Who Killed Scott Guy? (26 page)

That week’s events had got to his client as well. When his parents visited Macdonald at Rimutaka Prison on the Saturday, they noticed how quiet he was. They gave him a hug but when they sat down Macdonald looked at them and started crying.

‘It’s going to be okay,’ Marlene said, trying to reassure her son, despite being shocked at how down he was.

‘No, it’s not,’ Macdonald replied. ‘I think they’re going to convict me no matter what.’

Seeing video of himself in his final police interview acting innocent of the other crimes had been excruciating. ‘Fuck, this is hard to sit through,’ he noted in his diary as he watched it in court. ‘Just get it over with—stop lying.’ In his mind, Macdonald wondered how the jury would be able to see past several hours of him confidently pretending to be blameless throughout the interview, when he knew he was guilty of most of the things police were accusing him of.

‘I think your problem is you’ve had your head down for three weeks and you’ve forgotten how to keep it up,’ Marlene told him.

‘Yeah, I probably have,’ Macdonald replied. ‘But I’m just really worried that if I’m convicted, you’re going to be crushed because you’ve always been so positive and kept my spirits up.’ He told his parents that he felt like giving up and just pulling the blankets over his head come Monday morning, because the strain had become too much.

‘He was struggling,’ Kerry Macdonald recalled. ‘A bit overwhelmed—well, a lot overwhelmed.’

‘We love you no matter what,’ Marlene told her son. ‘It’s unconditional and we’ll never turn our back on you. You’ve just got to trust Greg.’

And of course Macdonald did—but he also found it difficult not to be able to speak up and defend himself against accusations he felt were wrong and unjust.

For three weeks he’d barely seen any sunshine, and his face was now noticeably pale when he entered the dock. He was still coming to terms with the break-up of his marriage and struggling to imagine any kind of future for himself, no matter what the trial’s outcome was. He’d not seen his children since being shifted to Rimutaka, relying on phone calls and trying to cope with moments like his 6-year-old daughter Lucy asking him, ‘Will I still be your little princess?’ On trial days the only people he had to talk to were his prison guards, and his lawyers who made brief trips down to see him in the court cells during breaks in proceedings. On weekends he was allowed a single visit from his parents.

But such was his state that weekend, he said he didn’t really want to talk to anyone else and even told his parents not to bother phoning the next day. Try as he might, he felt the jury would just concentrate on the other crimes he’d committed and deem him a bad man—a man who could kill his brother-in-law.

King was just as worried about this and equally sombre that weekend. ‘My concern has always been that the jury will do the simple thing and say, “Whoever did the damage must have done the murder.” I’ve said that from day one. We always knew it was coming but I think certainly it came out that it was obviously serious offending. So in those respects obviously we’re not in the position that we were a week ago—possibly we went backwards.’

The idea of asking for the case to be thrown out had been dispensed with—the Crown had a clear argument and it was too much to expect a judge would override the jury’s role and dismiss the charge against Macdonald.

So here King was, about to give his closing address, leaning against the dock, head down, organising his thoughts and arguments. Eventually he stood up and paced across the courtroom as media and the public began to take their seats. Anyone watching him would have noticed his shoes, spectacularly bold silver-and-black numbers with large stencilled lettering covering much of their uppers. Court staff had been so taken with them they’d taken photos on the two occasions he’d worn them.

King’s wife, Catherine, dashed in to give him a few words of encouragement and Liam Collins cracked a joke about being ready to take over if King couldn’t deliver his closing, like All Black Stephen Donald stepping up in the 2011 World Cup final to kick the match-winning penalty.

Just before court resumed, King walked across the court again and through door S8 to check on Macdonald, knowing that the next few hours and what he said during them would likely determine the verdict and Macdonald’s future.

‘If it pleases Your Honour, Mr Foreman, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, everything that you have just heard from my learned friend, of course, would be absolutely true if Ewen Macdonald were the killer. If he wasn’t, then all you have just heard is wrong,’ King began.

‘And in a four-hour closing address you heard about 20 minutes of evidence and three hours and 40 minutes of allegation . . . If you start from a presumption of guilt, then you can make everything else fit retrospectively. If he’s done it, it must have been his boots. If he’s done it, it must have been the farm shotgun. If he’s done it, he must have been able to do it within the timeframe. If he’s done it, he must have been able to get away with it and not be seen. If he’s done it, he’s taken a huge risk and gotten away with it. If he’s done it, everything he said afterwards is contrived and manipulated. If he’s done it, arriving at work exactly on time, looking exactly normal, wearing exactly what he does every morning when he’s not on earlies is all a big trick.

‘But if he hasn’t done it, members of the jury, they are the actions of an innocent person going about his normal and daily routine.’

King then listed four fundamental reasons why the Crown case was completely discredited. Firstly, there were the four people who heard shots or something that woke them at 5 am—a time Ewen Macdonald could not have been at Scott Guy’s gate committing the murder. Derek Sharp’s convoluted explanation for suggesting he heard shots around 4.45 am was mocked by King, who again questioned why the police hadn’t taken a few seconds to check the accuracy of Sharp’s clock and the veracity of his evidence, given that their case hinged on his timing.

