That night when Dad took us out of the community was the beginning of the journey of the next six years. From that moment on there was always the sense that we were escaping or fleeing something. ISRAEL
I remember all the moving around and there was always someone with us. Dad used to be constantly on the lookout, thinking someone from the community was going to come and get us, like at night time, the same as he did. TENDY (TENDER-JOY)
Phil was determined to make good his promise of getting Sandy out. He kept reassuring the kids and telling them not to worry, they’d be a proper family again. But he knew how strongly Sandy believed in Neville’s preachings. He knew she believed that the only way to eternal salvation was to live in his community. Getting her out would be easy compared with the difficulty of keeping her out. He reasoned that if he could break Neville’s hold over her, then she would be only too happy to stay with her children and with him. He knew, too, that Sandy wouldn’t listen to his arguments. He needed to find somebody who knew how to deprogramme people who had come out of cults. The nearest person his research turned up was a woman in Australia, and thanks to a friend who paid her expenses, he arranged for her to come to New Zealand in early February to work with Sandy. Phil planned to abduct his wife to coincide with the day the woman arrived in Christchurch.
As a precaution, Phil took the children up to Auckland to stay with friends who had left the community. The distance from Christchurch had several advantages: if Sandy ran away from him, she wouldn’t be able to take the children back to the community with her, but the greatest advantage was that the woman would be able to talk to Sandy while they travelled north in the car. Sandy would have no choice but to listen. With the help of his brother Michael, Phil worked out a plan to abduct Sandy at night. They kept it simple: they would just walk in and escort her out, carrying her if necessary. By now the community had a night watchman so the two men had to be more careful than when Phil had taken the children.
They crept into the accommodation block, slipped into Sandy’s room, and shone the torch on the bed, only to find a different woman asleep in it. They flicked off the torch and backed out, praying that she wouldn’t wake. It would all be over if she gave the alarm. She stirred but didn’t wake as they eased the door shut. What to do now? Sandy could be in any of the dozens of rooms in the two buildings that made up the complex. They had to get her that night. The woman from Australia was waiting at Faith’s house but, more than that, Phil didn’t think he could bear the disappointment of failing to rescue her.
He led the way out of the building and they hid behind a wall till the watchman went past. Phil’s mind was in overdrive, but in the end he knew his only hope of success was to ask his friend inside the community where Sandy was. He went to her room, hoping her quarters hadn’t been changed as well. But she was there and happy to tell him. Neville had taken precautions against another raid by moving Sandy to a different building.
The two men sneaked inside, finding the right room with no further problem. For the second time in as many months, Phil woke his wife in the dead of night. He was expecting her to shout at him, demanding to know where her children were.
‘Sandy,’ he whispered, one eye on Naomi still asleep beside his wife, ‘I’ve come to get you.’
She didn’t speak – just got straight up, but the disturbance woke Naomi who ordered her daughter to have nothing to do with Phil and to get back into bed.
Phil tensed, ready to grab his wife and run, but Sandy told her mother to be quiet and she walked out of the room with her husband and brother-in-law, still wearing her pyjamas.
The three of them tiptoed through the complex with Phil not quite believing it had been so easy. He’d been sure she would be angry with him, but she got into the car as if this were an ordinary trip. She wanted to know about the children: were they all right and where were they?
He reassured her that they were doing fine, and yes, he would take her to the friends they were staying with in Auckland and in the meantime they needed to go to Faith’s house to pick up the clothes he’d organised for her. He didn’t tell her about the deprogrammer who was also waiting at Faith’s.
It was well after midnight by the time they’d picked up the clothes and the woman, but Phil wanted to get out of Christchurch, away from Neville’s vicinity. Taking Michael with them for added security, he drove to a motel in a small town a couple of hours north, with the woman talking to Sandy the entire time. They were exhausted when they arrived. Michael slept what was left of the night across the doorway outside Sandy’s room.
In the morning, Phil knocked on her door but there was no answer. He flung the door open to find that she was gone. She would have had to climb over Michael to creep from the motel. He didn’t know if she’d even been to sleep. How long had she been gone? Had she had time to ring the community to ask somebody to come and get her? They leapt in the car, tore all over the town searching for Sandy, and found her eventually in a phone booth. By repeating that he was taking her to the children, Phil persuaded her to get back in the car. The children exerted a stronger pull at that moment than returning to the community.
