Who Killed Scott Guy? Read online

  It all seemed surreal. Just the previous afternoon he’d seen Scott at the house and had afternoon tea with him. ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ he’d shouted as he left and drove away, never imagining it would be the last thing he’d ever say to his son.

  When Bryan got to Scott’s house, Kylee was in their bedroom with Hunter, hoping against hope all this wasn’t real. It was left to Bryan to confirm that Scott was dead. He comforted them as best he could and then, at 7.47 am, picked up the phone and rang his wife Jo, telling her their son had been murdered.

  Jo Guy had left their home at 6.30 that morning to go swimming at the nearby Makino pool, which she did twice a week. A lifetime’s habit of early rising on the farm had been hard to break when they’d shifted into Feilding two years before.

  When she got home the lights were on but Bryan was gone, the garage door left open, and she got the impression he’d just suddenly taken off somewhere. As she stepped out of the shower, the phone rang and Bryan told her there’d been a tragedy. Jo immediately thought he was talking about her father-in-law. Instead, Bryan said, ‘Something terrible has happened. Scott’s been killed. You’d better get out here.’

  Jo could hardly breathe as she hung up the phone and raced out to her car, crying all the time. Heading up Aorangi Road, she was stopped at the cordon near David Berry’s house around 8 am. ‘I’m Scott’s mother, I’ve got to see my husband and daughter-in-law,’ Jo told police, but she was told she couldn’t go any further. ‘Not my baby, not Scotty,’ she cried, desperate to go and see him and find out what had happened.

  David Berry came over but wouldn’t tell her what he’d seen. Then her son-in-law, Ewen Macdonald, arrived crying and hugged her, saying, ‘It’s wrong, it shouldn’t have happened.’ Jo had known Ewen since he had started going out with their youngest daughter, Anna, 15 years earlier. The pair had been in the fifth form at the time, and the following year Ewen left school to work on the Guys’ farm. Now Ewen and Anna, with four kids, were living just down the road in the family farmhouse where Jo and Bryan had brought up their own four children.

  Jo called one of them, her eldest daughter Nikki, who was the next to arrive, at 8.15 am, in tears and swearing. She was living near Ewen and Anna, in the farm cottage at 213 Aorangi Road, and had been getting ready for work when the phone rang just after 8 am. For the past six years she’d run Reve, a women’s fashion shop in Palmerston North, with her mother. And now it was her mother calling, telling her that just up the road Scott lay dead.

  ‘What are you talking about? What do you mean he’s dead?’ Nikki asked, unable to grasp what she was hearing. Nikki, 32, and Scott, 31, had always been close, Scott often confiding in her about his dreams and problems. The thought of him having been killed on the road they’d grown up on stunned her.

  When she got to the cordon just back from Scott’s body she immediately comforted her mother. Ewen Macdonald was still crying, pinching the bridge of his nose as he gave her a hug and repeated, ‘It’s not fair. We had so many plans.’

  Because Bryan and Kylee were still inside Scott’s house, unable to leave until police said they could, the family members waiting at the cordon eventually decided to drive back to the old farmhouse where Ewen and Anna lived, at 147 Aorangi Road.

  Anna Macdonald had just got out of the shower and was dressing the kids when Nikki burst in yelling, ‘Anna, Anna, Anna—it’s Scott, he’s dead, he’s been shot.’

  ‘You’re joking, you’ve got to be joking,’ Anna repeated in disbelief, her children clutching at her in the confusion.

  Seventeen-year-old farm worker Matthew Ireland, the son of a local police officer, also arrived, looking white and not speaking, followed by Ewen Macdonald, who ran in through the laundry and asked Anna if she was okay. He was pale and shaking, his words broken and uncontrolled. Ireland described him as being in shock and looking like he’d seen a ghost.

  Soon afterwards, Scott’s brother, Callum, pulled up with his girlfriend, Brooke. At 24, Callum was the youngest of the Guy children and hadn’t been terribly interested in farming but had worked at Byreburn at various times to save money. Since February that year he’d had a job at the Salvation Army in Feilding, running a youth employment scheme, and was there when Ewen rang to say there’d been an accident and to come out to the house. As he drove there, he wondered why he wasn’t going to the hospital if it was an accident—and figured it must have been really serious or quite minor. Only when he arrived at Anna and Ewen’s house did his mother tell him Scott was dead.

