By 9.20 am they had settled in a small interview room. Howell sat across the table from Macdonald doing most of the questioning, with Jackson at the end of the table observing and adding the odd comment. The interview was videoed, and Macdonald was read his rights on numerous occasions and reminded he could contact a lawyer at any time.
Macdonald had previously admitted to poaching deer after helicoptering into land near Taihape in April 2009, for which he and Boe had received diversion for unlawful hunting. And he’d also fessed up to regularly poaching on the Sexton farm with Boe, something police were aware of because the pair had been caught and trespassed from the land. So at the beginning of the interview Macdonald again outlined how he and Boe had gone on their ‘missions’ at night, sneaking in from the beach to the forest and farmland in search of deer. But that was all he admitted to, convincingly denying any involvement in the other crimes in which Boe had implicated him.
For several hours the police went through these matters and Macdonald repeated his answers and alibis. But gradually Howell started to point to inconsistencies in his statements, and then produced phone and bank records that conflicted with Macdonald’s story of his whereabouts when the arson and vandalism had occurred. Often the officers would say nothing for a time, creating a silence that Macdonald felt obliged to fill with something he’d just remembered or other reasoning.
As Howell slowly, icily revealed the police hand, Macdonald began struggling to maintain his façade of innocence. Increasingly restless, he stripped off his jersey and drank a bottle of water quickly. To the police watching the interview, he was clearly becoming uncomfortable, a big man trapped in a small room being trapped by the convoluted tales he’d created for years.
At around 2.30 pm, after nearly five hours of questioning, Howell eventually played his ace, telling Macdonald they’d spoken to Boe. ‘Given that I know what he told us,’ said Howell, ‘and that you don’t know what he’s told us—if he was with you during any of this offending and he’s told the truth about it, what do you think he’s said?’
Macdonald made one last attempt to deny his involvement, one last feigning of innocence, saying Boe would have told them he had nothing to do with any of the crimes.
‘Well he didn’t say that,’ countered Howell. ‘What do you think he said?’ he repeated.
‘He said he was probably involved . . . He was there doing it all,’ Macdonald replied, his voice now quiet, suddenly stripped of the bravado of denial.
‘Yep, he did,’ continued Howell. ‘With who?’
‘Me,’ Macdonald admitted meekly.
What followed was a humiliating outpouring, as Macdonald put years of lying and hiding behind him and confessed to the arsons, vandalism, poaching, dumping of milk and killing of calves. When asked why, though, he could give little clear reasoning. Shooting Craig Hocken’s stags was a challenge. Dumping the milk, burning the duck-shooting hut and killing the calves were retaliation for being caught trespassing. They burnt down the old McKinnon house because they ‘just thought that it would be funny’. And the attack on Scott and Kylee’s new house? ‘I don’t know, we’re just, you know, doing it,’ he said, before admitting it was ‘mindless stupidity’.
Macdonald did, however, suggest he was harbouring a grudge against Scott, saying the partnership wasn’t fair and he ‘was working my arse off’ while Scott spent a lot more time at home. But while Macdonald was surprisingly forthcoming about the details of these crimes, he staunchly denied any knowledge of the threatening notes, and was adamant he hadn’t killed Scott. ‘It looks obvious these leading up to events, but you know, I’m not that blimmin’—I’m not a psycho.’
Howell and Jackson encouraged and cajoled, appealed to his honesty and any resurrected shred of morality in an effort to get him to confess to Scott’s murder. ‘I don’t see what you’ve got to lose now, Ewen,’ urged Jackson. ‘You know, you’ve laid your cards on the table. You’ve lost, you’ve lost everything that you’re going to lose. This is your chance maybe to save some face if anything.’
‘I wouldn’t take someone’s life, I’ve never been that extreme,’ Macdonald insisted.
The two officers again assailed him with the past crimes and how his desperate attempts at deception had now been completely exposed. ‘And now we’ve found out what we know,’ Howell reminded him, ‘and you’re the only logical person that fits in there.’
‘You can see the finger points at me,’ Macdonald acknowledged. ‘I’m in a bad situation, yeah, but I had nothing to do with that . . . I’m not the murderer . . . I am not guilty.’
