by Mike White
And if you think he could have disposed of or returned everything later in the day, remember Macdonald was with people virtually constantly from 5.02 am—at the milking shed, at the murder scene, at his home with grieving family and on the farm with workers and visitors. His opportunities to cover his tracks after 5 am were virtually zero.
One other point about the shotgun. Macdonald was a skilled hunter but all his poaching, including the killing of Craig Hocken’s trophy stags, had been done with a rifle. Shotguns were for duck-shooting. And if he was going to use a shotgun, would he really have used lightweight number 5 duck-shooting ammunition? Macdonald knew a lot about firearms and ammunition, having been around them since he was a child. Given what he learnt from his father who was a firearms expert—even having been called as an expert witness in court cases—and the enormous amount of shooting he’d done over 20 years, it’s much more likely Macdonald would have used buckshot or a single slug if he intended to kill Scott.
A number 5 shot shell has about 450 pellets that are 3 millimetres across. It’s designed for killing ducks and is light enough that it won’t tear them to shreds. The heavier the target, the heavier the ammunition. So for hunters shooting pigs or deer with shotguns, number 5 shot won’t guarantee a kill. Instead, they’ll use buckshot, which has just nine pellets the size of a fingernail, or a single solid slug.
By using duck-shooting ammunition, the killer ran the risk that if the shot hit Scott’s bulky winter clothing, while it might have knocked him over, it may not have killed him. Only a shot to his exposed face or head could guarantee that. Using such ammunition meant the killer limited their options—they had to get very close to Scott in order to ensure a direct hit. If Macdonald, who had ready access to heavier ammunition, had planned the crime as meticulously as police claimed, surely he wouldn’t have risked only wounding Scott, who could then have identified his attacker.
THE TARGET
What if Scott Guy had been late? As Greg King noted, during the trial many complimentary things were said about Scott’s character, but being early for work wasn’t one of them. He was well known for sleeping in—even his father acknowledged he’d ‘had a problem getting out of bed early to milk cows ever since he was a teenager’. Farm worker Simon Asplin told police, ‘It would be rare for [Scott] to be there before [4.50 am] as he is the sort of guy that just leaves things to the last minute. I don’t think he likes to get out of bed early.’ Arrival times varied widely, as shown by the times the workshop alarm was deactivated each day.
So on the morning of 8 July, how could Macdonald guarantee Scott would be on time? If Scott was late, even just five or ten minutes, Macdonald, by then crouching beside the gate waiting for Scott to arrive so he could shoot him, would have been late for work himself. And if this had happened, the other workers, Matthew Ireland and Simon Asplin, would have mentioned it when interviewed by police, immediately raising questions about Macdonald’s whereabouts. Moreover, he would surely have realised that any delay would also increase the chance of being spotted as he returned from killing Scott, because Asplin and Ireland would be arriving for work. It would have been an enormous risk to take given he couldn’t control what time Scott would leave for work.
Scott was due at the farm workshop about 4.50 am that morning, Macdonald about 5 am. If Scott was killed at 4.43 am as police claim, it suggests he was actually running early, given he only had to drive 1.5 kilometres to work. It raises the question why he would have been early on a cold midwinter morning and further suggests the murder actually occurred several minutes later.
This might seem immaterial nitpicking until you again consider all the things Macdonald had to do after the shooting—dispose of the shotgun cartridges, dive boots and possibly puppies, cycle home, return the bike to the garage and the gun to the office and go inside the house to put on his work gear. At some stage he would surely have checked he had no incriminating marks on him such as blood. So if you begin to move Scott’s arrival a little later, it becomes increasingly unrealistic Macdonald could have done everything before he was seen coming from his house, walking to the workshop, and deactivating the alarm at 5.02 am.
If you accept Macdonald planned the crime, he would have expected Scott to be heading to work just before 4.50 am. In his plan this would have given him a mere ten minutes to do everything he had to do before he was due to arrive at work. Would he really have believed he could have done everything in such a limited window? Without being noticed by the arriving farm workers? Macdonald knew Matthew Ireland had been turning up early that week in an effort to impress Scott, so he would have known the huge extra risk this added. In the police scenario he gets lucky—Scott is strangely early—and Macdonald gets a few more minutes to commit the crime and cover it up. But even still, is it enough?
And remember, when Macdonald arrives at work, he’s not sweating, steaming or acting abnormally. Nobody could recall anything about his behaviour that seemed extraordinary. Just a lazy joke about Scott sleeping in again, getting into their waterproof gear, jumping on the quad bikes and heading to the milking shed.
And if Macdonald was the killer, he knew that at any time Scott’s body could be discovered and police would rapidly swarm over the farm. Nothing could be left to do later, nothing could be left to chance.
THE ACCOMPLICE
Macdonald knew all along there was someone who could lead police straight to him—Callum Boe. Having committed a series of vicious crimes with him, Boe was the one person who knew what Macdonald was capable of and the one person who could provide the potential vital link to the murder. Thus, Macdonald must have believed Boe would forever keep their secrets, even when questioned by the police as was inevitable in a murder inquiry. It was a huge risk—because as eventually happened, if Boe slipped up or squealed, Macdonald would instantly become the number one suspect.
