Who Killed Scott Guy?

by Mike White

  Howell and Jackson encouraged and cajoled, appealed to his honesty and any resurrected shred of morality in an effort to get him to confess to Scott’s murder. ‘I don’t see what you’ve got to lose now, Ewen,’ urged Jackson. ‘You know, you’ve laid your cards on the table. You’ve lost, you’ve lost everything that you’re going to lose. This is your chance maybe to save some face if anything.’

  ‘I wouldn’t take someone’s life, I’ve never been that extreme,’ Macdonald insisted.

  The two officers again assailed him with the past crimes and how his desperate attempts at deception had now been completely exposed. ‘And now we’ve found out what we know,’ Howell reminded him, ‘and you’re the only logical person that fits in there.’

  ‘You can see the finger points at me,’ Macdonald acknowledged. ‘I’m in a bad situation, yeah, but I had nothing to do with that . . . I’m not the murderer . . . I am not guilty.’

  Howell was having none of it. ‘I have sat here and listened to you talk to me about those other crimes as if you had no knowledge of them at all, no knowledge—and now you’re expecting me to sit here and believe that you didn’t do the murder when all of the arrows point towards you?’

  But by 3.20 pm Howell and Jackson could see Macdonald wasn’t going to give them anything more and started the formalities.

  ‘I guess I won’t be going home tonight, will I?’ Macdonald asked.

  ‘I doubt it very much, Ewen. I’d imagine that you’d be appearing in court tomorrow at some time.’

  He was charged with the offences he’d admitted to then asked if he had anything to say about them.

  ‘Oh, guilty, aren’t I,’ Macdonald replied, before being taken to a police cell.

  At 6.40 pm Howell returned to see him and asked him to show them on a map of the Hocken farm where he and Boe had killed the stags. Howell then charged Macdonald with Scott’s murder. Macdonald was again read his rights and asked if he wanted to say anything.

  ‘Nah,’ he responded.

  CHAPTER 5

  King at court

  Kerry Macdonald clearly remembers where he was when he learnt his son had been arrested for murder. ‘I was in the Foxton pisser. I’d driven to Foxton to meet Charlie from Otaki Hunting & Fishing and transfer some stock because he had a shoot coming up.’

  After handing over the equipment at around 7 pm, Kerry suggested they might as well go for a drink. ‘And we’d only just opened the beer and I’d poured a glass and had a sip when the phone went. It was quite noisy so I walked out onto the footpath, got the news, walked back in to Charlie, told him what was happening and said, “Don’t say a fucking thing to anybody, I’m out of here.”’

  The phone call had been from his other son, Blair, a detective who worked in Wellington. When police arrested Ewen they felt it best to tell Blair and let him break it to his family. He’d initially rung his parents’ home just outside Feilding but when his mother, Marlene, answered, Blair wouldn’t say what it was about, instead asking where Kerry was.

  So it was left to Kerry, after getting the news in Foxton, to tell his wife that their younger son had just been charged with Scott’s murder and was now locked in a police cell. Marlene was making cupcakes for their grandchildren when he called, and remembers just being frozen with disbelief after she’d hung up. She hadn’t even known Ewen was going to be interviewed, hadn’t known he’d been in the police station all day.

  Blair had said he was packing a bag and coming up to Feilding for the night and so they all arranged to meet at Anna and Ewen’s house. When Kerry arrived about 9 pm, he walked in, gave Anna a hug, then noticed several strangers sitting around the dining room table and asked Anna who they were.

  She told him they were police, including investigation head Sue Schwalger, so Kerry went and sat down with them. Finally he turned to Schwalger and asked, ‘So what have you charged him with?’ and Schwalger rattled off the list of crimes, including Scott’s murder. ‘Oh yeah,’ Kerry replied then paused. ‘Got any advice?’

  Schwalger asked what he meant.

  ‘My son’s been arrested—what do we do now? Have you got any advice? I assume you’ve been through this before.’

  Kerry recalls Schwalger was stunned. ‘She said nothing. Totally fucked her. She couldn’t give any advice. It could have been a number—here’s victim support or our liaison officer or whatever. There was no humanity to it.’

