One Tragic Night (58 page)

Dixon said the only fibres he looked at under a microscope were those on the sample cut from the bottom of Oscar's prosthetic foot:

This wasn't even close to the scientific rigour Roux had sold to the court several weeks earlier. While Dixon may have observed the fibres on the foot at a microscopic level, the same was not done for the other samples to make the finding.

And there was more. Included in one of Dixon's reports, which had by now been handed over to the state, were two photographs taken of the door in court several weeks earlier. ‘The lighting in the court when we came to examine the door afterwards, the lighting showed it up very nicely. On previous examinations it did not appear as visible. I could see the fibres. We did not have good pictures. So this was very nice and it was well lit. It shows them up very clearly,' said Dixon, before admitting he had taken no previous close-up photos of the mark apparently showing the fibres embedded in it.

‘But remember,' said Nel, ‘when you came into court on 13th of March, there were people cleaning the door? The ladies that clean the court were busy cleaning the door. You were upset. You said how can they clean it, remember?' The door by that time was no longer a forensic exhibit, and was in the public domain, but Dixon argued that in his experience, often long after the crime, ‘there is always something left over'. His testimony was now bordering on laughable.

‘And you exclude that that could be fibres of a mutton cloth used in cleaning this door?' Nel was hitting straight at the processes and admissibility of Dixon's evidence. His tactic was cross-examination 101 – undermine the credibility of the expert witness so that his or her evidence would be inadmissible.

‘My Lady, I did not observe the cleaners putting an excessive amount of energy into cleaning the door, because that is caused by a strong blow … So I stay by my conclusion that those fibres were caused by the sock that was worn on the prosthesis, and not by a cleaner with a mutton cloth,' he said.

Dixon, of course, hadn't taken a sample to rule this out.

The geologist was presented with Oscar's prosthetic leg, the one the athlete wore on the night of the shooting. Nel had asked Roux whether it was appropriate, seeing as it may appear insensitive, but there was no objection. Awkwardly wielding the leg about and peeling off a sock, he pointed out where the sample plastic covering had been cut from its sole. This was the first time the expert had seen the prosthesis in real life. The scene was farcical.

It seems that the only test Dixon conducted that did appear to be sound was a chemical analysis of the varnish removed from the prosthetic leg and the varnish on the door that showed that they were a match. He used a gas-chromatograph
at the university's lab. But did he test the varnish on any of the other wooden doors in the house to exclude that the transfer took place on another door? Dixon had not. Varnish could also have been transferred to the sock, but he didn't test that either.

Dixon had felt the ignominy of searing cross-examination. He was wounded, fragile and scampering. He had been vociferously ridiculed on social media earning the title ‘ContraDixon'.

‘I was police forensics for 18 years. If you're an expert witness and you go to court, and our court system is adversarial, that's one of the things you must expect. I've had a lot of support from friends. I said, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends,”' Dixon told
The Guardian
after he stepped off the witness stand:

On the morning of his last day under Nel's scrutiny, Dixon took the unorthodox step of posting in jest about his experience on Facebook: ‘Third day in court today. Let's see how much of my credibility, integrity and professional reputation is destroyed. It is difficult to get belief in those who will not listen because it is not what they want to hear. After that, beer!'

Clearly a fan of the social media site, his account reveals he is a man of varied musical tastes. He likes Beethoven, heavy metal, harp music and Meat Loaf. And that Friday evening, once the trial had been adjourned and he had been dismissed, Dixon stayed true to his word. He drank a beer at the International Police Association bar in Pretoria. Sharing a beer with him was Wollie Wolmarans, the ballistics expert who was yet to testify.

Roger Dixon eagerly opens the plastic container, its bright-red handles and ‘Jolly' sticker belying the significance of its contents. Inside is a slice of Oscar Pistorius's prosthetic leg. It's just a slither really, with a few spots of dried black blood and a streak of varnish. Dixon points to it and explains its significance. He quickly closes that container and opens another that holds a policeissue evidence bag and a chip of tile from Oscar's bathroom.

We're inside Dixon's pokey office in the understated Stoneman Laboratory at the University of Pretoria, nestled between a parking lot and a lush botanical garden. The room is cluttered with large, covered microscopes, pieces of rock, graduated sieves and other paraphernalia you would expect to find in a researcher's retreat. Incongruously, a De'Longhi coffee machine is switching itself on and off on a side table.

Dixon had a rough ride in the trial. He was savaged on social media, with memes ridiculing him doing the rounds and jokes made at his expense. We want to know from him how he feels about this and whether his pride and reputation remain intact.

‘Well, I've been trying to collect all the pictures and images about me because some of them are quite funny and I want to have a page on my Facebook page which has got all of them there: my brief moment of glory, if you can put it that way,' he says with a laugh. He is hilariously self-deprecating and sarcastic. It's a necessary trait when one has been humiliated on live television and yet, despite his upbeat demeanour, it is clear he has been bruised.

‘People are suddenly absolute experts, they know what the answer is, and anybody who differs from their opinion is evil, is incompetent, is a liar … just my Twitter account, I had Twitter to follow the news, because I don't have radio
and TV at home so I can check up, what's the news headlines. I jumped from 13 followers to 600. It was an overnight sort of stardom and the messages that I started receiving there, some of them were extremely bad. So I stopped watching Twitter because it actually made me feel bad.