Prosecutor Ben Vanderkolk accused Macdonald of being meticulous in carrying out the crime. It was the same word he used ten years earlier at the trial of Mark Lundy, when accusing the Palmerston North man of scrupulously planning the murder of his wife and daughter.
If that was the case, then Ewen Macdonald must have realised there were enormous risks in his plan and been prepared to accept them. Because if one thing went wrong, one event was delayed or one incident occurred over which he had no control, even if he wasn’t actually caught, he would immediately have come under suspicion and his alibi would have collapsed. If Vanderkolk is correct, Macdonald was not so much meticulous as extraordinarily lucky.
It’s reasonable to argue that Macdonald had successfully carried out serious crimes in the past without being detected or even having suspicion cast on him. But a murder is totally different—it sparks a massive investigation where everyone and everything is analysed. In the case of the arsons, vandalism and deer-shooting, sometimes only one officer attended the scene or made inquiries. That was never going to happen with a murder and thus the stakes were infinitely higher.
But of course, you can still make a case that despite everything raised here, it was physically possible for Macdonald to have committed the murder and been undetected. And that’s fine as a theory—but in so many ways, especially when you add in the boot prints not matching Macdonald’s, it seems to strain common sense. And remember, it was common sense that Ben Vanderkolk implored the jury to keep hold of.
Presumably the police and prosecution convinced themselves it was all possible, filled in the gaps and rationalised the qualms raised here. You would hope so—because it would be a travesty to have arrested and charged Macdonald on a theory that defied logic or they weren’t sure of. But even after four weeks of trial it’s impossible to be certain of this, given the prosecution didn’t address many of these issues, despite claiming the case against Macdonald was ‘logical’. As Macdonald’s junior counsel, Liam Collins, puts it, ‘To this day, I don’t know how they think he did it. I would love someone to sit down and tell me minute by minute what he did and how he did it.’<
br />
At trial, Greg King put it to the jury that if Macdonald wanted to kill Scott, why would he be so blatant? Why would he hatch such an incredibly risky plan when he could easily concoct an event on the farm that looked like an accident? While this idea has its own complications and may seem fanciful, it does illustrate how there were many other ways at many other times that Macdonald could have killed Scott had he wanted to.
To accept he settled on a plot that was so risky, so potentially flawed, so open to detection and disaster, surely brings into question whether Ewen Macdonald could ever have been the person who stole from the shadows on the morning of 8 July 2010 and fired at least two fatal shots at Scott Guy.
CHAPTER 22
Sentencing
On 21 July 2012 Macdonald appeared briefly in the Palmerston North District Court. It was a perfunctory session to transfer the charges to which he’d admitted to the High Court, where they would be dealt with by Justice France—the logic being that his trial judge had a much better understanding of the entire case.
Macdonald seemed happy, quickly changing into a suit Peter Coles had brought over and then bouncing into court with a smile at his parents sitting in the public gallery. The stolid, downcast face of the month-long murder trial was gone, the weight of a life sentence lifted from him.
Two days later he may have wished he’d remained emotionless, as the suppression order was finally lifted on the other charges he’d admitted to. These were the three other attacks deemed too prejudicial to be referred to in his murder trial: dumping 16,000 litres of milk at the Sexton farm; setting fire to their duck-shooting whare; and killing 19 calves with a hammer at Paul Barber’s farm—all of the crimes committed with Callum Boe.
The public reaction was predictable—and the gravity and ugliness of his offences were juxtaposed on evening television broadcasts with his smiling entry to court days earlier. For many people, revelation of these new crimes just reinforced their opinion he must have been guilty of murdering Scott Guy and intensified their view he was an evil and dangerous lunatic with no remorse.
But Macdonald says his seemingly cheerful demeanour at the previous hearing was just a relieved reaction to not facing a murder charge. ‘I guess, because I’d prepared for the worst, then anything a lot less—I was happy. Five years compared to 20 years was a walk in the park. I knew I’d have to be held accountable for the other crimes but I was just over the moon to be only sentenced on what I’d committed.’
While not trying to minimise the scale or effect of the crimes Ewen had committed, Kerry Macdonald and Greg King pointed out that a blow to the head was both legal and the normal way to kill calves on farms and not sheer brutality as many pictured it. At Callum Boe’s sentencing in Queenstown, the judge had noted, ‘I do not accept what the Crown says, that the killing of the calves involved particular cruelty. There is no evidence of that.’ However, staff on the Barbers’ farm claimed some of the calves were not dead when found the next morning and had to be put out of their suffering.
Federated Farmers’ Manawatu-Rangitikei president Andrew Hoggard told The Dominion Post it was a shock to discover Macdonald’s acts. ‘We genuinely thought crimes like this were committed by some low-life toerag who’d never worked a decent day in their life.’
Along with the revulsion at Macdonald’s actions was equally predictable outrage that the jury didn’t get to hear of these crimes at his trial. Social media was awash with claims that if they had, then Macdonald would have been found guilty, and this was just another example of New Zealand’s deeply flawed justice system.
