Courage Amidst Adversity

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.

"I'm a gut-instinct person and I think Tony
got us," she says. "But I wondered whether
I should hand over my journals because it
bared my inner-most soul."
She would write every morning of the loss
of her son and when Ewan Macdonald was
arrested she poured her heart onto the page:
"Ewen must have been sick in the head.
How could he not have thought of his
beautiful wife, our Anna, and their four
special children? Their whole lives turned
upside down and ours along with them.
"Two absolutely beautiful girls, Anna and
Kylee, without husbands and left with
beautiful children faced with things they never
should even have dreamt of experiencing.
Ewen has changed so many lives for ever."
The book reflects Bryan and Jo Guy's
editorial input and both say it was a
cathartic exercise. As the strap line states,
this is also a story of courage.
"In a homicide nothing is sacred, everything
is delved into," says Bryan. "There is so
much in our lives the media didn't know
about and so many things happened in our
marriage way before Scott was killed that
if we hadn't made certain choices 20 years
ago we wouldn't have survived this."
The retelling of the manifold aspects
associated with this murder could easily
have become a relentless misery memory
but Farrington's maturity and experience
as a writer is evident as he deftly weaves
a cohesive and absorbing narrative
throughout. Indeed, there are times within
these pages when the coping skills of
Mr and Mrs Guy is inspiring. Neither the
Guys nor Farrington point to a culprit
but leave readers to draw their own
conclusions.