Who Killed Scott Guy?

by Mike White

  On the morning of 8 July, his alarm went off about 4.10 am. He’d been late to work the previous weekend and Scott had bawled him out about it so Ireland had started turning up early to mix up the calves’ milk in an effort to impress his mentor.

  Ireland didn’t wear a watch but says he didn’t think he mucked around too much before jumping in his car and heading the short distance from Feilding to the workshop at Byreburn, behind Macdonald’s house. He calculated the time by how many songs he listened to on his iPod, which was hooked up to the car’s stereo. He didn’t start the stereo until he’d backed out and was on his way—it had a subwoofer and Ireland’s dad had told him it woke the neighbours if he started it in the driveway.

  On the journey Ireland listened to two songs by Eminem—‘No Love’, which runs for four minutes 59 seconds, and ‘Going Through Changes’, which had just started as he arrived at work. Ireland admitted he’d been speeding on his way, so it seemed a fair assumption the trip had only taken him a bit over five minutes.

  He initially told Vanderkolk he got to work about 4.30 am and sat in his car waiting for the other workers to arrive. But then he told King he had only been waiting ten minutes maximum before Macdonald emerged from his house, wiping his eyes as if he was waking up, and unlocked the workshop at 5.02 am. Ireland calculated this from his recollection of spending a few minutes playing with his iPod then having a cigarette but only finishing half of it before Macdonald arrived. His car clock had said 4.45 am when he got to work, but Ireland said it was probably about five minutes fast. So best estimates were that he’d arrived between 4.40 am and 4.50 am.

  After Macdonald opened the workshop, they put on their waterproof gear, jumped on their quad bikes and headed for the milking shed. The other farm worker, Simon Asplin, also arrived as they were getting ready.

  Ireland’s evidence was vital for two reasons. Firstly, he had been waiting at Macdonald’s house at a time when police claimed Macdonald was returning from murdering Scott and supposedly stashing the shotgun in the farm office and bike in the adjoining garage. The office and garage were just behind where Ireland was sitting in his car, but Ireland didn’t see anything in that time, until the light went on in Macdonald’s house and he wandered over to the workshop—not sweating or steaming or puffing as could be imagined if he’d just raced back from Scott’s.

  If Macdonald had been in the office and garage putting things back where they were meant to be, he had somehow managed not to disturb Ireland. The only other alternative was that Macdonald had got back before Ireland arrived. If Ireland arrived at 4.40 am that was impossible, because Scott wasn’t killed till after 4.43 am. If Ireland arrived at 4.50 am—the latest time likely—then it only gave Macdonald seven minutes at the very most to commit the murder, get back home and dispose of everything he had to before Ireland drove up. The defence argued this was plainly impossible.

  The second critical piece of evidence from Ireland was what he’d seen as he arrived at work. Just as he turned into the driveway at 147 Aorangi Road, he’d noticed car headlights rounding the bend about 1 kilometre ahead, coming from the direction of Scott’s house. By the time Ireland parked at the workshop he saw the car pass by, and in police statements described it as a four-door sedan.

  This again raised the problem for the Crown that if a car had come down Aorangi Road between 4.40 am and 4.50 am—the time when Ireland was arriving—it had most probably passed Macdonald while, according to them, he was either lying in wait for Scott or cycling home. Despite repeated appeals, however, nobody reported seeing anything or being in the area at this time. Could the car in fact have been the killer escaping, the defence asked?

  King reinforced this by raising the issue of car tyre marks found at the roadside near the scene. Police had investigated them but been unable to identify what vehicle they came from. For the defence, this showed that, at best, there was a plausible alternative to Macdonald being the killer—someone else parked near Scott’s house and then seen driving away by Ireland. At worst, it showed there was much the police still didn’t know about the case.

  CHAPTER 12

  Suspects and puppies

  If the police didn’t have all the answers, the public certainly seemed to. Throughout the trial Greg King received hundreds of emails and letters from people purporting to have cracked the case or offering crucial information that would lead to the killer.

