Quaint streets are lined with fastidiously maintained flower boxes. With its resolute neatness, the town of Feilding, located on New Zealand's lower North Island, is a study in civic pride. Signs exhort its residents never to drop litter lest it lose its status as the nation's Most Beautiful Town, an award it has won 14 times and looks like it's planning on keeping.

Sitting on a fertile plain, Feilding is a cow town, a hub for the surrounding farming district. It is a polite community that doesn't require traffic lights. Running out from its centre is a long, straight country road. It was on Aorangi Road that the district lost its bucolic innocence.

On July 8, 2010, Scott Guy, 32, rose in the wintry pre-dawn. He made himself a coffee, went online to check Facebook, the news and the weather. At 4.40am, he headed out in his ute to milk the cows. In the pitch dark of the country, he found the gates to his driveway closed and got out to open them; momentarily, he was silhouetted in the car lights. His killer stepped out of the darkness.

When neighbour David Berry found his body next to the ute with its engine still running just after 7am, Guy had been shot in the face, hands and arms at almost point-blank range. The shots not only ripped through the jaw, mouth and eye of Scott Guy, but through the heart of his surviving family.

"Not my baby, not my Scottie!" wailed his devastated mother, Jo, in the disbelieving confusion of the hours that followed the appalling discovery. For the Guy family, that shattered morning was the start of a journey that would only become more painful and surreal as it hurtled towards a foreign terrain of unimagined grief, shifting truths, altered perceptions and betrayal.

"We'd think things couldn't get any worse," says Jo now, "and then, suddenly, [the situation] would flip - and flip again. It was like being tossed around in a washing machine."

The police quickly ascertained that the murder of Scott Guy was "intensely personal". Those driveway gates were only ever closed when stock was being moved. He had been ambushed. But they could find no reason for his brutal end. There was no evidence of any criminal activity in Guy's life - or of a spurned lover. "Scottie was very likeable," says Jo. "He had a lot of friends; he wasn't the sort to tick people off."

Says his sister Anna, now 31, "Scott just had to walk into a room and everybody loved him. He was very outgoing and could make everyone laugh."

Three chocolate Labrador puppies from a litter of eight disappeared from Scott's yard the night he died, leading his father, Bryan, to think he'd disturbed a burglar. "The police very quickly said that wasn't the case," he says, "but that was always my theory [at the beginning]." The puppies were never found.

Photographs of Scott Guy show a handsome, muscular, blue-eyed boy who was full of life. In television footage of national stunt-riding competitions, he can be seen riding a Palomino through flaming jumps. He left behind a two-year-old son, Hunter, and a beautiful wife, Kylee, who was seven months pregnant. A thousand people attended his funeral at Feilding's St John's Anglican Church on July 16, 2010, the winter trees stark against the blue hills.

Suddenly, the Guy family, used to the gentle, unchanging rhythms of life on a dairy farm, found itself blinking in the glare of a huge murder investigation. The seemingly inexplicable murder of a farm boy resonated deeply in this agricultural community. And the media soon discovered something else: they might just be country people, but the photogenic Guy family had charisma.

"We were grief-stricken, trying to understand what was going on and organising a funeral," says Jo. "Then we had the media knocking on the door all the time. Hundreds of people came into the house. I counted 70 one day and remember thinking, 'Who are these people?' "

As events unfolded, the saga started to resemble, noted one journalist, "reality TV without the prizes". Bryan modelled a dignity and fortitude in extremis that captivated the nation. On one occasion, he came straight from viewing his dead child's body to make a television appeal. Holding his weeping wife, he told the country, "You've got to hug your kids, your husband, your wife, your girlfriend."

The Guy family has been farming its 250-hectare property, Byreburn, since the 1920s. It is exceptionally close-knit, with all four of Jo and Bryan's four children - Nikki, Scott, Anna and Callum - either living on the property or very close by at the time of the tragedy.

As a girl, Anna, an attractive blonde, was a natural performer who appeared regularly in school plays and musicals. Her boyfriend, from the age of 15, was local boy Ewen Macdonald, whose father owns a hunting store in Feilding. Few people knew that she battled bulimia during her teenage years. "I was very sick, so I think I isolated myself from my friends and Ewen was that constant person there, so I relied on him a lot," she tells me. He was, she says, "solid and stable and always knew what he wanted to be - a dairy farmer".

Macdonald was drawn to the golden family. He loved the reassuring rhythms of its home life, with church and roast lunch on Sundays. From the age of 18, he worked tirelessly on the farm alongside Bryan, whom he adored. He was known in the district to be obsessed with farming.

In November 2001, when she was just 20, Anna married Ewen and had four children in quick succession: Finn when she was 22, Jack at 23, Lucy at 25 and then Wade at 27. "I just threw myself into it," she says. "The kids were my life. I didn't sleep a lot for a few years."

