Catching up with...Kimberley White

Kimberley White lived in terror during the trial. Photo / Natalie Slade

One of the enduring images at the murder trial of horseracing identity Greg Meads was that of his stepdaughter Kimberley White shaking violently as she gave evidence.

Meads said in the High Court at Hamilton that he had intended to give his wife, Helen, a fright with a shotgun, a few days after she told him she was leaving him.

But he walked into the garage at their Matamata home, waited for her to finish her phone conversation and shot her at close range in the throat.

When Miss White was called to the stand to answer questions from the Crown and defence during the October trial, she started shaking and her voice started trembling.

"Granddad asked me, 'Are you scared of the questions they will ask of you?'

"I said, 'No, I'm scared of the control he could so easily have over me again."'

Miss White earlier told the Herald how she lived in fear of Meads, who enforced silence at at the dinner table as he watched television.

He would not engage in conversation if the talk was not about himself or his horses.

While her friends were doing the things teenagers do, Miss White was on their Matamata farm working hard and feeling that her every move was being watched.

Her description of Meads as a "cold, controlling and calculated" person was not at odds with the lack of any emotion he showed through the week-long trial.

"I made eye contact with him while I was up there and he looked back at me but there was nothing there, nothing at all," she said.

"When I was looking at him I was thinking, 'You took my mother away, this is your fault'."

Miss White, a trainee teacher at Massey University, lived in terror knowing Meads was at large while awaiting trial, something she still battles to understand.

The Herald learned he had been bailed to a plush beachfront home with a woman understood to be his former wife. He had told a neighbour not to be alarmed if they saw police officers parked in his driveway.

But Miss White was afraid Meads could have turned up at her front door at any time.

"They said he couldn't come within 30km or whatever it was from us but the way he is nothing would have stopped him."

Miss White was about to set sail on an eight-day cruise with family members to New Caledonia, Noumea and the Isle of Pines when the Herald caught up with her.

While the holiday would be a relaxing and tropical affair she was saddened it would be her first without her mum.

Meads' shadow also lingered, she said, with his sentencing delayed until March 31.

"It's disappointing, I would have loved to have got it over with so we could start afresh," she said.

"That's not going to happen, but I have learned that not everything can go your way in life. But at least he's still in jail."

Miss White said Meads had never apologised for what he had done and doubted he ever would.

"It was my birthday on Sunday ... my mum would take the covers off my bed and tickle my feet and say, 'Guess whose birthday it is ?'

"She's not going to do that any more."