Who Killed Scott Guy? (17 page)
For the defence, the most crucial evidence was that of Fredriksson. The fact she was awake when she heard the shots, along with her knowledge of guns, lent her evidence great credibility. But most importantly she clearly heard three shots in rapid succession. The vital issue here was that the farm shotgun the Crown alleged Macdonald used could only fire two shots at a time. It then had to be broken, the two used shells removed either by upending the shotgun so they fell out or, more commonly, by physically taking them out by hand. Only then could a third cartridge be inserted, the shotgun snapped closed and another shot fired.
Many shotguns do allow multiple successive shots. Semiautomatic versions have a magazine that can fire many shots one after the other, automatically ejecting the spent cartridges. But the farm shotgun was a basic 12-gauge that only allowed two shots at a time before reloading. If Fredriksson’s recollection was correct, there was no way such a weapon could have produced the firing pattern and sounds she described.
The Saturday before the trial began, Greg King and Liam Collins had gone to the Trentham rifle range near Wellington with Mitchell Maxberry, who had been a gunsmith for more than 35 years. Maxberry, originally from the United States, was also a competitive shooter and had represented New Zealand. He had won more than 50 regional championships across 24 states in America and five US national titles. Some of his successes were rapid-fire titles for weapons including shotguns. During his life he had owned more than 500 firearms.
While Collins timed him with a stopwatch, Maxberry test-fired a Lanber shotgun similar to the one on the Guys’ farm, with the same mechanism and with ammunition virtually identical to that used to kill Scott. To fire two shots in succession took about one second. But to fire a third took even someone as experienced and slick as Maxberry, going as fast as he could, another seven seconds at best. He then tested a Benelli semi-automatic shotgun like Simon Asplin’s. He could fire three shots in one and a half seconds—almost identical to the ‘bang, bang, bang’ Fredriksson described in court.
The other test the trio conducted was to see how far a shotgun wad would fly if unimpeded. On a calm day, with the barrel of the Lanber horizontal, the wad travelled more than 37 metres. At the scene police had found two wads—one embedded in Scott’s neck, and one beside the nearby fence, which it had probably struck before falling to the ground. The testing at Trentham showed that a third wad could easily have travelled past Scott, over the fence behind him and well into the neighbouring paddock, from a shot that missed its target. Given the difficulty police had locating the second wad, which wasn’t found until two days into the scene investigation, despite being just metres from Scott’s body, not locating a third wad wasn’t necessarily surprising, the defence argued. There were two horses and 11 sheep grazing in the paddock, which could easily have trodden it into the ground, and the long grass would have obscured it from searchers.
And if there were three shots, there was no way Ewen Macdonald could have fired them with the farm shotgun. Police had hung their case on Macdonald using this weapon because there was absolutely no evidence he had access to any other shotgun. While he used one for duck-shooting, he didn’t own one, instead borrowing shotguns from his father, who ran the gun section at his outdoor store in Palmerston North. All Kerry Macdonald’s weapons were locked away at the time at his house and Ewen had no way of accessing them.
So it was the 25-year-old farm Lanber or nothing. And if there were three shots, then it was nothing—proof Macdonald had nothing to do with Scott’s murder.
While Bonnie Fredriksson’s evidence was the most compelling regarding the possibility of three shots being fired during the murder, it was her flatmate, Derek Sharp, who became one of the most crucial witnesses during the trial. His role was unlikely. But then, so was his testimony.
On the trial’s third day, Sharp appeared in court to explain what he’d heard, and, equally importantly, when he’d heard it. He stated that when he heard the two shotgun blasts, his bedside clock was reading 5 am. However, Sharp said the digital clock was at least 15 minutes fast. There had always been a problem with the clock gaining time, he noted, up to ten minutes a week, and he put this down to the proximity of high-tension wires that ran near the house, or the power supply.
So he had a system to account for the time gain and keep track of what the real time was. The system was, to put it mildly, unique. When the time gain on his alarm clock got too great he reset it. He did this using his wristwatch. The wristwatch, however, was also always fast, usually between three and five minutes, so he put the alarm clock back further than required to account for this. He also reset his alarm a little later every day to account for the clock gaining time. This was easier than changing the time each day, he insisted. When asked how he could be sure what the real time was, he said he used radio time pips to give him an idea of how fast his wristwatch was and then calculated how fast his alarm clock was, before deliberately resetting it slow.
At this point, Peter Coles, who was making his first appearance cross-examining a witness, paused and frowned before trying to clarify Sharp’s system: ‘But your watch is fast and you are setting the digital clock still at the wrong time?’
As Sharp continued to explain this convoluted process to a puzzled audience, the smiles among the press and public grew, until there were bursts of laughter. Even the judge was unable to suppress amusement. Sharp’s face seemed to flicker with resentment, bemused that people couldn’t understand his timekeeping system, which seemed sufficiently logical to him, though even he became confused at times when trying to explain it. But it was an issue the defence returned to frequently throughout the rest of the trial—sometimes to leaven the solemn court atmosphere with a laugh, but always to drive home a crucial point and fundamental omission in the police investigation.
While Bonnie Fredriksson, Alison Rankin and Fraser Langbein all noted that the time they heard shots or were woken was about 5 am, Sharp was the only witness to put it at 4.45 am—about the time police claimed the killing occurred. The importance of this evidence can’t be overstated—if the murder was at 5 am as everyone else suggested, there was no way Macdonald could have done it because he was seen coming from his house, 1.5 kilometres away, at this time by both Matthew Ireland and Simon Asplin and deactivated the farm workshop alarm at 5.02 am.