  From a suspicious green ute in Woodville to a Whangaparoa woman forwarding a newspaper advertisement for three chocolate labradors, King attracted those honestly trying to help and those living in a galaxy distant from reality. Generally, the approaches could be dispensed with because they simply didn’t fit the facts of the case or were plain loony. But that didn’t stop the advice and criticism coming as King’s performance was publicly appraised.

  For Kerry and Marlene Macdonald, the first weeks of the trial were difficult. Because they were being called as Crown witnesses, they were unable to sit in the court until they’d given their evidence. Scheduled near the end of the Crown’s list of 106 witness appearances, they had to rely on news reports to find out what had gone on each day. They spent much of the time at the Wellington house they’d been offered, though they’d return to Feilding some weekends.

  Kerry had taken time off from work. ‘I wouldn’t be functioning very well at the shop so I’m better off out of it.’ Knowing he couldn’t be much use in Wellington during the first week but wanting to keep his mind occupied, he drove to Hamilton for a conference. Inevitably, the rumour mill got cracking.

  On the morning the trial started, someone saw him parked at Waiouru en route to Hamilton. When that person bumped into Kerry’s brother-in-law they commented, ‘The old man obviously thinks he’s guilty. I saw him heading north.’

  It was one of the worst pieces of gossip Kerry heard, and reinforced how people were concocting their own truths, then spreading them as gospel. ‘What hurt me most was that I had pulled over and was in tears trying to put together a text to send to Greg so he could show it to Ewen before he went into court that morning.’

  The Macdonalds never flagged in their support for their son, visiting him as often as prison authorities would allow, which was once a week during the trial. And in the trial’s first fortnight they found Ewen generally positive. ‘On the whole he’s doing very well,’ Kerry said after the first week, ‘but inwardly a bit scared, a bit overwhelmed. He’s coming to grips with the procedure and the mechanics of the trial. It’s not the detail that’s worrying him, it’s just the matter of going in and listening to things and trying not to react to somebody he knows might be lying or whatever. It’s just the emotional side of things he finds hard.’

  But gradually the strain of having his life and awful actions played out daily began to take its toll, and Macdonald began to struggle with the sheer weight of the trial process. His daily routine saw him get to court, change into his suit, spend the day hearing testimony, go back to Rimutaka Prison in time for dinner then fall asleep. However, Kerry said his son would wake in the middle of the night with his mind whirring, and often couldn’t go back to sleep. ‘All in all he’s finding it hard,’ Kerry noted after the second week, ‘but he’s still standing tall and got his head up and looking us in the eye, not down in the dumps.’

  Making it more difficult was the knowledge of how many people were watching him on TV and staring at him in court with sheer hatred. In jail he’d fared reasonably well, been a model prisoner and kept himself out of trouble. When he was first taken to prison he was challenged a couple of times but was big enough to stand up for himself. He used the gym to stay fit, played rough ball games with the other prisoners and even started doing tai chi after Kerry and Marlene sent him a book on it.

  But unknown to his parents, the next week’s evidence would prove to be the hardest, and Macdonald would almost reach breaking point.

  When Ewen Macdonald’s trial was over and the tide of media coverage receded, Greg King was able to reflect
on the case with a modicum of detachment. And he was the first to admit they’d been dealt some luck by the police and Crown along the way.

  One of the areas from which they’d got a boost was the prosecution’s choice of trial format, dealing with the case thematically, meaning witnesses often appeared several times. While this helped the jury to understand the case it also made it easier for King to time and again return to points he wanted to stress and to ask questions he may have forgotten the first time around. ‘And I knew I didn’t have to fire all my shots each time.’ He also felt the emotional impact of crying wives and distressed family members was dissipated by repeat appearances.

