Who Killed Scott Guy?

by Mike White

  ‘All stand for his honour, the Queen’s judge,’ Conley cried, and Justice Simon France entered, bowed briefly to counsel and sat on the vast bench at the front of the court. The Queen, in the midst of her Diamond Jubilee carnival, of course remained regally and serenely oblivious to what was taking place in her name at the other end of the realm.

  Then Macdonald was brought in from a door marked S8, flanked by two prison guards, and stood in the dock at the back of the courtroom. He looked thinner, his face more angular than in the photos when he was arrested—perhaps a result of stress, perhaps just a function of prison food. His brother Blair had bought him a dark suit and six shirts with matching ties, and down the side of the folder he clutched was written what tie to wear with what shirt. Each Friday, King would take the shirts home to wash and iron in readiness for the next week.

  The charge of murdering Scott Guy was read to him by court registrar Sarah Perano and he was asked how he pleaded.

  ‘Not guilty, Your Honour,’ he stated—the only words he would speak during the entire trial.

  The process of what they call ‘empanelling’ a jury is a slightly curious one, as tactical as it is democratic. With around 60 potential jurors sitting at the rear of the court, the registrar called names, one by one. The person stood and made their way into the courtroom proper, turned right past Macdonald who was still standing, and entered the jury box, two rows of six seats facing across the courtroom. The names were called at random until the jury box was filled.

  At any time during their brief passage between public gallery and jury box, the Crown or defence lawyers could call out ‘challenge’, meaning they didn’t want that person on the jury, and they were forced to return to their seat. Each counsel had a maximum of four challenges. And unless they had vetted the names on the jury pool beforehand, they had at most ten seconds to size up a potential juror and make a decision to challenge or not.

  King never vetted jury lists in advance to weed out those with criminal convictions or choose those with a certain occupation or from a particular suburb. His aim was always for a demographic cross-section, and so he would only challenge if he thought the jury was becoming heavily weighted in one particular area—not because he didn’t like the look of someone.

  And so the potential jurors began to be called: the balding man with the briefcase; the woman in brown turtleneck and glasses; the 60-year-old with down jacket and backpack; the young guy in jeans with sunglasses tucked into his top. The Crown challenged three times, King twice, but the process was completed in ten minutes. Seven men and five women. It was swift and unscientific but this is how the New Zealand legal system works: trial by your peers—or trial by amateurs, as cynics would have it.

  They were 12 strangers who’d never met and were unknown to anyone in the court, but to Ewen Macdonald they were the most important people in the world, the people in whose hands his life now rested. They all stood and clutched blue Bibles as they swore an oath. One man held his up with two hands in front of him, as if in supplication for wisdom.

  The court registrar stood and told the jury it was their duty to decide on Macdonald’s guilt. The rest of the jury pool was then discharged, now chatting and smiling as they filed out, relief that their lives could return to normal perhaps tempered with disappointment that they’d missed out on the case everyone was talking about.

  Then Justice France addressed the jury, instructing them to forget the rumours they’d heard, not to speculate, not to conduct their own inquiries, and not to talk to anyone else about the case. ‘At the end of the day, you must be sure Mr Macdonald is guilty.’

  At 10.35 am Ben Vanderkolk rose to open the Crown case. Palmerston North’s Crown solicitor, Vanderkolk was an experienced and skilful prosecutor who’d held the role for more than 25 years since being appointed in his late 20s—his young age testament to his talent. Dubbed the Sheriff of Palmerston North or the Silver Fox, he was the man who put away Mark Lundy for murdering his wife and daughter in 2000. While King conveyed an air of slight untidiness, hair spiking upwards, robes slipping off one shoulder, Vanderkolk was always a picture of sartorial preparation in his pinstriped suit and perfectly fitting legal robes, greying hair smoothed flawlessly.

  King knew Vanderkolk well. He’d done his very first solo homicide trial against Vanderkolk in 1998, representing Christopher Holland who’d beaten to death 52-year-old James Tyson in Manawatu Prison. King managed to get his client’s conviction downgraded to manslaughter. He was well aware Vanderkolk was a formidable opponent, well known and liked throughout Manawatu. ‘He’s very slick, he’s very clever, he’s very charismatic.’

