Who Killed Scott Guy? (9 page)

He was in the first XV and became a keen boxer—not great, but damned determined. His dad recalls one bout where King was punched right out of the ring. While everyone roared with laughter, King climbed back in, lifted his gloves again and beat his opponent. ‘We’d finish the fight and I’d be covered in blood and barely able to walk, and the other guy would look like he’d just come out of a shower—but I’d win,’ said King. ‘I used to get a hiding on a regular basis, but that hardened me up for law. It taught me not to back down when you need to dig your toes in.’ Jeff’s battle with alcoholism, while eventually successful, also toughened King, giving him a lot of life experience at an early age, his mum said.

In 1988 King spent ten months representing New Zealand at the World Expo in Brisbane. The ‘token country boy’ impressed everyone he came into contact with, from Sir Edmund Hillary to Mick Jagger, and a testimonial by New Zealand’s deputy commissioner-general at the Expo, Don Hutchings, proved prophetic: ‘Greg will go on to achieve much in his life and New Zealand will come to know his name very well.’

King had his heart set on becoming a pilot and already had a freezing works job lined up to pay for flying lessons. But New Zealand’s Expo commissioner, Ian Fraser, suggested he should get a degree first. So despite having never met a lawyer, he enrolled in law at Otago University and was admitted to the bar in 1993.

King’s rapid rise since then had seen him defend priests on sex charges; a father accused of killing his seriously ill 5-month-old daughter; gang members involved in the country’s largest armed robbery; a 90-year-old charged with murdering his wife in a suicide pact on their 60th wedding anniversary; and the man who attacked the ‘Virgin in a Condom’ exhibit at Te Papa.

It was easy to characterise him as a siren chaser who sought the most high-profile cases, but that view ignored the countless clients he represented for whom he received no headlines, little recompense and often much opprobrium. In King’s book, everyone, no matter how devastating the evidence against them, deserved the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial with the best counsel. Often attacked for arguing on behalf of shitbags and scoundrels, King was adamant that nobody should be judged other than in a court.

This view was honed early in his career, in 1995, when he took on the case of a man accused of viciously raping a 12-year-old girl. The evidence against him seemed overwhelming and even King believed he’d done it. But before they got to trial, someone else confessed to the crime, with DNA tests later clearing King’s client. It was a brutal lesson not to presume or prejudge.

Tales of King’s generosity are legion: the cases done for free or a feed of fish; the client in a big case who wrote to him afterwards asking if he’d left a zero off his bill; the woman who stabbed her son, leaving him paralysed, who King got acquitted on the grounds of insanity, despite her husband wanting her jailed. After the trial King approached the husband to explain what had happened, then gave the man a lift back to work and, as he said goodbye, handed him money for his young son’s Christmas present. In 2004, King spent $50,000 of his own money to take the case of Bruce Howse to the Privy Council—not because he believed Howse was innocent, but because he was convinced he hadn’t received a fair trial and that to overlook the mistakes that had been made threatened the entire New Zealand justice system.

Friend and fellow lawyer Robert Lithgow said King would go looking for things other lawyers wouldn’t bother with. ‘He’s enthusiastic. He digs and burrows deeply and dives into cases and swims round in them like Scrooge McDuck. He just lives and breathes criminal defences every working minute—and probably when he’s asleep as well. He likes people no matter what they’ve done, enjoys helping them and doesn’t judge them.’

So despite the inevitable vitriol launched at Ewen Macdonald from the time of his arrest, despite the whispers about what other wickedness he’d done, King never for a moment had second thoughts about defending him.

He met Macdonald for the first time late that morning at the Palmerston North Police Station. Macdonald told him he didn’t want to apply for bail or name suppression, not wanting any speculation in the community about who had been arrested. Later, King met with Kerry and Marlene Macdonald, who were still in a nightmarish whirl of disbelief and doubt. Marlene remembers him calmly explaining the process, what would happen next and then saying, ‘Your boy hasn’t done this and we’ll get your boy home.’

‘And I thought, “How confident is that?”’

By the time they got to the courthouse at 1.30 pm it seemed most of the country’s media had arrived in Palmerston North, from local reporters to celebrity TV presenters like John Campbell. Even King, not unused to media attention, was taken aback. ‘I had no idea it was of that level of interest.’

While he had been aware of Scott Guy’s murder and the nine-month investigation, when he saw the wall of cameras and microphones he suddenly began to wonder what he’d got himself into.

CHAPTER 6
Preparing the defence

In late November 2011, Greg King walked from his office on the third floor of a Lower Hutt building and motioned a visitor to follow him down the corridor. In a room at the end he stopped and stared at a wall, a wall entirely covered with more than 150 lever-arch folders containing police information about their investigation into Scott Guy’s murder. In total there would have been close to 40,000 pages of what is termed disclosure.

The visitor shook his head and mentioned that King couldn’t possibly be expected to read all that. King looked at him just long enough and with just enough disdain to make it clear he thought the visitor was an idiot. ‘Well, we have to,’ he replied with restraint. ‘There’s no real logical structure to it—that would make life too easy, of course—so it’s just a case of doing it.’

There were no shortcuts. Every lead the police followed had to be re-examined and assessed. Every witness statement had to be cross-referenced with that of others. Every expert opinion had to be reviewed and tested. ‘Essentially it’s as simple as this,’ King explained. ‘They construct, we deconstruct. They build a case, we try and expose the weaknesses in it. They accentuate the negative and we try and eliminate it and put events in their proper context. So you’ve got to understand their case. And obviously the case they present is only a small fraction of all the evidence that’s been gathered. They’ve made an assessment somewhere along the line of what’s relevant and what’s not and present their case accordingly. So we need to go through the stuff they regard as not relevant and decide whether we think it’s relevant. So there’s a huge amount of sifting that has to take place. You’ve got to be really disciplined to ensure by the time you step in that courtroom that the work has been done. You’ve got to have an absolute intimate knowledge of what the Crown case is.’ But even if you did this, it wasn’t a fair fight, King stressed.

