Free Who Killed Scott Guy? by Mike White

striding up to the band, asking the lead guitarist if he could play Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’, grabbing the microphone and belting it out, strutting up and down among the guests. ‘It brought the house down,’ says Coles. ‘People still talk about it. But that was just typical Anna—walk into a room and light it up.’ He’d always seen Ewen as a good guy, ‘solid as’, whose life was the farm, Anna and his kids.
    Coles, 61, had also known the Guy family for 50 years, his father being good friends with Scott’s grandfather Grahame, and he’d gone through college with Bryan Guy’s sister. In Feilding, everybody knew everybody among longstanding community members. Coles was the first lawyer Macdonald thought of as he was led to a holding cell at the Palmerston North Police Station after his interview.
    Around the time Macdonald was calling Coles, Wellington barrister Greg King was on his way to dinner, also thinking about murders. He was heading to a Chinese restaurant to meet John Barlow, who’d recently been released from prison after serving 15 years for the 1994 shooting of Eugene and Gene Thomas. King had been Barlow’s appeal lawyer for a number of years as the controversial case was fought out. Over dinner, King toasted the fact he’d just got another client’s murder charge reduced to manslaughter and, for the first time in years, he didn’t have a murder case on the go.
    At 7 am the next morning all that changed when his phone went. It was Blair Macdonald calling, Ewen’s older brother. ‘Blair Shay Macdonald?’ King sleepily asked, recalling the name from cross-examining the detective several times in court. It was those experiences that had led Blair to phone King. He’d seen how good King was in court, knew his reputation as one of the country’s top defence lawyers, and wanted Ewen to have the best help.
    Blair explained what had happened, how Ewen had been interviewed without a lawyer and arrested for Scott Guy’s murder, and was now sitting in a cell, due to appear in Palmerston North District Court that afternoon. King was tired, a bit hung-over, and had a full day of appointments so told Blair to get a duty solicitor to cover Ewen’s first appearance and he’d take a look at the case later. ‘And then I thought no, and rang Blair back and said, “I’m on my way up now,”’ remembered King.
    Halfway to Palmerston North, King got a call from Peter Coles. The pair knew each other well, having worked together on a number of trials, including the brutal murder of paedophile Glen Stinson in 2007. Coles wanted to know if King was on board as he was wary of doing the case by himself given he was so close to the families. In his view, King was the ideal person to front the defence. King likewise wanted Coles involved, knowing how crucial it was to have local knowledge and input. Thus, by the time King arrived in Palmerston North on Friday, 8 April 2011, Ewen Macdonald’s defence had serendipitously been sorted.
    At just 41, King was already one of New Zealand’s best known lawyers, having been involved in a host of high-profile cases and fronting The Court Report on TV, canvassing legal issues. He’d cut his courtroom teeth in Dunedin with the formidable Judith Ablett-Kerr, who had hired him after he graduated. King helped her in the poisoned professor case, in which Vicky Calder was charged with killing her former partner, David Lloyd, with acrylamide but was acquitted at her second trial after King uncovered evidence that suggested Lloyd had suffered from an immune disorder. They also represented Peter Ellis, the Christchurch Civic Crèche worker controversially convicted of sex offences, at his appeal.
    At 27, King became New Zealand’s youngest lawyer approved to appear in murder trials and thereafter was involved in many prominent cases: Scott Watson, convicted of killing Ben Smart and Olivia Hope; samurai sword attacker Antonie Dixon; Bruce Howse, who