One Tragic Night (52 page)

However, the body bag did not stay sealed the entire time it sat in the office. On 18 February, the defence forensic team requested to see the door. Private ballistics expert Wollie Wolmarans arrived at Boschkop along with a photographer, and in the presence of the investigating officer Hilton Botha, the station commander broke open the seal and drew back the body bag to allow them to see the exhibit. Says Van Rensburg:

Van Rensburg kept the door until he handed it over to the photographer Warrant Officer Van Staden. The station commander resigned from the police service several months later, leading to media speculation he had been pushed out because of the bungling of the crime scene and the decision to keep this crucial piece of evidence in his office. However, Van Rensburg insisted both to the press and in court that he had left to follow his passion, coaching sport.

The door was held at Forensic Services after it had been collected, along with the Lazer cricket bat, by Van Staden. He photographed the exhibits before sending them off for analysis.

And so it came to be that the body bag containing the meranti wood arrived at Captain Mangena's office.

Having broken the seal on the body bag, the captain noticed that the door was in pieces, the panels knocked out by Oscar using the cricket bat were loose inside the bag, along with the shards and splinters collected from the crime scene. The package had arrived with an instruction to investigate (1) the bullet trajectory; and (2) terminal ballistics.

Standing the outer frame of the door against a gun safe in his office, Mangena slid the panels into position – only a narrow sliver of wood broken from the far right panel was missing. There was still blood on the door, as well as what appeared to be footprints, believed to be from a police officer's boot. These footprints were a focus during the cross-examination of several state witnesses as the defence attempted to prove that the crime scene had been contaminated.

Mangena took the measurements of the door: 227x79 centimetres. He then inspected it for spent propellant powder particles – burnt gunpowder – but couldn't find any. This could have provided clarity on how close the shooter was to the door when he pulled the trigger.

Vertically, the door was divided by a single horizontal wooden beam at its bottom third. The handle was situated to the right and located about halfway between the top and bottom of the structure. Four bullet holes peppered the horizontal region between the door handle and the wooden dividing bar – Mangena marked them from left, ‘A', ‘B', ‘C' and ‘D', and measured their distance from the floor, before noting them down for his report:

The front of the door, which would have been facing Oscar, displayed clean entry marks – near-perfect little round holes. The inside of the holes appeared to be scorched, perhaps darkened by the transfer of particles from the bullets fired
through it. The other side of the door, facing inside the cubicle where Reeva was positioned, presented an entirely different pattern – irregular splintered sections of wood were missing, up to three times bigger than the holes on the front. Fine splinters from these holes were picked up by the projectile passing through the wood and had become imbedded in Reeva's skin, as noted in the pathologist's report.

This was as much as could be done in the office. The real work for Mangena would be at the crime scene. The following day Mangena met photographer Bennie van Staden at the house to take him through the crime scene and assist him with photographs, as requested by the investigating officer Mike van Aardt. They weren't alone – Oscar's private forensics experts Wollie Wolmarans and Jannie ‘Wessie' van der Westhuizen were there to monitor the investigation for the defence. Other members of the investigating team, blood spatter expert Colonel Ian van der Nest and forensics expert Colonel Gerhard Vermeulen, were also present.

Mangena and Van Staden carried the door inside the house and up the stairs following the blood spatter trail on the floor, into Oscar's bedroom, down the cupboard-lined passage and into the bathroom. The sticky bright red spatter and pools of blood of three weeks earlier had turned a dark red, almost black in places, and had coagulated, bonding with the tiles and seeping into the grouting. The pile of bloodstained towels and the cricket bat were gone – packed into evidence bags weeks earlier. The two officers had with them the piece of evidence that had separated Oscar from Reeva, and now they had to put it back in place. Vermeulen helped the men, using the same screws that originally held the door in position.

‘The first time the door was hung out of position on the first attempt and the door couldn't close. A millimetre that way or that way and that trajectory won't be right again. Why was this door removed? They say it's for security purposes, but I've got my doubts. They don't want us to see it,' a member of the defence team told us.

Mangena then began the process of meticulously marking out the scene, starting with the four bullet holes through the door, and again measuring their height from the floor. Van Staden followed his every move with a click of the camera to document the process. With the door hinged and open, peering into the small cubicle Mangena noticed marks in the far right corner. Ricochet marks, he thought. From left to right, he marked them ‘E' and ‘F', which he believed were corresponding marks.

In court, Mangena explained his finding: ‘The bullet ricocheted on the first
wall marked “E”,' he said. ‘And it deflected to another wall on that side. So creating both holes.' He also noted down the heights of each mark:

Another mark on the wall, which Mangena tagged as ‘G', bore traces of lead – as if the projectile had fractured after hitting an object and losing a lot of its momentum. ‘It did not break the tile. It only left traces of it on the tile,' the ballistics expert explained to the court.

