Farm effluent ponds impossible to search
Three effluent ponds on the Guy family dairy farm were never searched by police investigating the shotgun slaying of Scott Guy because they were unsafe for divers and draining them would have destroyed any potential evidence.
Parts of the 300-hectare Feilding farm, known as Byreburn, where Ewen Macdonald lived were excavated last April, little more than a week after he was charged with the murder of his brother-in-law.
Detective Gregory Hogan told the High Court in Wellington yesterday that they were looking for dive boots, dead puppies and shotgun cartridges, among other things, but came up short.
The Crown case is that Macdonald tried to lay a false trail for police by killing three chocolate labrador puppies belonging to Guy shortly before shooting him.
Impressions of size nine Proline dive boots found at the murder scene suggest the killer was wearing them at the time.
Hogan said police could not search the effluent ponds because they were a health hazard for divers. Draining them required a pump with rotor blades, which would have destroyed anything they sucked out.
The jury heard yesterday from Macdonald’s father, Kerry, who said his son took dive boots away on hunting trips.
‘‘We just used them as camp shoes ... if your hunting boots got wet, you’d put them on while they dried.’’
The jury was shown pictures of a deer hunting trip in Stewart Island that Macdonald and his father were on in March 2004, where a pair of Proline dive boots could be seen.
Kerry Macdonald, who owns the Hunting & Fishing store in Palmerston North, said he sold items to his son at wholesale and lent him firearms from the store whenever he asked. His son would not have been able to access any of his or the shop’s guns without him knowing.
Macdonald’s wife, Anna, said the couple kept a spare house key in a dive boot when they were living in the Byreburn farm cottage before they moved into the farmhouse in mid-2008.
‘‘It had cobwebs all over it and it looked pretty dirty . . . there was nothing falling apart on it though, it was just shoved right at the bottom of the cupboard.’’
She recalled throwing a dive boot into a rubbish trailer before the move, but could not be 100 per cent sure.
Macdonald’s mother, Marlene, said she she saw dive boots at the farmhouse not long after her son moved in.
Shortly before Guy was killed, she was looking after her grandchildren while Ewen and Anna were in Fiji. She did not notice any dive boots then, she said.
Macdonald also said her son was upset and crying when he delivered the news of Guy’s death a few hours after the body was found.
Later that day, she asked her son how Guy had been killed. ‘‘I think he said his throat might have been cut, but I am not sure about that.’’
The trial continues on Monday.