Who Killed Scott Guy? (5 page)
Assisting her during the investigation were more than 100 police officers, as well as whatever forensic or scientific experts she needed to analyse evidence, isolate a suspect and assemble a case against them. The investigation was dubbed Operation Yellow—not because that colour had any significance to the murder, it was just a name given to the inquiry by the police hierarchy.
It would be difficult to overestimate the pressure that officers in charge of such high-profile investigations face—both professional and public. The longer the cases remain unsolved, the more questions are asked, the more public confidence in the investigators wanes. But for those expected to do a flawless and utterly thorough job in uncovering all the evidence, haste is an enemy, instant answers a fiction. As much as police would love cases to be cracked in a few days with compelling logic and irrefutable evidence, as they invariably seem to be on
CSI
, the reality is that investigations are often extended attrition exercises rather than smooth TV episodes with a silver-bullet solution at the end.
So police began with the basics—who was Scott and was there anything in his background that would lead to him being murdered? All their investigations confirmed he was well liked, someone people wanted to be around, and someone who’d made strong friends wherever he went, from Masterton to Mount Isa.
The only altercation they discovered was with a bouncer in Auckland around 2006, for which Scott was extremely remorseful. His vehicle had been stolen in 2007 but that was just random and the person responsible had an alibi for the time of the murder. There was absolutely no suggestion that either he or Kylee had been involved in extramarital affairs—in fact, everyone described them as a couple still truly in love.
But what police were aware of from the beginning of their investigation were two attacks on Scott and Kylee’s property that had remained unsolved. The first was the arson of an old house Scott was shifting to make way for the construction of his new home at 293 Aorangi Road. The wooden homestead had stood on what was known as the McKinnon block for decades but Scott and Kylee decided it wasn’t worth doing up so it had been sold for $8000 to be relocated. In October 2008 it had been jacked up and placed on trailers and was ready to move when, just before midnight on the Friday of the Labour Day long weekend, it was set alight and completely destroyed. Despite fire investigators being called in and extensive inquiries, nobody was ever found responsible.
By January 2009 Scott and Kylee’s new house on the farm was nearing completion. On Friday, 30 January, builder Brian Jackson had completed the last of the lining and everything was ready for the plasterers to come in on Monday. But that night, the house was badly vandalised, with windows broken, doors smashed with an axe, pipes and plumbing fittings torn out and holes punched in walls. Outside, ‘Fuken Bitch Slappr’ and ‘fuckn Hore’ had been scrawled on the walls in brown paint.
When Scott and Kylee drove up to the house the next morning to check on progress and discovered the damage, they were devastated. Kylee could only go part way down the smashed-up hall before having to leave. ‘I was shocked. I couldn’t understand any of it. You just felt so violated.’ Knowing the obscene graffiti didn’t relate to her didn’t make the attack any less frightening. For some time she wasn’t sure if she could remain in Manawatu, but eventually Scott convinced her they should stay.
While the arson had been unsettling, the vandalism was much more serious and worried everyone in the area. Scott was furious, telling friends he wasn’t going to take shit from anybody and buying a short pump-action shotgun he hid behind the seat in his ute while the house was being finished.
Concerned about a possible link with the arson, police installed a covert video camera in the nearby old woolshed, hidden under blankets and pointed towards the driveway. It was left there for two months but no intruders were captured on it, and by April 2009 Scott and Kylee had shifted into their new house.
Police were aware of these attacks from the beginning of their investigation, and naturally suspected they could be linked to Scott’s murder as part of a deliberate and targeted attack on the couple. The day after his death, this theory was given extra weight when two rural delivery drivers reported threatening notes that had been placed in Scott and Kylee’s letterbox at 259 Aorangi Road around the time of the arson and vandalism. The first reportedly said, ‘Stay away from him Kylee, you whore,’ and then, ‘You cheating whore, what comes around goes around.’ The third note was supposedly found in the letterbox just after the vandalism, stating, ‘Now you know how it feels to lose something you love.’
Though the notes were never found nor had they ever been seen or mentioned by anyone else and Kylee had no knowledge of them, police believed the drivers’ reports. Despite the superficial appearance that everything in Kylee and Scott’s life was happy and they had no enemies, a picture was beginning to form of a concerted and callous attack on them by somebody.
But who?
Inserted into this theory was the fact that three of Scott and Kylee’s labrador puppies had gone missing at the time of the murder. Scott had fed the seven remaining puppies (Jo Moss had been given one on the Tuesday) in the old cowshed the night before he was shot. But when Ewen Macdonald went to feed the dogs on Friday, 9 July, he discovered there were only four puppies remaining, along with their mother, Katie.
Scott had given Katie to Kylee before they were engaged and this was her first litter. In the weeks before Scott’s death, they had printed flyers and put them up in several Feilding and Palmerston North shops, advertising the pups for $700 each.
The fact that the wavy-patterned shoe imprints found around Scott’s body had also been discovered outside the old cowshed made it likely that whoever killed Scott had also taken the puppies. Looking from Aorangi Road, the old cowshed was to the right of the driveway, about 100 metres from the gates and about the same distance from Scott and Kylee’s house. One scenario contemplated by police was that Scott had disturbed the thief as he came down the drive on his way to work and the shooting had followed an altercation.
When police issued a media statement asking for help locating the puppies, the response was phenomenal, with potential sightings reported from literally the length of the country. While ultimately unsuccessful, it illustrated both the public’s interest in the case and their willingness to help catch Scott Guy’s killer.