  Thus it had been important for King to get the trial out of Palmerston North, away from Vanderkolk’s patch, and down to what King considered his home turf. But as he sat directly behind Vanderkolk, he had no way of knowing whether that would be anywhere near enough to give him an advantage.

  ‘Within minutes of 4.43 am on Thursday, the 8th of July 2010,’ Vanderkolk began, ‘Scott Guy was murdered. He was killed by a shotgun blast to his throat followed by a second shot to his face, hands and arms. He fell dead where he was shot, in the entrance to the driveway of his family home.’ His delivery was calm and measured, his descriptions vivid and emotive. He had the voice of a man convinced of his arguments, hoping to convince 12 complete strangers. He talked of the darkness, of Scott being ‘trapped’ by the closed gates, and of the malevolent movements of the killer. ‘The killer and the killed, were known to each other.’

  He spoke of the blood from Scott’s wounds flowing into the footprints the killer left beside his body. And he spoke of Ewen Macdonald and the 14–17 minute window he had to commit the crime and return home by bicycle, 1.5 kilometres away, by 5.02 am, when he was seen coming from his house and unlocking the farm workshop. Macdonald’s actions following the murder were traced and then his history on the farm, the friction with Scott, the run-ins they’d had—and the crimes he’d committed—were all detailed.

  For the jury, hearing these things for the first time—especially the arson and the vandalism to Scott and Kylee’s houses—it must have been a startling beginning to the trial. Expecting to hear competing arguments about a murder, they were suddenly confronted with the accused being an acknowledged serious criminal. It was an ace that Vanderkolk had to play early and did so with relish. He emphasised the vulgar graffiti on the house and the extent of the damage. And he linked it to the threatening notes that had appeared in Scott and Kylee’s letterbox around the time of the crimes. There was a similarity between the graffiti and the language used in the notes, Vanderkolk said, as he stressed the words, labouring their obscenity for impact.

  And then he took the jury through events in the weeks before Scott’s murder, and the growing uncertainty Macdonald allegedly felt over the farm’s future. He outlined how the farm shotgun was stored in an office just behind Macdonald’s house and how it couldn’t be excluded as the murder weapon because it wasn’t locked away.

  But most compellingly, he told the jurors of the distinctive footprints found at the scene, which matched Pro Line dive boots that had not just been sold in Manawatu—but sold in the Palmerston North Hunting & Fishing store owned by Macdonald’s father. While the retail price was nearly $60, the wholesale price was $35—and police had found evidence of a Visa purchase at the store by Macdonald in February 2004 for that exact amount.

  He argued that while Macdonald was well known to have a pair of dive boots he used on hunting trips, tellingly, police had been unable to find any on his property following Scott’s murder. And he said the size of the footprints found at the murder scene matched those of all Ewen Macdonald’s other footwear—size 9. ‘Forensic examination will enable you to conclude . . . that a size 9 Pro Line dive boot could have made the impression left in the scene.’

  In closing, Vanderkolk admitted the case was circumstantial but said it was safe to convict someone on this evidence as long as they were ‘sure’ and ‘certain’
that Macdonald was the murderer. ‘And the evidence you are going to hear in the next four weeks, when drawn together, is capable of supporting your verdict of guilt of Ewen Macdonald to a level at which you can be sure.’

  As Vanderkolk sketched an outline of Macdonald as a devious man, then coloured it with his acts of violence, Macdonald kept his head down, writing his thoughts in an exercise book. ‘Vanderkolk is relaying all my past offending and trying to paint a nasty picture of me. It sounds pretty graphic and makes me look like a horrible monster. I hope Greg can reverse the damage.’

  But while Vanderkolk’s opening address spanned two hours, Greg King’s introduction just before lunch took little more than five minutes. ‘Good afternoon and welcome to the High Court of New Zealand,’ he told the jury with a half-smile. ‘It’s certainly a baptism of fire.’

