Who Killed Scott Guy? (4 page)

With bad weather threatening, the Fire Service helped erect two large tents over the driveway, covering the ute and Scott’s body, and also shielding the scene from onlookers.

Jackson was well aware the distinctive footprints on the driveway could be crucial, so he liaised with Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR) forensic scientist David Neale from Porirua near Wellington and got crime scene officers to make plaster casts of them. This was done by carefully pouring a liquid mixture into the impressions and letting it set. When this was done the cast was lifted off, revealing a mirror image of the print. Further wavy-patterned prints were found in the paddock to the right of the driveway as seen from the road, apparently leading to the old woolshed where Scott and Kylee had recently moved the puppies, and three more prints were found in the yard by the puppies. In all, more than 60 casts were taken from the driveway and surrounding area and sent to ESR for examination. Jackson’s hunch that these were significant in time proved to be absolutely correct, the boot impressions becoming one of the most crucial aspects of the investigation.

Scott’s body was formally identified by neighbour David Berry, photographed and examined before being removed from the site just after 5 pm and taken to Wellington Hospital’s mortuary. Chillingly, just as Scott’s body was being taken from the driveway, his cellphone, which was in his jacket pocket, rang. Police immediately removed it as a potential source of evidence.

The following morning, forensic pathologist John Rutherford began his post-mortem on Scott’s body. Having done more than 6400 autopsies, Rutherford, with flowing white hair, keen eyes and an intimidating list of qualifications, was one of the country’s most experienced pathologists.

He could tell immediately that Scott had died from the massive wound to his neck, the shotgun blast having ripped a hole 13 centimetres by 5 centimetres. Embedded in the wound, next to Scott’s voice box, Rutherford discovered a large fragment of the shotgun wadding. The wadding, or wad, is a piece of plastic that holds the pellets inside the shotgun shell, separating them from the propellant, which, having been ignited, launches the pellets down the barrel. After leaving the gun with the pellets, the wad eventually falls away beyond the muzzle, though it can travel more than 30 metres before this occurs. The fact that it was found within the central wound immediately suggested Scott had been shot at close range, close enough that the wadding hadn’t had time to become separated from the central core of pellets after being fired. However, there were no powder burns on Scott’s skin, which would have suggested a point-blank killing, where the shotgun is fired from 10–20 centimetres away.

Rutherford also found pellet wounds spread from Scott’s torso to his head, predominantly on the left side of his face, with some on his left forearm and hand. In total, close to 260 lead pellets were found throughout his body. Surprisingly, there were no other external injuries such as might have been sustained in a fall or have pointed to a struggle before the shooting.

Rutherford couldn’t say with certainty that death would have been instantaneous, but such was the severity of the injuries, he concluded Scott would have lost consciousness within seconds. Ultimately, he surmised all Scott’s injuries could be explained by one shot but couldn’t exclude there having been a second or further shots.

Also attending the post-mortem was Kevan Walsh, a forensic scientist from ESR in Auckland. Walsh had been analysing forensic items since 1983 and was a specialist in firearms analysis. The following day, Saturday, 10 July, he went to the scene at 293 Aorangi Road and spent two days painstakingly inspecting and measuring the site.

Orange paint lines marked where Scott’s body had lain, but otherwise everything remained as it was when police first arrived. There were no signs of shotgun marks on Scott’s ute, but Walsh quickly discovered a number of pellet strikes along a three-rail wooden fence to the right of the driveway. There were also marks on a young sapling nearby and the stakes around it, with some pellets still embedded in them. Walsh carefully marked and measured each of these in an effort to ascertain the direction and distance from which they had been fired.

Despite finding the pellets that had obviously passed by Scott during the shooting, police found no other wads, which suggested that only one shot may have been fired. Then, not long after 1 pm on the Saturday, more than two days after police began examining the scene, a second shotgun shell wad was discovered. Remarkably, it was alongside the fence, behind the sapling where Walsh and others had been examining the pellet marks.

Police have since claimed the wad must in some way have been masked by the tent covering Scott’s ute and body, but photos taken on the very first day, before the tent was put up, show white-suited officers poring over the ground near where the second wad was found. And even when it was erected, the tent remained well clear of the fence line.

Official police photos of the wad, supposedly taken at the time it was found, show it sitting on top of the grass in a very obvious position. If this is so, it is incomprehensible police didn’t notice it during all the time they were closely searching the scene, examining the pellet marks in the fence and sapling and erecting the tent. If a single pellet, just millimetres across, could be discovered, it seems impossible to believe a white plastic wad several centimetres long could remain unseen within a metre or so.

Suspicion remains that what actually happened was that somebody, most likely someone involved in the investigation, inadvertently stood on the wadding early in the scene examination, pressing it into the mud and leaving it largely obscured until it was noticed two days later. While police photos show the wad as being clean when found, Kevan Walsh later added weight to this theory, recalling that when the wad was found ‘It looked muddied’ and appeared as if it had been trodden on.

