Who Killed Scott Guy?

by Mike White

  Wylie, unsurprisingly, failed to see the funny side of it, though. ‘I was just really upset that they knew where I lived and that someone would do that to me.’

  Her friend, Petrea Twort, said Wylie was frightened by the anonymous note and felt the message was ‘watch your back’. She was also concerned for her son and her mother, who she lived with. Wylie didn’t contact police about the notes, though she stopped going to Hawke’s Bay, scared she might run into members of the Bullock family, Twort said.

  In a bizarre twist, Callum Guy, Scott’s younger brother, began going out with Wylie later that year. When Kylee found out, she told Callum he had to break off the affair because it would upset Chanelle. Wanting to keep on side with his family, Callum agreed.

  Kylee’s actions regarding Leanne Wylie created difficulties for the defence team. While the Crown used Kylee’s emotional reaction to the notes supposedly left for her and the graffiti painted on her new house to its advantage, the defence knew they could undermine this by saying, ‘But hey, weren’t you also involved in delivering anonymous notes to someone you didn’t like? Didn’t you write nasty things about a woman you knew very little about?’

  Greg King, however, had decided early in the case that they wouldn’t attack Kylee, even though it could help balance the Crown’s case, because everyone recognised she was a genuine victim. In his view, any points scored by the defence would be outweighed by the negative reaction from jurors. On top of this, Ewen Macdonald had instructed King not to criticise Kylee.

  King said they thought carefully about using the note left for Leanne Wylie as evidence because they had to consider if it was in fact Wylie who may have left the anonymous notes for Scott and Kylee. This was something police had investigated but decided to discount. Interestingly, when Kylee was asked by police to list who might have left the notes for her, she included Macdonald, Nikki Guy and a friend of Scott’s, but not Leanne Wylie.

  Ultimately, King decided not to use the Leanne Wylie evidence, believing there were sufficient inconsistencies in the evidence of other witnesses to create doubt whether the three notes Brett MacDonald and Emma Beaney claimed to have seen actually existed. ‘It’s like anything. You choose a course, weighing up all the evidence we had, and we decided to go down the path, and I think correctly, that there were no notes.’

  However, Peter Coles admits it was extremely tempting to challenge some of Kylee’s statements during the trial with the Leanne Wylie information. At one stage, when Kylee stated how shocked and bemused she was that anyone could be so callous as to attack her anonymously, Coles passed a note to King saying they had to bring up the Leanne Wylie evidence now, in cross-examination. King, who had ultimate decision-making control on the defence team, resisted, and the court never heard about it.

  After the trial, King said he still felt it was the right decision to leave Kylee alone, despite being armed with evidence that could have dented her credibility as a witness. ‘I wouldn’t have enjoyed putting that stuff to Kylee and I’m glad I didn’t have to do it.’

  CHAPTER 14

  Kylee and Anna

  TRAGEDY AND TEARS

  As the days passed in the trial with a succession of witnesses who’d known Scott Guy or Ewen Macdonald, or had worked on the case, public interest grew. Most days the major papers ran it on their front page and news websites rated it their top story. A press bench of around 20 reporters kept the public updated as each witness appeared, distilling the most important evidence or alarming quotes. Prior to the trial, TV3 had applied to stream proceedings live, but this had been declined by Justice France, who was conscious of the need to prevent even more of a media spectacle in his court.

  The court’s public gallery held about 70 people, but some of these seats were reserved for family. Kylee Guy’s family were often there, as was Blair Macdonald, Ewen’s brother, sitting in the back corner of the courtroom. Witnesses couldn’t sit in the gallery until they’d given evidence, so the Guy family and Kerry and Marlene Macdonald weren’t regular observers until later in the trial. But many members of the public were, fascinated by the drama being played out. Some had taken annual leave to attend, others hastened down in their lunch breaks. Law students sat in to watch and learn. One woman, who’d attended most of Scott Watson’s three-month murder trial in 1999, was determined to sit through this one as well. She’d only missed two days, when a friend inconveniently arrived from Melbourne and didn’t consider observing a murder trial suitable tourist fare.

