One Tragic Night (55 page)

Another oversight, it emerged, was that he did not study a mark just below and to the left of the door's brass handle because he had focused solely on matching up the bat to the door. He could find no other marks that matched up to the bat. ‘We will present evidence that that mark was caused by the prosthesis kicking the door or making contact with that door and the fabric of the sock was in fact still embedded [in the door] and varnish of the door [was found] on the prosthesis,' said Roux. This was another important aspect of Oscar's timeline – that he first tried to kick the door before fetching the bat.

How and why did Vermeulen overlook this? ‘I could not link it to the cricket bat so that is why I only elaborated on the first two marks that we spoke about,' he said, before suggesting that the mark could have been caused by Oscar possibly tripping over or stepping on the piece of wood after it was knocked from the panel.

Roux appeared incensed, arguing that it was impossible for the sock fibres to become embedded in the wood of the door and the varnish on the prosthesis without significant force being applied – like a kick. ‘The fabric was tested, the wood was tested, the prosthesis was tested, they all match,' he insisted.

Despite these assuring claims from the defence team, it later emerged that the tests had been conducted by Roger Dixon, and by the time he stepped off the stand Dixon's credibility was questioned by many.

But for now the focus was still on the state and the fact that it had not tested the prosthetic legs and the sock fibres against the mark on the door, despite Oscar telling the bail court a year earlier that he had kicked the door with his prosthetic legs.

Vermeulen admitted that he did have the prosthetic leg in his possession, but he was only requested to examine damage to the plastic covering on the shin. He had not used his initiative to carry out any kind of tests outside the ambit of his instructions. He also accepted that if a study of the mark on the door proved
to be a match to the prosthetic foot – although he was not convinced of it – it would indicate that Oscar was wearing the prosthetic legs at the time.

Roux presented a photograph to the court of the prosthetic leg where a sample of the plastic covering had been removed ‘in order to do the comparison and the markings in the microscopic testing in relation to the mark on the door' – he was referring to the tests conducted by Dixon. Vermeulen said he knew Dixon; he had been his commander before he left the police's forensic laboratory, and he had experienced him as a competent person.

In wrapping up his cross-examination, Roux asked Vermeulen whether he had seen the YouTube video of a man conducting the bat vs gun sound test. The video had been posted online and had gone viral. It showed an American expert, Alexander Jason, conducting an experiment to determine if a bat strike on a wooden door could produce a sound similar to a gunshot when heard at a distance. It wasn't an attempt to replicate Oscar's door, his bat or the technique used but despite this, it seemed to suggest that the sounds were similar.

Vermeulen had not seen the video.

‘I do not know how scientific, but it was done with a microphone 180 metres away and the person taking a bat and hitting a door and then after that, firing a 9 mm to compare the significant resemblance of the shot and the bat,' Roux told him. ‘Did you do any test when you heard about the version that there was, of the accused, there was first a shooting and the hitting of the door, to understand the resemblance between that?' asked Roux.

Vermeulen had not conducted such a test, but neither had the defence team, and it was only after this video emerged that Roux dispatched Wolmarans and Dixon to the shooting range to conduct a similar test.

When he re-examined Vermeulen, Nel wanted to deal with nine items, and posed them as fairly straightforward questions. While Vermeulen provided some explanation to support his answers, it was clear what his answers were:

Nel paused here and asked Vermeulen to speculate, as he had been asked to do by Roux. It was earlier put to the witness that the only reason why the accused would have kicked the door was to open it because it was locked. ‘Could there be other reasons?' asked Nel. ‘Let us speculate. You were asked to speculate. Could it be to scare someone? Is it possible? Just to make a noise? That is possible.'

Vermeulen agreed that was indeed a possibility.

Colonel Ian van der Nest has seen his fair share of bloodied crime scenes and mutilated victims. For 20 years he's been investigating the circumstances of unnatural deaths, first at the Biology Unit, and then at the Victim Identification Centre of the police's Forensic Science Laboratory, where he is highly regarded amongst his peers. Van der Nest has been directly responsible for over 1 300 investigations, excluding those where he has assisted colleagues.

His blood spatter analysis played a major role in the investigation of the 2010 murder of right-wing Afrikaner leader Eugene Terre'Blanche. The accused in the matter, Chris Mahlangu, had bragged to friends that he and an accomplice beat their victim to death during a scuffle over unpaid wages. But Van der Nest's study of the blood spatter pattern and the body disputed that claim. Mahlangu was convicted of the murder, while the court acquitted his co-accused.

