by Mandy Wiener
Lundgren had listed numerous factors that might have delayed gastric emptying, from the types of medication a person was taking and whether they smoked cigarettes to underlying medical conditions and their exercise and sleep routine. But she conceded that on the facts before her, related to Reeva, she did not know that any of them existed except that the patient was pre-menopausal.
Lundgren was a tough witness for Nel and was not going to be pushed into conceding on the possibilities presented by the prosecutor that any accurate determination on the time of the last meal could be made by studying the stomach contents. When the prosecutor looked at Oscar’s timeline – around eight hours from the time the couple ate between 7 and 8pm and until when she died at about 3am – and the resulting improbability any food would have remained in the stomach, Lundgren offered that the insoluble fibre in the vegetables might have delayed gastric emptying.
But Nel continued to push the witness, referring to Saayman’s evidence that even in death the enzymes in the stomach would continue to break down substances. So how was the pathologist able to recognise food if it had been in the stomach for so long? ‘I am a clinician, I deal with live patients and I have immense respect for Professor Saayman, who is a forensic pathologist and his patients are deceased. So I am not a forensic pathologist and I do not wish to comment,’ Lundgren said.
Saayman had inserted a disclaimer in his report when he acknowledged that gastric emptying is an inexact science, noting on his finding that ‘if there is any substantive evidence to the contrary, that must be weighed up by the court and ultimately, it will be the prerogative of the court to make that decision’.
‘Do you agree with that?’ asked Nel, attempting to force the witness into a confrontational stance with the state’s witness. ‘Is there anything that you see that would say the court should not take that into account?’
But Lundgren wasn’t biting, opting for a diplomatic course of action and referring the court to the forensic pathology literature already submitted that questions the reliability of using gastric emptying as a measure. ‘I am not prepared to comment on what Professor Saayman’s opinion is. It is as it stands, however, I have been given forensic pathology evidence to read and there it states quite categorically that it is not a good idea to judge the time of the last meal from the stomach contents.’
The cross-examination came full circle when Nel referred back to Lundgren’s own report in which she stated, based on the available evidence that included the meal of chicken stir-fry, that ‘in the ideal world, after six hours of fasting, after this meal her stomach should probably have been empty’. With Lundgren unable to identify any of the factors she listed as affecting gastric emptying being present in this case, Nel was satisfied he had done enough with this witness to ensure Saayman’s evidence remained persuasive.
It would be up to Judge Masipa to decide whether to accept the expert witnesses’ testimony on gastric emptying – this could be a crucial element in deciding whether or not Oscar and Reeva were awake in the hours before the shooting and whether an argument between the couple possibly led to the incident or not.
The Door
Exactly three weeks after the shooting, on 7 March 2013, a white body bag arrived at the office of police ballistics expert Chris Mangena. It had been dispatched by the Case Administration Section of the Forensic Science Laboratory in Pretoria. Mangena, a captain attached to the Ballistics Unit since 1995, has worked on nearly 6000 cases over the past two decades.
Mangena broke the red seal marked ‘30002’, pulling apart the two zippers to reveal the item to be studied. It contained ‘One damaged 227x79 cm Wooden Door’ – the meranti door from Oscar Pistorius’s bathroom through which the athlete had shot and killed Reeva Steenkamp.
The door had taken an interesting journey from the Paralympic superstar’s house in Silver Woods to Mangena’s office – one that would cause some consternation and raise many eyebrows. It also, arguably, led to the resignation of Colonel Schoombie van Rensburg, the station commander at the Boschkop police station (a claim he denies), which was handling the murder investigation. It is the type of incident that occurs occasionally in South Africa, where the quality and standard of police forensics can be dubious as a result of high case loads and substantial backlogs.
