By Lloyd Burr and Angela Beswick
Ewen Macdonald swore to his wife Anna he did not kill her brother, a court has heard.
Giving evidence this afternoon, Anna said she had visited Macdonald in prison a number of times as she had “so many questions” following his arrest.
“I wouldn’t go to prison and visit him and not ask questions,” she told the High Court in Wellington.
“And it wasn’t just one visit; it was visit, after visit, after visit – because I had a lot of questions about these things”.
When Anna asked Macdonald if he had killed Scott Guy, he said: “No, I swear I didn’t”.
The night Mr Guy’s house was vandalised, Anna says she saw her husband in the farm shed – when he was meant to be on the road to Ruakaka.
He had left around 6pm with his friend Callum Boe, but Anna was woken at around 9pm by a noise or light. She recalls looking out the window to see two shapes in the farm shed.
“I crept down the footpath and went up to the fence and I could make out two shapes and I thought it had to be Ewen.
“I yelled out, ‘What are you doing?’ and they said, ‘What are you doing?’.”
The pair told her they had an accident and had come to the farm to repair the damaged trailer. Anna says she heard the pair drive off shortly after.
Macdonald ‘genuinely shocked’ by news of vandalism
Anna says her husband sounded “genuinely shocked” when she told him someone had vandalised Scott Guy’s house.
In her evidence this afternoon, Anna said she called Macdonald – who was in Ruakaka at the time – because she was “pretty freaked out”. She said she was worried someone would do the same to their house.
“I did go on about it quite a lot,” she says. “Ewen just said, ‘They wouldn’t come to our house. We are living here – no one was living there. Someone did it for fun, don’t worry’.”
Asked whether she had ever considered the handwriting in the graffiti was similar to her husband’s, Anna said she had never thought about it.
“It never entered my mind that Ewen might have done this,” she said. “I wouldn’t be looking at the person sitting next to me.”
Following Macdonald’s arrest, Anna said she asked him how he could hate someone so much to vandalise their house.
“He said: ‘I didn’t hate them. I was really pissed off when I wrote the graffiti’.”
Macdonald told her his anger was more directed at Kylee. He said that Kylee wound Scott up about his ideas on the farm and was always asking him to come home to Hunter.
“After the graffiti he said he felt terrible, and bought gifts for Kylee and went out of his way,” Anna recalled.
“He got clippings out of our garden, he came home from work early, he took the older kids out on the farm. At the time, I remember thinking ‘This is great, this is positive’.
Anna said she told Macdonald she couldn’t believe he had felt “so upset and cross about these things” but hadn’t spoken to her about it.
She recalled telling him: ’We are a husband and wife and if I was upset, I would talk to you but you thought all of these things and you didn’t talk to me about it He said he wanted to keep me out of it.’
“It was my family and he didn’t want to hurt me or involve me in it.”
Kylee Guy felt ‘violated’ by vandalism
Vandalism and graffiti on the family home left Scott Guy’s wife Kylee feeling “violated”.
Giving evidence at her husband’s murder trial today, Kylee Guy says she couldn’t work out why someone would do that and wondered if it was directed at her.
Ewen Macdonald told police he vandalised the property because Mr Guy wasn’t pulling his weight on the farm. He said he was sick of “working his arse off”, while his brother-in-law was at home with his family.
Kylee says she and her husband discovered the damage when they were on their way to Hawke’s Bay for a weekend holiday.
They called in to see the house, which the builders had just finished, where they were confronted with smashed glass and words written on the wall.
“I heard Scott say, ‘Oh my God’, then I saw the laundry door had been smashed,” she recalled. “Then I saw the words”.
Kylee said she got halfway up the hallways and become too upset.
“I had to leave.
“The laundry door was totally smashed… the walls were smashed in. I was crying and asking, ‘Is this towards me?’.”
Kylee said she couldn’t understand any of it or why someone had targeted them.
“It was just terrible. We were asking, ‘Who’s done this? Who could do this?’.”
In an interview with police after the murder, Macdonald admitted to crimes of intimidation directed at Mr Guy and Kylee.
They included vandalism and arson, when an old farmhouse on the Guy property was burnt down.
Macdonald told police he did it “for a laugh”, but maintains he did not kill Mr Guy.
Crown alleges Ewen Macdonald left threatening notes
A rural postie claims he found an offensive note in the Guy family’s letterbox, weeks after Ewen Macdonald set fire to a house on the property.
The jury in the Scott Guy murder trial has spent the morning hearing evidence from postie Emma Beaney and Brett Macdonald, the postie in charge of rural delivery in the Feilding area.
Both claim they found offensive notes in the Guy letterbox in the two years prior to the murder.
The Crown alleges the three notes were part of Macdonald’s attempt to drive Mr Guy and his wife Kylee off the farm.
Brett MacDonald said the note he found – weeks after Ewen Macdonald set fire to a house on the property - was written roughly, on a scrap piece of paper, in biro.
“It went along the lines of, ‘You cheating whore’ and ‘What comes around goes around’,” Brett MacDonald told the High Court in Wellington today.
He said he didn’t tell police about it until after Ewen Macdonald was arrested for the murder, because he didn’t want people to think he was a “nosey person, reading through all their stuff”.
He said Ms Beaney, found two others and the pair talked to each other about the notes after the murder.
In evidence given this morning, Ms Beaney says both notes were written in what appeared to be a Sharpie, on a scrap bit of paper. She says she can recall what the notes said, word for word.
The first one, which she says she found after Macdonald set fire to Mr Guy’s house, said: ‘Stay away from him Kylee you whore’.
Ms Beaney says another note, found in the week after Mr Guy’s house was vandalised, said ‘Now you know how it feels to lose something you love’.
The only people who have ever seen the notes are the rural posties, the Guys never saw them.
Macdonald denies leaving the notes.
But defence lawyer Greg King accused Ms Beaney of making up information about the notes.
"This is something you have just made up isn't it,” he said.
Ms Beaney replied, simply: "No".
"There were no notes,” Mr King continued.
"There were definitely notes,” Ms Beaney said.
"But you never raised it with Scott or Kylee.”
"No."
"You never reported it to the police."
"No."
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