Nevertheless, Ewen Macdonald expected her to keep their house tidy at all times and for the children to be bathed and in their pyjamas when he came in from work. "I knew he was quite controlling," she tells me, "but I'm not quite the type to do what someone tells me to do, so we clashed a little bit there. He did it in a roundabout way. He'd make little digs when he came home, like, 'What have you been doing all day? The place is a tip.' He didn't drink. He didn't have any friends; his friends were my girlfriends' husbands."

New Zealand's 60 Minutes journalist Sarah Hall interviewed the family one month after Scott Guy's death when their grief was still very raw. "I remember thinking, 'Why is this woman married to him [Macdonald]?' " says Hall. "Anna is so charismatic, vivacious and joyful: he was very quiet and reserved. He clearly didn't want us to be there or to go on camera. He just watched us. He was a kind of periphery figure. It struck me that something wasn't right. Anna says now, looking back, he didn't want to go and see [Scott's] body when everybody else was going and she had to force him to be a pallbearer at the funeral. Afterwards, I got into the car and said to my producer and cameraman, 'The brother-in-law did it.' "

At one point during the 60 Minutes program, Anna tearfully says to camera: "[Whoever did this] how can they sleep at night?" Scott's wife, Kylee, terrified by the fact that her husband's murderer was still at large, fled to her family at Hawkes Bay, leaving empty the brand new dream house she and Scott had built together on the property. She has never returned.

"It was the why and the who," recalls Hall. "I remember Anna saying to me, 'Are one of us going to be next?' " No one knew that the prime suspect was among them, eating at their table or sleeping in one of their beds.

Back in 2002, Scott, disenchanted with the early-morning milking, had left the farm and spent a year working as a jackaroo in the Australian outback. Returning to New Zealand a year later, he went to Hawkes Bay and worked on a beef farm for about nine months; he and Kylee met at a rodeo. "From the moment we met, we just couldn't be apart," she later told the jury at the trial of her husband's alleged murderer. "I just loved him to bits and he loved me. He was one in a million."

When the job on the beef farm finished, his father talked him into coming home. "He still didn't want to milk the cows, so we said he could run the cropping and the young stock, rearing the calves," says Bryan. Macdonald would manage the staff and day-to-day management of the dairy shed. "We thought that if we separated the roles enough, then he and Ewen could be their own bosses in their own areas."

Friction among farming families is commonplace; the countryside is full of the disgruntled descendants of those who have lost the battles for the family property. Those who do not inherit are doomed to work for those who do.

Bryan Guy tried to deal with the fraught business of succession as fairly as he could. As part of the process of preparing to hand it over to the next generation, four years ago he and Jo bought the lovely, light-filled wooden house in town where we meet. They had sold the homestead on the farm to Anna and Ewen for an interest-free $250,000 loan. This was much less than it was worth and the move infuriated Scott. "They were helping Anna and Ewen when we were struggling," Kylee later told the court. (Scott and Kylee were living in a rented cottage on the property.)

Bryan organised for both couples - Scott and Kylee, Anna and Ewen - to each purchase a 10 per cent share of the business (the farm and dairy). He and Jo would retain 80 per cent of the shareholding. "We said to the kids that there was an opportunity to be involved in the farm if they wanted it, and that if we all worked together, we would be able to have a better business than each of us working separately," Bryan tells me. "We were aware that there could be possible tensions and went to quite a bit of trouble to make sure everybody talked about what the issues were.

"We got a facilitator in to help us go through people's expectations for the future. We also talked about exit clauses so that if one party wasn't happy, the opportunity was there to exit from the business. We hadn't decided on future share purchases at the time of Scott's death but, at some stage, Scott and Kylee and Anna and Ewen would likely buy another 10 per cent each, leaving Jo and me with 60 per cent."

Bryan structured the trust funds in such a way that if either of his children divorced, their former spouses would have no claim on the farm.

Scott's sudden return after a long absence caused simmering tensions to surface. "Ewen couldn't stand Kylee," says Hall. "He thought she was a princess." Ewen complained to Anna that he worked far harder than Scott, that it wasn't a fair partnership.

Anna remembers stressful exchanges with her husband. "He'd say, 'First Scott's on the farm, then he's not, then he wants a house and then he wants this and he wants that.' I told him to talk to Scottie or Dad. He'd say, "It's your dad's farm, he can run it how he wants to. It's not my place to say.' Ewen was such a perfectionist and Scottie was so laid-back and cruisy that it got on his nerves."

One night at a concert, after he'd had too much to drink, Scott told his sister, Nikki, that Ewen was "the worst thing that ever happened to our family; the farm would be better if he wasn't there".