Howell was having none of it. ‘I have sat here and listened to you talk to me about those other crimes as if you had no knowledge of them at all, no knowledge—and now you’re expecting me to sit here and believe that you didn’t do the murder when all of the arrows point towards you?’
But by 3.20 pm Howell and Jackson could see Macdonald wasn’t going to give them anything more and started the formalities.
‘I guess I won’t be going home tonight, will I?’ Macdonald asked.
‘I doubt it very much, Ewen. I’d imagine that you’d be appearing in court tomorrow at some time.’
He was charged with the offences he’d admitted to then asked if he had anything to say about them.
‘Oh, guilty, aren’t I,’ Macdonald replied, before being taken to a police cell.
At 6.40 pm Howell returned to see him and asked him to show them on a map of the Hocken farm where he and Boe had killed the stags. Howell then charged Macdonald with Scott’s murder. Macdonald was again read his rights and asked if he wanted to say anything.
‘Nah,’ he responded.
Kerry Macdonald clearly remembers where he was when he learnt his son had been arrested for murder. ‘I was in the Foxton pisser. I’d driven to Foxton to meet Charlie from Otaki Hunting & Fishing and transfer some stock because he had a shoot coming up.’
After handing over the equipment at around 7 pm, Kerry suggested they might as well go for a drink. ‘And we’d only just opened the beer and I’d poured a glass and had a sip when the phone went. It was quite noisy so I walked out onto the footpath, got the news, walked back in to Charlie, told him what was happening and said, “Don’t say a fucking thing to anybody, I’m out of here.”’
The phone call had been from his other son, Blair, a detective who worked in Wellington. When police arrested Ewen they felt it best to tell Blair and let him break it to his family. He’d initially rung his parents’ home just outside Feilding but when his mother, Marlene, answered, Blair wouldn’t say what it was about, instead asking where Kerry was.
So it was left to Kerry, after getting the news in Foxton, to tell his wife that their younger son had just been charged with Scott’s murder and was now locked in a police cell. Marlene was making cupcakes for their grandchildren when he called, and remembers just being frozen with disbelief after she’d hung up. She hadn’t even known Ewen was going to be interviewed, hadn’t known he’d been in the police station all day.
Blair had said he was packing a bag and coming up to Feilding for the night and so they all arranged to meet at Anna and Ewen’s house. When Kerry arrived about 9 pm, he walked in, gave Anna a hug, then noticed several strangers sitting around the dining room table and asked Anna who they were.
She told him they were police, including investigation head Sue Schwalger, so Kerry went and sat down with them. Finally he turned to Schwalger and asked, ‘So what have you charged him with?’ and Schwalger rattled off the list of crimes, including Scott’s murder. ‘Oh yeah,’ Kerry replied then paused. ‘Got any advice?’
Schwalger asked what he meant.
‘My son’s been arrested—what do we do now? Have you got any advice? I assume you’ve been through this before.’
Kerry recalls Schwalger was stunned. ‘She said nothing. Totally fucked her. She couldn’t give any advice. It could have been a number—here’s victim support or our liaison officer or whatever. There was no humanity to it.’
For Kerry and Marlene, it was the first realisation that when something like this happens, lines are quickly drawn by police as well as the public. An us-and-them environment evolves, with the accused’s family generally among the ‘them’. In contrast, Kylee’s sister, Chanelle Bullock, said at the time of Macdonald’s arrest, ‘The police have been so personable, they’ve become our friends.’
While the Guy family received huge sympathy and assistance—and rightfully so—the Macdonalds often had to flounder their own way through a bewildering system and the situation they’d been thrown into. Even simple things like what courtroom Ewen would be appearing in and when were never passed on to them. ‘Nothing’s ever explained. You just learn it as you go along,’ says Marlene.
After being arrested, Ewen Macdonald had finally phoned a lawyer. Remarkably, despite being continually reminded he could contact one at any time during his interview, he’d never shown any interest in doing so—not really thinking he needed one. When he realised how serious things had become, he called Peter Coles, who lived in Feilding and had known the Macdonald family for years. Coles had often gone fishing with Kerry Macdonald, and Anna had worked as his receptionist for three years. He’d been to Ewen’s 21st and his wedding to Anna, and the couple had come to his 50th birthday party, a 1960s-themed affair at the old Feilding Racecourse.
