Steeped in Blood (29 page)

We were also able to demonstrate that the woman had been on antidepressants as a result of the pressure of her marriage. Indeed, at the time of her husband’s death, she had been tranquillised so heavily by her doctor that she couldn’t have formulated the intention to commit a crime.

In this case, I gathered facts and provided the lawyers with information that they could use in court. This role – one more akin to that of private investigator or police detective than a forensic scientist – is one I often find myself playing. This was one of the quickest court cases I have ever seen: the defendant was acquitted before lunch time.

The bloody hand does not inherit. This was the burning issue in a case that took place about ten years ago, when a husband and wife were found dead in their home. Both had been shot, and it was a
mystery as to who had shot whom. It was the second marriage for both the husband and the wife, and they each had children from their previous marriages. The order in which they died became very important in determining the disposition of the estate – if the wife had pulled the trigger first, her husband’s children would inherit the estate; if the husband had shot his wife first, her children would inherit. South African law states, ‘
de bloedige hand erf niet
’ – the bloody hand cannot inherit from the crime.

From the blood-splash analysis, I was able to determine that the wife had shot her husband first, and had then turned the gun on herself. The case was held before Judge Peter Schutz, and its ending was controversial, with much unhappiness from the deceased wife’s children.

Murder cases involving intimate relations can sometimes leave more questions than answers for me, as happened with the Kobrin matter. This case also highlighted blatant flaws in police procedure, which seems to be a thread running through so many of the cases in which I have been involved.

Raymond Kobrin was a medical doctor who was murdered in the early 1990s. His wife was charged with organising a hit on her husband. I was called in by her defence team to assist with the investigation.

Janet and Raymond lived in Bedfordview, Johannesburg, and had several children. Raymond ran a successful GP practice in Benoni, after having trained at the University of Pretoria – in fact, he and I had been at school together. Strangely, he seemed to have all sorts of contacts outside the world of medicine that were both disturbing and unusual. There were rumours of connections with military intelligence, and these ghosts seemed to haunt the investigation from time to time, although they were never fully explored.

The Kobrin marriage was far from happy, and Raymond was not the faithful husband he should have been. At the time of his death, he had a girlfriend, whom he stayed with on occasion. It was a stressful time, and there was talk of divorce.

One afternoon, Janet and the children went out to a movie and the family’s staff had the afternoon off. Raymond came to the house, the reason for which was never quite clear – perhaps he was there to fetch some clothes or talk to the family. He suddenly disappeared. When his girlfriend didn’t hear from him, she became worried and frantically started calling around. These were pre-cellphone days, and Raymond, being a doctor, carried a pager. She called the paging company and left a message for him to call her.

Two and a half weeks later, someone noticed a nasty smell coming from a car parked at the airport. When the locks were forced open, they found Raymond’s body in an advanced state of decomposition, with a single small-calibre bullet hole in the back of his head.

Janet Kobrin was the main suspect. The police investigated, and I was appointed by Janet Kobrin’s attorney, Graham Edwards, to conduct a forensic investigation. I went to the house in Bedfordview and was met by Warrant Officer Holmes, the investigating officer. I still recall thinking that he was like Sherlock Holmes, but he turned out to be anything but. I put my hand out to greet him and he ignored it, asking me, ‘Who are you?’

I introduced myself. ‘I have heard of you,’ he replied, saying that he had learnt of me while at police college. I asked what they had said, and he answered, ‘They told me that if that guy comes to your crime scene, you tell him fuck all!’ I saw this as one of the few genuine compliments about my abilities from the police!

I started investigating the case. Raymond’s girlfriend provided one of the key pieces of information: she had called Janet in the late afternoon of the day that Raymond had disappeared to ask her if she knew where he was. Just before she called Janet, she paged Raymond. A distinctive ‘bleeping’ sound was made every time a message came through. The girlfriend swore blind that she heard the ‘bleep’ as she was talking on the phone to Janet, which meant that Raymond’s pager must have still been there when she phoned.

Janet was adamant that the pager had not been there when the
girlfriend called. Something else must have gone off that sounded similar, I thought. There were blood stains on the carpet, so Raymond had been at the house when he was killed.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to find something that sounded similar to the pager sound that the girlfriend had heard. I tried the alarm clock, the kitchen timers – everything and anything in the house that made a noise.

It subsequently transpired that it
was
Raymond’s pager that had gone off, and that Janet had known that but had let me waste time on a wild-goose chase. I have a very firm belief: if a client lies to me, I withdraw from the case. It is simply too dangerous to get sucked into a potential web of lies. My job is to find the truth using scientific investigation, which is impossible to do if untruths are at play. As a result, I withdrew from the case, yet I continued to follow its progress.

The police did appallingly sloppy work. They tried to get Janet’s son to make a confession by assaulting him while in custody, which led to a court application being made and cast doubt on the police’s abilities. The police, a bunch of hoodlums, thought they could get away with anything: many crimes in those days were solved by a confession, which was often obtained by assaulting the accused or a witness.

A strange aspect to this case was the murder weapon. It was found much later in the incinerator at the nursing home where Raymond worked. Someone found the carbonised remains of a frame of a pistol. Who would have known to hide it there?

At the end of a long case, in which no conclusive evidence came to light, Janet was acquitted on the charge of murder.

Honesty, for me, is always paramount, and its benefit was brought home to me by another case of husband–wife murder. A man had shot his wife. He said that he had found her in the arms of another man and had murdered her in a crime of passion. I was asked to do a reconstruction of the crime scene.