On the day after the shooting, Colonel Van Rensburg returned to Oscar’s house. The atmosphere was far calmer than the previous morning when he had been the first police officer to arrive following the shooting. He had already had to deal with a watch being stolen from the crime scene and now Van Rensburg had been informed that, amid the media frenzy, some newspapers were willing to pay up to R60 000 for a photograph of the door. He knew that the door had to be removed from the scene immediately.
‘We decided to take it down,’ Van Rensburg told the trial court a year later. ‘The door is the most valuable evidence, exhibit on the scene, because it indicated the shooting holes. The deceased was behind this door when she was shot. So that was the main reason … it had to be seized. But when we received the information on the Friday, we decided we would do it immediately.’
In a scene out of a keystone cop sitcom, the officers set about trying to find packaging, and a form of transport that would be big enough to hold the door.
‘It is a very big … big door, as you see,’ explained the station commander. ‘So we made arrangements that we take body bags. Now I personally drive to Bronkhorstspruit and got body bags, different sizes of the body bags and then only the biggest body bag the door could fit in.’
Lieutenant-Colonel Frans van der Merwe from Forensic Services and police photographer Warrant Officer Bennie van Staden set about taking down the door. There might have been a concern about whether or not the officers would have been able to reconstruct the exhibit once it had been removed, but Van Rensburg was confident it would be easy to reassemble with a screwdriver. They took down the door and sealed it in the body bag with official seals.
Once they had carried the bag outside the house, the next problem was trying to fit the door into a police car. The men had to call in a long-wheel-base vehicle to fit the door into the back, but then they encountered another concern. The loose panels of the door had shifted and the officers were concerned they would rip the body bag, which would mean that the evidence could be contaminated. Securing this crucial piece of evidence was proving to be a real headache for Van Rensburg.
A police constable drove the door to the Boschkop police station where it was handed in to what is known as the SAP13, where exhibits for all investigations are booked and held. Usual practice at Boschkop is for the bigger exhibits to be kept in the charge office, which is a temporary facility. However, on that Friday afternoon, the officers could not fit the exhibit in and decided to leave it standing in the passage of the charge office. When the station commander arrived back at his office, he found the door, still sealed, leaning against the wall in the passage. According to ‘Standing Orders’, it is the responsibility of the station commander to safeguard the property and the exhibits. So Van Rensburg signed for the door and took the unusual step of choosing to keep it in his office. He was quizzed about this decision when on the stand during the murder trial.
‘Now I know someone will ask the question, why do you take it to your office. The first thing about the office is it is secured. There is security … I am the only person that had a key to the room … It was kept there in my office the whole weekend.’
The arrangement was that on the Monday, Warrant Officer Van Staden and Lieutenant-Colonel van der Merwe would collect the exhibit and hand it in at Forensic Services. But the investigating team got caught up in the bail application and before they realised, more than two weeks had passed.
‘Now during this period this door was kept in my office. I was the only person in control of that office. No meeting was held during that period in that office. If someone come and see me I close the door, I lock the door and I went to another office and have a conversation with that
person. Also … there was only two faxes on the station. One fax is in my office. Sometimes the people come and they want to fax something. I took that faxes and I fax it myself. So nobody else did tamper with that evidence explained …’ Van Rensburg to the court.
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:
We open and we let it … the door stand upright and we open as far as possible that they can see it. There was splinters, small splinters that was falling out at one corner. So I picked that splinters up with hand gloves and I put it back on the body bag and then they started taking photos. Then the request was that we have to take it out, because they want to see the height of the bullets … ag, what the holes is and I said: ‘No, I am not going to take out this thing.’
Actually they was agitated with me, they said then there is no use that they come here and see this thing. So I say, sorry that is the only allowance that I am going to make for him, to see the door and then we sealed the door … ag we sealed the bag again and we sealed it with another seal … and then it was taken back into my office, and again lie in front of my desk.
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:
A – 93.5cm
B – 104.3cm
C – 99.4cm
D – 97.3cm
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:
E – 89cm
F – 87.5cm
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 informat
ion 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.
