It is little wonder human drama and murder mysteries are so popular in books and on television. Readers and viewers are appalled, intrigued and challenged. Death is so final, relationships so tangled and the unknown so tantalising. How much more compelling, therefore, when it is all so real - as in the violent slaying of Scott Guy at 5am in his Feilding driveway almost two years ago.
This was the killing not of someone "from the wrong side of the tracks" or from a milieu of violence; just a likeable dairy farmer and family man from middle New Zealand. The district and, by proxy in our intimate land, the nation, was bewildered.
How could something like that occur? Was there a connection with violent crime, with drugs? Are people safe in their own homes?
Then came the shock that the police believed their man was Mr Guy's brother-in-law Ewen Macdonald. Festering family resentment lay, they claimed, behind the shooting, and the case took on aspects of a Cain and Abel-like Biblical tragedy. The stage was set for a murder trial that seized public attention day after day. The hearing and the speculation surrounding the matter are such that it is already likely to go down in public consciousness like the sagas of David Bain, Arthur Allan Thomas, Scott Watson or Mark Lundy.
The police interview video, where Mr Macdonald first denied and then admitted burning and vandalising Guy houses, and where he admitted poaching two of a neighbour's trophy stags, seemed compelling. But an arsonist is not necessarily a killer. The defence sowed doubt about dive boots and gunshots and other issues. The public saw a skilled defender in action, and the jury deliberated for 10 hours over two days, coming back to find, unanimously, Mr Macdonald not guilty.
While the court of popular opinion will hold differing views, and while case coverage was comprehensive, it was only the jurors and others in court for the full trial who sat through all the evidence, minute-by-minute.
Only they could see, hear and feel the nuances and follow all the twists and turns. It is jurors that this country's legal system charges with delivering a verdict.
A trial like this, featured in newspapers and on television each day, gives everyone a thorough opportunity to see our justice system in action. Open courts, highlighted by an occasional high-profile trial, should increase confidence in justice. We learned the prosecution argues that circumstantial evidence threaded together makes a rope strong enough to convict, and the defence aims to fray those strands. We can be assured that our system, at least in this instance, does not convict if there is reasonable doubt. We can know, as also in the recent George Gwase case in Christchurch - where the defendant was acquitted of raping and murdering his niece - that the prosecution bringing a serious charge is still a long way short of a guilty result.
Judge-and-jury trials go back centuries into English common law. Naturally, they have their weaknesses. By involving lay people in the heart of justice, however, they prevent the law becoming solely the realm of the elite and from being cut off from the experiences of "ordinary" people. When defendants are everyday citizens, like Ewen Macdonald, that is important. He, and we, are tried by "our peers".
Everyone who has followed the trial must feel for the victims and their agonies; the wife who lost her husband, the parents who lost their son, the two children who will grow up without their father, the sister who lost her brother and appears now to be estranged from her husband, the four Macdonald children whose family is split and whose father now may face more jail time for arson and other offences.
And who could not be impressed by the courage and calm of Scott Guy's parents, Bryan and Joanne Guy, when Mr Guy made his public statement on Tuesday night about facing the future?
Hopefully, empathy plays a major part in the huge interest in these proceedings, rather than just a fascination with "whodunnits" or a ghoulish attraction to tragedy.
