A long-time family friend of farmer Jack Nicholas fired three shots in a reconstruction of the farmer's killing almost four years ago, a High Court trial was told in Napier yesterday.
Senior Constable Craig Skeet, the sole-charge policeman at Bay View on State Highway 2 north of Napier,grew up on a farm near Makahu, the Kaweka Ranges foothills block broken in and developed by Mr Nicholas.
And it was there that he did his role-play, firing three .308 rounds into the ground on September 22, 2004, four weeks after the killing.
He told the court how he first removed his boots and crept up a gravel drive in his socks to fire the shots from beside a post about 40m metres from where Mr Nicholas died, and then returned to his vehicle and drove from the remote area to Napier.
The dawn walk up the hill without boots was intended to see if it could be done without alarming the farmer's dogs, which Mr Nicholas' wife, Agnes, did not bark before the shooting.
They also did not bark during the reconstruction, Mr Skeet said.
His method of departure was done to try to establish how the offender could have left the farm and the area, without detection, the times it would have taken to pass the homes of various residents in the area, and the time it could have taken the killer to get back to Napier.
Mr Skeet was giving evidence on the seventh day of the trial of 51-year-old Murray Kenneth Foreman, who was living at Haumoana at the time of the shooting.
He denies murdering 71-year-old Mr Nicholas, or being in the Makahu area at the time.
The officer, an experienced search and rescue tracker, told the court that having known the Nicholas family most of his life, it was often him to whom the family turned first when there were problems on the farm.
About 7.25am on the morning of the shooting he was phoned at home by the farmer's son, Oliver Nicholas, who was also at Makahu, and was told Jack Nicholas had been shot and had died.