  Everyone gathered in the kitchen in a chaotic huddle of hugs, tears and heartbreak.

  CHAPTER 2

  The investigation begins

  Meanwhile, Bryan Guy, Kylee and Hunter were still holed up in the house at 293 Aorangi Road, police telling them to stay where they were until initial scene examinations were carried out.

  It was a busy morning on the farm—a busload of visitors was coming as well as the vet, an artificial insemination technician, a load of feed and the milk tanker—so Bryan rang Ewen Macdonald and told him to just carry on with the farm work.

  Macdonald was still at his home with everyone else and told Anna he had to go back on the farm to feed out silage.

  ‘Are you sure? Do you have to go?’ Anna asked.

  ‘There’s no one else left to do it. I’m gonna have to go,’ Macdonald told her. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

  It wasn’t until mid-morning that Bryan and Kylee were allowed to leave the house, crossing paddocks back to the road, where police took them to Anna and Ewen’s house and the rest of the family. The last thing Kylee did before leaving their home was to take Scott’s wedding ring from a shelf in the wardrobe.

  Life had just been turned on its head for Kylee, who was seven months pregnant with their second son. Dawn that morning had brought despair and confusion that would continue for months as she tried to understand what had happened to her world.

  The day before had been happy and normal. She and Hunter had been to town in the morning with her good friend, Jo Moss, looking for furniture and a rug for their bedroom. Scott came home for lunch and late that afternoon they all went to The Warehouse in Feilding to get some light bulbs and a train track for Hunter. Back home, Scott played with Hunter, fed the litter of labrador puppies they were in the process of selling, and they had fish and pasta for dinner. A friend, Mark Pedlow, rang asking for Scott’s advice on rearing calves and they discussed perhaps going shares in buying some. Hunter went to bed around 7 pm but didn’t want to go to sleep, more excited about his trains he was snuggled up with. Kylee was exhausted so collapsed into bed not long afterwards and yelled out to Scott to come to bed, which he did after having a shower.

  She woke the next morning about 6.30 when Hunter came into their bedroom, carrying his precious trains. Kylee switched on the TV and Hunter sat in bed watching children’s programmes for a bit while she dozed. Some time after 7 am, they heard farm bikes and Hunter immediately thought Scott was coming home, jumping off the bed calling out, ‘Bike . . . Dad!’ Kylee at first thought the farm workers must be moving stock along the road but wondered why they’d be doing it at that time of the day, so eventually she got up and looked out her bedroom window. She saw Scott’s ute in the drive and a stock truck parked on the road, but when she noticed the police cars she started to worry, thinking maybe young farm worker Matthew Ireland had been hit by the truck.

  Scooping up Hunter, she grabbed one of Scott’s jackets from the garage and Hunter’s coat from by the front door then went outside, only to be stopped by policeman Neil Martin with his arms raised as he came up the driveway. When he reached Kylee, he told her Scott had been in an accident and the news wasn’t good. Kylee went back inside and dissolved into tears. Seeing how upset she was, Hunter began crying and so they went back to the main bedroom and sat there sobbing. She rang her friend Jo Moss and asked her to come quickly and help look after Hunter, and then called her mother, Diane Bullock, in Hawke’s Bay.

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nbsp; When her father-in-law, Bryan Guy, arrived he confirmed her worst thoughts—Scott had apparently been murdered. But why? And by who? It all seemed so inconceivable. Scott had been the centre of her life since they met on 8 March 2003. The blue-eyed guy with a dimpled chin who loved sour lollies, country music, playing the guitar, living the cowboy life and life with Kylee surely couldn’t now be dead, less than 100 metres away? ‘From the moment we met we couldn’t be apart,’ Kylee later recalled. ‘We were one in a million. We were best friends. He was an amazing father.’