They continued the drive north to Picton with the woman trying to reason with Sandy; her children needed their mother; she wanted to be their mother and she couldn’t be if she stayed in Neville’s church. The woman’s arguments were eloquent and persuasive, but Sandy’s loyalty to Neville and her belief that she could only serve God in his church were equally strong. Phil drove, listened, and swung between hope and despair.
They took the ferry to Wellington and stayed that night with the Bilbies whose lifestyle must have seemed to Sandy the epitome of worldliness and so helped to confirm for her that she was right to shun the world. Clive, a kindly, benign father-figure, so different from Neville, tried to reason with her, too, but she kept saying, ‘I’ve got to serve God. I’ve got to do what’s right.’
Phil despaired. Sandy was torn between what she wanted to do and what she felt she must do. He could only hope that her love for her children would prove stronger than her belief that the only way she could serve God was to return to Neville.
They left for Auckland the next day, a long drive for a woman who hadn’t been far outside the community since she was 16. Phil couldn’t work out whether or not the deprogrammer was making any impression on Sandy. One moment he thought she was winning but the next moment it seemed that Sandy was rejecting everything she said. As arranged, he dropped the woman off at Auckland Airport.
Always the optimist, Phil talked to Sandy about how much the kids were looking forward to seeing her. Surely when she saw them she would be able to leave Neville behind.
His spirits lifted as he watched her reunion with her children. It was all he had hoped it would be, proving to him how much she loved and wanted to be with them. Tendy, particularly, clung to her and wouldn’t let her out of her sight. Israel, Dawn and Justine had so much to tell her. Phil watched his family and knew he’d done the right thing in reuniting them. Sandy hugged them and told them how they’d grown, they’d changed – and she was so pleased to see them. She held Crystal close as if she was afraid her baby would vanish if she set her down.
Sandy’s attitude towards Phil gave him hope, too. Instead of the reproaches he still half-expected, she was making every effort to be friendly towards him. Later he realised she had believed that they would all return to the community with her.
But the set-up of five small children in a caravan, along with a husband who had to participate in the outside world, was an impossible situation for Sandy. The combination of her extreme loyalty, naïvety and deep religious conviction, made her feel besieged in the outside world where people bombarded her with ideas and information so contrary to Neville’s teachings. It didn’t help when business contacts kept calling Phil, assuming he was still heading the community waterbed business. He had to keep explaining that he now had nothing to do with it. Sandy saw such contacts as influencing him to turn away from the God she believed in. She believed utterly in Neville’s teachings of an evil outside world. Salvation, he taught, was only possible if she lived in his community. Cunningly, his teachings also decreed that children would be saved even if only one of their parents led a true and Godly life with him in the community.
Once Sandy understood that Phil wasn’t going back and wouldn’t let the children return either, she believed that their only hope of salvation was for her to sacrifice herself by giving them up and going back without them. The tug between wanting to be with her children and feeling she had to serve God made her increasingly unhappy. Phil’s own situation was precarious: he could offer her life in the caravan in Auckland or in the bare house in Christchurch. He reluctantly accepted that the only thing to do was to let her return to Neville’s community. He told her to ring them. They paid for her air ticket and she flew back without her children.
As always, Phil refused to accept defeat. The children were upset but not devastated, having complete faith in their father when he said, ‘Don’t worry, kids. We’ll get Mum back. We’ll all be a family again.’ He drove them back to Christchurch, staying cheerful and optimistic so that the children remembered the joy of seeing their mother, rather than grieving because she had chosen to leave them. Their dad was their hero, the one who would never abandon them, the one who would make things right. He gave them hope. He promised he’d get their mum back and they knew he would do it. On the long drive south he kept them occupied by singing to them, stopping at parks to let them play, and playing games with number plates as they drove.
All the time, Phil’s mind was busy. Sandy had gone back because he hadn’t thought things through and so he made a plan for what to do once he’d rescued her a second time. He was determined to learn from that first mistake. Back home in Christchurch, he threw his energy into devising a plan designed to let her live away from Neville and the community. He was determined to get her out again, but this time he would make it work.
