Who Killed Scott Guy? (22 page)

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 them 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.

During Anna’s second appearance, Greg King fired one of the biggest shots he had—and in doing so took one of the biggest risks of his defence. It was virtually the first issue he raised that day when he rose to cross-examine Anna—what happened to her husband’s dive boots?

King had commented before the trial that there were going to be times when he’d have to ask questions he didn’t know the answer to—despite it being a supposed maxim among lawyers that you never do this because you risk being caught out by an unexpected answer. ‘Whoever said that never did many trials, because the reality is there’s just no way of knowing what the answer is till you ask the bloody question. So you have to take a calculated risk at times.’ This was one of those times.

Because Anna was a Crown witness, King had been barred from speaking to her before the trial, but he had spoken to Ewen Macdonald many times. And Macdonald had told King that the only pair of dive boots he had owned had been thrown out around April 2008 when they shifted from the farm cottage at 213 Aorangi Road to Anna’s parents’ house at number 147. Macdonald had used the dive boots on hunting trips as hut boots. They were useful for putting on after hunting if you had to go outside to get water, have a pee at night or go fishing. Hunters liked them because they were light and packed down easily. While some people hunted in them, Macdonald never did, preferring a sturdier pair of leather boots.

Armed with the claim by his client that he didn’t even own a pair of dive boots at the time Scott was gunned down, King knew he had to question Anna on it. This was because Macdonald had told him it was Anna who threw them onto a trailer full of rubbish they had outside the cottage as they were clearing up. The risk was that Anna’s recollection would be different from Macdonald’s. If she said he still had a pair or didn’t recall disposing of them, she would have sunk a crucial defence argument and added weight to the Crown contention Macdonald used the boots for silence and stealth when shooting Scott.

But she didn’t. ‘The last time I saw [one] it had a lot of cobwebs on it and it looked old and falling to pieces a little,’ she told King without prompting. As they were clearing out the boot cupboard by the back door at the cottage, she recalled holding it up and saying to her husband, ‘What the hang have you got this boot for? I’m not taking that with us.’ She said neither she nor Ewen were hoarders and if they didn’t need something they got rid of it. Her last memory of the boot was throwing it onto the rubbish trailer that day and she never saw it again. The boot had actually been used as a hiding place for the cottage’s spare key, but Anna said that when they shifted to 147 Aorangi Road they hid the key in a hollowed-out rock in the garden.

The revelation that at least one of Macdonald’s dive boots had been thrown out more than two years before Scott’s shooting was stunning. If Macdonald didn’t own dive boots, there was no way he could have been responsible for the footprints at the murder scene. Remarkably, the importance of this evidence seemed to pass by most media. In the following day’s
Dominion Post
it rated just one paragraph at the end of their story, which twice found room to note that Anna wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
The New Zealand Herald
didn’t mention it at all.

Their muted reaction to this development wasn’t shared by the Crown, who were completely blindsided by the news that the dive boots on which their case hung had been thrown out. Somehow, in all their lengthy discussions and formal interviews with Anna, they’d not gleaned this basic information. Behind the scenes, they immediately applied to the judge to reinterview Anna, pulling her back in and grilling her for several hours the following day.

That weekend, Greg King was ecstatic about the hit he’d landed on the Crown over the boots. But when Anna appeared in court on the following Friday, she backtracked slightly on her previous recollection, saying she now ‘thought’ she had thrown the boot out but couldn’t be absolutely certain. Vanderkolk also elicited from her that it was her husband who had reminded her about throwing out the boot, probably during one of her trips to visit him in prison. Anna said this filled in the blank for her about what had happened to the dive boots.

When Greg King cross-examined her about this, the pressure she was under to remember exactly what had happened to a piece of footwear more than four years earlier was clear. ‘I’ve been thinking about it because it’s been blimmin’ doing my head in,’ she said.

She outlined how there were countless pairs of boots and shoes thrown into the cupboard at the back door of their old house. ‘The last recollection that I can make, is the one dive boot that I saw that we always kept the key in and I thought it was scungy and we were going to move and I said to Ewen, “We’re not keeping that, we’re not taking that down [the road to the new house],” because we were just having a big clean-out, a big throw-out and I think I remember throwing them out but I can’t physically remember throwing them out. I couldn’t be 100 per cent sure.’ Anna confirmed that was the last time she saw the dive boot and she never saw it at their new house at 147 Aorangi Road after they shifted there in April 2008.

