Steeped in Blood (7 page)

He decided to start his own tobacconist. Within a few years, he had set up a chain of shops around London, and had amassed a great fortune. One day, he went to see his bank manager to discuss how to invest this money. When he was asked to sign some documents, he admitted that he couldn’t read or write. The bank manager looked at him in horror and said, ‘You have done so well in business. Imagine where you would have been today if you could read and write.’ The tobacconist looked at him and smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would still have been the verger at St Peter’s.’

With this story in mind, I suggested to Maureen that she and I
make sandwiches and find someone to sell them for us, as there were no food outlets around our offices. We got to work and made delicious sandwiches. We did not, however, have the same success as the St Peter’s verger – our product hardly sold. We ate most of the sandwiches ourselves!

These were exciting times forensically, and the lack of cash flow at times was something that I did not take very seriously or worry about for any length of time.

I was contacted by a reporter from the
Sunday Times
, who came to interview me. A few days later, an article titled ‘Forensic Scientist aims to show the other side’ appeared in the newspaper, which brought me my second case, a drunken-driving case in Bronkhorstspruit.

There were major flaws at that time in the process of testing for drunken driving. When attempting to convict a man of driving while under the influence of alcohol, a blood sample is drawn and analysed to determine the alcohol content in the bloodstream. The law states that the sample must be sterile in order for it to be suitable for chemical analysis. In other words, there must be no micro-organisms in the sample. This implies a completely germfree process when the blood is drawn.

Almost all alcohol that is produced for drinking purposes, however, is created by the fermentation of sugar by micro-organisms. The yeast that converts grape juice into wine is but one of a myriad small creatures that converts sugar and other chemicals into the wonderful, simple alcohol called ethyl alcohol.

The way in which doctors took samples in the mid-1980s was guaranteed to lead to contamination with micro-organisms. The government doctor would bare the driver’s arm and, without cleaning the injection site, would draw a sample of blood. The sample would then be placed in a small bottle with a screw-top lid called a McCartney Bottle. This bottle contained certain chemicals that were supposed to prevent the formation of alcohol by any microbes
that had inadvertently found their way into the bottle during the opening and filling process, thus making the analysis accurate. Unfortunately, about 40 per cent of the bottles tested by Dorothy Gill at the time contained living microbes, which could alter the alcohol concentration.

The moment it could be established that living microbes inhabited the bottle, the accused was perfectly entitled to ask if the state could prove that these microbes had not converted some of the blood sugar into alcohol. Of course, the state could not rule this out, and conviction under those circumstances was out of the question.

Drinking and driving was, and still is, one of the major problems in this country. I faced a moral dilemma in the Bronkhorstspruit case, and in some of the cases that followed, in that I was helping drunken drivers to get off scot-free. I wrote a letter to the then Attorney-General, raising the issue with him, as I was genuinely concerned by the fact that I might be assisting drunken drivers to walk away without facing the consequences of their crime. I also decided to raise the issue with the Deputy Attorney-General, Kevin Atwell. He was a man of great integrity, and one of the few state employees whom I had felt comfortable dealing with. I wrote to him, and he replied, saying that the matter was out of his hands and that I should contact the state health chemical laboratories.

I did this, and drove to Pretoria to see the head of the state health laboratories, Dr van Niekerk. He listened to what I had to say, politely thanked me, and indicated that they were quite satisfied with the way things were run, and that they would contact me if they felt the need. My meeting with Dr van Niekerk was the start of a process that, in retrospect, can only be described as a three-ring circus.

It would have been easy to solve the problem – all that the state needed to do was to take the blood in sterile conditions, something that any junior nurse could have told them. I explained this to
Atwell, but he was adamant that his hands were tied, and suggested that I try to win a case or two and then come back to discuss the matter with him.

It was around the same time that an attorney came to see me on the way home from court. He was accompanied by Advocate van Nieuwenhuizen, who was interested in my work. Shortly afterwards, I started receiving instructions from the attorneys who had briefed him. One of these was Nick von Wesel from the law firm Cliffe Dekker & Todd (now Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr). Between Von Wesel, Van Nieuwenhuizen and me, we were briefed on around 100 cases of drunken driving, and we won all of them. Thanks to the total intransigence of the state over alcohol testing, I was comfortably kept in business for the first two years of practice.

Criticism was received from far and wide, and at one point I even had the organisation Mothers Against Drunken Driving (MADD) publicly criticising my role in helping drunken drivers to get off the hook. The reality, of course, was that I was not making the law, but simply taking advantage of it. The state’s stupidity kept me alive for a good few years, and I started to earn a reputation for finding the loopholes. All we had to do was ask a few pertinent questions of the state prosecutors regarding the taking of blood samples. Their charts and graphs would mean nothing when the blood sample could not be guaranteed to be sterile.

The state hated me. General Lothar Neethling, who headed up the police forensic laboratory, in particular despised me. We were adversaries for many years, and he always used to say to me, ‘Klatzow, I can’t wait to get you in a witness box. I will crush you!’ But, sadly for him, he never did.

