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Farm Jack A jury which tomorrow starts deliberating if Hawke's Bay farmer Jack Nicholas was gunned-down by an angry solo dad from 80km away, faces a defence proposition it was much closer to home - the farmer's own son. The finger was pointed at the High Court in Napier today by Bruce Squire QC, counsel for Murray Kenneth Foreman, 51, who pleads not guilty to a charge of murder. Foreman, an experienced hunter who lived at Haumoana, on the coast between Napier and Cape Kidnappers, denies being the person who shot 71-year-old Mr Nicholas just before 6.30am on August 27, 2004, at Makahu Farm, about an hour's drive inland into the foothills of the Kaweka Ranges. It came in his closing address, after a three-hour closing by crown prosecutor Russell Collins in a trial before Justice Simon France and a jury of eight women and four men. The prosecution focuses on claims by Donna Kingi who says Foreman arrived home in his car on the morning of the shooting and told her over their garden fence he thought he had shot someone, and that he later left to get rid of a gun. She also says that about a fortnight earlier Foreman took son Che for a trip into the hills, but returned early angered that a farmer had stopped them from crossing the land. Having moved to Australia about a month after the shooting, Ms Kingi's claims were first revealed in an e-mail to Sensible Sentencing Trust national spokesman Garth McVicar in November 2005, and Foreman was not arrested until April 2006. Among 40 people filling a small public gallery today were defence target Oliver Nicholas and widowed mother Agnes, whom Mr Squire suggested was "covering-up" for someone, when she was the third of more than 110 witnesses in the six weeks since the first evidence was given on April 14. Mr Squire, who will complete his address in the morning, spent about 1hr 20min focusing on evidence he asserted meant the killer had to have been someone "close" to Mr Nicholas. Largely avoiding the use of a name, he said the jury might consider that Oliver Nicholas, who lives on the farm with his wife and two children, was about the only option. Mr Squire cited the lack of physical evidence at the scene such as footprints and tyre tracks, Mrs Nicholas's evidence of the silence of Jack Nicholas's working dogs on the morning of the shooting, and her husband's lack of any cry in pain or other sounds as evidence that the shooting had to have been done by someone "close" and familiar with the farmer's daily routine. He asked what the jury might make of the presence of .308 ammunition in Oliver Nicholas's home, which had been explained as probably having come from friends whom he had taken hunting. He asked also what the jury might have made of the victim's son's decisions to go unarmed in search of a killer before help arrived, and to go to tend stock just a few hours after realising his father had been murdered. Mr Collins claimed the accused had lied, starting with telling police at the outset he had been home with his son and the boy's mother, when it was obvious the mother had not been there. Mr Collins said the accused lied more and more as the inquiry progressed. Conversely, the expected defence attack on the credibility of Ms Kingi, and claims she had only stepped forward in hope of a reward, would be in the face of numerous evidential factors of which she could not have been aware.