By 3 News online team
Anna Macdonald, the wife of murder-accused Ewen Macdonald, has recalled the events of the morning she found out her brother had been killed.
Her husband is charged with murdering her brother Scott Guy at the end of his Aorangi Rd driveway on July 8, 2010.
Macdonald is on trial at the High Court in Wellington and has pleaded not guilty to the charge.
She says she didn’t find out Scott had been murdered until just before 8:30am. She was dressing her daughter Lucy when she heard a “whack” on her door.
“Nikki [her sister] came in yelling ‘Anna, Anna. It’s Scott, he’s dead, he’s dead. He’s been shot,” she told the court.
“I didn’t believe her. I said ‘Who said this? What do you mean?’…She was pretty spaced-out.
Mrs Macdonald says Nikki was flaked by farm hand Matthew Ireland who was “white as a ghost and didn’t say anything”.
She says Nikki then announced that, “Everyone’s coming, everyone’s coming here [to their house].”
“It would have been about 10 minutes then Ewen ran in. He was pale and shaking and he had been crying.
“I thought someone must have got this wrong…Then Mum came. She was very upset. She kept saying ‘Not my baby, not Scotty’,” she said in tears to the court.
She says her husband came up to her and said, “I have to go out on the farm and feed out.”
“I said ‘Are you sure?’ and he said, ‘There’s no one left to do it, I’ll be back soon.’”
Mr Guy's wife Kylee Guy sat in her bedroom and became increasingly upset as the commotion unfolded at the end of her driveway the morning of his death, a court has heard.
She says her son Hunter woke her that morning and not long after, she saw a stock truck parked on the road with Mr Guy’s ute parked on the driveway.
The gates were closed, she says, which was unusual.
Her first thought was that a farmhand, Matthew Ireland, had been hit by the truck while on the quad bike. She didn’t think it was her husband.
A teary-eyed Ms Guy told the court she went outside to investigate but a police officer stopped her.
“I went outside and started walking…It was light and I could clearly see the light. I could see someone running….he raised his arms up and told me to stop.
“We stopped then he came down the driveway and I asked him what happened…He told us to get back inside,” she told the court.
When she got back into the house, she says she became increasingly upset.
“I went back to the bedroom. I just sat there…. I was just getting too upset and Hunter was getting upset so I called [neighbour] Jo Moss.
After this, Ms Guy says Scott’s father came into the house, followed not long after by two police officers.
Ms Guy also gave a chronology of the days leading up to the murder of her husband and says the night before, she was exhausted and “just wanted cuddles” from him.
She says he was busy on the phone to Mark Pedlow, a share milker, and just wanted him to come to bed.
Mr Pedlow had a habit of “going on and on” on the phone, she told the court.
At this stage, Ms Guy was heavily pregnant with the pair’s second child.
She says she was a heavy sleeper during her pregnancy and did not hear Mr Guy’s ute start up the next morning.
There was nothing out of the ordinary in the week before her husband’s death and nothing “untoward” on Aorangi Rd or the family’s driveway the night before.
Macdonald has pleaded not guilty to the charge of murder.
Focus on morning of murder
So far the focus of proceedings has been on the events of the morning of the murder.
Neighbour David Berry, the first person on the scene, told the court yesterday how it initially appeared as though Mr Guy’s throat had been cut.
But Nikki Guy says that when she arrived at the cordon Macdonald twice corrected Mr Berry that her brother had been shot, not stabbed.
The defence case yesterday focused on the timing of events, including questioning the reliability of another neighbour’s statements about when he heard gunshots.
The neighbour, Derek Sharp, told the court his bedside clock is never on time because transmission lines nearby interfered with its accuracy.
Despite his insistence that he knew the correct time because of a system he used involving his wristwatch and the time announced on National Radio, the defence says Mr Sharp could have been mistaken on the morning of the murder.
The next phase of proceedings is expected to pay attention to the relationship between Macdonald and Mr Guy, with details to be given by Crown lawyers of the jealousy they argue the murder-accused felt towards Mr Guy.
3 News
source: newshub archive