  For Kerry and Marlene, it was the first realisation that when something like this happens, lines are quickly drawn by police as well as the public. An us-and-them environment evolves, with the accused’s family generally among the ‘them’. In contrast, Kylee’s sister, Chanelle Bullock, said at the time of Macdonald’s arrest, ‘The police have been so personable, they’ve become our friends.’

  While the Guy family received huge sympathy and assistance—and rightfully so—the Macdonalds often had to flounder their own way through a bewildering system and the situation they’d been thrown into. Even simple things like what courtroom Ewen would be appearing in and when were never passed on to them. ‘Nothing’s ever explained. You just learn it as you go along,’ says Marlene.

  After being arrested, Ewen Macdonald had finally phoned a lawyer. Remarkably, despite being continually reminded he could contact one at any time during his interview, he’d never shown any interest in doing so—not really thinking he needed one. When he realised how serious things had become, he called Peter Coles, who lived in Feilding and had known the Macdonald family for years. Coles had often gone fishing with Kerry Macdonald, and Anna had worked as his receptionist for three years. He’d been to Ewen’s 21st and his wedding to Anna, and the couple had come to his 50th birthday party, a 1960s-themed affair at the old Feilding Racecourse.

  Ewen had dressed up as Austin Powers and Anna as Felicity Shagwell, wearing knee-length boots and a miniskirt, with her hair done up on top of her head. Coles recalls her striding up to the band, asking the lead guitarist if he could play Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’, grabbing the microphone and belting it out, strutting up and down among the guests. ‘It brought the house down,’ says Coles. ‘People still talk about it. But that was just typical Anna—walk into a room and light it up.’ He’d always seen Ewen as a good guy, ‘solid as’, whose life was the farm, Anna and his kids.

  Coles, 61, had also known the Guy family for 50 years, his father being good friends with Scott’s grandfather Grahame, and he’d gone through college with Bryan Guy’s sister. In Feilding, everybody knew everybody among longstanding community members. Coles was the first lawyer Macdonald thought of as he was led to a holding cell at the Palmerston North Police Station after his interview.

  Around the time Macdonald was calling Coles, Wellington barrister Greg King was on his way to dinner, also thinking about murders. He was heading to a Chinese restaurant to meet John Barlow, who’d recently been released from prison after serving 15 years for the 1994 shooting of Eugene and Gene Thomas. King had been Barlow’s appeal lawyer for a number of years as the controversial case was fought out. Over dinner, King toasted the fact he’d just got another client’s murder charge reduced to manslaughter and, for the first time in years, he didn’t have a murder case on the go.

  At 7 am the next morning all that changed when his phone went. It was Blair Macdonald calling, Ewen’s older brother. ‘Blair Shay Macdonald?’ King sleepily asked, recalling the name from cross-examining the detective several times in court. It was those experiences that had led Blair to phone King. He’d seen how good King was in court, knew his reputation as one of the country’s top defence lawyers, and wanted Ewen to have the best help.

  Blair explained what had happened, how Ewen had been interviewed without a lawyer and arrested for Scott Guy’s murder, and was now sitting in a cell, due to appear in Palmerston North District Court that afternoon. King was tired, a bit hung-over, and had a full day of appointments so told Blair to get a duty solicitor to cover Ewen’s first appearance and
he’d take a look at the case later. ‘And then I thought no, and rang Blair back and said, “I’m on my way up now,”’ remembered King.

  Halfway to Palmerston North, King got a call from Peter Coles. The pair knew each other well, having worked together on a number of trials, including the brutal murder of paedophile Glen Stinson in 2007. Coles wanted to know if King was on board as he was wary of doing the case by himself given he was so close to the families. In his view, King was the ideal person to front the defence. King likewise wanted Coles involved, knowing how crucial it was to have local knowledge and input. Thus, by the time King arrived in Palmerston North on Friday, 8 April 2011, Ewen Macdonald’s defence had serendipitously been sorted.

