By Shelley Nahr
Ewen Macdonald’s hopes of being freed from prison have been dashed.
A Parole Board hearing this morning found, once again, he was too great a risk to the community to be released.
The former Feilding farmer is serving a five-year jail sentence after admitting crimes including slaughtering calves with a hammer, vandalism and arson.
But Macdonald, 34, consistently denied a more serious charge, the shotgun murder of his brother-in-law, Fielding farmer Scott Guy in July 2010. He was acquitted in 2012 after a five-week trial. No-one has been convicted of the killing.
Today Macdonald’s parents were with him as he made his third bid for parole. They were visibly upset and shaken by the decision
At his last two parole hearings, Macdonald was found to have a "significant personality disturbance" and to display narcissistic traits.
A forensic psychiatric told those hearings that if Macdonald found himself in situations involving revenge, entitlement, perceived injustice, and envy, he would continue to pose a significant risk of reoffending.
An updated report to today’s hearing said Macdonald had still not addressed the personality traits that led him to offend.
Macdonald has regularly spent the past three weeks working out of Rolleston prison in an unnamed industry and returning to jail at night.
He wore jandals, denim shorts and a grey t-shirt as he offered two conditions to the parole board that he would agree to if he were to be released. He suggested that he could be GPS monitored to “alleviate the fears of his victims and the public” and also that he be barred from speaking to any media.
But despite being described as a model prisoner and his Corrections officer saying he had no qualms about Macdonald being released, the board decided against it. The hearing last fifty minutes and the board took a further 10 minutes to make its call.
Macdonald has been in custody since he was arrested in April 2011 for Guy’s murder.
The pair each managed aspects of the Guy family farm in Feilding but the murder trial heard evidence they had a strained relationship.
Macdonald admitted premeditated attacks in which he - with a co-offender - extensively vandalised the home Scott Guy and his wife Kylee were building on the farm, scrawling crude messages on the building's exterior.
In sentencing Macdonald, Justice France said the axe attack on the home and the arson of an old farmhouse on Scott and Kylee’s property were “targeted, cruel act(s), motivated … by the desire to hurt.”
Kylee Guy, who was pregnant with her second son at the time of her husband’s murder, opposed Macdonald’s bail.
Macdonald also committed premeditated acts of revenge against neighbouring farmers such as bludgeoning their calves to death, setting an historic whare alight, and also deliberately spilling thousands of litres of milk.
Macdonald’s former wife Anna Guy stood by him throughout the five week trial in which he was accused of shooting her brother, but has since moved to Auckland taking their four children. She now has a new partner and a baby daughter.
She reportedly wants little contact with her ex-husband.
RadioLIVE
source: newshub archive
