Puzzling leads in the case of slain farmer

BY TONY WALL

Everyone loved the puppies. Scott and Kylee Guy's little boy, Hunter, adored playing with them, and his cousins from down the road were always wanting a cuddle. Adults, too, couldn't get enough of them – friends from around the district often popping in for a quick look.

At first the eight puppies, born to the Guys' chocolate brown labrador, Katie, were kept inside the couple's newly built home in Aorangi Rd, south-east of Feilding, but when they became bigger and too smelly, they were moved to an outbuilding.

Now, bizarrely, the litter is at the centre of police attention, one of the few clues in the hunt for Scott Guy's killer. The 31-year-old – a cowboy, bullrider, farmer, but first and foremost a family man – was shotgunned at his farm gate by a mystery assassin in the early hours of July 8 and the trail remains cold.

Last week, police announced that three of the puppies were last seen the night before Guy was murdered, raising the question, did he disturb an early-morning thief and pay with his life? But with this baffling case, one question only leads to another.

What puppy thief would carry a shotgun? Wouldn't he have heard Guy getting into his ute and seen the lights come on, giving him plenty of time to conceal himself?

Why shoot him? Isn't it more likely that the killer was lying in wait, intent on settling some perceived grudge? But if so, what? Guy was, by all accounts, a hard-working, clean-living man, too busy on the family farm and looking after his son and pregnant wife to get involved in anything nefarious.

While these same questions nag at the wider Guy family, no one has much time to dwell on them – there are cows to be milked and silage to be spread.

On Friday morning, the Sunday Star-Times observed three unmarked police cars pulling up to the Guy driveway. Nine detectives tumbled out and, ignoring the main house, made their way towards the outbuilding where the puppies had been housed, walking around it several times.

Then later on Friday, a tantalising lead: police announcing that a woman had been seen two days earlier trying to give away chocolate labrador puppies in the carpark of The Warehouse in Palmerston North. The slim woman, with long sandy blonde hair, tried to give a puppy to customers and two others were spotted in the front seat of her dark stationwagon, police said.

There were also two children in the car. A breakthrough, or a wild goose chase? Police can't be sure.

Guy's father, Bryan Guy, is bemused by the idea of a psychotic puppy thief-turned killer, who perhaps saw the flyer advertising the dogs for sale for $700 each and snooped around the property in the dead of night trying to find them.

"You'd hate to think someone was pinching the dogs and shot him because of that. I mean, that's a bit drastic, but it could be, who knows?"

DESPITE THEIR loved one being shot down in cold blood, some members of the Guy family have managed to remain remarkably upbeat. Partly this is because the full horror of what happened has yet to sink in, but they also maintain positive outlooks on life.

"It's so hard to feel sad when you're used to looking at the bright side," said Scott's sister, Anna MacDonald. His younger brother Callum, 24, to whom he was particularly close, said: "It still seems a bit surreal. It will be a lot harder in the next few weeks when I start to miss him a lot more. At the moment it feels like he could just be on holiday."

The family has a great sense of humour, shown by the number plates of their vehicles. Grandfather Grahame's plate is UDAGUY, Bryan is BOSGUY and Scott was MRGUY.

Scott Guy was a cowboy and rodeo rider – shortly before his murder he turned up to a disco at Hunter's kindergarten dressed in full cowboy regalia – and his other main loves were movies and music.

He and Callum would play X-Box games together and listen to metal bands like Avenged Sevenfold, whom they saw at a gig in Auckland a couple of years ago.

"They've got a new album out in a few days, the first thing that came to my mind was: `Oh, I should tell Scott.' Then I realised I can't," Callum said. He has quit his job as a youth tutor at a local employment training centre and will move back to help out on the family farm.

Scott Guy had run the drystock and cropping side of the family farming business. In 2003 he worked as a jackaroo on a cattle station in Northern Queensland before moving to Hawke's Bay to a cattle farm there. He met Kylee at a rodeo. They married in 2005 and moved back to Feilding, where Kylee worked in a childcare centre.

Lately, the couple had been plagued by crime. In October 2008, an old villa that was being removed from the property to make way for the couple's new home was torched.

"It [the arson] was terrible for Scott, he was pretty upset about it," Bryan Guy said. "It wasn't a good way to start, and it delayed the building of the new house because of the investigation."

Then, in January last year, the nearly completed new home was broken into and thousands of dollars worth of windows and walls were smashed.

"I think they were a bit frightened, sort of, `what might happen next?' Again it wasn't solved – they felt pretty vulnerable, they pretty quickly got alarms around the house," Bryan Guy said.

Kylee is too terrified to return to the farm in the wake of the murder and is being cared for in the Manawatu by her mother and two sisters. She is due to give birth to another boy in September.

Bryan Guy dismisses local speculation that his son might have discovered a dope plot. Only once, 20 years ago, did he discover a couple of tiny cannabis plants on the farm. "It's such a bizarre thing. I've really got no idea what anybody would have as a motive."

Anna MacDonald said the family was confident police would crack the case. "Feilding's too small and New Zealand's too small, you can't go far.

"Someone's going to crack at some point – I can't imagine it not being finished," MacDonald said.

In the meantime, there is work to be done. Says Bryan Guy: "Nature doesn't stop. We've got 400 cows starting to calve this week, they're coming, ready or not. We've got to be prepared to carry on."

NEIGHBOUR'S GRUESOME DISCOVERY

Police have said that a "passing motorist" discovered Scott Guy lying dead on his driveway around 7am on July 8, but it turns out the motorist was Guy's closest neighbour, David Berry, who is said to be devastated by his gruesome discovery.

Berry had seen Guy's ute sitting at the end of the driveway with its lights on. Thinking it odd, he went to investigate. Guy may have been dead two hours when Berry found him lying in front of his ute with shotgun wounds to the neck. He called police, as well as Guy's neighbour on the other side, Bruce Johnstone, who in turn called Guy's brother-in-law and farming partner, Ewen MacDonald.

The men gathered at the scene and waited for police. Guy's wife, Kylee, had started walking down the driveway, but was stopped from seeing her husband by a police officer who had arrived on the scene. Neither Johnstone nor Berry wanted to talk about their experience.

- © Fairfax NZ News