Ewen had dressed up as Austin Powers and Anna as Felicity Shagwell, wearing knee-length boots and a miniskirt, with her hair done up on top of her head. Coles recalls her striding up to the band, asking the lead guitarist if he could play Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’, grabbing the microphone and belting it out, strutting up and down among the guests. ‘It brought the house down,’ says Coles. ‘People still talk about it. But that was just typical Anna—walk into a room and light it up.’ He’d always seen Ewen as a good guy, ‘solid as’, whose life was the farm, Anna and his kids.
Coles, 61, had also known the Guy family for 50 years, his father being good friends with Scott’s grandfather Grahame, and he’d gone through college with Bryan Guy’s sister. In Feilding, everybody knew everybody among longstanding community members. Coles was the first lawyer Macdonald thought of as he was led to a holding cell at the Palmerston North Police Station after his interview.
Around the time Macdonald was calling Coles, Wellington barrister Greg King was on his way to dinner, also thinking about murders. He was heading to a Chinese restaurant to meet John Barlow, who’d recently been released from prison after serving 15 years for the 1994 shooting of Eugene and Gene Thomas. King had been Barlow’s appeal lawyer for a number of years as the controversial case was fought out. Over dinner, King toasted the fact he’d just got another client’s murder charge reduced to manslaughter and, for the first time in years, he didn’t have a murder case on the go.
At 7 am the next morning all that changed when his phone went. It was Blair Macdonald calling, Ewen’s older brother. ‘Blair Shay Macdonald?’ King sleepily asked, recalling the name from cross-examining the detective several times in court. It was those experiences that had led Blair to phone King. He’d seen how good King was in court, knew his reputation as one of the country’s top defence lawyers, and wanted Ewen to have the best help.
Blair explained what had happened, how Ewen had been interviewed without a lawyer and arrested for Scott Guy’s murder, and was now sitting in a cell, due to appear in Palmerston North District Court that afternoon. King was tired, a bit hung-over, and had a full day of appointments so told Blair to get a duty solicitor to cover Ewen’s first appearance and he’d take a look at the case later. ‘And then I thought no, and rang Blair back and said, “I’m on my way up now,”’ remembered King.
Halfway to Palmerston North, King got a call from Peter Coles. The pair knew each other well, having worked together on a number of trials, including the brutal murder of paedophile Glen Stinson in 2007. Coles wanted to know if King was on board as he was wary of doing the case by himself given he was so close to the families. In his view, King was the ideal person to front the defence. King likewise wanted Coles involved, knowing how crucial it was to have local knowledge and input. Thus, by the time King arrived in Palmerston North on Friday, 8 April 2011, Ewen Macdonald’s defence had serendipitously been sorted.
At just 41, King was already one of New Zealand’s best known lawyers, having been involved in a host of high-profile cases and fronting
The Court Report
on TV, canvassing legal issues. He’d cut his courtroom teeth in Dunedin with the formidable Judith Ablett-Kerr, who had hired him after he graduated. King helped her in the poisoned professor case, in which Vicky Calder was charged with killing her former partner, David Lloyd, with acrylamide but was acquitted at her second trial after King uncovered evidence that suggested Lloyd had suffered from an immune disorder. They also represented Peter Ellis, the Christchurch Civic Crèche worker controversially convicted of sex offences, at his appeal.
At 27, King became New Zealand’s youngest lawyer approved to appear in murder trials and thereafter was involved in many prominent cases: Scott Watson, convicted of killing Ben Smart and Olivia Hope; samurai sword attacker Antonie Dixon; Bruce Howse, who stabbed his two stepdaughters; and Sophie Elliot’s killer Clayton Weatherston all had King in their corner.
It was all a far cry from King’s humble beginnings, born into a state house family in Whanganui in 1969 to Jeff, a half-Maori shearer and freezing worker, and Jennifer, his redheaded schoolyard sweetheart. When Greg was six, the family moved to Turangi, where Jeff worked as a prison warden, locking up the likes of Arthur Allan Thomas.
His mum remembers Greg as always being argumentative, and his Tongariro High School reports noted he ‘talks too much’. But despite also being labelled ‘a lazy worker’ and being put in the bottom science class where he had to grow a plant rather than make a hot air balloon, King eventually became the school’s head boy.