  The crowds grew so large that security guards in the foyer outside the courtroom often had to ask those waiting to get in to stop crowding around the door. When the doors opened for each of the day’s four sessions, people were often seen sprinting across the foyer to try to get a seat. Court staff had a ‘Public Gallery Full’ sign put up on the doors and eventually erected barriers to organise the queues. Those unable to get in often remained in line outside the courtroom, waiting for someone to leave or to be first in line for the next session. Inside, the court crier several times had to ask members of the public to remain quiet during evidence.

  It’s easy to view such public interest with disdain, to characterise it as voyeurism, a distasteful intrusion into others’ misery. But equally, it’s fair to argue this was just natural interest in what was the biggest—if not the most important—story of the day. It was a real-life soap opera in which the public could be extras of a sort.

  And it was always like this. When Minnie Dean, the so-called Winton baby farmer, was tried in 1895 for killing three young children, spectators sold miniature dolls outside the courthouse as souvenirs. Enormous crowds gathered at the trial of schoolgirl murderers Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme in Christchurch in 1954. More recent cases, such as the trials of David Bain, Scott Watson and even Chris Kahui, have transfixed the country. Rightly or wrongly, a large proportion of people find real-life crime stories mesmerising, and Ewen Macdonald’s trial engrossed them.

  Public interest seemed to peak, however, whenever Kylee Guy or Anna Macdonald gave evidence. The sense of it being something special was heightened by their appearance in the courtroom through a side door behind the witness box rather than through the public gallery and body of the court like everyone else.

  In four appearances, Kylee outlined life on the farm, her life with Scott and the events of the morning he was murdered. Throughout it all a picture was painted of Scott as a doting father and uncle, and a loving husband. At times Kylee slipped into tears as she remembered her husband, dabbing at her eyes with tissues proffered by the court crier. When she pulled up her right sleeve slightly, the names of Scott, Hunter and Drover were easily seen tattooed on the inside of her forearm. ‘We just got along so well . . . He was a real softie—he didn’t want to upset anyone.’

  But she admitted Scott was frustrated at his parents when they shifted to Feilding and left their house to Anna and Ewen, saying it was ‘disappointing and sad’ that Bryan and Jo hadn’t helped them into a house. Fairness, she stressed, was a big thing for Scott, but she insisted he wasn’t greedy.

  Kylee detailed Scott and Ewen’s working relationship, saying they had ‘totally different personalities’ but by and large got on well. This was especially so after the pair attended a farming conference in Invercargill just before Scott’s death. When they returned, Kylee said Scott had told her how Ewen had opened up and it had been good to spend time together.

  She described the incident at the Reve birthday party as ‘sad and inappropriate’ but agreed it was the only time she’d seen a disagreement like that between them. Her clear contempt for Macdonald was barely restrained, though; at one point in the middle of a response she muttered, ‘I don’t even like saying his name.’ Given what Macdonald had admitted to doing in his attacks on their property, her ill will was understandable.

  While public sympathy for Kylee abounded, there was an equal amount for Anna Macdonald. Not only had she lost her brother, she’d lost her husband and marriage in the most ghastly
circumstances. She’d had to explain to her four children why their dad had disappeared from their lives, and what the police believed he’d done—shot their Uncle Scotty. The kids had kept her going in many ways, their daily routines unable to be ignored, their future wellbeing her priority. Both sets of grandparents helped out with their care, and for a while Anna had sessions with parenting guru Nigel Latta to help her cope.

  On her first appearance in the witness box she had clearly been crying and had to breathe deeply to remain composed, answering questions in a quavering voice. As she stared at Ben Vanderkolk who was questioning her, she could see her husband directly behind him. Macdonald had glanced up as she came in but after that kept his head down, writing in the journal in which he recorded each day’s witnesses and events. Beside her name that day he drew a heart, going over it several times in biro.

