Steeped in Blood (30 page)

With a staunch Dutch Reformed background, Fred was a highly religious person. He was an active member of His People Christian Church, a charismatic church with a strong belief that the Bible is the undiluted word of God, and he took his religion seriously, living his life accordingly. I was led to understand that he never had a conventional sexual relationship with Inge in the form of full penetrative sexual intercourse, but that there had been significant petting between them.

Like any couple, Fred and Inge had their ups and downs. It appeared that, prior to Inge’s murder, there had been some kind of lover’s tiff between them: Inge had written a letter to Fred in which she apologised for the argument, yet they appear to have parted amicably on the morning of the fateful day on which Inge was killed. Fred left her flat that day and proceeded to a second-hand furniture shop to purchase a bookshelf for a friend. Since Fred drove a light pick-up van, he was able to transport the bookshelf, and he was going to deliver it to his friend later.

Unaware of the horrific events that would ensue, Fred then
drove to work in Pinelands, where he clocked in at Old Mutual at 11.05 a.m. The advanced access-control system – the only way to enter or exit the building – monitors staff’s photographs as they move through the turnstiles: these records proved that Fred was in the Old Mutual building from the late morning onwards. He was in meetings for the rest of the day, finishing somewhere between 5 p.m. and 5.10 p.m. Fred then logged on to his computer at 5.14 p.m., and technical evidence indicated that he sent and read emails at this time. The access-control system showed that he left the building at 6.11 p.m.

Leaving work, Fred went home to his flat in Pinelands, where he had supper before delivering the bookshelf to his friend, who lived in the same block of flats as him. At 7.10 p.m. he received a call from Bennie Schoeman. The call, which registered at the Old Mutual 1 tower serving the area around Fred’s flat, lasted for more than eight minutes.

While delivering the bookshelf to his friend that evening, Fred parked in a no-parking zone and his wheel was clamped. This event, as irritating as it must have been for him at the time, ultimately played a critical role in his defence, as there was a record of his having spoken to the security staff at around 7.45 p.m., when he requested that they unclamp his wheel.

Fred simply could not have had enough time to drive the roughly thirty-kilometre trip from Pinelands to Stellenbosch to murder Inge. If Fred had left work just after 6 p.m., as the access-control system at Old Mutual indicated, he would have had to drive in peak-hour traffic to Stellenbosch, have words with Inge, murder her, clean up the blood splatters on himself and get back to Pinelands in time for his phone to register at Old Mutual 1 at 7.10 p.m. and to have his wheel clamped at around 7.30 p.m. Considering these time frames, this simply isn’t possible.

Fred knew that Inge was planning to stay at home to study that evening. They SMSed frequently; the last message he received from
her was at 1.36 p.m. Fred SMSed Inge a few times that evening and couldn’t understand why she was not replying. He became increasingly anxious, and at around 9 p.m. he called Mrs Lotz, SMSing her a short while later. Fred’s flatmate, Marius Botha, then arranged for another friend, Christo Pretorius, who lived close to Inge, to go and investigate while Fred departed for the Lotz home to get the keys to Inge’s apartment.

Fred collected the keys and left the Lotz house, heading for Inge’s flat. Just after he left, however, he received a call from Marius asking him to turn back and wait at the Lotzes’ house, as Marius wanted to speak to them. Fred and Mrs Lotz then waited for Marius, who arrived just before 11 p.m. to break the devastating news: Inge’s body had been found lying bloodied and lifeless on the couch in her flat.

The police arrived on the crime scene shortly afterwards. There followed a series of events that can best be described as a catalogue of blunders.

It is sacrosanct in forensic science that the scene of the crime is cordoned off immediately. Anyone entering the scene must be properly clothed with footgear, overalls and other kit so that they do not contaminate any crucial trace evidence that could be the sole basis on which to build a case. The first mistake made in the Lotz investigation was that the crime scene was not cordoned off properly. Policemen traipsed in and out of the flat so freely that when a blood-stained print was discovered, the investigating officer had to take all his men to one side to see if one of their shoes had made the footprint. That is appalling, and should never have been allowed: the very basic principles of forensic investigation were broken at the outset.

