Phoenix Roycroft with his mum Rikki Edwards on her last visit to New Zealand to visit her son in 2018. Edwards has lived in Australia for the past 10 years. Photo / Supplied
Rikki Edwards, frozen by anxiety, decided to cut off contact with her son Phoenix and his father Lee in March this year.
It wasn't meant to be a permanent break.
But she didn't know how to have a difficult conversation.
Phoenix's growing spurts of aggression when he last visited her in Queensland a year earlier in January 2020 had disturbed her.
Abrupt violence had sparked out of him towards his younger half-brother Flynn and she had noticed odd small cruelties to harmless animals.
She had seen this in someone else. A pattern of behaviour.
Hesitating from across the Tasman in phone silence, Edwards worried over how to broach the subject of Phoenix's underlying issues.
It's a decision she regrets every day.
"I feel responsible. There's so many emotions in me," Edwards told the Herald on Sunday.
Two months after she stopped her weekly call to her then 13-year-old son, he was found dead with his 43-year-old father in Coatesville on Auckland's North Shore.
The father-son pair had been living in a sleepout on a larger property along Māhoenui Valley Rd when they died just before 6.30am on May 25.
Police are not searching for anyone else in relation to the deaths.
Edwards, 32, said when she heard the news at her home in Kingaroy, Queensland, she knew instinctively it wasn't an accident.
"I put two and two together, because knowing Lee, I knew, and then I had to stop and think and go why? But when they told me it was non-accidental ..."
Lee's mother, Janette Roycroft, said this week she views her son as also a victim — caused by his "deep" mental health issues.
"Lee was very much a victim of the health issues that he had been struggling with and he had been trying to get under control for some time," Janette Roycroft said.
"These issues were so deep and well hidden. We still can't understand how this tragedy came about. Lee is as much of a victim in this.
"I feel that I have nothing to forgive him for because I knew of his pain."
Likewise, Edwards said Lee's story is one of undiagnosed mental health, and she at least wants to bring attention to what the horrific consequences of that can be if left not fully treated.
"I knew Lee probably better than Lee knew himself. So he would mean well. Like anyone with depression, or anything that runs deeper, Lee would always go 'yep I'm going to do this, this and this'. He would overwhelm himself. He'd just go big and when it wouldn't happen then his depression would kick in big time. And when he drank he was just uncontrollable."
Edwards said she had always been "uneasy" about her ex-partner Lee, since she had left him and moved to Australia when she was 20 and Phoenix was just 3.
The pair had met at her family's barbecue in Auckland when she was 18 and he was 28 in 2008 and it had been instant attraction.
"He was friends with my cousin. My cousin played the drums and Lee played the guitar. And I just walked in there and it was literally like attraction at first sight. We both looked at each other and every time I walked past he'd mess up a riff which I thought was pretty funny."
The new couple fell pregnant just a few months later and attempted to build a life in Auckland's North Shore, between Torbay and Coatesville where their respective parents lived.
"I had Phoenix when I was 19, he was 29. I knew he had issues but in 2008 people weren't really talking about mental health back then, let alone men's mental health.
"I knew he was taking tablets. He sort of mentioned, 'oh yeah this is for my depression or whatever'," Edwards said.
Then living on Coatesville Rd not far from where Lee and Phoenix died over a decade later, Edwards said it didn't take long for serious dysfunction to emerge in their relationship.
"Things with Lee escalated. He was an apprentice carpenter, so he obviously had to leave early for work. [He'd] get Phoenix up, give him a bottle and come pop him into bed with me in the morning and then we'd sleep in.
"[We] moved out to Coatesville. There was obviously no public transport, I didn't have a car or anything, so I was just walking to the dairy down the road with Phoenix and we'd have coffee and stuff. But he'd [Lee] come home early and surprise me. He'd go look in cupboards and say I'm cheating and there's someone here. And there's no one there obviously. So he suffered, I would say, from paranoia as well. I'm not a psychiatrist, I don't know but it was a lot deeper than just depression."
Edwards said she doesn't believe it's fair to go into great detail of what eventually caused her to leave their shared Coatesville house, but it became an untenable situation.
The 20-year-old was alone in Auckland after her mother and step-father had moved to Australia shortly after the birth of Phoenix.