‘I came out feeling fine. And then I got upset when I read what other people's opinions were and are based on the fact that what I said didn't fit “their” story. And the way people said things was sometimes extremely … it's libellous, some of these Twitter things I got and messages and email I received, I can take the people to court and I can sue them. Because people say things and they type things down just like that. But would you sit down and write a letter saying those things and post it to somebody? Would you say it to their face? No!' says Dixon bitterly.

He believes the massive media hype and live video coverage of the trial had a significant impact. Over the course of several months, the broadcast turned witnesses into pseudo-celebrities and created heroes from villains, but Dixon isn't pointing any fingers.

‘Normally when you go to court and you testify and there are people who don't like what you are saying, and they get aggressive and you can get accused of lying, it's within a court. Yes, it's open, there's journalists there, but a journalist then has to listen and understand and write a report and then it's published. Now you've got this direct, international feed all over the place. People are seeing it live, they are hearing it, they are immediately making judgements.

‘You're moving from the world of a small area which is dull and boring – the law – to celebrity. We're going from the Roger Dixons of this world, giving dull and boring evidence, to the Kim Kardashians of the world whose every move, no matter how inconsequential is reported on ad nauseam and they make money out of it. There's no ways that you can actually equate the two, and having public broadcasting directly there compromised the trial, as far as I am concerned.'

Dixon, who elected to give televised evidence, echoes what many critics of the live broadcast have claimed: that it has resulted in an unfair trial because witnesses might have been scared away or could have tailored their versions.

‘Our legal system actually has been all these years that the witnesses must be unaware of what the other witnesses are saying, so your evidence that you present is much less influenced by outside events around the case. As a scientist doing an investigation before the case, yes, I consult with people. You are a team, you consult, that is not a problem, but what about eyewitnesses?'

Or in this case ‘earwitnesses'.

‘They see how the first person and the second person gets attacked and grilled
and, all of a sudden, my opinion and from what I know is that they suddenly become unwilling to testify, or from what we see, they suddenly think, “I can become a movie star,” and they start saying things which fail to be credible and I think that's the influence of this instant TV fame. I mean it's much better than
Big Brother
or your local soap. And it's for free!' says Dixon, his humour never far away.

The sense one gets from talking to Roger Dixon is that he's bitter and frustrated that Gerrie Nel was elevated to a popular, crime-fighting character and anyone who dared to differ was cast as ‘evil', being from ‘the dark side'.

Dixon claims not to care what the court of public opinion decides about him. That is opinion, not fact, and scientists only deal in fact, he reminds us. ‘They were not my audience, all right. To be honest, my dear, I don't give a “blank”,' says the scientist in his best imitation voice. ‘I'm quoting somebody,' he adds, in case his joke was missed.

‘See, if you are professional, your court is the audience. And the assessors. The accused. The victim and the legal people. That is your audience. It is not that … you know, the peanut gallery outside.'

But deep down it does hurt. ‘At the end of the day, I do care, but I'm not going to let it worry me because, you know, most of them are totally wrong. It's irrelevant and whether they're saying it because it will sell a story to a newspaper, or whether it will buy them an extra round of drinks in the pub – I notice that was taken up,' he sniggers, a reference to the Facebook post he wrote on the last day of his evidence. ‘I mean, really, if people can seriously believe that I was worried with my integrity … that thing that I wrote in Facebook, was successful. It was taken up by somebody and totally misinterpreted.'

Dixon is not a fan of the adversarial court system in South Africa, which sees two sides competing to ‘win'. It is this approach that he believes has seen the prosecution make compromises by only leading evidence that favours the state's case. It's also brought out the ugliness of personal point scoring.

‘That has unfortunately got to the state where the two sides, especially the side that has got all the evidence and got all the stuff, doesn't want to share it. This is a problem. It's something I have encountered throughout my career, because it becomes an object of “I must beat the other person” – I'm not talking specifically about this case. But if the shoe fits … basically it comes down to: this was a competition between two sides represented by two people and somebody is going to win. At times it felt to me that is the way it was.

‘Many statements were made by Mr Nel which immediately became facts and news headlines all over the world. “My integrity was destroyed”, this, that and
the other thing. That is a standard tactic in court. If you can make the expert witness doubt themselves, if you can make them stumble, if you can make them feel that perhaps they aren't properly qualified, this that. And you can fail them on their ability to present well, then the evidence also is diminished, so I've experienced that quite a lot in court, because many of the cases where I've testified on are not straightforward, normal things.'

After he stepped off the stand, Dixon said about Nel's conduct that ‘all is fair in love and war' but it is evident that he didn't approve of the prosecutor's behaviour.

‘I would have liked that he had a little more sound basis for some of his statements. I would also have liked that he kept to the facts. Everybody has their own style or conduct. I note that I was found to be “boring”, “monotonous,” etc. and my Twitter site was “boring” and this and that. The facts have to be presented in an unemotional way, because they are the facts. People mustn't see me getting really emotional about something. If I need emotion when presenting my evidence, that means I lack evidence and doing the emotional stunt and attacking the person means you're actually doing that because you actually can't attack the facts.'

Dixon won't go so far as to say that this case was a travesty of justice, but he will say that he believes it was compromised – in many ways – most significantly, by what he calls the ‘deliberate manipulation of the facts'.