Greg King had always known this would happen. And he always knew the worst public response would be triggered by the calf-killing incident. In November he’d predicted that even if Macdonald was acquitted, ‘the headline the next day will be, “Jury Didn’t Hear That He Killed Calves”. Frankly, I think the reaction from the public to hearing it demonstrates precisely why a jury shouldn’t have heard it. It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. The jury shouldn’t have heard it because it can cloud their judgement, it can overwhelm them and when that happens, the technical precision of evidence becomes irrelevant.’
And King emphasised that not including these crimes during the murder trial wasn’t contentious—Ben Vanderkolk and the Crown accepted they should be inadmissible because their relevance was outweighed by their potentially prejudicial effect. If the calf killing had been part of the murder trial, King said he would have been tempted to leave the trial in Palmerston North rather than apply for it to be shifted to Wellington. ‘Because rural folk on a jury could have more understanding of killing calves this way, I think, more than a bunch of Wellington public service vegans sitting on a jury hearing about it. Bobby calves are killed all the time—just like roosters are killed every time they’re born in the hen house. Rural people are aware of rural realities more than people who just buy their meat plastic-wrapped in the supermarket.’
But no matter what context was offered about rural realities, there was no escaping the determined and vengeful nature of Macdonald’s crimes. And for many, the acts simply confirmed the image of Macdonald as a complete monster.
That image easily fed into the belief Macdonald really was Scott’s killer, despite what the jury and court had ruled.
On 14 September 2012 a woman approached this journalist outside Palmerston North’s courthouse, where Macdonald was about to be sentenced. ‘Are you from the media? Are you here for the Scott Guy case?’ she asked enthusiastically. She was a slight woman in her 50s who said her birthday was that weekend—the same day Scott and Kylee’s second son, Drover, would turn 2.
Like everyone in town, she had a theory on the case, how it had to be someone with local knowledge, how she’d been down Aorangi Road and looked at the scene, how she was sure it must have been Macdonald. ‘You know what I think? He must have had two pairs of boots. One bigger and one smaller. He must have worn thick socks with one when he was hunting, so they were bigger,’ she concluded with a knowing nod before scurrying off to catch her bus. And that was that. Case solved. Despite the fact that there was no evidence Macdonald ever owned two pairs of dive boots, despite the overwhelming evidence he never hunted in dive boots, despite the Crown never raising such a scenario, the woman had found a theory that suited her conviction that Macdonald was guilty.
As Liam Collins summed it up, ‘At the end of the day, it’s a case of, “He did other things, so he must have done this. We don’t have any evidence of this, but he must have done it. Who else? We can’t think of anyone else.” Without the other crimes there was no case.’
But it was the other six crimes for which Macdonald now faced sentencing.
Outside the courtroom a polite crush began with reporters, cameramen and fascinated public all positioning themselves to get a seat. Strangely, the smallest courtroom was used. When a burly security guard with mullet, stab-jacket and ominous leather pouches on his belt finally opened the door, many missed out on the final public appearance by Macdonald. ‘Please place Ewen Kerry Macdonald before the court,’ the registrar called and Macdonald, in striped shirt, pink tie and suit entered, flanked by two prison officers.
That morning, Greg King had been realistic about what Macdonald would get. ‘Four years would be good, five we might think of appealing, six we’d definitely appeal.’ King had travelled up from Wellington to appear with Peter Coles for Macdonald. Ben Vanderkolk was away so Paul Murray presented the Crown’s submissions.
He stressed that all the offending was highly premeditated, most was driven by vengeance, and in many cases trust was abused. ‘Each offence . . . derived from a sense of entitlement.’ The crimes against Scott and Kylee’s property were ‘intensely personal, done with the intention to unsettle’. There had been little remorse, and Macdonald had been able to carry on with his life until he was caught. Murray encouraged Justice France to treat the crimes separately and impose a cumulative sentence because there were four separate sets of victims.
This wasn’t the first time this approach had been urged. Just days before, Kylee Guy had sent a letter to the attorney-general, exhorting him to ensure Macdonald was heavily punished. ‘Ewen Macdonald is a very dangerous, vindictive man and an extreme danger to our society and people. He needs to pay for all of his individual and separate crimes and the hurt, pain and suffering he has caused, not only to myself, my husband and our children but to numerous other people within New Zealand . . . I am now alone and I must protect my children and for this I need a sentence that reflects appropriate justice. If the offender is granted a concurrent sentence, it will not reflect the suffering he has caused to my family, neighbours and the community and will mean that he is able to escape the true gravity of his actions.’
She said that when Macdonald was released, her only choice would be to move to Australia because of her fear of him. ‘Please look at this within your heart and help us,’ she concluded.
As part of her relationship with the Sensible Sentencing Trust, Kylee also wrote a letter with its spokesman Garth McVicar to a number of MPs, including the prime minister, courts and justice ministers, and leaders of other parties. This letter also railed against concurrent sentences being used for Macdonald, saying he was an evil man who committed all the crimes independently. Imposing a maximum penalty for only one charge and rolling the other sentences into this would be pathetic, they said, and send a message to criminals they got ‘free hits’ after their first crime, as well as telling most victims that they didn’t matter and weren’t entitled to justice.