  ‘This case is the proverbial and classic whodunit,’ he continued, a magnifying glass on his desk as if to emphasise his point, and he stressed it was up to them to decide if the Crown had solved the mystery—but it wasn’t their job to try to solve it themselves. He quickly referred to the foolish and nasty acts committed by Macdonald, knowing their impact would still be settling with the jurors. There was no avoiding it—but acknowledgement, contrition and apology were the best counters.

  He then handed each juror a piece of paper with just two things on it—two times. One was ‘4.41 am’, when police said Scott Guy last touched his computer before finishing his coffee and heading out the door to work. The other was ‘5.02.51’—the time Ewen Macdonald deactivated the alarm on the farm workshop behind his house, more than 1.5 kilometres from where Scott Guy’s body was found. King stressed that in the trial timing would be critical, and he invited the jury to fill the gap between these two definite and provable times with the key events and issues that were to be raised. ‘So sit back, buckle in and enjoy the journey through the evidence.’

  At that stage it was arguable that any of the jurors was imagining their task would be one filled with enjoyment. It was a murder, for goodness’ sake, with all the attendant misery and loss inevitably involved. And their job was to weigh someone’s fate, either convicting him of the worst crime imaginable or clearing his name of an unjust accusation. But King’s words were designed to stress that the trial should be about evidence—fact and logic—not emotion and prejudice. This was an arena of analysis, not gut-feeling.

  If they were expecting immediate fireworks between opposing counsel arguing over Macdonald’s movements or the like, the jury would have been deflated. The first person to enter the witness box was Constable Frazer McKenzie, a policeman from Levin who was the officer in charge of exhibits. With bald head and blue uniform, he took the obligatory oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and adjusted the microphone to make sure he was heard by everyone.

  It was a perfunctory and procedural start to a witness list that stretched far into the future. A circulated sheet showed there were to be 106 witness appearances, involving more than 70 people—some appearing more than once during the Crown’s case. McKenzie’s task was to laboriously identify all the exhibits on the table at the front of the court and confirm they were the same items that had been seized or gathered by the police and entrusted to him. The exhibits ranged from less than startling documents to arresting items such as shotgun cartridges, an ammunition belt and a splitting axe.

  There were the morbid and intimate ones, like Scott Guy’s bloodied and pellet-scarred cap preserved in a Perspex case. And technical ones, like pellet fragments and shotgun waddings, presented like entries in a science fair display. The greatest number of exhibits were casts of boot prints found at the murder scene. Arrayed in plastic boxes, they looked like puddles of melted vanilla ice-cream, or pavlovas that had been trodden on.

  But the exhibit that captured everyone’s attention was the shotgun taken from the Guy farm. In his opening, Vanderkolk had clearly suggested this was the murder weapon, and as soon as court crier John Conley lifted it from the exhibits table and walked towards the witness box for McKenzie to identify it, the press cameras began clicking madly. It was a mini-fusillade as the photographers realised this was their dramatic front-page photo for tomorrow’s paper. The tan wooden stock of the Lanber shotgun swept up smoothly through the trigger mechanism and into the twin black barrels. The barrel configuration meant it was dubbed an ‘under and over’ shotgun, a 12-gauge, by far the most common type of shotgun in New Zealand, the type beloved by hundreds of thousands of duck-shooters. On the farm, the shotgun had been used for putting down sick cows or scaring away birds. But now it was being paraded at the front of the courtroom, just metres from the jury, as the weapon likely to have killed Scott Guy.

  When Greg King got his opportunity to cross-examine McKenzie, he went through the items, clarifying where they were found and the dates they’d been taken. When it came to the ammunition belt, McKenzie had to admit to King that where police had actually retrieved it was different from the location stated on their documentation. It was a small point, immaterial in the long run, but it sowed the first seed in the jurors’ minds that police had made errors, that perhaps they’d been shoddy or not as exactingly methodical as they wished to seem. And it served as a warning to the police and prosecution that King and his fellow counsel had done an exceptionally thorough job sifting through the evidence, cross-checking every detail, spying out any irregularity.

  CHAPTER 9

  Simon Asplin

  WITNESS OR SUSPECT?