  Anna appeared on six different occasions over four weeks. Inevitably, she was quizzed on her reaction when Ewen was arrested and it became clear he had been responsible for the attacks on Scott and Kylee’s property. She said it took many trips to see her husband in jail to understand what had been going on in his head that led to the crimes. ‘I had a lot of questions and it wasn’t just on one visit. It was visit after visit after visit for me to understand what went wrong.

  ‘I said to him, “I can’t believe you felt so upset and cross about things and not being able to tell me about it.” Because if I felt cross or upset, I would have said, and I just thought between a husband and a wife that’s what you do—that’s the person that’s there for you.’

  Macdonald had replied that he didn’t want to involve her in his frustration with Scott because it was her family and she would be hurt.

  ‘I can’t believe that you would hate someone so much that you would do that,’ Anna had told him when discussing the vandalism to Scott and Kylee’s house.

  ‘No, I didn’t hate them,’ Macdonald replied. ‘I was really pissed off.’ The attack was more to do with Kylee because he felt she wound Scott up with ideas and was always ringing him to come home and help with Hunter.

  He told Anna, however, that he felt terrible after the vandalism and tried to do nice things for Kylee and be a better husband and father in his own life. It was a change Anna noticed and loved seeing, though she didn’t know what was behind it.

  Naturally, Anna asked her husband straight out if he had murdered Scott.

  ‘No, I swear I didn’t,’ he replied emphatically.

  But it was on Anna’s second visit to the court, on day seven, Wednesday, 13 June, that her most dramatic testimony came, proving to be one of the trial’s pivotal moments.

  That day Kylee and Bryan Guy had already given evidence before Anna stepped into the witness box, made herself comfortable, adjusted the microphone and looked up at Vanderkolk in readiness. He took her back to the time Scott returned to the farm from Hawke’s Bay, a time when Anna had doubts about the farm being big enough for all the families.

  Anna contrasted her husband’s approach to the farm, which was ‘very organised . . . quite a perfectionist’, with that of her brother, who would often be in a rush to finish and who she never imagined would stay on the farm long-term. Indeed, Kylee had made no secret of the fact they would eventually move back to Hawke’s Bay, where her family and friends were. Anna and Ewen, however, felt they’d stay at Byreburn forever, especially after moving into the old family home at 147 Aorangi Road.

  She admitted there was competition between the boys, saying if one put in ten fence posts, the other felt driven to put in 12. Ewen worked harder to prove he was up to the job. ‘He did want to look after us. He said he was working the long hours so he could provide more for me and the kids,’ Anna recounted, tears starting to fall down her face. ‘It was always about “you and the kids”.’

  At this, Macdonald started breathing deeply and blinking, biting his bottom lip, the first signs of real emotion from him since the trial began. There were light moments, too, though. At one point Anna recalled Macdonald’s passion for hunting, the ‘missions’ with Callum Boe, and times when another young farm worker wanted to go out hunting and Macdonald would tell her he couldn’t be bothered but felt obliged to go anyway. Deep down, though, she knew he actually did want to go out hunting, and when she recounted this to the court, Macdonald smiled broadly. And when Anna talked of Macdonald’s computer budgeting skills and mentioned, ‘I did the spending, he just added it up,’ the smile became a laugh.

  Anna explained how tensions over house and farm ownership had arisen, but that Macdonald had been reluctant to speak up, feeling it was Bryan’s farm and he was just the son-in-law and it wasn’t his place to question decisions.

  The Reve birthday party flare-up was the only time there was a confrontation, and Macdonald was simply frustrated at Scott leaving the farm early and leaving him and the other workers to finish up. She insisted Macdonald didn’t raise his voice or swear, and it was Scott who ‘just fired up’ and yelled at him. In her view, Scott was most at fault for causing the scene with his testy overreaction, but what happened was soon forgotten.