He settled the older children into school then worked on the plan. He figured that if they had somewhere remote to live then Sandy wouldn’t be worried about outside influences. There was still no money, either to put towards a plan to get her out, or to support and care adequately for the children who were finding life even harder now that they’d had the few days with their mother. Living conditions in the dingy little house were spartan because it was still completely devoid of furniture.
Phil typically saw the barrenness as a problem to solve. He had no spare money to buy anything, even from second-hand shops, so he scavenged for timber at the city dump. First he made waterbeds for the children. Israel and Crystal slept in one room, Dawn, Justine and Tendy in the second bedroom, while he had the third. Gradually he scavenged more wood plus the odd, battered piece of furniture from the dump, but until he could make a table and find chairs and chests of drawers, the family sat on the floor and kept their clothes in suitcases. The children wore clothes given to them by their aunts, Faith and Mercy, as well as an odd collection from charity shops. They look back now and laugh at photographs of themselves dressed in hideous combinations of colour and style. The community which they’d come from wasn’t strong on fashion and they had no idea of how to put a look together.
Even with the furniture Phil had made or scavenged, the house was always bare. The cupboards were, too. At first the children lived on bread and sometimes, for a treat, they’d have milk. As their father earned more money they ate things he could prepare easily, such as canned tuna, baked beans, and instant noodles. The one thing always in the cupboard was flour because it was cheap, but Phil was too busy to do anything with it. He didn’t know how to cook and the children got used to the smell of burning whenever he did venture beyond the tins and instant noodles.
Israel had often been with his mother in the kitchen in the community, helping her rub butter into flour, mixing dough, and watching as she put batches of baking into the oven. From this grounding, he taught himself to cook, making pancakes and scones for his sisters, then trying more complicated recipes. All the children relished the variation in their diet, although there were a few disasters. Tendy created the most dramatic one. She wasn’t quite four years old, but Israel’s cooking impressed her. Early one morning she slipped out of bed and headed for the kitchen to make breakfast. It looked easy and she knew that cooking involved getting things out of the cupboards. She took out all the cooking utensils, found a bowl almost as big as she was, and set about copying what she’d seen Israel doing – putting things into the bowl and mixing them up with the big spoon. In went the flour, the dried macaroni, instant noodles, vegemite, bread and milk. She was busy stirring when the family discovered her. She looked up at them, her blond hair tousled and her smile wide. ‘I’m cooking.’
Phil cleaned up the mess. Even his younger children had picked up the ‘you can do anything’ attitude he was intent on instilling in them; all the same, he hoped Tendy wouldn’t try cooking by herself again until she had a few more skills.
The sense of responsibility weighed on Israel. It seemed it was up to him to make sure his sisters had food in this strange new world where meals didn’t automatically appear three times a day. He worried that there would be nothing for them to eat the next day, or even at the next meal. He accepted that his stomach pains were part of this new life.
Phil, knowing that the best thing he could do for his children was to give them back their mother, threw all his energy into making sure this second attempt to get her out would succeed. She’d been so upset by the worldly influences that he felt it would be best if they could live away from the outside world.
Accordingly, he put an ad in the paper seeking to rent a bach in an isolated part of the upper Marlborough Sounds. A Christian couple, Wes and Ellen, replied, and when they heard his story told him he could have the bach rent-free. They were his miracle.
There were many more obstacles to overcome, but Phil was extremely focussed; he would solve the difficulties one at a time. He made lists, ticking off each item as he achieved it.
Wes and Ellen took him and the children up to the Sounds to see the bach. It was ideal because the only access was by water which meant nobody could creep up on them. The drawback was that Phil now needed a boat, and he’d had no boating experience. He needed money to buy a boat and he had none. He added the boat, the boating know-how, and the money to his list. He took a course and got his marine certificate, ticked that off. Did a first-aid course and ticked that off, too. Making the money to buy a boat was the easiest of all. He knew how to make waterbeds so that was what he did. He set up a workshop in the lounge, and in the evenings he made the beds, getting the children to help with the assembly. The children loved helping; they thrived on having him around and doing things with him. It was exciting, too, because they knew that all this effort was to get their mother back.
The suppliers Phil had dealt with when he was in the community knew his story and helped him by giving him the mattresses for nothing. He would finish a bed, put an ad in the paper, and sell it the following day. By the end of March he had $20,000.
