Video evidence of police interviewing Ewen Macdonald the day he was arrested has been shown at his murder trial at the High Court in Wellington.
Macdonald is accused of murdering brother-in-law and business partner Scott Guy at the end of his driveway on July 8, 2010. He denies the charge.
The Crown argue Macdonald shot Mr Guy because of increasing tensions on the family farm in which they both managed and had shares in.
They say he tried to drive Mr Guy and his wife Kylee off the farm by burning down an old farmhouse and vandalising their house while it was being built.
Today, the jury will continue to watch a video recording of police interviewing Macdonald hours before they arrested him.
Yesterday afternoon, the court was shown the first two-and-a-half hours of the video tape which showed Macdonald denying having anything to do with the theft of the neighbour’s deer, the arson on an old farm house and vandalism at Mr Guy’s new house.
He has since admitted being responsible for all three crimes.
In the video, police ask him directly if he was responsible for the offences, starting with the theft of the Hocken family’s prized deer which went missing in 2006.
“I'll put it to you bluntly: Have you got any involvement in that at all?,” Detective Laurie Howell asks him.
“Nah, nah, I’d be honest, that’s what my old man said to me, he said ‘have you been round there?’ and I said ‘nah, I’m not that stupid’,” replied Macdonald.
“Did he?,” says Mr Howell.
“Yeah. It’s too close to home. A day or two after he said ‘Oh you been round there?’ and I was like ‘nah, nah’,” says Macdonald.
“Why did he say that?,” the detective replies.
“He probably just thought, you know. I just thought ‘nah, that’s too close to home. I’m not that dumb’. Yeah. But they are just silly. Those stags are thirty pointers, they are not a trophy of mine…I don’t class them as a trophy,” he says.
Half-an-hour later, Macdonald is asked again.
“Do you clearly deny any involvement of the theft of the deer at the Hocken’s?”
“Yep, yep,” he replied.
Later in the interview, Mr Howell moves on to questions about the arson involving the old farmstead being removed from the site where Mr Guy’s new house would later be built.
Macdonald says he expected to be taken in and questioned about it.
“Anna, mum and dad, everyone and my brother have been saying it, they said ‘wait until they start going to town on you’,” Macdonald says.
“So you have been expecting it,” replies Mr Howell.
“Oh yeah, yeah, like ‘it’s going to be your turn soon’ and I was like ‘yeah I know’,” says Macdonald.
When asked why he was expecting to be questioned, he starts talking about moving furniture to Tauranga.
Macdonald is then asked again:
“I think I was pretty clear at the start when I asked you. Are you responsible for the arson of that house?,” Mr Howell says.
“No, no,” Macdonald replies. “Why would I do it? It was part of the farm, it was going to help Scott and Kylee get their dream. It had no benefit to me whatsoever. It just creates more problems,” he says.
He says in the video that he and his wife Anna were shocked by the news of the arson and didn’t hear a thing all night.
“Anna and I were shocked. We’d obviously slept right through if there had been engines or whatever screaming up the road. I slept right through it,” he said.
Macdonald then said he had heard it was a former worker of the removal company who was angry at being sacked.
“At work [farm hand Sheryl said there had been a disgruntled employee, [who] got the sack or something. That’s the assumption her brother Phillip was making about who was responsible,” he said.
The rest of the video will be played today.
Watch the video for excerpts from the police interview shown yesterday
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