Who Killed Scott Guy? (35 page)
So on arriving back at his house after killing Scott, having managed to avoid being seen by other traffic and not be noticed by Matthew Ireland as he rode up the drive and put the bike away, Macdonald still had to stash the gun in the office—also without being spotted by Ireland or the other farm worker, Simon Asplin, who was due to arrive any time. Again, to hide the shotgun elsewhere hoping to sneak it back into the office later, was an impossible risk, given it was fair to expect, as happened, that Bryan or the police would check on its whereabouts straight after hearing Scott had been shot. Nobody noted muddy or bloody footprints on the office carpet, and police testing for DNA there produced nothing.
You could suggest Macdonald managed to kill Scott and get back to the house before Ireland turned up for work. While it’s impossible to know exactly when Ireland arrived—best estimates are between 4.40 am and 4.50 am—he was very early, hoping to impress Scott because he’d been late the previous weekend. Police theorise the murder occurred about 4.43 am. It could easily have been later, given we don’t know exactly when Scott left his house, but this is the earliest it could have happened because he was still using his computer until 4.41 am at least. We don’t know if he then went to the toilet, how long he took to finish his coffee, if he had a smoke, fiddled with his iPod in the ute or whatever.
But if 4.43 am is accurate, then Macdonald had at most seven minutes to shoot Scott, check he was dead, cycle back 1.5 kilometres, get rid of the puppies if he hadn’t done so already, ditch the dive boots and shotgun cartridges (none were found at the scene) somewhere they’ve never been found, return the bike to the garage, clean the gun, break it down and replace it in the office and be inside his house, putting on his milking gear, before Ireland arrives. Even if you believe he could have somehow returned and stashed the bike and gun undetected after Ireland had arrived and was sitting in his car not far away, the time available to do everything he needed can only be stretched to about 15 minutes.
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.’
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.
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.