  In a marked departure from the traditional approach to presenting a case, the Crown arranged its evidence thematically, grouping witnesses according to the area of the investigation being dealt with. Normally, witnesses appear once and are questioned and cross-examined on a range of matters. But in this trial, the case was unveiled subject by subject—‘Early morning 8 July 2010 . . . The relationship between the Accused and the Deceased . . . Suspects . . . Puppies’—meaning witnesses often appeared on several occasions, some up to seven times during the trial.

  One of these was the first member of the public to give evidence, Simon Asplin from Feilding. Asplin was a worker on the Guys’ farm and had been on morning milking with Macdonald and Matthew Ireland on 8 July 2010. He’d been at Feilding Agricultural High School with Scott Guy and Macdonald and did a polytechnic joinery course on leaving. But he always felt farming was where his heart lay, and in September 2002 he started working at Byreburn, particularly enjoying driving tractors. He was essentially the farm’s daily second-in-charge under Macdonald, but when Scott returned to the farm in November 2003, his role and responsibility slipped, along with his 2IC title. Asplin left Byreburn in September 2006 to work for a farm contractor near Marton, but returned less than two years later.

  On the morning Scott was shot, Asplin arrived at work just after 5 am. When he realised Scott wasn’t there, he shrugged it off—Scott had a history of sleeping in, especially when on the early shift. After putting on his milking gear, Asplin rode a quad bike from the workshop to the milking shed and met up with Macdonald and Ireland. When milking finished, he went down to the back of the farm to shift fences. At 7.25 am, Macdonald phoned Asplin saying Scott had been in an accident and he’d tell him more later, and in the meantime he should go home for breakfast before returning to Byreburn to meet artificial insemination technician Trevor Wing, who was due at 8.30 am.

  On the stand, Asplin immediately looked uncomfortable, over-warm in his North Face jacket, with round face, red cheeks and receding hairline. And after Vanderkolk had taken him through the morning’s events, Asplin’s discomfort soared as King attacked. His very first question was, ‘Mr Asplin, are you very familiar with shotguns?’

  King then had Asplin explain his experience with firearms, ammunition and the farm’s weapon. He outlined how Asplin didn’t like Scott, had described him as arrogant, as someone who thought he was better than other people and had led a privileged life due to his father’s successful farm. In one interview
with police, Asplin said Scott had nothing but a big holiday on the farm and labelled him a ‘daddy’s boy’.

  When Scott had returned to Byreburn, Asplin was bitter at being displaced from his tractor work and role as Macdonald’s assistant. After Asplin came back to the farm in 2008, King alleged he asked for the title of assistant manager but was declined. Bryan Guy did, however, promise him more time on the tractor rather than being stuck in the milking shed, but this didn’t eventuate.

  During the trial, other witnesses described Asplin as the farm gossip, who always wanted to know what was going on, often bitching about Scott or Ewen and playing one off against the other. Disillusioned and not seeing a future for himself on the farm, Asplin began looking for other jobs. Unknown to anyone else on the farm, the day before Scott was murdered, he had taken several hours off to go to an interview in Palmerston North for a sales representative role with an agricultural machinery firm.

  The morning of Scott’s death, Asplin had acted bizarrely, King suggested. When Asplin returned to the farm after breakfast, Trevor Wing asked him what was going on with the flashing lights and cordon up the road. Despite knowing something serious had happened to Scott, Asplin merely said there’d been an accident—even though Wing knew the Guy family and Scott well and would obviously have been concerned about him. King pressed him on why he wouldn’t have told Wing that Scott had been in an accident, leaving Asplin flummoxed and flustered: ‘I don’t know, I don’t remember, I don’t recall.’

  There were other examples of curious behaviour, King claimed. Around 8.45 am, Matthew Ireland had arrived back at the cowshed and asked Asplin if he knew Scott had been killed and then asked who would have done something like that to Scott. Asplin snapped at him and angrily told him to go and do some work—a reaction Ireland felt was surprising and unwarranted but Asplin explained by saying he was upset and wanted to grieve alone. There was also a phone call between Asplin and a friend, Derek McNabb, where the pair discussed what had happened. But when asked for details of what McNabb told him about Scott’s death, Asplin was vague.