Secondly, King raised the issue of the three bangs neighbour Bonnie Fredriksson had clearly heard as she lay awake. If there were three shots in rapid succession as she recalled, there was no way the double-barrelled farm shotgun, which held only two cartridges, could have been responsible. ‘And if it is excluded, there is no alternative theory—the Crown case is fatally undermined. It must be. There is no plan B. It will be pure speculation and guesswork to say, “Well, I think there were three bangs but, oh, he must have somehow got access to a semi-automatic shotgun, disposed of it with the puppies, with the dive boots, with the spent cartridges.” There is just no evidential support for that whatsoever. If the farm gun is excluded because it can’t go bang, bang, bang, then in my submission the Crown case is in tatters.’

The third piece of evidence King highlighted was the mystery sedan Matthew Ireland had seen driving along Aorangi Road as he arrived at work. The car had been coming from the direction of the murder scene just after police said Scott was shot but had never been traced, despite exhaustive appeals to the public. ‘Surely with all the publicity, with all of the police inquiries, someone would’ve come forward and said, “Well, actually, I was out for a drive that morning, at 4.45 am along Aorangi Road, beautiful winter’s morning, just went out for a cruise and I didn’t see anything. Didn’t see that there was a utility with its lights on and in the lights was a dead man.” The Crown would just have you dismiss that.’

In addition, King said, there were unidentified car tyre tracks found near the murder scene, which were also close to a clump of cut grass found on the road that had a wavy-lined boot print on it. ‘My friend tries to say it was a car doing a three-point turn. That is speculation. Where is the evidence of that? . . . But oh, despite the fact there is absolutely no evidence, not one iota of evidence to place a bicycle anywhere near the scene—you can rely on that. So when you’ve got actual hard evidence at the scene, you can ignore it. And when there’s none, it’s because [Macdonald] has concealed it.’

The jury had diagrams of the murder scene showing the location of all wavy-lined boot prints, some of which were next to the fence by the driveway where ESR forensic scientist Kevan Walsh suggested the killer probably fired from. King drew the jury’s attention to a cluster of boot prints just to the right of this spot. This pattern, he suggested, was consistent with someone using a semi-automatic shotgun that ejected its cartridges after firing and the killer moving to his right to retrieve the shells and remove the evidence, then making off. ‘I’m not trying to say it’s the answer to the case but it’s consistent, I submit, with the evidence of three bangs, with the evidence of the location of the gunman using a semi-automatic shotgun.’

King’s final attack on the Crown theory was to do with the other suspects police had ruled out. He again referred to one well-known local criminal who’d been involved in a burglary just hours before Scott was killed, who stole cannabis and Winfield Gold cigarettes—the same type of packet that was found discarded near 293 Aorangi Road. Although this man was known to use shotguns during his crimes, police accepted an alibi for him from his partner who thought she heard him come home about 4 am, despite admitting she was also wasted on methamphetamine.

King also reminded the jury how prevalent burglaries had been in the area before Scott’s murder and the number of shotguns that had been stolen along with large amounts of ammunition. ‘What do you think they were stolen for? Do you think they were stolen so that people could use them for lawful purposes?’

Again and again, King brought the jury back to the issue of evidence that had been uncovered but remained unexplained versus the police theory, which ignored such evidence but instead relied on supposition. ‘This is not a game, this is about as real as it gets. It’s all right for my learned friend to approach this case on the presumption that my client is guilty and to tie everything back to that. But you must approach it on the presumption of innocence, you must question critically all of these strands. If it’s at 5 am, he could not have done it. If there were three bangs he could not have done it. If there is a mystery sedan . . . how can you exclude that, how can you say, “I am certain that Ewen Macdonald is the killer and I’m just going to ignore Matthew Ireland’s confirmed sighting of a sedan at exactly the approximate time”?

‘In my respective submissions, members of the jury, it’s a matter for you. But these are submissions that are based on the evidence and it’s the evidence that you have sworn, that you have affirmed to base your verdict solely on. Not on prejudice, not on photos of beautiful puppies, not on tears, not on emotion, not on terrible photos of terrible injuries—but on the evidence.’

Despite the clear gaps in the police case that the defence could highlight and the doubt around evidence, King’s biggest challenge was to overcome the impression Macdonald was so full of hatred and revenge that it led to him killing Scott. ‘There’s no doubt that Ewen Macdonald and Scott Guy had problems in the past,’ King acknowledged. ‘And the culmination of that were these dreadful acts that Ewen Macdonald committed against him. But you need to be careful. You cannot do what the police did and jump from A to Z. There are lots of other things in the middle that need to be taken into account.’

King had scrupulously sought not to bring the character of Scott or Kylee into question throughout the trial. He’d steered away from denigrating their actions or personalities, knowing the jury would likely react negatively to it. But in trying to put Macdonald’s acts in context, he flirted with criticising Scott, pointing out that the genesis of the ill-feeling on the farm actually came from him. It was Scott who begrudged Ewen having shares in Byreburn, it was Scott who claimed he had a hereditary right to take over the farm, it was Scott who was angry that Anna and Ewen had moved into the family home at 147 Aorangi Road in 2008.

‘The resentment was from Scott Guy, not from Ewen Macdonald . . . And yet at the time of the murder we know that there was no animosity, there was no resentment, there was no problem. You see, the concern of the defence is that you simply be seduced by the false logic that the police demonstrated in the course of their interview with Mr Macdonald by suggesting that whoever had done the damage must be the killer.’