Anderson had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia two years earlier, but he had stopped taking his prescribed medication and was a regular cannabis user. He was under the care of the Capital & Coast District Health Board's community mental health team, yet the system meant to monitor him had let him drift. Two years before the shooting, police had revoked his gun licence after an arrest for hooliganism and had even attempted to revoke his father's firearms licence. Despite these warning signs, Anderson arrived at the Raurimu lodge that February morning armed and in the grip of psychosis. Six lives ended in the space of minutes. The victims were ordinary people gathered in a holiday setting, their names etched into the memory of a community that had never imagined such violence in its midst.

The massacre exposed uncomfortable truths about how New Zealand managed both mental health care and firearms access. At the time of the shooting, retired judge Thomas Thorp was already conducting an Independent Review of Firearms Control, due to report in February 1997. The deadline was extended to June, and Thorp's final report noted Anderson's psychiatric history, the revoked firearms licence, and the use of a single-shot shotgun, though he did not analyse the case in depth because it was still before the courts. What the Raurimu case made painfully clear was that revoking a licence did not mean removing access to weapons, and that community mental health monitoring could fail catastrophically when a patient disengaged from treatment. These were not abstract policy questions. They were the precise failures that had allowed a known risk to walk into a lodge full of people.

Anderson was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a psychiatric facility. In the years that followed, his story took unexpected turns. In 2008, he published a collection of 36 poems titled Toys in the Attic. A year later, in an interview with North & South magazine, he expressed remorse, writing that his mind had been "labouring under a psychosis that convinced me the future of the world was at stake." By 2011, he credited Buddhist meditation with helping him reintegrate into society. In 2014, it emerged that he was teaching at an art school in Wellington. He published a book, The Devil's Haircut, in 2023. For the survivors and the families of the dead, Anderson's public reappearance stirred complicated emotions. Forgiveness and accountability do not follow tidy timelines, and Raurimu's wound has never fully closed.

Raurimu itself remains what it was before that February morning: a small, quiet settlement in the volcanic heartland of the North Island, surrounded by native bush and the rugged terrain of the central plateau. The Raurimu Spiral, a marvel of railway engineering that climbs 122 metres through tunnels and hairpin bends, draws visitors who know nothing of the 1997 tragedy. But for those who do know, the name carries weight. New Zealand would face an even deadlier mass shooting in Christchurch in 2019, prompting sweeping firearms reform. Raurimu was an earlier, smaller reckoning, a moment when the country confronted the cost of systemic failures and the randomness of violence in places that seem immune to it.