  The Crown had made much of the event, Vanderkolk describing it as ‘explosive’—mainly because it was the only time anyone saw the two disagree or argue. Certainly, there was evidence of snide comments behind each other’s back, lazy slinging off at the other in moments of frustration, but no actual confrontation. Despite attempts to make the Reve incident resonate with sinister portent, the testimony of Anna and others pointed to its brevity, putting it in context—a bit of a blow-up that quickly blew over.

  And, tellingly, she noted how her husband’s behaviour changed in the 18 months before Scott’s death, in the time following his attack on Scott and Kylee’s house. At one stage Macdonald told Anna, ‘I’m sick of coming home and moaning about them and getting annoyed about stuff. I’m going to let it go and I want to move on.’

  He bought a silk tree for Kylee’s birthday, helped them landscape their property, gave them cuttings from his own garden and even made a photo montage at home with Scott, Kylee and Hunter in it. At the same time he cut back on his hunting trips, spent more time at home with the kids, took sons Finn and Jack out on the farm more, and got elected to the Colyton School Board. In March 2010 he came second in the Manawatu/Rangitikei/Horowhenua Farm Manager of the Year awards and was on a high for weeks afterwards.

  Three months later the couple took their first holiday together for seven years, going to Fiji’s Treasure Island to celebrate Ewen’s 30th birthday. Anna told Greg King how much fun the trip was. ‘We remembered why we fell in love and we really enjoyed each other’s company. We went out for dinner every night and we danced and joked and swam and it was really cool, actually. Like, he just totally relaxed.’

  Then King asked her, ‘On the 7th of July 2010 had your life ever been more perfect?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were positive about your future?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were positive about your husband?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You had four beautiful children?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You had a beautiful nephew?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And another on the way.’

  ‘Yeah. We were in a really good space.’

  At that moment, it all became too much for Ewen Macdonald to hold back. Hearing his wife’s descriptions and remembering the good and tender times, he broke down in tears, holding his left hand to his forehead and the bridge of his nose, unable to stifle his loud sobs.

  Onlookers could only imagine what was racing through his mind and tearing at his heart at that moment—the memory of how good things had been, the realisation of how he’d thrown all that away with his other crimes, the awareness of losing Anna and being separated from his children, the hopeless wish he’d never been that stupid. Anna, too, began crying, and no matter what prejudice and preconceptions anyone had brought to court that day, it would have been hard for th
em not to feel a wave of sadness wash over them, an appreciation of sorrow for what had been but had also been lost.

  It was a powerful moment, skilfully created by King, who’d never met Anna and couldn’t be certain of how she would react as he tried to demonstrate how Macdonald had undergone a marked personal transformation in the year and a half before Scott was killed. The clear evidence from Anna was that much of her husband’s anger had dissipated. The clear suggestion, therefore, was why on earth would he murder Scott when their past problems had largely been resolved?

  But Ben Vanderkolk was having none of this apparent emotional manipulation. Springing to his feet for his re-examination, he acidly asked Anna if on 7 July 2010 she had any idea her husband had been involved in shooting Craig Hocken’s deer, burning down the old house on Scott and Kylee’s property or vandalising their new home. No, she replied each time.

  It was a skilful rejoinder, attempting to skewer the atmosphere King had created and replace memories of contentment with a visceral reminder of Macdonald’s brutality. But while the points were instantly and well made, they couldn’t completely counter the impression that had been formed, that Macdonald was no longer that criminal brute by the time Scott was murdered.

  Anna Macdonald’s evidence was vital in one further area—the mystery of the dive boots. It was impossible to overstate how crucial these were to the Crown case. Four examples of the Pro Line dive boots, which police believed made the distinctive impressions around the murder scene, sat at the front of the court, mounted on boards. In fact, more than half the trial’s exhibits were casts of footprints found at 293 Aorangi Road.

  The boots were the only forensic link the Crown had between Macdonald and the scene. They didn’t have his DNA (a sample of which he’d willingly provided), his fingerprints or anyone who’d seen him there. Just imprints from a neoprene dive boot they alleged he’d owned and worn to murder Scott.