A former police negotiator says the latest photos of a campsite used by Tom Philips and his children appears to look like a bolthole, not a permanent residence.
Two large, established and heavily concealed structures were discovered in recent weeks in dense bush surrounding Marokopa, police said on Friday. It was believed they were the family’s primary campsites.
The new photos show camps that were more established than the makeshift one the family was living in immediately prior to Phillips’ death. The fugitive father was shot and killed on September 8 after a confrontation with police.
Lance Burdett, who spent 22 years as a cop, becoming the lead crisis negotiator, said people on the run don’t usually have one regular place to stay.
“[The pictures] surprised me in the fact that they are reasonably developed, but it’s certainly not a place that I think you could live permanently in, certainly not through the winter,” he told ThreeNews.
“People who do this – that go disappearing into the bush, or who run criminal enterprises – have places where they can rotate in and out of. The idea is to keep moving.
“When you get a cluster of [places], if somebody comes to this place, you can quickly dart into another place, and then another place.
“They look to me like they are temporary – they are areas where [Phillips and the children] can keep moving, and hunker down if they need to.”
Burdett said it would have been “very difficult” to stay warm in these campsites
“It looks like they’ve just kept moving around and kept moving around, to be more difficult to find,” he said.
“I’m not a survivalist, but most people will tell you that if you can find a cave or a big hollow tree or something like that, you hunker down on those to give yourself protection in the winter.
“If, from the look of the photos, it was open to one side, that’s not going to give you any protection.”
Detective Superintendent Ross McKay said inquiries indicated the Phillips family moved regularly between the campsites.
“For the last few weeks, police have been piecing together information and building a picture of Phillips’ movements,” he said on Friday.
“What is now clear is that Phillips moved regularly from coast to farm to bush in a complex manner that meant he was unlikely to be stumbled across.”
Burdett said police will be analysing all of the items found at the various campsites, in order to find the people who assisted Phillips during his time on the run.
“Where did this come from, who gave it to them – was it brought there, who brought it there,” he said. “By breaking down each little piece, it tells a story, and it will probably tell a story of who’s been helping.”
Burdett said it was likely a small number of people were helping the fugitive father, “because it was so tight-knit,” and Phillips wouldn’t have wanted many people to know his whereabouts.