Inge’s flat was not broken into and nothing had been stolen, and she was skimpily dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. It appeared from these factors that she knew her killer. Later, at the trial, it became obvious that Fred had been the main – and sole – suspect from the
beginning. In all fairness to the police, the people closest to a murder victim should always be on the list of suspects: many murders are committed by people intimately involved with their victims, as their emotions overwhelm the normal social rules governing human behaviour. It is therefore quite acceptable that Fred was placed in the frame of suspects, but he should not have been the only one. The police should have examined the evidence and decided whether it incriminated or eliminated him. It appears that this did not occur.

As Fred was the one and only suspect, the police investigators believed that he had to be lying, for whatever reason. Once a crime investigator makes up his or her mind in a forensic investigation without looking at the facts, he or she is liable to make every mistake in the book. That’s exactly what happened.

After Fred had left her flat earlier that day, Inge had gone out at around 3 p.m. and bought a hamburger and chips from the local Steers. She had also rented a DVD,
The Stepford Wives
– a sadly ironic choice in the light of what was about to happen to her – but we will never know whether or not she watched the film before she was murdered. She was last seen alive by tilers arriving at her complex at around 4 p.m.

The DVD and a fingerprint became the centre of a heated debate. Fred’s alibi was always that he had been nowhere near Inge’s flat that afternoon: he had been at Old Mutual from eleven o’clock in the morning until just after six in the evening. The police claimed to have found a fingerprint on the DVD cover that belonged to Fred’s left index finger, implying that he had been at Inge’s flat after 3 p.m., precisely when he professed to have been at work. Had this been true, it would have blown his alibi right out of the water.

When the other fingerprint expert and I examined the fingerprint, there appeared to be a number of irregularities. The first was that it appeared not to have been taken off a flat rectangular surface. Folene, a type of sticky tape, is used to lift a fingerprint. When you pick up a fingerprint, you also pick up the background
– the substratum behind it. If a print comes off a wooden surface, for example, you will pick up the wood grain as well; if the surface has curved edges, these will be seen on the lifted print too.

There were curved lines on the folene lift of the fingerprint we examined in the Lotz case. It could not have come off a DVD cover, which is flat and has only straight edges on the outer surface where the print was found. It is impossible to lift a curved line off a straight-edged surface. When I spoke to the police about the fact that this fingerprint had clearly been lifted from a curved surface, they were defensive.

One would also have expected other fingerprints – Inge’s, for example, and those of the shop assistant – to be present on the DVD cover, but only one person’s print was lifted, and it belonged to Fred. This pointed to another strange, but obvious, fact: there was only Fred’s fingerprint present. There should have been additional prints on the underside of the DVD cover, as it is impossible to hold a DVD box with only one finger.

To make matters worse, the police returned the DVD to the DVD shop, failing to retain it as a vital piece of evidence. The DVD cover should also have been photographed where it was found, as should the actual fingerprint before the cover was moved. In addition, the DVD container should also have been photographed
in situ
after it was dusted for prints. These are the most elementary of forensic procedures, yet they were simply not carried out. A policeman merely pointed out where he had found the cover. Handled correctly, this piece of evidence alone could have convicted the murderer.

The fingerprint blunder doesn’t end there. After the police’s approach had come under severe attack by the defence, the police took the print to their central lab for examination by Roger Dixon, the control forensic analyst at the police’s forensic science laboratory. He came to the same conclusion as us: that the print came from a curved surface. This certainly suggests that this evidence
was tendered by the police in bad faith – how could they have made such an elementary mistake, and one of such enormous proportion?

Another piece of ‘damning’ evidence was raised against Fred – a bloodstained mark on the bathroom floor in Inge’s flat. It would certainly have been damning had it been justified. The police employed in-house footprint ‘expert’ Bruce Bartholomew to examine the mark. He found it to be a mark made by Fred’s shoe, and the police were adamant that this was indeed the case.