Apart from the problems with blood testing, the police periodically made some other mistakes in their zeal to arrest drunken drivers. I was involved in one such case, in which Nick von Wesel had developed a malignant tumour of the parotid gland (one of the salivary glands near the ear). A mutual friend, Grant Kassner,
had removed the tumour, but there was some facial-nerve bruising, as often happens in such cases. Nick ended up with a surgical Bell’s palsy, which caused the left-hand side of his face to droop. It also made him slur his words and meant that he had a problem with his balance.

One day, while on his way home from work, Nick was stopped by the traffic police for a minor offence. The traffic officer took one look at him and immediately arrested him for driving under the influence. He was taken away, and at the forensic laboratory he was examined by the young district surgeon. Of course, there was no case for drunken driving.

Some time later, Solly van Nieuwenhuizen and I were in court on another drunken-driving case. Who should be the district surgeon who had been called to give evidence? None other than the same one who had examined Nick. She was being particularly stubborn, and would not concede that unsteadiness on the feet could be caused by a wide variety of conditions, of which inebriation was only one. State officials, as I had learnt, rarely make any concessions in court. The district surgeon took refuge in technical terms and kept referring to the positive Rhomberg sign, which is just another fancy name for being unsteady on the feet.

Van Nieuwenhuizen asked her to demonstrate the Rhomberg sign. She called for the court orderly, but the legal counsel insisted that she use the instructing attorney – Nick von Wesel. Of course, Nick swayed around like a branch in a storm, and the district surgeon had to concede that there may indeed be other reasons for unsteadiness on the feet!

According to law, blood samples taken within two hours from the commission of the crime will be presumed to be an accurate measure of the blood alcohol at the time of the crime. But what happens if there are two conflicting blood test results within the two-hour period?

A young man had attended his work office party and, after
consuming vast amounts of punch, was on his way home in his father’s Mercedes-Benz. As luck would have it, he was stopped in a roadblock and asked to blow into a breathalyser. Of course, he was found to be over the legal limit, so he was promptly arrested and taken to the police station, where he was charged and then told to sit on a bench in the charge office. A blood sample was taken from him, and he sat waiting. When no one seemed to take any notice of him, and still in possession of his car keys, he eventually decided to sneak out and go home.

The man jumped into his car and drove off – straight into another roadblock! This time he decided not to stop, and an exciting chase ensued. He was rearrested and charged for a second time that evening, and a second blood sample was taken. Both blood samples were taken within the statutory two-hour interval after the first commission of the crime.

The two test results were poles apart, and the magistrate was not prepared to guess which was the correct reading. Theoretically, the two samples should have been identical, but because of the way the blood samples were taken, there were discrepancies and there was doubt. The young man was acquitted.

Over that time, I continued, unabated, defending people charged with drunken driving. The prosecuting authorities found it almost impossible to achieve a conviction using this flawed system. I discovered that the state would never admit that it was wrong. They would use tactics that included counter-arguments, personal criticism and throwing in irrelevant curve balls in an attempt to avoid the real issue at hand – namely that of taking samples correctly.

These times, for me, were not about game-playing. Drunken driving is very serious, and can lead to great tragedy. By not being able to prosecute effectively, one can argue that the state, in a sense, had blood on its hands.

It is interesting to know that alcohol can also form in the body through other means. On 28 February 1975, a great tragedy occurred
when a London underground train crashed into a dead end in an unused section of the tube system at Moorgate. Forty-two passengers and the driver were killed. The accident site was a mangled mess, and it took several days before the body of the driver was extricated from the wreckage. At the post-mortem, his blood alcohol was found to be high. It was only after a substantial effort by forensic analyst Janet Corry that it was discovered that the alcohol in the driver’s body had formed during the process of decomposition. This is the same process that occurs when bacteria or fungi get into a blood sample and convert the sugar in the blood into alcohol.

The explanation that alcohol has formed naturally in the blood is often offered by lawyers in cases where their clients have been killed in road accidents, but it is only a valid defence in cases where there are obvious signs of decomposition. In most other cases, the post-mortems are conducted within a time period that would not allow for alcohol to be formed naturally, as occurred with the train driver at Moorgate.

This is particularly significant for insurance companies. Many companies will refuse to pay death benefits if the driver of the car is over the legal blood alcohol limit. This often results in great hardship for those left behind, but there is no doubt that the devastating effects of alcohol on our roads should be combated by all available means: insurers should not be expected to pay for the damage caused by the hordes of reckless, inebriated drivers.

It took about six years for the state to see the light. Eventually, it adopted more scientifically accurate methods of collecting blood samples from drunken drivers that would guarantee a sterile sample. This was not without its teething problems, but the system that I recommended is now in place and the blood alcohol cases are tried fairly and in a more scientifically reliable manner. I have not given evidence in a drunken-driving case in many years.

These were exciting times and interesting years. At one point, I
was branded as somewhat of a forensic outlaw. This label was to be reinforced repeatedly in the following years, especially with regard to my growing involvement in fire investigations.

‘[There is a] myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent.’

– IVAN ILLICH,

Austrian philosopher

Fire is a vivid manifestation of chemistry at work, and a very important part of forensic science. I had read a great deal about fires, but at this point in my career, in the early eighties, I had never actually investigated one. This was soon to change.

Each fire investigation presents a unique challenge: it is arguably one of the most demanding areas of forensic science, particularly with regard to finding and interpreting evidence. A fire can create misleading evidence, and it is easy, as the forensic scientist, to make a mistake.