With the bullet holes and ricochet locations marked out, Mangena pushed yellow steel rods with a near-perfect 9 mm diameter through the holes in the door – the path of the bullets were thus mapped in 3D. Inside the cubicle, the four rods projected towards the toilet bowl leaving very little place to hide. By extending the rod through hole marked ‘B', Mangena matched the trajectory to the ricochet mark ‘E' on the wall – the only bullet that missed its target. Using his trusty EVI-PAQ level and angle finder – an industry standard in forensic circles – Mangena determined that the bullets travelled at a downward 5- to 6-degree angle. Next he turned to his laser, mounted on a sturdy Manfrotto Tripod. By lining up the beam of red light with the mark ‘E', through mark ‘B', and adjusting the position and height of the laser, Mangena placed the shooter at the entrance to the bathroom – 220 centimetres from the door. With the blinds and door closed, Van Staden stood on the toilet seat to take a photograph looking down – the thin beam of light passed through the door, striking the point where Mangena believed a bullet ricocheted.

Having gathered all the information he could from the crime scene, Mangena and the other officers removed the door from its hinges, packed it back into the body bag and took it to the laboratory for further examinations.

Meanwhile, Mangena had also been sent a disk containing all of the crime scene photos and pictures from the postmortem that had been captured by Van Staden. He gave special attention to images of the spent cartridge cases and bullet fragments and of Reeva's vest showing the holes where bullets had struck her. He needed to understand what the crime scene looked like when it was fresh, as he would explain to the trial court.

‘When you are reconstructing the crime scene, you have to get the idea of the whole crime scene, how the crime scene was positioned,' he said. ‘If there are any chairs, if there is any furniture, anything that can be moved in the crime scene which might have a role in reconstructing the crime scene.'

Absent from the crime scene on the day of the investigation was the small wooden magazine rack, located to the right of the toilet bowl when facing it. The captain analysed pictures of the locations of the spent cartridges – three in the bathroom, one in the passage – and the position of bullet fragments inside the cubicle.

Key to reconstructing the scene is knowing the location of the injuries sustained by the deceased – Mangena pored over the autopsy photos. He noted the tissue and bone fragments on Reeva's black top, the bruises on her back and chest, as well as the height from her heel and location of the hip, head, elbow and finger wounds. He then gathered the measurements taken of Oscar at Ergonomics Technologies, and was ready to put it all together to create the scene.

Using his 19 years of experience in the Ballistics Unit of the police, Mangena ruled out the possibility that Reeva was sitting on the toilet when the first shot was fired – the holes through the door were too low for them to have struck her in the hip. Reeva was standing upright and against the door, facing it, when the first bullet – in a downward trajectory – passed through point ‘A' on the door, 93.5 centimetres high, and struck her on the right hip, 93 centimetres from her heel. The match-up of hole to wound meant this had to be the first shot – it entered her pelvic area and shattered the hipbone, making it impossible to stand.

She fell backwards, but not on to the floor – the height of the remaining holes through the door could not account for the wound to Reeva's elbow; instead, she collapsed on to the magazine rack in a seated position.

Oscar fired the second shot, the bullet passing through point ‘B' on the door, missing Reeva but striking points ‘E' and ‘F' on the wall above her head, breaking into fragments before striking the critically wounded woman on her back and causing the bruises noted in the autopsy. From there, the lead core bounced off her back and into the toilet bowl.

He pulled the trigger for a third time. Mangena could not establish whether this marked point ‘C' or ‘D' on the door, but was confident it caused the wound to Reeva's right elbow. In the seated position on the magazine rack, he believed Reeva had her arms up covering her head in a defensive position – the height of her elbows in this position corresponded with the height of the bullets through the door at a downward trajectory. During his testimony in court, Mangena vividly demonstrated how Reeva would have been holding her arms wrapped over her head, cowering away from the shots piercing holes through the door as she sat slumped down on the magazine rack.

The third bullet passed through the door, then through Reeva's upper arm,
where it shattered the bone, exited the underside of the upper arm and spattered tissue and bone fragments on to her vest. The shards of steel that ripped though her flesh had spent a significant amount of their energy and were left with only enough momentum to cause the bruises below her right breast.

Oscar then pulled the trigger for the last time. Mangena believed that with the devastating wound to her right arm, making the limb unusable, Reeva just had her left arm and hand to try to protect herself. With her left hand on top of her head and cowering with her head in a forward position, the last bullet tore through the soft tissue between her index and middle finger, which was up against her head, before striking the skull. The projectile fragmented, sending part of it into her brain while another piece exited a few centimetres further back, before hitting the wall, mark ‘G'.

In Mangena's view, that last shot caused the victim to collapse – her head coming to rest on the toilet bowl and her body wedged between the toilet and magazine rack. The pool of blood on the floor must have been caused by her hip and elbow wounds, and bloodstains on the toilet seat and inside the bowl confirmed this.

This sequence of events was important for the state. After sustaining the first wound to her hip, and as she collapsed backwards and the second bullet was fired and missed, did Reeva scream? The pathologist, Professor Saayman, testified that after sustaining a wound of this nature, it would be abnormal not to scream. And if Reeva did scream, why did Oscar continue firing? Is this the screaming neighbours heard when they woke up in the dead of night?