We knew where the cartridge cases had been found – on the right-hand side of the room – and also that an automatic pistol ejects the cartridges in a particular way. The man’s version of the story was completely at odds with the way the crime scene looked, taking into account the trajectories, wounds and other elements of the scene. I told him that his explanation was improbable, and he said, ‘I think I had better tell you the truth.’ He gave me another account, which was much closer to the truth and which was believed in court. He had actually committed cold-blooded murder, but the fact that he opened up in court was an extremely important component in his not receiving the death sentence. Honesty does pay, in the long run.

Poisoning your intimate partner may be seen as a ‘clean’ way of eliminating him or her, and every thirty or forty years arsenic seems to raise its head in popularity. I have had a number of clients approach me over the years on the suspicion that they were being poisoned by their partner. Ninety per cent of the time there are innocent explanations for the symptoms they are experiencing – arsenic produces symptoms very similar to those of gastro-enteritis – but, once in a while, poison is a reality. (In the famous 1932 case of Daisy de Melker, the pathologists were fooled into thinking that her first two husbands had died of gastro-enteritis. It was only when her son died and his body was later exhumed, together with the husbands’ bodies, that traces of arsenic and strychnine were found.)

A few years back, a dentist in Stellenbosch became very ill after eating poisoned chocolates. At around that time, I was visited by a woman who was convinced that her boyfriend was trying to poison her. He had given her a beautiful box of chocolates and had encouraged her to eat them all herself. She became desperately ill afterwards and came to see me.

I took a statement from her and, from what she described, I
suspected that it was a case of arsenic poisoning. I was not sure what I was dealing with here because of arsenic poisoning’s mimicking of gastro-enteritis. This poison is easily identifiable in a person’s hair, so I took hair samples from the woman and analysed them – she was loaded with arsenic! I called her and asked her to come in and see me. I told her my findings, and she looked visibly shocked. She then asked me if I thought she should go back to him. I looked at her in disbelief and said, ‘Madam, that is a no-brainer!’

People do strange things in relationships. One fellow came to see me, suspecting that he was being poisoned. He had seen his girlfriend sprinkling something over his curry one evening and, after he ate it, he fell violently ill. He had managed to get hold of the bottle and brought it with him, wanting to know if the contents were toxic.

One of the problems with analysis of this sort is that there are about four million organic compounds, and a significant number of those are toxic. Many of these substances are used in herbal remedies that are readily available.

There was a minute amount of the substance used by the girlfriend left in the bottle, and I was at a loss as to where to start, so I placed it under a microscope and had a look. In the corner I found a tiny pair of insect wings, so I put the contents back in the bottle and went to see Dr Zumph, a medical entomologist at the South African Institute for Medical Research. He identified it as a wing from the cantharides beetle, otherwise known as the Spanish fly. Among other medical uses, this beetle is ground up and used as an aphrodisiac, but it contains a corrosive substance called cantharidin. The dosage should be minuscule; a harmful dose can cause painful urination, fever and sometimes a bloody discharge. In some cases, it can prove fatal. This man had clearly been given too much of this substance, which caused his illness. Whether his girlfriend had administered it by accident or purposefully, I will never know!

The truth, it has been said, is often stranger than fiction, and I
recall a rather amusing case where a woman came to see me with a problem. She drank Johnnie Walker whisky, and couldn’t understand why the first few drinks always tasted fine, but then started to taste terrible. She suspected that her husband was trying to poison her, and brought the bottle of whisky for me to analyse.

I ran extensive tests and could find nothing. I then heated a small sample and the strong smell of a urinal began to emanate from it. I took a sample and tested it, and I found it to be full of urine! Her husband waited each time until she had had a few drinks, and then urinated in the bottle – probably just to irritate her! I told her that she was unlikely to die.

I see all kinds of people and all manner of things in my practice. The veneer of civilisation drops away so easily; all that is left is the plain truth about people and how they deal with life and relationship problems. Mine has been a varied practice – it has certainly never been boring!

‘There are those state agencies who are so blind to the possibility of innocence that they ignore or withhold evidence consistent with it as irrelevant.’

– GEOFFREY ROBERTSON,

human rights lawyer, author and broadcaster

Around 10 p.m. on the evening of 16 March 2005, the Lotzes received the message that all parents dread: their daughter, Inge, had been found brutally murdered in her flat in Stellenbosch. The tragedy of this beautiful young woman’s death is impossible to quantify. Even more tragic, however, is that the subsequent criminal investigation stands out as one of the worst police investigations
ever
to have taken place in South Africa, leaving her killer roaming free. Whether it was stupidity, dishonesty or a combination of both on the part of the police we will never know for certain, but every mistake that could have been made was made in this case.

Inge’s boyfriend, Fred van der Vyver, was arrested for the murder, and I was called in by his family to investigate on behalf of the defence team.

The story starts with a young couple, Frederik Barend van der Vyver and Inge Lotz, who started dating at Stellenbosch University in 2004. Inge was highly intelligent, making strides through the academic world with her studies towards a master’s degree in mathematics. She had the world at her fingertips: not only was she bright, but she was attractive and likeable.

Fred was also mathematically gifted, having obtained a scholarship to study actuarial science from Old Mutual. He was working for the financial services company at the time of Inge’s murder. It was their common interest in mathematics that had brought Fred and Inge together: they had met through the Department of Mathematics at Stellenbosch, and a relationship had developed between them. Inge’s parents knew Fred well, and the relationship had all the hallmarks of one that could have ended in marriage. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be.