By November 2011, 110 police officers had been involved in the investigation. This didn’t count the specialist search and dive squads who also worked on the case. It also didn’t include three scene-of-crime officers, two photographers, electronic crime lab staff, and administrative assistants including receptionists, typists and data-entry personnel.

Officers had travelled to Northland, Auckland, Coromandel, Tauranga, Queenstown, Christchurch and Wellington for interviews and inquiries. Over 2000 interviews had been conducted and more than 550 formal statements taken. A toll-free 0800 number had been set up, with more than 300 calls received, and 32 media releases had been made.

At the same time, Greg King had only just received approval for funding from Legal Aid for a second counsel, Peter Coles. He’d also employed a private investigator, Paul Bass, to help with some inquiries, with no guarantee he would be reimbursed.

The Scott Guy murder investigation was the most overwhelming King had faced in terms of detail and disclosure paperwork, but he was still reluctant to concede he was struggling with the magnitude of the case, or the weight of evidence seemingly stacked against Ewen Macdonald. ‘It’s not without its problems,’ he noted. ‘It would be much better if the arson and the damage to the property hadn’t happened. If that was the case I think their case would be very weak. Now, with it, they think their case is very strong.

‘The Crown say these incredibly stupid things that he’d done against Scott in the past are demonstrative of his hatred, his malice towards Scott and that, on one level, is quite powerful,’ he continued. ‘Whether it’s a sufficient link to say, I can be sure beyond reasonable doubt that he must therefore be the murderer—that’s the question. And frankly there will be some who think it’s enough, there will be some who think it’s suspicious but not enough, there will be some who think, “What the hell’s that got to do with the murder?” That’s just plain human dynamics.’

Callum Boe was evidence that someone could do stupid and violent acts but wasn’t a murderer and, in King’s view, the case was a genuine whodunit. ‘And it’s unusual in that respect,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t have the usual features you associate with a strong police case. There are no eyewitnesses, there’s no confession, there’s no compelling forensic link. What it seeks to do is rely on motive. And that motive, from what I’ve seen, I believe is overstated and exaggerated, and everyone is reinterpreting it with hindsight.

‘One of the things I’m concerned about is the beat-up that always happens in trials whereby issues in the past assume huge significance. And you get people providing statements to show that there were all these things said at the time and done and it all stands to be reinterpreted retrospectively and can all look kind of horrible and sinister. But it’s not going to be easy, I know that. But it’s certainly not hopeless, not at all, not at all.’

In cases like this, one of the first questions people would ask King—or want to ask him but realise it was tacky and tactless—was whether he thought his client was innocent. In Macdonald’s case, King’s reference point was the first time he met him. ‘He admitted absolutely all his actions in the other matters but denied absolutely his involvement in the murder. And until that position in any way shape or form changes, that’s the approach I start from,’ he said. ‘There seems to be this never-ending naivety about the role of defence lawyers—people really do despise us and think it’s just a game to us to win at all costs and to hell with anything else. They don’t understand our ethical responsibility—we cannot actively mislead or deceive the court.’

King would never ask his clients if they were guilty or not but would explain to them the benefits of pleading guilty early and the tangible rewards they could receive for this at sentencing. ‘And in this case it prompted the reply, “I’m not guilty, I didn’t do it, I’m not going to plead guilty to it.” He was absolutely resolute.’

In the seven months since Macdonald’s arrest, King had got to know his client well, having visited him in jail regularly. ‘And I like him a lot, but that doesn’t impact on how I do my job. I feel privileged that he’s put his faith and trust and literally his life in my hands. On one level that’s a very high privilege—like the surgeon who performs the operation that may or may not result in him dying. On the other hand it comes with a huge amount of responsibility. These things are hard work and they’re tiring and they’re stressful. But they’re what I do.’

After two early preliminary and largely perfunctory court appearances, Macdonald didn’t appear before a judge until his trial in June 2012.

But on 15 November 2011 there was a hearing about his case that would have a huge impact on the eventual outcome. Before Justice Simon France in Wellington’s High Court were two issues to be decided. The first was where Macdonald’s trial should be held—Palmerston North or Wellington. Normally trials are held in the area where the offences occur, and in this case the nearest High Court would have been Palmerston North. But such was the profile and discussion about Scott Guy’s murder, the defence felt there was little chance an impartial jury could be found within the Manawatu catchment. Details of Macdonald’s other crimes had been suppressed but even still, rumours about the murder, about Macdonald and about his other offences were rife. Shifting the trial to Wellington, King argued, meant jurors were less likely to have been exposed to such information, much of it completely wrong.

To prove their argument, Peter Coles organised for affidavits to be taken from a cross-section of community members around Feilding and Palmerston North, outlining what they’d heard about the case. They came from all walks of life—a hairdresser, a butcher, a motelier, a farmer, a security guard and an IT engineer, among others. Many already knew about the other crimes Macdonald had committed and admitted to. And many had also heard gossip about Macdonald that was totally at odds both with the facts established by the police and with their theory of what happened. The most common of these was that Macdonald and Callum Boe were in a gay relationship. This belief, dubbed the
Brokeback Mountain
rumour, had no truth to it, but became one of the most pervasive pieces of whispering about the case.