In June 2008, Scott informed his family at a gathering that, as the oldest son, he should inherit the farm when Bryan died. His siblings were shocked by his outburst and blamed Kylee for it. His father wasted no time in telling him that this wasn't going to happen: each of them had to work, make a contribution to the business, in order to have a share in the farm. After all, he, Bryan, had had to earn his share when he entered a 50:50 partnership with his own father. Nothing was ever going to be "just inherited".

Scott Guy's assertion that night, the Crown would later tell the court, had been his "death warrant". Says Jo now, sadly, "I thought we'd sorted it all out."

Ewen rarely spoke at the family meetings. Four months later, in October, the old home belonging to Scott and Kylee that was being moved off the property to make way for their new one was torched in the night and burned to the ground. In January 2009, their new one was vandalised. Doors, windows and water pipes were shattered and the walls in every room punctured. Painted on the walls were the words, "FUKEN BITCH SLAPPR". The strength and ferocity of the attack was horrifying.

Soon after, a hunting lodge on a neighbouring farm was burned to the ground. In September 2009, Ewen "went crook" at Scott at a family meal at the Elm Cafe in Palmerston North, saying he was sick of him not pulling his weight. Scott felt that Ewen was "taking over the farm", according to his younger brother, Callum.

After this, says Anna, Ewen changed. He took a silk tree and hydrangea clippings to Scott and Kylee for their garden, helped them with some landscaping and made a montage of photos for them. "All of a sudden he became quite nice and was doing things with Scott and Kylee and doing heaps up at the school with Jack and Finn and I thought, 'Okay, he's obviously realised he can't just sulk and not talk about things,' " says Anna.

"A lot of our arguments were about communication. I'd say, 'You have to talk to me,' and he would just go quiet. It was kind of a love-hate relationship. We were more like flatmates, really."

In June 2010, Scott and Ewen went to a conference in Invercargill, at the bottom of the South Island. They shared a motel room, ate pizza together and came back excited for the future of the farm. But their visions for the future were very different. Scott wanted to subdivide the land and create a recreational lake for wave-boarding. Ewen, on the other hand, was interested in farming technology that would increase production and save costs.

That same month, Anna and Ewen went on holiday to Fiji. "It was good, we had fun," she remembers. "Now I look back and think I didn't know the real person I was there with."

On July 8, 2010, the day that Scott Guy died, Ewen Macdonald, who was in charge of staffing, had rostered Scott on to oversee the early-morning milking, a chore his brother-in-law hated. That night, the family were due to attend a dinner because the farm had been awarded two milk-quality awards. Scott had excitedly bought new clothes: it was a rare night out for a young father. Ewen said he wouldn't go, but didn't say why.

In the months after the tragedy, Anna became wrapped up in her children and her heartbroken parents. "Mum was a mess for about six months," she says. With hundreds of cows to milk every day and without Scott to help, Ewen worked even harder on the farm. Nobody noticed anything different about him. "I ate with the kids and we just lived separate lives," says Anna. "We didn't spend any time together, not even to eat a meal or watch a movie."

On April 7, 2011, nine months after his death, Ewen Macdonald was arrested and charged with the murder of Scott Guy. With all leads exhausted, the police were confident that if they could identify the property vandals, they would have their murderer.

And Callum Boe, a young farm hand at Byreburn, had made a confession. At night, when Anna was sleeping, he and Macdonald had gone out on "missions". They were the deer poachers who'd shot two $20,000 trophy stags on a nearby farm. They'd slaughtered 19 calves using a hammer on another neighbour's farm. They'd gone onto another neighbour's property and emptied a milk vat of 16,000 litres of milk, worth tens of thousands of dollars. But Boe had been elsewhere in the early hours of the morning of July 8.

For five hours, Macdonald denied all involvement with the animal slaughters and property vandalism - before finally admitting his guilt to police. "He couldn't believe that Callum Boe dobbed him in," says Anna. The police interview footage shows him sweating, spluttering, asking for water. Finally, he says pitifully, "I'm not going home tonight, am I?" He hasn't been home since.He denied the murder, however, saying, "I am not that psycho", and continues to deny it.

Ewen Macdonald had been a part of the Guy family for 10 years. When he was arrested for the murder of their son and brother, its members were left reeling in disbelief. Six days after her husband's arrest for the murder of her brother, Anna Guy consented to an interview with Sarah Hall. "She was absolutely shocked to the core," says Hall. "She was scared she was going to break down in the interview. She just couldn't believe that it could be possible. It wasn't just the murder charge; by now, Ewen had admitted his involvement in the other charges [the property vandalism and animal slaughter]."

Anna was falling apart. Torn between the vestiges of love and revulsion she felt for the man she'd married, she was making herself sick. Had she really spent the past 10 years sleeping with a murderer? "I thought the police must have got it wrong," she tells me. "I could understand you might do damage to property; if you're really angry, you probably could do that. But actually hurting anyone or killing someone, that was just too extreme. I didn't marry that person. I didn't know that type of person. I wouldn't have thought I'd choose that type of person. You have history, you've had children. I kind of felt physically sick about it the whole time. I blamed myself for a while.