Meanwhile, he wanted his kids to keep in contact with their mother and would drop them off for weekend visits at the community. In effect, Phil was saying to his father, You can’t stop them seeing their mother and if you try holding on to them you know what I’ll do. What he would have done was go straight to the media and blast the whole story across every front page in the country. Both men by now were well aware of the power of the media and Phil knew his father clearly understood the amount of negative attention that would be generated if the community were to be involved in such publicity.
Eight-year-old Israel was terrified during those visits to the community. It was wonderful seeing their mum again, and all of the children looked forward to being with her each weekend, but he was old enough to be aware of the tense undertones of the visits. He knew from Neville’s preaching that outsiders were evil, wicked people, and now he and his sisters were the outsiders. All the time they were in the community, he felt people were looking at them, thinking how bad they were. He knew that this was the place they’d had to escape from, so the people here must be evil, even though he’d never heard his dad say so, and their mum had come back there to live, so how could they be? It was very confusing for a young boy with such a keen sense of responsibility.
Neville put a stop to the visits, telling Phil that it was too hard on the kids. Phil knew it wasn’t about the kids; this was just another chapter in the battle between him and his father. His determination equalled his father’s. His children were going to see their mother whether their grandfather liked it or not.
The following weekend he dropped them off out the front of the community, telling Israel, ‘Go in and tell Mum you’ve come to see her.’ Then he drove away.
Neville came out to meet them, bringing Sandy with him. He took one look at his five grandchildren standing hand-in-hand in front of him and launched into a tirade. Their father was evil. He was wicked. He had wrecked his children’s lives by forcing them to live outside in the full wickedness of an evil world with him, their Godless father.
Israel was terrified. Dawn just wanted be with her mother and she tried to shut out her grandfather’s shouting by clinging to her. Justine, Tendy and Crystal were too scared and too young to make sense of the outburst. They cried as Sandy held them while Neville repeated over and over: ‘Your father is evil. He’s wicked. Isn’t he, Sandy?’
It was clear Sandy was torn between being Neville’s obedient, humble servant, and protecting her children. The only way she could do so was to hold them and nod in response to Neville’s ranting. She was careful not to verbally support what he was saying, and when she was alone with her children she never repeated any of his accusations against Phil. But the entire weekend was tainted. None of them could relax, even when Neville wasn’t around, and they were frightened to let Sandy out of their sight.
When Phil picked them up two days later they were a mess. He loaded them into the car, but before he could get in, Neville came out with the men and surrounded him. With the children cowering in the car, Neville gave the order, ‘Gather round, men. Let’s cast the demons out of this guy.’
Above the melee of shouts and shaking fists, Phil heard one of the men yell, ‘Why don’t you get down on your knees and beg forgiveness?’
‘If that’s what it takes,’ Phil said, ‘then I’ll do it.’
They laughed.
He drove away, knowing that in the eyes of the community he was unforgiven and unforgivable.
All the way back to Christchurch he worked at reassuring the children: ‘Everything’s going to be okay, kids. Don’t worry, you don’t have to go back there again. Don’t worry, we’ll get your mum out. We’ll get her out.’
Neville’s diatribe didn’t change the way the children felt about their father. Israel remembers his calming presence in the car on the way home. They could relax. They were with their conquering hero, their rescuer, their dad.
Phil never took them to the community again, but he was more determined than ever that Neville wasn’t going to win. He would get Sandy out and the children would have their mother again.
He bought a boat for $15,000. Next he enrolled the children in the Correspondence School, had suitably modest clothes made for Sandy, and set the bach up. Everything was ready, except that he still hadn’t devised a plan to get her out and he considered another midnight raid too risky.
He devised and discarded plan after plan. Some he tried didn’t work. He asked the doctor for sedatives strong enough to send a person to sleep. There was a video night coming up in the community which would leave the accommodation blocks empty for the evening. The plan was for his younger brother David to sneak in, put a bottle of spiked water beside Sandy’s bed, and hide until she fell asleep. He would then call Phil on the mobile and together they would carry her out. David got into her room without any problem but heard somebody coming before he had a chance to put the water beside the bed. He scarpered, managing to get out without being caught.