  Kylee had grown up in the Hawke’s Bay region on the North Island’s east coast, left Havelock North High School early and gone to live in Gisborne for a while before coming back home. She’d had a few boyfriends in the past, one so violent a trespass order had to be taken out against him, but her last relationship had ended about six months before. She was just 18 and completing her early childhood teacher training when she met Scott in a Havelock North pub after the Mohaka Rodeo where he’d been bull riding. Scott and his then girlfriend, Renee, had been drifting apart, and from that night he and Kylee became inseparable.

  At the time, Scott was working at Rissington Breedline, a sheep and beef farm west of Napier, and living on the property. When his parents visited, Scott told them that Kylee was ‘a keeper’. Jo Guy recalled thinking ‘Kylee was beautiful and really nice’ when she first met her, and the fact she liked baking for Scott added to the good impression. But just as their relationship began getting serious, Scott was made redundant after a reorganisation on the farm. So later in 2003 he went back to Feilding and the family farm, helping out with the crops they grew for their stock. It was the type of farming he preferred and, as Kylee put it, ‘He didn’t have any interest in the dairy side of things.’

  Kylee would travel down to see him at weekends, but in November 2003 Scott decided he couldn’t wait any longer and proposed. Three months later Kylee shifted to the Manawatu region, initially living with Scott at his parents’ home, and then shifting into a rented house adjacent to the farm on Aorangi Road. It took a while for her to settle into the district and farm life. Missing her family hugely and hating the weather, she relied on the extended Guy family for support. As Kylee acknowledged, ‘It wasn’t a happy time for me.’

  At one stage Scott mentioned to his mother that there was some pressure on him to shift to Hawke’s Bay, but Jo reminded him that, ‘He who earns the gold, makes the decisions’. So they stayed, although as Jo later noted, Kylee ‘has very strong ideas and Scott would usually bend to them’.

  They married on 8 January 2005 at Kylee’s parents’ house in Hawke’s Bay, walking down the aisle to ‘It’s Your Love’ by Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, in front of 120 guests. Kylee’s sisters, Jessica and Chanelle, were bridesmaids, and Scott’s younger brother, Callum, one of the groomsmen. They honeymooned on the Gold Coast and settled into life on the farm with Kylee doing some work in early childhood centres despite having pulled out of her Bachelor of Education course.

  When Hunter was born in April 2008, Bryan Guy said Scott was so excited he became, ‘almost mother and father at the same time’. He loved his new family life, loved Kylee’s baking, loved the daily routine of coming home for breakfast of bacon and eggs with her and Hunter. And he doted on Hunter, frequently finding excuses to pop home and see him during the day and often taking him out on the farm with him.

  ‘He was his whole world,’ Kylee recalled.

  Scott’s relationship with Kylee was always strong. Even though he wouldn’t wear his wedding ring while working, he’d put it on as soon as he’d had a shower on Friday night and wear it for the weekend, or whenever they went out. He had Kylee’s name tattooed on his left forearm, Hunter’s on his right. But while the couple had built a house on the farm in 2009 and Kylee had settled much better away from her family, they didn’t see themselves living on Byreburn for the rest of their lives. Ultimately the plan was to move back to Hawke’s Bay, in maybe ten or 15 years, and own a smaller farm.

  There was never much chance Scott was going to be far from farming, his life thus far having seen him come and go from Byreburn between other rural jobs. As a kid he’d grown up in gumboots, helping out his dad on the farm, which had grown to 372 hectares, bordering the Oroua River. The Guy family had been farming in the area for more than 90 years, since Scott’s great-grandparents, Cecil and Mary, began milking cows in 1919. Scott’s grandfather Grahame, who he was very close to, had then taken over, eventually going into partnership with Scott’s father, Bryan, who was the only one of the six children who wanted to farm. Grahame and Bryan shared the farm for 25 years until Grahame retired in 1998 and Bryan took over.

  Scott started at Taonui School in 1984, and his father remembers him being one of the first boys to play netball at primary school. But by the time he got to Feilding Agricultural High School it was rugby that preoccupied him. Despite being head boy in 1996, Scott wasn’t a great fan of school and left midway through the seventh form to go to Taratahi Agricultural Training Centre in Masterton for a year. Afterwards he worked on a dairy farm in the Wairarapa region in the south-east of the North Island, then went to Wellington with a girlfriend he’d met at Taratahi with ideas of life in the city. But he struggled to find a job, spent a few months on a benefit and then, broke and hungry, as his mother described it, rang home to see if there was a job for him on the farm.