"I really didn't have anywhere. My family was here in Australia," Edwards said.
So that is where she moved in desperation.
"I tried to take him [Phoenix] with me but I got told if I take him with me without Lee's permission, he could have me for kidnapping and I'd go to jail and all this stuff. [I was] 20. We all think we know [at that age], and that's not the case".
Despite the abrupt break, Edwards was still back in New Zealand to visit her son the year after she left.
From there, a gradual equilibrium established itself.
"I would fly back every year to Phoenix to go see him, then for two or three weeks I would stay at their house. Over time, Lee and my relationship sort of got to the point where we were mates but he never really had a relationship with anyone else after us."
A car crash in the ensuing decade made these trips to New Zealand harder for Edwards physically, and eventually when Phoenix was 10 she took legal steps to let him fly by himself to visit her in Queensland.
Edwards said Lee was initially steadfastly against it.
Despite Lee's opposition, the application was successful and for the past three years Phoenix travelled around Christmas time to visit his mum in Kingaroy.
"It was great. I took him to Movie World, stuff like that. It was really great, like he loved it," Edwards said.
Edwards said she was conscious of being sensitive to not trying to divide Phoenix from his home in Coatesville.
"His [Phoenix's] whole life is in New Zealand. I wasn't going to rip it away from him now with solicitors and all this other stuff," she said.
"I didn't think it would be fair to start a whole s*** show in regards to now wanting Phoenix to go to solicitors to now get him to come over here [permanently]. That's his family. If he came to the age where he decided, it was his choice that he wanted to move over, then 100 per cent I would have been fine. Like, cool come over. But I wasn't going to start a big fight because I knew Lee would never let him move over, there's no way."
Despite this, Edwards said she sensed Phoenix's visits to Australia caused Lee suspicions and a kind of fear of abandonment.
"I've never bad mouthed Lee in front of him [Phoenix] at all. But I think Phoenix brought something up [to Edwards] and I was like, 'I didn't leave you'. There is a very real possibility that Phoenix might have brought up wanting to live here [to Lee]. That also crossed my mind."
But Janette Roycroft saw first hand the devotion she said Lee had for his son, and the sacrifices he made to raise him in Coatesville.
"Lee raised Phoenix on his own for most of his life and he absolutely loved Phoenix," Janette said.
"We would ask people not to judge the situation without knowing the full details. Mental illness is cruel and does not discriminate."
Phoenix's last visit to Kingaroy was in January 2020, right before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
An incident with her then 4-year-old son from a subsequent marriage, Flynn, seriously disturbed Edwards.
"They were just playing in the room, Flynn and his mate, and Phoenix was watching movies. It was nearly bed time. It was wooden floor and I heard what sounded like a child jumping off the bed. Then the next thing I heard was them going, 'You hurt me, why would you do that?'
"I went in there and a child's crying and then his mate was like, 'Phoenix came in and grabbed a pillow and hit Flynn really hard where he hit his head on the wall'. That was the sound, it was really loud."
The incident intensified her growing concern with some of Phoenix's behaviours from previous years.
A trip to Bribie Island, Queensland, a year earlier had also bothered her when she witnessed Phoenix's indiscriminate cruelty to crabs he found at the beach.
"Little things, but to me it's a big thing. To me that's not okay. I don't like that kind of stuff, and my child was doing that," Edwards said.
The parallels to some of Lee's behaviours bothered Edwards. She remembers her ex-partner tormenting their dog Rusty, until he would snap and bite back at Lee.
"It's not funny. If you're a child growing up around that it becomes your normal. I can't really make a statement that he's like that because of [Lee], but it's only common sense that you think possibly that is why Phoenix learned that. And that to me was scary."
And so Edwards' anxiety continued to grow for Phoenix's state of mind ever since he left her for the last time in Kingaroy in January 2020.
From there, Edwards said her weekly calls to the father and son increasingly dwindled over the next 14 months to March 2021.
"There would never be a set time. I work in aged care, really early mornings, I come home late. I live out of town, it's full on being a single mum," she said.
"Yes [it would be weekly calls]. And then I started distancing myself. I didn't just stop. It was more like the phone calls got further apart. It got to the point where it wasn't at all. It would be maybe March, April, still a long time, but it was only a few months from when I stopped to when he did what he did."
