a female accomplice allegedly held up a bank at gunpoint.

The incident was witnessed by a local resident who told the Otago Daily Times how she had seen two people rushing out of the ANZ bank in a hurry, dropping wads of cash as they went. Both were dressed all in black and wearing motorcycle helmets.

'There were heaps of $50 notes falling on the ground,' she said. Thinking they had dropped the money by mistake she stopped one of them – the smaller female – and offered to help pick it up.

It was only then that she saw both were armed. At that moment the owner of a nearby supermarket tackled the man to the ground. There was confusion and it was alleged the man said, 'Fire the gun'. Shots then rang out, though no one was hit.

As the supermarket owner backed off, the duo ran off to a car park where their getaway motorbike was waiting.

The robbery happened on May 16, but police only revealed in September that they believed Phillips was responsible and that they had charged him with aggravated robbery, aggravated wounding and unlawfully possessing a firearm.

They reiterated their view that Phillips had been receiving help to stay hidden and urged people to rethink their support for him in light of the new warrant for his arrest. Police did not identify the female involved in the robbery.

That summer Phillips was also spotted at a supermarket wearing a medical face mask. He drove away in a stolen Toyota Hilux. In November, he was again caught on CCTV, also accompanied by a child, trying to smash his way into a store. When an alarm sounded they fled on a stolen quad bike.

That the most recent sighting should have also occurred not far from Marokopa comes as little surprise. As local mayor John Robertson says: 'Look, for him to be out there with the children for this long one has to assume that he is getting help somewhere along the line. Within the community there is a whole range of views on this. Some probably support Tom and some think his judgment is really bad.'

It is a point taken up by the children's mother. 'My babies deserve better,' she told the New Zealand Herald earlier this week. 'It is beyond time that they come home and realistically, you know, if Marokopa wants to keep Thomas they can keep Thomas, I just want my babies home.

'That's all I want. They can have him. I really don't care. I don't really care if the police get him. That's not my issue. That's not my problem.

'My problem is that my babies are gone. My problem is that people are helping and they need to stop. Those people need to stop. They are just innocent children and they should not be where they are now.'

In her attempt to cope with the loss of her children, she says she tries to pretend they aren't still missing. She has two other daughters, who are older than the three who are with their father, but admits she feels 'lost'.

'Since they've been gone, I've lost my way. I'm not me.

'They were my world, they were my everything,' Cat said. 'I feel like I didn't fight hard enough, I didn't make enough noise. I feel like it's my fault.'

Reflecting on their relationship, Cat described how her husband had been extremely controlling.

She claims he did not like her going anywhere or doing anything on her own and did not want her to put their children in childcare.

She added that she was worried how their ordeal would affect them in the long term.

'They have got their whole lives ahead of them and it is already destroyed,' she said.

'It is going to take them years to, you know, gain any semblance of normality regardless of how we proceed from here because so much damage has been done and it takes a long time to undo that damage.

'Nobody should have to go through any little part of this. None of it is right.

'I don't even know what they look like now, they will be so big. They would have changed. I just love my babies. I love them so much – they are my life.'

For all that, given Phillips' obvious skill at evading capture, it's hard to predict when she will see them next.