Van der Nest was instructed late on Valentine's Day to attend Reeva's postmortem scheduled for the following morning. At the autopsy he made his own observations, took notes and also helped other officials take measurements and photos of the body. Later that day he went to the crime scene. Van der Nest testified that he was asked specifically to investigate what appeared to be blunt force trauma to Reeva's right eye, the blood spatter around the house, as well as the cricket bat. Investigators had to rule out that Oscar had at some stage attacked Reeva with the bat.

Album 5 presented in evidence included pictures of Van der Nest's investigations in the house. He identified areas by letters of the alphabet, like ‘AA', ‘BB' and ‘CC', which were written on small blue Post-its and stuck on a surface near the particular spatter to be photographed. Area ‘AA' was the spots of blood that came to rest on the couch in a small lounge located beneath the staircase. ‘BB'
was the blood between that lounge and the kitchen, while ‘CC' marked out the area where Oscar had placed Reeva's body at the foot of the staircase. The blue Post-its tracked the blood trail up the stairs, down the passage through the TV room, into Oscar's room and through into the bathroom.

Van der Nest said he soon ruled out the spatter patterns as being the result of blunt force trauma:

The walls down the sides of the staircase showed dozens of fine drops of blood. One particular pattern was in a distinct vertical line, caused by the arterial spurt from one of Reeva's wounds. ‘If one follows my progression of the alphabetised markings, even upstairs and you will see that there is a commonality in all of this in that they have a serpentine or an S-shape and that is typically what you would expect in an arterial type of spurting pattern,' he said.

Van der Nest used various terms to describe the blood spatters on the scene: ‘contact staining', ‘drip trails', ‘passive drip staining' and ‘arterial spurt'. He explained that the shorts Reeva was wearing had become saturated with blood emanating from her hip wound, which contributed to the drip trail from the bathroom down the stairs. And Reeva's long blonde hair had also become soaked with blood and acted like a paintbrush when coming in to contact with items such as the staircase rail and the tiles in the bathroom.

Van der Nest's study of the bathroom confirmed what was already known: ‘The deceased sustained wounds while being in the toilet. These wounds were consistent with gunshot wounds from my observations at the postmortem and that three of these wounds, which the deceased sustained could have resulted in severe bleeding,' he said, referring to the head, hip and arm wound. Van der Nest said the spurting could have occurred from the head wound or the elbow wound.

The scene marked ‘UU' dealt with the toilet itself, with close-up photos of the toilet bowl, its lid and the seat that showed up very fine spatter, broken pieces of hair together with particulate consisting of human tissue debris. Van der Nest found this to be consistent with the damage caused to Reeva's head, which meant that her head was in close proximity to the toilet seat lid when the bullet
struck it. He further explained that the bloodstains on the seat indicated that after the incident that caused the particulate spatter, Reeva's head came to rest on the toilet.

‘The head was in the surrounds of the toilet because the pieces of broken hair and particulate and bone matter would follow in the direction of the projectile because that is the kernel direction of the force. So she must have sustained or received the wound somewhere in front of the lid of the toilet,' he said.

The two main pools of blood – on the toilet seat and flowing into the bowl, and the large pool on the floor – were caused by the head and the arm wound, and then the hip wound respectively.

Van der Nest agreed with ballistic expert Captain Mangena's reconstruction of what happened behind the door. After the shooting, Reeva was retrieved from the cubicle using a combination of drag-lifting movements that created the patterns on the floor. Van der Nest said that the evidence and the spatter throughout the house showed that she was picked up from the floor and carried into Oscar's bedroom, then in to the TV room, down the passage, down the stairs and placed at the bottom of the staircase.

Roux's cross-examination of Van der Nest was concluded in less than five minutes because there was nothing to dispute. He referred to the expert's report where he was quoted as referring to paragraphs in Oscar's bail application statement. ‘The version of events as set out in paragraph 16.13 to 16.17 in the aforementioned statement are consistent with the observed bloodstained patterns,' said Van der Nest in his report. In the particular paragraphs Oscar stated how he broke down the door panels, moved Reeva out of the toilet cubicle, picked her up off the floor and carried her downstairs.

‘Do you still stand by that?' asked Roux.

‘I do,' said Van der Nest.

And with that, the expert was thanked and excused from proceedings.