Who Killed Scott Guy? by Mike White Page B

but mentioned he had 160 folders of disclosure from the police about Scott Guy’s murder needing punching and filing that would take him a week, if he was interested. Collins did it in two days and so impressed King he was asked to stay.
    Ewen Macdonald’s defence was Collins’ first real trial, and King gave him the enormous task of going through all the police evidence and collating it. But more than that, Collins had to understand it, work out how it fitted together, compare witness statements and see how they differed from each other. He read and absorbed details tirelessly, working 13 hours or more most days, including weekends. Despite his inexperience, 26-year-old Collins became the defence’s reservoir of knowledge about the case.
    But ordering and understanding the case was severely hampered by how the police had presented their material to the defence. As well as the hard-copy paper files, the Crown had given the defence several CDs containing electronic copies of all documents. These, however, were in a pdf format that couldn’t be searched or even, initially, printed. In a case with so many witnesses and so much detail, not to be able to carry out a search for a word or name or topic across all the disclosure was a huge impediment.
    On 12 March 2012, King asked Crown prosecutor Ben Vanderkolk for a copy of the entire police file—not just the initial disclosure of material until Macdonald’s arrest—and also asked for help with searching software. Three weeks later he repeated the request. Vanderkolk replied that they had provided what was required, and normal Adobe software would search the files they’d provided—‘I remain of the view that there is no obligation to provide you with the Insys [sic] search engine or any other search engine’—and added they would continue to provide disclosure in paper and pdf form.
    King and Coles had employed licensed investigator Paul Bass from Whanganui to help them with inquiries and sorting the police disclosure. Bass was a former cop who’d risen to acting detective sergeant and been at the 1990 Aramoana siege where David Gray killed 13 people, but had left the force in 1996. Since becoming an investigator in 1997, he’d worked on many cases, including the defence of Mark Lundy, who was accused of murdering his wife and daughter in Palmerston North in 2000.
    Bass knew that Adobe software couldn’t search the files the police had given them and became increasingly frustrated at his inability to cross-reference material. While the defence could search within a page, they couldn’t search across the entire file—and there were more than 60,000 pages. He paid $700 for software that supposedly converted pdfs to searchable format but after nearly 50 hours had only managed to convert 20 per cent of the disclosure, and even that was incomplete.
    On 26 April, Bass was at the end of his tether and wrote an angry email to Peter Coles saying that while police had a fully searchable electronic format, the defence had the equivalent of a whole lot of photocopies put onto a CD: ‘No disrespect, guys, but frankly I am over this one!’ Bass said the unfairness of the situation had to be brought to the judge’s attention and the trial needed to be delayed. ‘The police and Crown have shown a clear bias [against] the defence and have not provided disclosure impartially.’
    In the following week Peter Coles wrote to Ben Vanderkolk twice, asking for assistance with searching material and for other crucial material that was missing from the police files. Greg King, halfway through his American study tour, was alerted to the problems and also emailed Vanderkolk. ‘Unless a searchable electronic version of disclosure is provided immediately I will have no option but to file an application for an adjournment of the trial date,’ he wrote. ‘This is obviously a last resort but we are facing an insurmountable hurdle trying to manually manage disclosure with the changes to