In 2010 in the early hours of a cold midwinter's day in the Manawatu, 31-year-old Scott Guy was brutally murdered by a shotgun blast that sent 260 pellets ripping through his body. Just two months later his widow, Kylee, gave birth to their second son.
It took nine months for
the police to make an arrest and when they did it shocked a nation. Ewen Macdonald, husband to Scott's sister Anna, son-in-law to Bryan and Jo Guy and a partner in the family farm, was charged with murder and other offences.
If these traumatic events were sufficient, it
wasn't to end there for the Guy Family of
Feilding. In just three years since the murder
Scott's grandfather Grahame passed away;
his cousin, AndrewMarshall, was murdered
in Western Australia; Ewen Macdonald
was acquitted on the murder charge but
sentenced for other crimes as his wife,
Anna, announced she was finishing their
relationship; Greg King, the lawyer who
successfully defended Macdonald on the
murder charge was found dead in a street
overlooking Wellington Harbour.
How much can one family cope with? In
a new book entitled simply Scott Guy,
Bryan and Jo Guy (Scott's parents)
chronicle this multifaceted real-life story
in extremis. What's remarkable is not so
much the catalogue of convulsive events
the book examines, even though each in
isolation could bend the brave, but the
sheer openness of opinions expressed
on the page at a time when it would have
been easier to run for the hills and hide
in a hole.
Kerikeri author, Tony Farrington, seems
to have been offered extraordinary
access to the thoughts and feelings of
this couple who overnight grappled with
the emotional complexities of one of their
own being murdered by one of their own,
an exhaustive police investigation and the
relentless attention of the country's press.
Jo Guy gave the author the intimate journal
she started a day after her son's murder
and which not even her husband has read.