"The thing I can't understand is that he never raised a hand to the kids or me. I never saw him treat animals badly or hit them or yell at them. It was very hard to understand. He promised he hadn't killed Scott. But the trust was gone."

She had to tell her children that their father had been taken accused of the murder of their uncle. Finn, her oldest child, was just seven.

Anna, who is not divorced but has changed her surname back to Guy, was left without a provider when Ewen went to prison and had to sell the homestead back to her parents. Then, 13 shell-shocked months later, the family faced the most publicised trial the country has ever seen. "They were good-looking white people," said Ewen's high-profile barrister, Greg King, by way of explanation in a TV interview. It was a Shakespearean storyline: a seemingly mild, gentle pillar of the community, on the board of the school trustees, on trial for the murder of his brother-in-law.

The Guy family's lives were dissected in minute detail for a public who fed off every morsel. Their business became New Zealand's business. "We couldn't get over at the trial how [the media interest] took on a life of its own," says Bryan. "It was like being in somebody else's movie. There were never going to be any winners, no matter what happened at the trial. It was not going to bring Scott back."

At the trial, the defence presented evidence that, in the days before his death, Scott had been concerned enough about a white sedan on the other side of the river to call the police. A neighbour said a rough-looking person stinking of alcohol had turned up at his house wanting to know if Scott Guy lived there. He'd felt sufficiently alarmed not to pass on the correct address.

As well, a cigarette had been found at the scene of the crime of the same type - Winfield Gold - that had been stolen in a burglary four days earlier by a man who - when arrested later - was also in possession of semi-automatic shotguns, methamphetamine and other assorted drugs. The man's only alibi for the possible murder of Scott Guy was a meth addict who'd once threatened to kill police.

Then there was Simon Asplin, a farm worker who held a long-standing grudge against Scott dating back to their school days and who'd lost his tractor-driving job on the farm when Scott returned after his hiatus in Australia. "He's pissed a lot of people off," testified Asplin.

It was a cliffhanger trial. Macdonald had, says Sarah Hall, "the best defence lawyer in the country by far, and he did an incredibly good job". Greg King's ringing rhetoric was beamed into New Zealand homes every night to riveted viewers. "The summing up was so good," says Hall, "that the prosecutor went and shook his hand at the end of it. It was a Shakespearean tour de force. The jury was captivated." (King was later found dead beside his car in Wellington on November 3 in a suspected suicide.)

The prosecution's evidence, on the other hand, was largely circumstantial. The gun was never found and a boot print at the scene could not conclusively be proven to be Macdonald's.

Knowing he'd have to face the media straight after the trial, Bryan had written three statements: one for a guilty verdict, another for a not-guilty verdict and a third for no verdict. He and Anna had decided that whatever the jury came back with, they would accept it. Anna could barely breathe.

On July 3, 2012, Macdonald was acquitted of the murder of his wife's brother. The jury believed there was room for reasonable doubt. Emotionless throughout the trial, Macdonald burst into tears as Kylee ran from the court, shouting, "He killed my husband."

In September, Macdonald was sentenced to five years for arson and vandalism, 17 months of which he had already served. Kylee is now working with the Sensible Sentencing Trust to have the case re-examined. The police have told the family that there are, currently, no other suspects, but will reopen the case if new evidence comes to light.

There has been a verdict, but no sense of closure for the Guy family. "Anna genuinely doesn't know whether Ewen did it or not," says Hall, who has become her close friend. "She has been through hell. But what she is saying is that she doesn't want this to be the one moment in her life that affects the next 30 years."

"Until you go through adversity, you don't know how you'll cope," says Bryan, whom Sarah Hall and her producer have affectionately dubbed the Dalai Lama of Feilding. "One of the things we didn't want to be is angry and bitter. We read books about how your emotional state affects your physical health. We don't want to be getting crook. To keep healthy, we've got to keep in a good state of mind. Anna has to get on with life. If she holds that resentment in her heart, it will destroy her and the kids. It's a pretty big incentive."

Says Anna: "I hate feeling cross or sad or angry or anything like that. I don't want to live like that. I want my children to have a happy childhood." She now believes Ewen to be "a bit of an unusual personality. He definitely wanted to be a great farmer, but it just turned into this huge competition. I don't think Scott even knew he was in the competition. Once you're in it, you're kind of stuck in it and that's all you think about. He was so tired, he was kind of just spiralling out of control. [Ewen] was making out that he could cope and I thought he could - but obviously he couldn't."

Incredibly, during all of this, a star was born. Anna was so compelling on TV that offers to work in media are coming her way, and she is working on local radio. There will almost certainly be an interesting second act for the homebody housewife from Feilding.

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