  At just 41, King was already one of New Zealand’s best known lawyers, having been involved in a host of high-profile cases and fronting The Court Report on TV, canvassing legal issues. He’d cut his courtroom teeth in Dunedin with the formidable Judith Ablett-Kerr, who had hired him after he graduated. King helped her in the poisoned professor case, in which Vicky Calder was charged with killing her former partner, David Lloyd, with acrylamide but was acquitted at her second trial after King uncovered evidence that suggested Lloyd had suffered from an immune disorder. They also represented Peter Ellis, the Christchurch Civic Crèche worker controversially convicted of sex offences, at his appeal.

  At 27, King became New Zealand’s youngest lawyer approved to appear in murder trials and thereafter was involved in many prominent cases: Scott Watson, convicted of killing Ben Smart and Olivia Hope; samurai sword attacker Antonie Dixon; Bruce Howse, who stabbed his two stepdaughters; and Sophie Elliot’s killer Clayton Weatherston all had King in their corner.

  It was all a far cry from King’s humble beginnings, born into a state house family in Whanganui in 1969 to Jeff, a half-Maori shearer and freezing worker, and Jennifer, his redheaded schoolyard sweetheart. When Greg was six, the family moved to Turangi, where Jeff worked as a prison warden, locking up the likes of Arthur Allan Thomas.

  His mum remembers Greg as always being argumentative, and his Tongariro High School reports noted he ‘talks too much’. But despite also being labelled ‘a lazy worker’ and being put in the bottom science class where he had to grow a plant rather than make a hot air balloon, King eventually became the school’s head boy.

  He was in the first XV and became a keen boxer—not great, but damned determined. His dad recalls one bout where King was punched right out of the ring. While everyone roared with laughter, King climbed back in, lifted his gloves again and beat his opponent. ‘We’d finish the fight and I’d be covered in blood and barely able to walk, and the other guy would look like he’d just come out of a shower—but I’d win,’ said King. ‘I used to get a hiding on a regular basis, but that hardened me up for law. It taught me not to back down when you need to dig your toes in.’ Jeff’s battle with alcoholism, while eventually successful, also toughened King, giving him a lot of life experience at an early age, his mum said.

  In 1988 King spent ten months representing New Zealand at the World Expo in Brisbane. The ‘token country boy’ impressed everyone he came into contact with, from Sir Edmund Hillary to Mick Jagger, and a testimonial by New Zealand’s deputy commissioner-general at the Expo, Don Hutchings, proved prophetic: ‘Greg will go on to achieve much in his life and New Zealand will come to know his name very well.’

  King had his heart set on becoming a pilot and already had a freezing works job lined up to pay for flying lessons. But New Zealand’s Expo commissioner, Ian Fraser, suggested he should get a degree first. So despite having never met a lawyer, he enrolled in law at Otago University and was admitted to the bar in 1993.

  King’s rapid rise since then had seen him defend priests on sex charges; a father accused of killing his seriously ill 5-month-old daughter; gang members involved in the country’s largest armed robbery; a 90-year-old charged with murdering his wife in a suicide pact on their 60th wedding anniversary; and the man who attacked the ‘Virgin in a Condom’ exhibit at Te Papa.

  It was easy to characterise him as a siren chaser who sought the most high-profile cases, but that view ignored the countless clients he represented for whom he received no headlines, little recompense and often much opprobrium. In King’s book, everyone, no matter how devastating the evidence against them, deserved the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial with the best counsel. Often attacked for arguing on behalf of shitbags and scoundrels, King was adamant that nobody should be judged other than in a court.

  This view was honed early in his career, in 1995, when he took on the case of a man accused of viciously raping a 12-year-old girl. The evidence against him seemed overwhelming and even King believed he’d done it. But before they got to trial, someone else confessed to the crime, with DNA tests later clearing King’s client. It was a brutal lesson not to presume or prejudge.