  But perhaps a greater gift to the defence was the Crown decision to call police officers who had investigated all other suspects in the case. At least 60 persons of interest, not including family and farm workers, had been considered by police throughout Operation Yellow. All but Macdonald had apparently been ruled out. The defence had copies of all police interviews but getting the jury to hear the evidence within them was difficult—until the police decided to show how they had excluded other possible killers.

  While King understood the Crown rationale of needing to explain that they had checked out the alibis of other suspects and they could be excluded, it also allowed the defence to show any failures or gaps in that process. This opportunity occurred during the trial’s second week, when Detective Sergeant David Thompson from Palmerston North, the officer in charge of suspects, was called.

  He began by detailing how they’d looked into Scott Guy’s life to build a clearer picture of him—checked his phone contacts, his Facebook account and his employment history, and asked acquaintances to recall past events. Thompson found that far from having a list of enemies, Scott was well liked by long-term friends from the various chapters of his life. ‘He was someone that people wanted to be in his company.’ In fact, police couldn’t find any areas of concern regarding his life other than the issues at Byreburn—and in particular his relationship with Macdonald.

  While up to six people, including Macdonald and Derek Sharp, had raised the possibility the fatal shots were meant for them, this theory was excluded by investigators. As was the scenario the murder was a burglary gone wrong. While there had been burglaries in the area, police claimed there was nothing that linked them with Scott’s killing. Dogs had been stolen but there was no pattern to these thefts. Thompson said they also ruled out a drug connection.

  When Paul Murray had finished questioning Thompson, it was Peter Coles rather than King who rose to cross-examine him. This was because Coles had spent hundreds of hours looking into these aspects of the police investigation, chronicling all other crime in the area and examining the movements of other likely suspects. Being a local lawyer, Coles was well aware of past police operations, investigations and local criminals.

  Thompson was forced to acknowledge there had been 181 burglaries in the Palmerston North rural area between 1 April and 16 July 2010, nearly all unsolved. In seven of these, firearms were stolen, including a number of shotguns. Police were unable to say if these had been recovered. There had been 11 burglaries just in the area around Aorangi Road from 30 January 2010 until Scott’s murder.

  Coles raised with Thompson the exploits of several well-known criminals who had been active the night Scott Guy was killed. While the judge suppressed their names, their enthusiastic criminality remains recorded. In one instance a group of burglars robbed a house and then swapped the goods for methamphetamine. One of them smoked his whole stash of meth then went out. His partner, who at the time was facing charges of threatening to kill the wife and children of a local police officer, claimed she heard him return, maybe around 4 am but couldn’t be sure because she was ‘pretty wrecked’, wasted on drugs herself. She didn’t get up, fell asleep again and the first time she actually saw her partner was the next morning when she got up. However, this alibi for her partner was accepted by police.

  Thompson acknowledged that others on their persons of interest list could not provide complete or convincing alibis but had been ruled out because they were considered unlikely to have been involved.

  Coles also raised the issue of a crumpled cigarette packet found by police searchers on the roadside near Scott and Kylee’s driveway the day after the murder. The Winfield Gold packet was empty and looked as if it could have been there for some time. It transpired, however, that a sticker on the packet showed it was only available for sale from 21 June 2010 so it must have been left there recently. This was particularly pertinent because one of the suspects detailed above had been involved in a burglary the evening before Scott was killed, in which several cartons of Winfield Gold cigarettes had been stolen.

  While the police were aiming to show every possibility other than their theory Macdonald was the killer had been examined and every loophole closed, Coles was determined to show just how many gaps and unanswered questions remained. He pointed to an incident on 4 July, just days before the murder, when Scott Guy rang 111 to report a suspicious vehicle across the Oroua River from the farm. He described it as an old white sedan, something like a Nissan Bluebird. Intriguingly, Coles noted that the methcrazed burglar mentioned above—who was known to use shotguns to get his way—was seen the day of Scott’s death in an old white Toyota sedan.