Numerous other phones, watches and clocks were checked by police for accuracy against the world clock, including Macdonald’s, Ireland’s, Asplin’s and the workshop alarm. But Derek Sharp’s bedside clock never was—despite him being one of the only people who could help pinpoint exactly when the murder occurred. A simple police check on Sharp’s clock would have verified if it was indeed running 15 minutes fast and how much it gained each day.
For Greg King, the failure to do this was inexplicable, given how it could have added crucial certainty to the police case. It seemed bizarre given police had gone to extraordinary lengths to check and measure other pieces of peripheral evidence. When one police witness later explained the detailed measurements of two letterboxes on Aorangi Road complete with diagrams and dimensions, King insisted the intricate sketch be admitted as an official exhibit, to contrast this meticulous approach with the apparent sloppiness regarding Sharp’s clock.
In addition, police hadn’t tested Sharp’s theory that his clock was continually gaining time because of the nearby high-tension wires. When police forensic analyst from the electronic crime laboratory Antony Drake was later asked if this was possible, he said he’d heard of it. But the defence wasn’t convinced and employed Palmerston North electrical engineer Peter Shelton to visit Sharp’s house and measure the electromagnetic fields. The reading was infinitesimal—hundreds of times less than that coming from common appliances such as desk fans, razors or digital clocks. He said powerlines or the power supply could have no effect on the operation or timekeeping of a digital clock, decisively debunking Sharp’s claims.
Thus, the evidence of the only witness police had that put the killing around 4.45 am was shown to be uncertain and unreliable.
The confusion surrounding what time Scott was killed continued after Sharp had given his evidence. Antony Drake entered the courtroom two witnesses later. Drake had been given Scott and Kylee’s Compaq laptop computer that Scott had used on the morning he was shot. It showed he’d logged in at 4.36 am and three minutes later checked several internet sites. The first three were Trade Me, Facebook and MetService. Drake initially said the internet browser appeared to have been shut down at 4.40.41 am but confusion arose over whether Scott had also logged into Hotmail. Eventually Drake had to admit under cross-examination that he’d not initially listed Hotmail in his report, but that morning had gone back and reviewed the files and agreed the internet email site had been visited at 4.40.38 am. And at 4.40.59 am the computer had gone into the MSN NZ news website.
Despite having had the information from the computer for nearly two years, Drake seemed ruffled and unsure of the facts. Discrepancies between a detective’s job sheet and his evidence further fostered an air of incompetence. The situation became almost farcical when a computer-savvy juror handed the judge a note suggesting an explanation for what may have occurred.
Despite Drake earlier giving evidence that it was likely the internet browser was switched off at 4.40.41 am, the court eventually agreed that the last physical act on the laptop—the last keystroke or mouse click—was at 4.40.59, when it went to the MSN NZ news site. How long Scott looked at this, with its revolving news stories, without actually touching the computer, is entirely unknown. In the police scenario he didn’t spend any time looking at it, instead gathering his gear and heading out the door to his ute. In their view he was therefore at the gates by 4.43 am.
The defence argued nobody knew how long he looked at the news stories as they came up, nor was there any way of knowing what else he did before leaving the house. How long did he take to drink his coffee? Did he go to the toilet? Have a cigarette? How long did he take to put on his gear, go outside, lock the door behind him and walk to the ute? Did he fiddle with his iPod there? Did he let the ute warm up?
In the defence’s view it was likely Scott took longer than two minutes between leaving his laptop and arriving at the gates. Thus, the 4.43 am starting point posited by the police was a best case scenario for the Crown—the scenario that allowed Macdonald maximum time to commit the murder and return home in time for milking.
While the defence might have appeared to be nitpicking over a few seconds here and a few minutes there, these were critical issues. Every minute later that Scott arrived at the gates in the police theory restricted the time Macdonald had to kill him and get back to his house 1.5 kilometres away, and reduced the chance he could have been the killer.
The defence repeatedly stressed that it was impossible for Macdonald to have time to shoot Scott, walk over to his body to check he was dead, pick up the shotgun cartridges (because none were found at the scene), ride a pushbike 1.5 kilometres back down Aorangi Road with a shotgun without being seen, dispose of the shotgun shells, puppies and dive boots in such a secret place they were never found despite intensive searches, clean and break down the shotgun and replace it in the office exactly where Bryan Guy had left it, put the bike in the garage, check himself for incriminating marks such as blood, enter his house and get changed into his milking gear—within the time available. Add to this possibly stealing the puppies—but of course this could have been done before the murder.
The Crown argued that Macdonald had 17 minutes—between 4.43 am and 5 am, when he was seen coming from his house—more than enough time to do what he had to do. Police witnesses even detailed how they reconstructed the journey between the entrances to 293 and 147 Aorangi Road, with Detective Laurie Howell briskly walking the distance in just over 12 minutes, and biking it in three minutes 44 seconds.
On hearing this, Greg King somewhat flippantly asked if Howell had been carrying three puppies and a shotgun when he reprised Macdonald’s supposed escape from the scene. But timing was everything, King reminded the jury—and if it seemed implausible that Macdonald could have done everything he needed to in the brief window available, then it further created reasonable doubt that he was the murderer.