CHAPTER 3
Dark deeds and dead ends

The discovery of the second wad gave Walsh, one of the country’s top experts when it came to interpreting firearms evidence, crucial information in solving the riddle of how Scott Guy had been shot. Faced with a murder committed in the predawn dark on a secluded country road, police had no easy route to finding the killer—there were no witnesses, no murder weapon, no apparent motive and no trail to follow from the scene. In fact, there was precious little evidence even at the scene other than the distinctive footprints close to the body. The post-mortem could tell them so much—medically, how Scott had died—but it needed experts such as Walsh to interpret the tiny details and create a picture that would act as a starting point for their investigation.

So when Walsh arrived at 293 Aorangi Road, he wanted to add to what he’d learnt from the autopsy and see if he could work out where the killer had been when he fired at Scott. The pellets embedded in Scott’s body gave him some clues, and those found in the fence and sapling helped round out his theory. It was an amalgam of distance, angles, ballistics and patterning, a reduction of provable detail into a plausible reconstruction of the crime itself.

Back at the lab, he carried out test-firings using a number of shotguns to ascertain the likely spread of the pellets after they left the gun’s barrel. While firearms and ammunition vary, and often the two barrels on a shotgun are manufactured to give a different spread, Walsh’s experiments were designed to give him a clear picture of how close the killer had been to Scott and where he was likely to have been standing. At the end of his work, Walsh concluded the murderer had fired two shots from a 12-gauge shotgun, from between 2 and 6 metres—but most likely 3 to 4 metres away. He couldn’t rule out that there were other shots—but nothing he found at the scene suggested that and, importantly, only two wads had been discovered.

In Walsh’s opinion, the second wad, found two days after Scott’s murder, had struck the fence and fallen down beside it. If a third shot had been fired and missed everything, it was conceivable the wad may have ended up beyond the immediate scene in an adjoining paddock. Searches were carried out in the paddock, but nothing was found. However, the difficulty locating the second wad beside the fence showed it was impossible to be certain there wasn’t another undiscovered wad, given there were horses and sheep in the neighbouring paddock that could easily have trodden it into the soft soil well before the searches began.

While this may have seemed unimportant to police at this stage, the possibility of more than two shots having been fired became a critical and arguably deciding point in the case. But for the moment, police were concentrating on working out the basic facts of the killing.

Crucially, Walsh was able to suggest the direction the shots had been fired from, positing that the killer had been standing to Scott’s right—or to the left of the driveway if looking in from Aorangi Road—where the gravel of the driveway met the roadside grass, near the left-hand gatepost. This would have put the killer just outside the arc of the headlights from the ute when Scott pulled up to open the gates.

At 4.35 am on Monday, 12 July 2010, police reconstructed the events before Scott’s death, driving his Hilux down the driveway with the lights on high and low beam. Photos taken during the reconstruction showed a narrow zone illuminated in front of the vehicle with little visible outside this, including the area just beyond the gatepost where Walsh suggested the killer fired from. Police also estimated that the time from Scott leaving the house to arriving at the gates was just under two minutes. Given he finished using his computer at about 4.41 am they surmised the murder occurred at 4.43 am.

In Walsh’s view, the first shot hit Scott fully in the throat and led to his death. The second blast was not as accurate and struck Scott as he was already falling backwards, accounting for the upward path of pellets found in his body. Pellets from this shot also hit his left arm and hand, which Walsh deduced was raised near his face, while other pellets carried on, lodging in the fence and sapling.

Thus the police scenario was that the murderer was waiting for Scott at the end of the driveway, having closed the gates to ensure he stopped and got out of his vehicle. When Scott did this, the gunman stepped out of the shadows and moved towards Scott, firing at him twice. After walking up to Scott’s body to be certain he was dead, the killer was briefly silhouetted in the beam of the ute’s headlights before once more disappearing into darkness.

Almost immediately, the crime became a source of public fascination and speculation. A well-liked young farmer, gunned down at his front gate on a dark country road for no clear reason: it was as bizarre as it was brutal. When it became known that Scott left behind a young wife and son—and, even more heart-wrenchingly, an unborn son who would never lay eyes on his father or feel his arms around him—sympathy naturally stretched beyond the Feilding and Manawatu communities.

Scott’s body was released by police on the Monday following his murder and taken to his parents’ house ahead of the funeral. More than 1000 people packed out Feilding’s Anglican Church as his coffin arrived on the back of his ute, surrounded by friends in cowboy hats like Scott’s. His mates from Australia carried him into the church and his family, including Ewen Macdonald and Kylee’s sisters Jessica and Chanelle, carried him out. Jackaroo colleagues cracked whips in respect for their mate while Scott’s dog sat forlornly on the back of his ute.

Scott’s death became a national crime and the hunt for his killer almost a national cause. Certain cases attract this extraordinary focus. In recent times, the disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope from a New Year’s Eve party in the Marlborough Sounds, and the murder of teenager Kirsty Bentley exactly a year later in Ashburton, are two that transfixed New Zealand and drew enormous media attention. Equally, Scott Guy’s murder predictably sparked huge public anger and expectation—expectation that a culprit would be quickly found and harshly punished.

Put in charge of meeting these demands was Detective Inspector Sue Schwalger. At 46 she was one of the country’s top female cops and the crime manager for the central North Island region. Of Samoan and German heritage, she had joined the police in 1983, but left when she had two children, and rejoined in 1991. After a stint in Counties Manukau’s badlands, the motorbike-loving grandmother with a traditional Samoan tattoo on her wrist was promoted to detective inspector in 2008.