At Anna’s sixth and final appearance the following week, King returned to the subject. He prefaced his questions by saying he wanted to make sure he’d captured her position on the dive boots correctly. So again Anna recounted what she could remember—how during the big clean-up of 213 Aorangi Road, Ewen was going in and out of the house with things and, as he passed, Anna would ask if he wanted to keep this and that. She repeated that when she picked up the dive boot she told Ewen she wasn’t going to keep it. She was throwing small things into a black rubbish bag and there was a rubbish trailer just outside the door, ready to be taken to the farm’s fire pit. ‘I’m assuming I threw it on the trailer because I wouldn’t want one old tatty dive boot.’ And try as she might, that was as much as she could recall.

The only other person who recalled seeing Macdonald’s dive boot was his mother, Marlene. While Anna insisted she never saw the boot once they shifted to 147 Aorangi Road, Marlene said she remembered seeing it once at the new house, soon after they shifted, in 2008, when she took round some baking and asked her son where the spare key was.

However, in June 2010 when Anna and Ewen went to Fiji for their holiday and Marlene moved into their house to look after the children, she insisted the boot wasn’t there in the outdoor cupboard when she went looking for it. ‘I am positive. I would swear on the Bible.’

The fact Marlene suggested she’d seen the boot at the new house in 2008 didn’t help the defence’s argument that it had been thrown out, but King felt she might have been confused as to where she noticed it, having originally said in a police interview that the last time she saw the boot was at Christmas 2007.

He also pointed out that far from Ewen Macdonald attempting to twist people’s memories from inside prison—as the Crown suggested he had done by reminding Anna she threw out the boot—Macdonald had demonstrably not tried to influence or correct one of the people who visited him most and was now giving evidence detrimental to his case—his mother.

The doubt cast over the dive boots’ existence by Anna’s testimony was unquestionable. But as powerful as it was, it didn’t match the next revelation in the mystery of the killer’s footwear.

CHAPTER 15
Dive boots
THE RIDDLE OF THE WAVY LINES

By the beginning of week four, the Crown was entering the final phase of its arguments. It was also beginning the most important forensic area of the case—the mystery dive boots that left clear prints at the murder scene.

Right from Ben Vanderkolk’s opening address, it had been clear that this was central to showing Macdonald was the murderer. When he first outlined the Crown case to the jury, Vanderkolk indicated Macdonald had owned a pair of size 9 Pro Line dive boots responsible for the imprints around Scott’s body. Police also had evidence of their purchase and photos of Macdonald wearing them, he said.

The importance of the boots was also obvious to the defence. By the time the first witnesses were examined on the subject, 23 lever-arch folders of evidence surrounded Greg King and Liam Collins next to him, strewn around the floor within easy reach, creating a physical and evidential paperwork battlement.

The Crown outlined how it had checked footwear stores in the lower North Island to try to find the shoe that left the crucial imprints and also searched international databases and internet sites. Eventually, they came to believe the prints were created by dive boots, and further searching isolated the Pro Line W375 model as having the distinctive sole pattern that matched what they were looking for.

The boots had been manufactured in Taiwan and imported to New Zealand via the United States in a single shipment of 305 pairs in 2003. They had a zip on the inside of the ankle, rubber covering the toe and heel, and were described as a ‘rock bootie’. Multifunctional, they could be used for diving and fishing and also as a light hunting boot.

In total, 281 pairs were sold through Hunting & Fishing stores, including the one Kerry Macdonald part-owned in Palmerston North. Between November 2003 and May 2004, the Palmerston North store ordered 25 pairs of Pro Line dive boots, including five pairs of size 9 boots. Nationally, 54 pairs of size 9 boots had been imported. The boots had a wholesale price of $35 plus GST and sold in Hunting & Fishing stores for $59.95.

Detective Laurie Howell said in total 5573 pairs of the boots had been manufactured by the Dynaway Industrial Company in Taiwan between 2000 and 2006 for the Pro Line company. He had spent several hours searching internet sites and viewed more than 30,000 shoes but never found anything matching the Pro Line boot’s imprint.