One has to understand how this type of comparison – between the sole of a shoe and a print – is done. Before you compare two marks, they have to have the same class characteristics. There are thousands of Hi-Tec trainers (or Caterpillar boots, or whatever the case may be) with the same pattern on the underside – this is called the ‘class characteristic’. Marks that do not share class characteristics escape comparison. Thus, a mark made by a shoe with a diamond pattern cannot be compared to a shoe with a club-shaped pattern on the underside, as the print clearly could not have been made by that shoe.

Fred’s shoe had a specific pattern on the sole that, according to the police, seemed to match that of the bloodstained mark. Given that there are many thousands of shoes sharing the same pattern on the underside, there has to be a match in ‘individual characteristics’ between the print and the shoe. These come about through individual wear – a piece of glass that may have cut the sole at a given spot, or damage from treading on a nail in a specific place or way. The chance of two people making the same marks on the soles of their shoes is so minuscule that it can be accepted as being impossible. It follows that, if the individual characteristics are identical, one can accept that as proof positive that the marks match.

In the case of Fred van der Vyver’s alleged footprint, there were no individual characteristics on the print. The police hinged their
allegation on the fact that there were purportedly three specks of dust on the shoe sole, which, they said, made a specific imprint that showed up in the print.

This was further complicated by the unsatisfactory way in which the mark was compared to Fred’s shoe. When you lift a fingerprint (or footprint, or any other kind of print) from a surface, you get a mirror image of the actual print. You need to compare the lifted print to an inverted image of the actual print, which is obtained by inking the suspect’s finger and taking a print. You cannot compare the finger to the lifted fingerprint.

For some reason, the police didn’t make an inked print of Fred’s shoe. Their argument was that they didn’t want to disturb the three specks of dust that they alleged were present on the sole of the shoe. These three or four specks of dust were critical to their argument that this was Fred’s shoe. Bartholomew merely compared the photo of the blood mark on the floor to a photo of the surface of the shoe. This is not the way to do it.

Inge’s attack and murder were frenzied. She had been assaulted with at least two separate weapons and had been violently stabbed – there was blood everywhere. Whoever had carried out this terrible act would have been covered in minuscule specks of blood. Forensic science is very good at identifying tiny spots of blood, even if they have been washed off the surface in question. Considerable scrubbing is required to remove blood from clothing completely, particularly from shoes, which have many nooks and crannies in which blood can lodge and stick.

Yet no blood was found on Fred’s shoe. If he was the killer, he would have had to have washed the shoe over and over again. Yet three or four little specks of dust had remained on the shoe, despite Fred’s alleged scrubbing. Why, then, would the dust have been dislodged if Bartholomew had done an inking? The approach of the police investigators fails in logic.

Because the police had been seriously attacked on the fingerprint
issue, they were becoming edgy with their evidence on the shoe. They decided to send Bruce Bartholomew to meet with an FBI expert on footprinting, William Bodziak, who has also written a book on the subject. Bodziak took one look at Bartholomew’s efforts and declared that it was not even worth commenting on them. Bartholomew sent a message back saying that Bodziak had agreed with his assertion that it was a good match. No one in the police or prosecution questioned Bodziak; Bartholomew’s statement was accepted without question.

The defence team came to hear of this and called Bodziak, who made short shrift of Bartholomew’s statement promoting the idea that it was Fred’s shoe that had made the mark. The FBI expert eventually became a witness for the defence. Despite this, Bartholomew doggedly stuck to his unscientific and improbable version of events.

How can forensic investigators make such serious mistakes? Did they in their hearts believe Fred was so guilty that they were willing to ignore scientific principles – or the truth? The fingerprint and footmark were two crucial pieces of evidence that were so flawed that there was no hope of success for the police investigators in court.

The manner in which evidence relating to the murder weapon was handled is also laughable. The hammer that was allegedly used by Fred to bludgeon Inge to death was an ornamental hammer that had been a gift to Fred from Inge. He kept it in his car, under the seat. If it had been used to murder the girl, there would have been blood on it – it would have been very difficult to remove all traces of blood from the murder weapon. Yet the police found no blood on the hammer. They also decided to keep their blood expert away from the defence.