  He later did a year at Massey University in Palmerston North, studying for a diploma in agriculture, and while he didn’t pass, as Bryan Guy said, ‘He had a lot of fun . . . Life was an adventure and he was ready to live it to the full.’

  Scott went back to the farm until 2002, when he left for Australia to work on a farm near Mount Isa in the Queensland outback, mustering cattle on horseback. It was a defining period in his life and also the fulfilment of a childhood fantasy: Scott had gone to every school fancy dress as a cowboy with his hat and cap guns. At Augustus Downs station he spent long hours in the saddle, rounding up cattle and branding them. He formed a close bond with his workmates, who dubbed themselves Team Delta and tattooed the name on their shoulders.

  When he returned from Australia in November 2002 he was a real cowboy, with chaps, hat, stockwhip, boots and spurs, and had started bull riding. Before he left he’d been going out with local girl Renee Matthews, and when he came back they started seeing each other again.

  But milking cows for a living didn’t interest Scott greatly, so he went to Hawke’s Bay to work. When that job ended and he returned to Byreburn in 2003, the idea was that he would be in charge of the crops and calf-rearing on the farm, while Ewen Macdonald continued to manage the dairy side of the operation. It was an arrangement that seemed clean and equitable. But, as became clear after Scott’s death, it was one that brought tension, unrest and accusation in the years that followed.

  Back at the murder scene more police began to arrive, changing into protective white overalls, boot covers and gloves. Officers would remain there for the next five days, poring over the driveway, adjoining paddocks and nearby roadside in the hunt for any possible clues. Senior Constable Neil Martin snapped the first photos of the scene on his cellphone with the sun just starting to rise and light up the early daffodils that lined the drive to Scott and Kylee’s house.

  Aorangi Road, which stretches for more than 3 kilometres, was closed at both ends to everyone but family and friends, while the immediate scene was taped off. At the cordon police established 400 metres back down Aorangi Road, near David Berry’s house, Ewen Macdonald overheard one officer complaining that this had to happen right at the end of his shift and thought, ‘You arsehole.’

  More people arrived, including Jo Moss, Kylee’s closest Manawatu friend. Jo’s son Luke was one of Scott’s best mates and Jo had been an enormous help with Hunter, visiting Kylee most days. Two days before, Scott and Kylee had given Jo one of their labrador puppies as a thankyou for everything she’d done. When Kylee phoned her early that morning in a hysterical state, Jo quickly got c
hanged and headed to Kylee’s house with her husband, Evan. The police cordon stopped them from reaching Kylee, but by this time Jo knew that Bryan Guy and two officers had gone to the house to be with her.

  Detective Glen Jackson from Palmerston North’s CIB arrived at 293 Aorangi Road at 9.50 am and assumed the role of officer in charge of the scene. After being briefed about what had happened since the body was found, Jackson began taking a closer look at what was around him.

  Scott’s mud-splattered ute with its heavy bull-bars and MR GUY number plates was still sitting in the driveway where it had stopped, 4 metres from the gates, engine idling, headlights still on, with music coming from it. The gates to the property were open, though the left-hand gate as Jackson looked at it from the road wasn’t fully back. To the right of the entrance was another gate leading to a paddock where horses and sheep grazed and this was also open. Scott’s body lay in a star shape in front of the ute, his feet where the gates met when closed.

  Almost immediately, Jackson became aware of distinctive footprints around the scene. They were of a wavy-patterned sole and could be easily seen from the road edge where he stood, leading to the body, imprinted in the soft soil of the driveway, which was damp from overnight rain. Stepping plates were carefully laid over the area, which allowed police to approach Scott’s body without damaging these prints or anything else at the scene. Just before midday, Jackson examined Scott’s body, noting the large wound to his throat and blood around his head as well as his right leg. He had heard reports that Scott’s throat had been cut, based on what David Berry said when he first found the body, but Jackson now realised it was more likely that Scott had been shot, as shotgun pellet injuries were clearly visible on his left hand and arm and his face.