A detective has told a jury he and a police photographer inspected footwear at the home of the man accused of killing Feilding farmer Scott Guy.
Ewen Macdonald is on trial at the High Court in Wellington charged with murdering his 31-year-old brother-in-law on 8 July 2010 over what the Crown says were rivalries over the running of the family farm.
The defence says while Mr Macdonald acknowledged that he had damaged property belonging to Scott Guy and his wife Kylee, that does not make him a murderer.
Detective Graeme Parsons told the court on Thursday he spoke to Mr Macdonald by telephone and arranged to visit his address to view various items of footwear, including the boots he was wearing on the morning Scott Guy was shot dead.
Mr Parsons said he told Mr Macdonald that investigators also wanted to look at other footwear at his home to eliminate various marks found at the crime scene.
He said the accused told him the gumboots he had worn on the morning of the killing were with Mr Guy's father, Bryan Guy, but he had smaller ones available with the same tread pattern.
The detective said Anna and Ewen Macdonald brought 15 pairs of footwear to the front door which were photographed.
Graffiti photos led to break-through, court told
The jury was told the release of photos of graffiti painted on Scott and Kylee Guy's home led to a break-through in the murder investigation.
Detective Sergeant David Thompson told the court on Thursday that by late 2010, the amount of information about the inquiry was declining and that led to a decision early last year to release pictures of graffiti on the couple's new house via the media.
The court was told information then came in which led police to look more closely at the relationship between Ewen Macdonald and a man who admitted joining in on the vandalism on the Guy home.
Mr Thompson said 11 burglaries were also solved as a result of the murder inquiry, but some burglaries near the Guy house remained unsolved.
Pair eliminated from inquiry
The court was told two cars near the Guy farm around the time of the shooting have never been found.
Detective Seargeant David Thompson said two men who had been on the suspect list were eliminated from the inquiry. It turned out that around the time Mr Guy was killed they were returning an item they had taken while burgling a house in Palmerston North.
The detective said that item was an urn containing the ashes of a dead child.
Mr Thompson said a scruffy man who turned up at a neighbour's house looking for Scott Guy in the days before he was killed has also never been found.
