Who Killed Scott Guy? (19 page)
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.
When this was revealed at trial
The Dominion Post
carried one of the trial’s more inspired headlines: ‘Hush Over Puppies.’ It was too much to expect the news to remain a secret though. In a community abuzz with speculation and rumour about the murder, it wasn’t long before virtually everyone seemed to know.
So on 21 July police sent out a media statement asking for information about the missing puppies. It was the first clear lead in the investigation that had been disclosed and the public swarmed to help. Sightings of chocolate-coloured labrador puppies flooded in. There was even a report from someone on an Air New Zealand flight of a puppy barking in the hold, which police had to follow up. DNA samples were taken from the remaining puppies to try to trace the stolen ones.
By the time Macdonald was arrested, police had accumulated 15 lever-arch folders of information and interviews on just this single aspect of the case. Extensive searches were conducted on the farm and roadsides in the area but no puppies or remains were found. After Macdonald’s arrest he took police to parts of the farm where he had buried poached deer—evidence of those animals was found but no puppies. Police specialist search squads also excavated other areas, and dive squads combed waterways on and around the farm, but again there was no sign of the dogs.
Indeed, despite thousands of hours of police time being invested in this part of the case, no indication was ever found of what had happened to the missing puppies and whether they were killed or not.
On the Tuesday morning of the trial’s second week, Greg King strode into court as everyone was setting up for the day and greeted the prosecutor. ‘Morning, Ben.’
‘Morning, Greg, how are you?’
‘Good, good. We’ve cracked it.’
‘Thought you would have,’ replied Vanderkolk.
‘Yep, we’ll be out of here by lunchtime,’ King quipped.
Generally chirpy, King admitted the ‘second-week trial blues’ were threatening his energy levels, but he still managed a joke with pretty much everyone he came across.
Custom had quickly crept into proceedings. Each morning the jury was led out by their foreman before members took their usual seats. In the public gallery, regular spectators grabbed their favourite positions. Likewise, on the press bench, those who’d covered the trial from the start staked their right to a certain seat and newcomers generally had to take what was left over if there was room.
When TV journalist John Campbell made a brief and belated appearance towards the end of the trial, a special desk was set up for him and his producer, much to the scorn of Greg King, who somewhat unfairly dismissed it as celebrity carpet-bagging.
As well as presiding over the trial, Justice Simon France had to keep a close watch over how it was being reported, and as time went on he became increasingly frustrated with the conduct of some media. Early in the trial he chided one journalist for tweeting information that was mentioned ‘in chambers’—a session where the jury is excluded and lawyers discuss contentious points with the judge. Such proceedings are automatically suppressed and even though the tweet was only to do with court finishing early, it was a reminder that the judge was monitoring what the media produced and was keen to keep it within clear boundaries.
Throughout the trial, competing media rushed to be first to report details, no matter how trifling or tawdry. Inevitably, there were instances where this compulsion became almost ridiculous. On 1 July the
Herald on Sunday
ran a piece titled ‘Analysing the Women on the Witness Stand’. It gave comments from body-language analyst Suzanne Masefield, who had ‘watched a lot of testimony in the Scott Guy trial’.
She purported to describe the impact giving evidence had on the trial’s ‘leading ladies’, Anna Macdonald and Kylee Guy, saying Anna’s ‘body language shows a lady used to containing and suppressing feelings, until they can no longer be restrained (like a shaken up cola bottle)’. Kylee, meanwhile, was more like a ‘wounded child’. Most of the other journalists in court disapproved of the story and it earnt a stern rebuke from Justice France, who, it is understood, banned the paper from court and referred the story to the acting solicitor-general.
But perhaps the most bizarre story to emerge from the trial related to the attire of one of the journalists. At the lunch adjournment on Wednesday, 27 June, court registrar Sarah Perano approached NZ Newswire journalist Laura McQuillan with a slightly concerned expression and asked her to change the gold-sequined pants she was wearing for something darker, less hugging and more appropriate. Perano felt the pants weren’t discreet enough for Justice France’s court, a sartorial step too far from Justice Ministry guidelines on attire, which suggest women wear a dress, or a skirt and blouse, or trousers and blouse; men are required to wear ties. McQuillan felt it was an overreaction, given her legs were under a table during proceedings.
The event hit Twitter within minutes, with McQuillan’s trousers quickly dubbed ‘disco pants’. It made
The Huffington Post
and was the most popular item on
The New Zealand Herald
’s website that day. But such was the public appetite for any snippet from the trial, relevant or not, media knew there was a ready audience.
The case against Ewen Macdonald was almost entirely circumstantial. And the jury was told that this wasn’t unusual and nor was it a sign of inherent weakness in the Crown argument. Not every murder is committed with onlookers present. Not all murderers helpfully leave incriminating samples at the scene. Few go out of their way to subsequently help police.
So without these ‘gold standard’ pieces of evidence—DNA, fingerprints, eyewitnesses, a confession—police were forced to collate incriminating information into an argument they hoped the jury would find compelling. An important strand of this argument was the issue of three mystery notes, supposedly left for Scott and Kylee, that police suggested had been written by Ewen Macdonald in another act of intimidation.
On 9 July, the day after Scott was murdered, rural posties Brett MacDonald and Emma Beaney provided what appeared to be a vital lead. They said that, between them, they had found threatening notes in Scott and Kylee’s letterbox three times, which appeared to be directed at Kylee. Brett MacDonald said that a few weeks after the arson of the old house on Scott and Kylee’s property—in October 2008—he had been delivering mail on a Saturday along Aorangi Road. At that time, Scott and Kylee were living at 259 Aorangi Road, one of Bruce Johnstone’s properties, waiting for building to begin on their new house.