Edwards said it got to the point where she too couldn't mentally face the topic of Phoenix's worrying behaviour.
"It's just such a hard thing, the longer I left it the longer it just felt like, 'oh, it's too late now'. But no, I've got to do something and then the more guilty I felt about not ringing him. I think because I hadn't talked to Phoenix or Lee, he felt, this is my opinion only from what he was like, he felt that he had lost control."
Edwards said since her son and former partner died on May 25, she has been numb with disbelief, struggling but also thankful to have her responsibilities to Flynn to preoccupy her from the pain and horror.
"I was literally in Phoenix's life full-time until I left, and I didn't leave because it was too hard. No one would leave their child because it was too hard. Not me anyway. My son now [Flynn] — there's no way any man will take him away from me. I have major issues now thanks to this whole situation. It's just messed up," Edwards said.
The grieving process has not properly begun, she is well aware.
"It's just very odd. I literally feel nothing except if I think about Phoenix. Whatever happened that morning. That is the only time I feel something, and it's not a good feeling. But then again I haven't really had time to sit down and scream and cry because [of] my 6-year-old. He knows that Phoenix has died and he asks me how. I'm not going to lie to him. I just said I will tell you when you're older, and he accepted that which is great."
A coronial inquiry is under way into the death of Lee and Phoenix that could take years to be finished.
The Coatesville community, which the father and son had been intimately part of for more than a decade, has been devastated by the loss.
Lee Roycroft had for many years worked as a caretaker at Coatesville School, just a few hundred metres up Māhoenui Valley Rd where he died.
Parents were in tears on school grounds in the days after the deaths.
Janette Roycroft said this week the "huge support" they received from those who attended Lee and Phoenix's services "show that they were both well loved by the wider community".
"We are still very much devastated by the loss of Lee and Phoenix and struggle every day to understand what has happened," Janette said.
"We miss Lee and Phoenix every day and wish we could have them back."
A family statement on behalf of the Roycroft family in May, described Lee as a hardworking man, well respected in the local community who was a talented musician. He was always by the side of his son.
Edwards said she could not return to Auckland for her son's funeral for several reasons.
Unvaccinated for Covid-19 in May this year, Edwards had also let her passport expire while living in Australia, no longer having the need to travel to New Zealand to see Phoenix these past three years. She was also going through a divorce.
"I didn't get my closure from being at the funeral or having anything to do with the funeral. Not even any obituary," she said.
"I was very much still involved in his life up until this last few months before this had happened. He came over. I paid for his flights. I took him places. We did stuff. I was still very much his mother."
But amid the pain, Edwards said she can find some compassion for the father of her child.
"I really don't think in the big scheme of things that Lee was a bad person. I just think he had issues that weren't dealt with, treated," she said.
"I think really overall if he had got the right treatment for everything he would have been amazing. Just like with music.
"He was amazing at it. He could just pick up a guitar and start playing a riff and make a song on the spot.
"Thinking about it now, that was his way to deal, that was his safe zone. For Lee that was his music, which is why he was so amazing, even the piano, because he had untreated mental health issues."
Edwards said her main impulse to speak out about the life-changing pain she is only just beginning to comprehend, is to highlight the need for men to feel comfortable admitting to their mental health battles.
"I think more men should not be feeling like there's a shame, they're ashamed, to admit they have a mental illness, Instead they should find a support person, someone they trust.
"People that I know, men are the ones that don't want to come forward and admit that they have a problem because they feel like it's a stigma.
"Men don't have anything wrong with them. For them to feel like that is wrong for society to want to judge a man because he's got a mental health issue."
Mental health experts stress suicide is complex and can rarely be reduced to a single cause or factor.
Where to get help:
• Lifeline: 0800 543 354 (available 24/7)
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO) (available 24/7)
• Youthline: 0800 376 633 or text 234 (available 24/7)
• Kidsline: 0800 543 754 (available 24/7)
• Whatsup: 0800 942 8787 (12pm to 11pm)
• Depression helpline: 0800 111 757 or text 4202 (available 24/7)
• Anxiety helpline: 0800 269 4389 (0800 ANXIETY) (available 24/7)
• Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155
If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
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