Death of Jack Nicholas - the trial

A jury was today starting its search for a verdict at the end of the seven-week trial of Haumoana man Murray Kenneth Foreman, who is charged with murdering Hawke's Bay farmer Jack Nicholas almost four years ago.
The jury of eight men and four women was expected to retire early this afternoon, after a day and a half of closing addresses by prosecution and defence counsel and the summing-up by trial judge Justice Simon France.
The small public gallery of 40 seats was again filled yesterday, as it had been for most of the last week. Attendees included the shooting victim's widow, Agnes Nicholas, who has been in court almost throughout since giving evidence in April.
Foreman, 51, and known as ``Mo,' has pleaded not guilty and denies he was the person who shot Mr Nicholas, who was 71 when he died near the garden gate on his remote farm at Makahu, just before 6.30am on August 27, 2004.
The accused first told police that he was at home at the time, with his son and the boy's mother, more than 80km from the murder scene in the foothills of the Kaweka Range.
Crown prosecutor Russell Collins spent three hours on his address yesterday, focusing on the evidence of former Foreman neighbour Donna Kingi that Foreman told her on the day of the shooting he thought he had shot someone, and on what the Crown says were lies told by Foreman to police and friends.
Defence counsel Bruce Squire QC then addressed the jury for more than two hours, and it was more than 90 minutes before he mentioned the name of the key witness, half an hour before his address was broken by the overnight adjournment.
Mr Squire focused firstly on the possibility that the killer had to have been someone who was much more familiar with the farm than his client, that it was most likely to be someone ``very, very close,' and that victim's son Oliver Nicholas was almost the only option.
DEFENCE AIMS AT MURDER VICTIM'S SON
Donna Kingi's evidence effectively put her former neighbour on trial for the murder of farmer Jack Nicholas, shot dead almost four years ago.
But when it came time to gun down her story in the High Court in Napier yesterday, in closing addresses in the trial of murder accused Murray Kenneth Foreman, it was more than an hour before defence counsel Bruce Squire QC mentioned her name.
Instead, Mr Squire argued the answer as to who killed the 71-year-old Mr Nicholas was much closer to his home at Makahu Farm near Puketitiri than it was to Foreman, who once claimed to police that at the time he was home with his son and the boy's mother more than 80km away in seaside Haumoana.
Mr Squire told the jury, which was empanelled on April 9 and started hearing the evidence five days later, that on the evidence in court, they might consider the victim's wife, Agnes Nicholas, was ``covering up' for someone, that the killer was someone ``very close' - and that son Oliver was about the only option.
The finger-pointing came late on the 24th day of the trial over the shooting of Mr Nicholas at his garden gate on August 27, 2004.
Both Oliver Nicholas and wife Ange said they and their two children were at home in their cottage about 500 metres away from the homestead when they heard the shots ring out.
It is Ange Nicholas's phone call to Agnes Nicholas at 6.30am that pinpoints the time of the killing.
Foreman, whose 48th birthday was two days later, pleaded not guilty to a charge of murder which wasn't laid by police until May 2006.
Closing the case against Foreman, Crown prosecutor Russell Collins focused on claims by Ms Kingi, but it had to be assessed along with a range of other evidence in the case, including lies told by Foreman to the police and friends, and other evidence he said would have been ``stunning coincidence' if Ms Kingi's aim in coming forward more than a year after the shooting was to claim a reward.
Ms Kingi, who completed a pre-planned move to Australia just a month after the shooting, first revealed she believed she had important information in an e-mail to Sensible Sentencing Trust national spokesman Garth McVicar in November 2005.
She told the court that Foreman was at his home in Grove Rd, Haumoana, on the morning of the shooting. He told her over their garden fence he thought he had shot someone, and that he had to break down the gun.
She also said that about a fortnight earlier, Foreman took son Che for a trip into the hills.
But he returned early angered that a farmer had stopped them from crossing the land.
Mr Collins said she had never claimed a reward.
Three months after her first approach to Mr McVicar, she e-mailed him ``shocked' that she had only just learned he was involved in posting a reward, and that people might not believe her.
The prosecutor said, however, that Ms Kingi could not have been aware of the police gathering of other evidence, which included a statement by Haumoana woman Antoinette Cuthill-Coutts that Foreman had told her he had had possession of the murder weapon and that what happened to Mr Nicholas was a ``good job anyway'.
Ms Kingi had made no attempt to claim a reward, Mr Collins said, and she returned to New Zealand to help police by wearing a hidden recording device during a visit to Foreman, whom she had regarded as a good friend.
She feared him less than the burden of keeping her secret. Foreman said he could not remember telling Ms Kingi that he thought he had shot someone.
But Mr Collins said that having first come to police notice just days after the shooting in questioning hunting-licence holders, it was a way of starting to manage the ``nightmare' that had returned.
Mr Collins said the jury should consider his lack of a denial and the friendly response of inviting Ms Kingi back, and compare that with angry responses captured in the bugging of his home and that of friends, in which he talked about wanting to ``slit' Ms Kingi's throat, and claimed he'd told her to get out.
Also in those conversations, Foreman's partner, Lyssa Whatarau, told how she had been reinterviewed by police and been caught out lying about being with Foreman on the morning of the killing.
The Crown said that while the gun used in the shooting had never been found, Foreman had .308 weapons despite denying ever having had guns of that calibre. He had ammunition of the precise .308 150 grain silver-tip Winchester type used, and there was evidence he had had another .308 rifle that was never disclosed to police.
Mr Squire, who was to complete his address today, spent more than an hour focusing on evidence he asserted meant the killer had to have been someone ``close' to Mr Nicholas.
Mr Squire cited the lack of physical evidence at the scene such as footprints and tyre tracks, Mrs Nicholas's evidence of the silence of Jack Nicholas's working dogs on the morning of the shooting, and her husband's lack of any cry in pain or other sounds as evidence that the shooting had to have been done by someone familiar with the property and the farmer's daily routine.
He asked what the jury might make of .308 ammunition which Oliver Nicholas had. He questioned whether Oliver's removal of a diary from his dead father's chest pocket may have been to check it didn't contain information he didn't want police to see, and he suggested Oliver's decisions to go unarmed in search of a killer before help arrived, and to go to tend stock a few hours after realising his father had been murdered were based on knowing there was no longer a danger from a gunman on the loose.
Foreman did not give evidence in the trial, and while Mr Collins did not draw attention to that, he said the court didn't have to find the answer to the question about where the accused was: ``We know where he was.'