  Tales of King’s generosity are legion: the cases done for free or a feed of fish; the client in a big case who wrote to him afterwards asking if he’d left a zero off his bill; the woman who stabbed her son, leaving him paralysed, who King got acquitted on the grounds of insanity, despite her husband wanting her jailed. After the trial King approached the husband to explain what had happened, then gave the man a lift back to work and, as he said goodbye, handed him money for his young son’s Christmas present. In 2004, King spent $50,000 of his own money to take the case of Bruce Howse to the Privy Council—not because he believed Howse was innocent, but because he was convinced he hadn’t received a fair trial and that to overlook the mistakes that had been made threatened the entire New Zealand justice system.

  Friend and fellow lawyer Robert Lithgow said King would go looking for things other lawyers wouldn’t bother with. ‘He’s enthusiastic. He digs and burrows deeply and dives into cases and swims round in them like Scrooge McDuck. He just lives and breathes criminal defences every working minute—and probably when he’s asleep as well. He likes people no matter what they’ve done, enjoys helping them and doesn’t judge them.’

  So despite the inevitable vitriol launched at Ewen Macdonald from the time of his arrest, despite the whispers about what other wickedness he’d done, King never for a moment had second thoughts about defending him.

  He met Macdonald for the first time late that morning at the Palmerston North Police Station. Macdonald told him he didn’t want to apply for bail or name suppression, not wanting any speculation in the community about who had been arrested. Later, King met with Kerry and Marlene Macdonald, who were still in a nightmarish whirl of disbelief and doubt. Marlene remembers him calmly explaining the process, what would happen next and then saying, ‘Your boy hasn’t done this and we’ll get your boy home.’

  ‘And I thought, “How confident is that?”’

  By the time they got to the courthouse at 1.30 pm it seemed most of the country’s media had arrived in Palmerston North, from local reporters to celebrity TV presenters like John Campbell. Even King, not unused to media attention, was taken aback. ‘I had no idea it was of that level of interest.’

  While he had been aware of Scott Guy’s murder and the nine-month investigation, when he saw the wall of cameras and microphones he suddenly began to wonder what he’d got himself into.

  CHAPTER 6

  Preparing the defence

  In late November 2011, Greg King walked from his office on the third floor of a Lower Hutt building and motioned a visitor to follow him down the corridor. In a room at the end he stopped and stared at a wall, a wall entirely covered with more than 150 lever-arch folders containing police information about their investigation into Scott Guy’s murder. In total there would have been close to 40,000 pages of what is termed disclosure.

  The visitor shook his head and mentioned that King couldn’t possibly be expected to read all that. King looked at him just long enough and with just enough disdain to make it clear he thought the visitor was an idiot. ‘Well, we have to,’ he replied with restraint. ‘There’s no r
eal logical structure to it—that would make life too easy, of course—so it’s just a case of doing it.’

  There were no shortcuts. Every lead the police followed had to be re-examined and assessed. Every witness statement had to be cross-referenced with that of others. Every expert opinion had to be reviewed and tested. ‘Essentially it’s as simple as this,’ King explained. ‘They construct, we deconstruct. They build a case, we try and expose the weaknesses in it. They accentuate the negative and we try and eliminate it and put events in their proper context. So you’ve got to understand their case. And obviously the case they present is only a small fraction of all the evidence that’s been gathered. They’ve made an assessment somewhere along the line of what’s relevant and what’s not and present their case accordingly. So we need to go through the stuff they regard as not relevant and decide whether we think it’s relevant. So there’s a huge amount of sifting that has to take place. You’ve got to be really disciplined to ensure by the time you step in that courtroom that the work has been done. You’ve got to have an absolute intimate knowledge of what the Crown case is.’ But even if you did this, it wasn’t a fair fight, King stressed.

  By November 2011, 110 police officers had been involved in the investigation. This didn’t count the specialist search and dive squads who also worked on the case. It also didn’t include three scene-of-crime officers, two photographers, electronic crime lab staff, and administrative assistants including receptionists, typists and data-entry personnel.

  Officers had travelled to Northland, Auckland, Coromandel, Tauranga, Queenstown, Christchurch and Wellington for interviews and inquiries. Over 2000 interviews had been conducted and more than 550 formal statements taken. A toll-free 0800 number had been set up, with more than 300 calls received, and 32 media releases had been made.