Two other major lines of inquiry were followed by police. The first was to look at other burglaries in the area and see if there was any connection with what had happened at 293 Aorangi Road. Perhaps it had been a burglary gone wrong—the real target being the puppies—and Scott got in the way.
But they soon ruled this out. The woolshed next to where the puppies were being kept was unlocked and housed potentially more attractive things to steal. But when police inspected it they found the dust on the floor was undisturbed, suggesting nobody had been in there to scout things out. They also surmised that any burglar would have been able to see lights and movement in Scott’s house and would have escaped before he came down the drive on his way to work, or hidden in the shed until he was gone. The ute itself had not been stolen and nothing inside it, including Scott’s wallet, appeared to have been taken. Instead, the police settled on the theory that the killing was targeted and planned.
Another possibility was that his death was somehow tied up with drugs. A persistent story they heard was that Scott had discovered a large cannabis plantation among one of their maize crops, or along the Oroua riverbank at the rear of the property, and pulled it out. But extensive investigations turned up only two incidents of drugs on the farm—once when two seedlings were found near the river and once when a worker was discovered with a plant.
Contractors who harvested the maize were all questioned, and none recalled any cannabis amid the crops. Police drug officers said nothing had ever been found in the area during operations. Moreover, Taonui Airfield, which was popular with trainee pilots and gliders, was nearby. The farm was right on its flight path, so aerial surveillance was constant and nobody had ever reported drug-growing.
Police also investigated Scott’s own drug use but considered it was minimal and found no evidence of recent use. Even his drinking was moderate. Some of his friends were known to have cannabis dealings but Scott’s contact with them was purely to do with farm matters. Ultimately, police determined that drugs weren’t part of what had caused Scott’s death.
Thus, at the end of 2010, after six months of intensive investigation and despite having a list of 60 ‘persons of interest’ drawn up from their general and burglary inquiries, police still had nobody that stood out as a prime suspect. There had been searches, roadblocks, flyers and thousands of interviews. They had sifted countless witness statements, pieces of potential evidence and hopeful leads from the public. They had also considered claims from several people that they were actually the intended target and Scott’s murder was a mistake.
As always in unsolved cases, psychics offered their visions and services. Even Kylee’s sister, Chanelle, who her mother described as spiritual, had a ‘flash’. She saw a blue-and-white sedan and someone she described as ‘white trash’ with a mullet, and Scott leaning over the car calling out to Chanelle. She provided police with the car’s number plate but it came to nothing.
Rewards for information had been contemplated, and members of the public had offered to fund this. Kylee, who had given birth to their second son, Drover, two months after Scott’s death, had pleaded with police to make an offer. But police chose not to, concerned that it might elicit a flood of speculative money-hunters whose claims would divert police from the investigation’s focus.
Kylee, as well as Scott’s parents, had made tearful public appeals for those with information to come forward, and there had been several TV programmes devoted to the case. But as the Guy family marked its first Christmas without Scott, to many there was a sense that police had run out of ideas and the investigation had stalled.
All that was to change in the New Year, though, when police finally decided to release a vital piece of information to the public.
At the beginning of 2011, Sue Schwalger’s investigation team sat down and reassessed where the inquiry was at. New information from the public had almost totally dried up and existing leads had been exhausted. In December the full-time investigation team of 40 had been reduced to 24. By January this was cut to 14 and the General and Suspects squads of the investigation were combined. Schwalger had to admit to media they still didn’t know why Scott had been killed, let alone who had killed him.
As police reconsidered the investigation’s direction, they decided to concentrate on what they called the ‘previous incidents’ phase and people who had issues with Scott Guy. They also formed a strong view that the arson and vandalism against Scott and Kylee’s property were connected to the murder, something many people had always believed. Ironically, even Ewen Macdonald’s father, Kerry, had told police two weeks after the murder, ‘My thoughts and gut feeling is that there’s some connection with the arson at Scott’s house and then the vandalism and now the murder.’
So from January, the investigation team’s focus fell on Ewen Macdonald, primarily due to the fact that several people had pointed to friction between Macdonald and Scott and tension over the farm’s future ownership. While many had mentioned this, few really considered Macdonald could be the murderer, his links to Scott being too close, and their differences being typical of families in business together.
Police had drip-fed information to the public throughout the investigation but remained silent about much of what they had discovered, not wanting to give the culprit any warning or advantage. But in early February 2011, in an attempt to spark a response from the public, they released details of the vandalism to Scott and Kylee’s house, including photos of the graffiti painted on the walls. Though the spelling was erratic, some of the lettering was distinctive and they thought somebody might recognise the style. Better still, they hoped someone would know about the attack and come forward.
They got what they wanted.
When the photos of the graffiti were published in the paper, the boss of Manawatu building company Turbine Residential, Ricky Crutchley, thought he recognised the handwriting of a former employee, Callum Boe. As he told the police, ‘My wife was at work and I was at home at the time we saw the newspaper with the graffiti. We both had the same thought when we saw it—that it was Callum’s writing. I reached straight for his timesheets to look at those, thinking, “I bet that’s how Callum writes.” I certainly think there are some similarities in the writing.’
Boe’s parents had both died when he was young. After that he’d been raised by his grandparents, Dave and Rema Casey, at Colyton, not far from Byreburn, while his older brother, Reon, went to live with their other set of grandparents. The Guys wanted to help him so they gave him weekend and holiday work, and when Callum left school he went to work on the farm full-time, assisting Ewen Macdonald with the dairying operation. He formed a good friendship with Macdonald, even though he was quite a bit younger, and the pair used to go hunting often. At work they’d joke around in what some described as a slightly silly, childish way.