Another time Phil heard that Sandy had a dentist’s appointment. He arranged for an accomplice to go to the waiting room and let him know when she arrived. Neville got wind of it and Sandy didn’t keep the appointment.
In the end Phil decided to kidnap Sandy when she was away from the community during the day, going to a fake doctor’s appointment he would set up for her, ostensibly a consultation about her ongoing eye problems.
The community doctor was the friend Phil had built the kitchen for years before, and although he knew very well that helping Phil meant he’d lose thousands of dollars in business – because Neville would cut off anyone who helped his son – he didn’t hesitate, and set up the appointment immediately.
With the day and time sorted, Phil went back to the planning. It was exciting to devise an intricate plot, and that it was against his father lent extra spice. He hired a plain white car and a police uniform, asked a friend’s 21-year-old son to play the part of the policeman, and even wrote him a script of what to say when he pulled Sandy’s car over. Phil didn’t tell Faith or any of his siblings except Michael what he intended to do, for fear they would try and talk him out of it.
The planning had taken weeks but by April 1990 it was all complete. Phil didn’t begrudge the effort or time he put in, as it showed his children to what lengths he would go to get their mother back, and would also show his wife that he loved her and wanted her. He believed utterly that he was right to abduct Sandy; the issue wasn’t so much about taking her away from where she wanted to be, as giving her back to her children. She would be happy in the supportive environment he’d gone to so much trouble to create. Their children would be happy with Sandy free to be the loving mother he knew she wanted to be. All they needed was time away from the influence of the community, time for him to show Sandy that life on the outside didn’t have to be the hell Neville’s diatribes painted it. Phil didn’t consider the legalities of what he was doing, probably because he’d grown up in a community where his father’s word was above the law of the land. Out in the world it certainly wasn’t illegal for a grown man to disobey his father. He saw that the end justified the means.
On the day before Sandy’s appointment, Phil drove the children up to the bach at Blackwood Bay. He was so confident of the abduction succeeding that he told the children that Mummy was coming the next day. All of them were too excited to sleep much that night. By the morning Phil’s confidence of the previous night had vanished. Would it work? Would the timing be right?
In fact the plan worked perfectly. Back in Canterbury, the ‘policeman’ intercepted the car in which Sandy and her minder were travelling. He stuck word for word to the script Phil had written: ‘Are you Sandra Cooper, and are these the names of your children?’ When she said, ‘Yes’, he told her she was wanted for questioning.
She got out of the community car and into the hired car, without asking for police ID. They made an incongruous couple, the fake police officer and the woman in her long, blue dress, headscarf and sensible shoes – she accepting the turn of events without suspicion. Phil had banked on the fact that she was used to obeying authority figures, but more than that, he knew that once she did begin to understand the situation, she would go along with it because she’d be concerned about her children. They drove off, the ‘policeman’ telling her that he was going to take her to them. He then made an official-sounding radio call to Phil to say they were on their way.
Phil still couldn’t relax. It was a five-hour drive to Picton, and the ‘policeman’ had to stop to pick up Michael who again was acting as security, and the break might give Sandy the chance to escape. He knew, too, that seeing Michael would instantly give the game away because she knew him. Phil believes she must have suspected the truth but went along with the story because she wanted to see her children. She didn’t speak or ask questions during the entire journey.
Phil waited til the car was about an hour away before he loaded the children into their 17-foot runabout. The trip to Waikawa Bay from the bach at Blackwood Bay took about 20 minutes, with the children straining their eyes all the way in case Mummy was already there and waiting for them. When they got to the jetty there was still some time to wait. Phil strove to be calm and reassuring although his nerves were stretched tight. What would he say to Sandy? How would he justify what he’d done?
Her car got to the marina at Waikawa Bay at about three in the afternoon. The ‘policeman’ kept to the script as Phil approached: ‘Are you Philip Cooper?’
Phil wanted Sandy to feel that the whole exercise was official and under control because she had been so used to control in the community. But none of that mattered the minute she saw the children who raced towards her, smothering her with hugs, kisses, tears and questions.
All the way to the bach in the boat she cuddled and held them. She hadn’t seen them for about two months.
The only thing that didn’t go right was that the ‘police officer’ rolled the car on the way home. He wasn’t hurt, but his mother found out what Phil had done and she was none too pleased.