  Even if police could dismiss this similarity as a long shot, they had to admit they’d never found the car Scott reported to emergency services. Nor had they identified the sedan Matthew Ireland saw when turning into 147 Aorangi Road between 4.40 am and 4.50 am the morning of the murder. Nor had they located the other car Ireland saw that morning as he headed to the milking shed about 5.05 am, which he described as having a noisy boy racer exhaust. And nor had they ever identified a rough-looking man who turned up at David Berry’s house one night not long before the murder, smelling of alcohol and asking where Scott was.

  Coles’ cross-examination was painstaking, probing the police case time and again, finding chinks in their supposed thoroughness and certainty until doubt seeped in. Greg King, not used to conceding centre stage in court, described Coles’ work as riveting and said he did his job ‘just superbly’. His knowledge of the Manawatu and Feilding areas as well as local police investigations had been crucial, King noted as he heaped praise on his colleague. ‘He’s a devastatingly effective lawyer, extremely experienced and extraordinarily capable—and what a pleasure to work with him.’

  People sometimes pondered why this case attracted so much public interest compared with the dozens of other murder cases heard each year that scarcely attract a headline. The answer lay in the many elements surrounding Scott Guy’s murder. There was a young man cut down in his prime, a shotgun murder in the dead of night, two fatherless children, two beautiful wives, a background of rivalry and bitterness over a family farm, hints of drugs, tearful pleas from a widow, a nine-month search for the killer—and then the discovery that the accused was the victim’s brother-in-law and business partner. It was the stuff of crime fiction, come to life in rural Manawatu. And to top it all, the case even had cute puppies making a crucial cameo.

  The eight chocolate labrador puppies, the offspring of Scott and Kylee’s dog Katie and another purebred, were nearly 2 months’ old at the time of the murder. Originally they’d been in Scott and Kylee’s garage but had been shifted to a kennel and run outside the house, and then, a few days before Scott’s death, to the old cowshed, about 100 metres away in the adjacent paddock. The shed was only used for storing the power supply for the electric fences, and Scott and Matthew Ireland had fenced off the yard area to make it secure for the puppies.

  There were four puppies of each sex, and Scott and Kylee’s friend Jo Moss chose a female, which she collected on Tuesday, 6 July. She had just lost one of her dogs, and Kylee and Scott, wanting to thank her for all her help looking after Hunter, gave her the pick of the litter. Her nephew, Matthew Ireland, had also been promised a puppy and had picked out a male he called Tui. The idea was that he
would work off the cost of the pup while helping out on the farm.

  The rest of the puppies were to be sold and had been advertised for $700 each on flyers put up in shops in Feilding and Palmerston North in the fortnight before the murder. One flyer was put in Kerry Macdonald’s Hunting & Fishing store and Kylee also advertised them on her Facebook page. At the time of Scott’s death, nobody had bought any of the puppies.

  On the evening of 7 July, when Scott and Kylee came home, Scott went over to the cowshed to feed Katie and the puppies. The following day, after Scott’s death, Bryan Guy raised the issue of their care with police and drove into Feilding to buy milk powder and dog biscuits, which police fed to the dogs. Detective Glen Jackson had been made aware of the puppies on the day of the murder but didn’t realise at the time how many there should have been, so it wasn’t until the following evening, when Ewen Macdonald went to feed them, that anyone realised three were missing.

  Just before 6 pm that night, Macdonald spoke to Detective Sergeant Gary Milligan at the Palmerston North Police Station and told him what he’d found. At trial, Milligan said Macdonald told him there should have been eight puppies but one had died. Macdonald denied saying one had died and it seems odd he would have made such a comment—he was well aware Jo Moss had been given a puppy and that Matthew Ireland had also been promised one. But under cross-examination Milligan was adamant that these were the words used.

  Given that police had already discovered distinctive footprints around Scott’s body and also leading to the shed and back, news that puppies were missing was a major development. It suggested the murder was linked to the missing puppies and that possibly someone had come to steal the dogs, been disturbed by Scott heading to work and shot him. Realising the potential importance of this break, police swore everyone to silence, not wanting the information leaked to the public.