by Mandy Wiener
The Blood and the Bowl
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:
I could see no area of origin and these stains were not radiating from a specific source which one normally associates with a sort of blunt force trauma. To me this was an artefact from the arterial spurt that had arisen from above and ‘from above’, I mean the landing between the stairwell between the upper and ground level.
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.
Perhaps most interesting was what Van der Nest did not testify about – whether or not the toilet had been flushed. Intriguingly, it is this piece of evidence that private forensic experts thought most crucial before the trial began in March 2014.
Former senior policeman and author of numerous books on forensics, Hennie van Vuuren, stated that the analysis of the toilet bowl would be critical. ‘I would like to know whether the contents of the toilet has been analysed because that will tell us a story. What was the reason why Reeva was sitting in the toilet. Has the contents been analysed? Oscar never mentioned anything about hearing the toilet being flushed. So what was happening really? Physical evidence will tell us that story. If proper, complete, accurate analysis of all evidence has been made.’
Van der Nest did not make a finding in this regard in his report, so was not led on this from the state’s side and there was no questioning on it from the defence. A cursory layperson’s study of a photograph of the inside of the toilet bowl shows clear white sections of porcelain separating the ‘columns’ of blood, like vertical stripes on a candy cane. The white stripes marked where water appeared to have washed away the blood.
A source in the investigating team said they’d established that at some point the toilet was flushed. The source said blood flow had in some areas been replenished, which meant that the water was flowing from the cistern, or at least partially, at the time Reeva’s head was still over the toilet bowl.
It was thought that Reeva had already bled into the bowl, and when Oscar broke down the door and entered the cubicle, he might have inadvertently leaned on the flushing mechanism. But this cistern has a partially recessed button, with options for heavy and light flow, so whoever flushed the toilet must have done so purposefully. Did the accused literally attempt to flush evidence down the toilet? Or had Reeva been shot moments after having flushed the toilet herself?
Private forensic investigator Cobus Steyl believes that the latter is indeed possible. ‘Reeva could have flushed the toilet and that was the sound that caused Oscar to shoot. She fell in such a way that her head was bleeding over the bowl with some of the water still flowing towards the end of the flush. The initial shot to the head would cause the blood to gush out like a shaken bottle of Coke, but then it stops because she is bleeding from the wounds lower on her body,’ he said.
Steyl stated that the flow pattern of the toilet water could easily be established by putting a dye in the water and test flushing it. He said it appeared that towards the end of the flush, after the valve had closed, there was still some water in the pipe, but that this tapered off.
He believes that while this fact may have been irrelevant to each side’s case, it should still have been presented to the court. ‘You never know whether it could play a vital role towards the end of the case when all the information is put together. It is for the court to decide what is important or not,’ he said.
Speaking after the closing arguments had concluded, defence forensic scientist Roger Dixon was insistent that this was an absolutely crucial piece of evidence that should have been introduced to the court.
‘The toilet had been flushed! She sat and flushed. That trickle takes maybe thirty seconds to taper down. She flushed, he yelled, she slammed the door, she fell down and the last trickle of the toilet after the flush cut those runnels through the blood. The water ran over the blood. The blood didn’t happen afterwards. She flushed the toilet. If she had been so scared and frightened she would have peed in her pants. Her bladder was almost empty,’ said Dixon.
‘We didn’t find very much urine in the bowl. It had been tested,’ he revealed.
‘This was the third startle. It destroys the state’s case totally. With the third startle, his worst fears are confirmed. That’s the crux of the case. It destroys the “I’m going to chase you and kill you because I don’t like you any more” idea. It shows that she went to the toilet with her cellphone, under her own steam, no hurry, no rush. When he yelled, she reacted by locking the door.’
Dixon said this wasn’t part of his remit and it was something he only discovered after he had concluded his testimony.
A member of the prosecution team said Nel didn’t introduce this evidence because there were simply too many possibilities to consider. ‘There was no realistic conclusion to reach based on the available evidence, we would have just been guessing.’ The National Prosecuting Authority did not comment on questions sent to it about this.
Roux didn’t touch on this either – flushing the toilet was not in his client’s timeline and if Roux believed a police officer on the scene had inadvertently flushed the toilet he almost certainly would have pounced on it.
But the evidence appears to show that at some point the toilet was flushed. As Hennie van Vuuren said before the trial had even begun, this evidence would tell a story – a story that both sides have chosen to ignore.
In any event, the weight of the forensic evidence and how it slotted in to the version being offered by either party would ultimately have to be decided on by Judge Masipa.
ContraDixon
Roger Dixon speaks with the authority and confidence you would expect from an expert witness with a Master’s degree and nearly 20 years of experience in the police’s Forensic Science Laboratory. A middle-aged man, neatly dressed in a grey suit and matching tie, with a grey beard and moustache, he stood upright in the witness box with his hands on the desk in front of him, one folded over the other. He rocked back and forth as he addressed the court, and tapped out the syllables of the words he spoke, enunciating clearly for all to hear what he had to say. Following each question his hands invariably left their resting position, taking flight in the space in front of his chest, with his fingers flexing and assuming all manner of positions to animate and emphasise what he was trying to convey to the court. Dixon liked to talk and often ventured off on a tangent before being reined in by Roux. This habit landed Dixon in trouble when Nel took over the questioning for cross-examination.
And yet, despite his confident and assuring demeanour, Dixon broke two cardinal rules of expert testimony in a court of law: don’t testify on a subject you are not an expert in and don’t talk more than is necessary.
He was the first witness to testify after Oscar stepped off the stand. On the morning of Dixon’s testimony, Johannesburg daily newspaper The Star featured a headline reading ‘Oscar trial: Now for damage control’. There was an expectation that he would bring with him redemption.
Dixon was introduced to the court as a forensic geologist with degrees in Chemistry and Geology, who had previously headed up the Materials Analysis subsection at the SAPS, now being managed by Vermeulen. In his career in the police, he had obtained qualifications and attended numerous courses offered by local and internal organisations, including the FBI. He was responsible for ‘all types of trace evidence, forensic geology, fibres, all types of organic pollutants, crime scene investigations which were varied, such as industrial accidents or theft, or break-ins and break-outs … it is a very wide generalist area’.
In this case, as Roux led him, Dixon testified on an incredibly wide variety of subjects, including ballistics, wound ballistics, pathology, sound and light levels and other fields, but in cross-examination he conceded he was not an expert on these subjects, but a layperson. An irresistible cliché crept into the headlines as it became apparent that Dixon was a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. It also emerged that this was the first trial he had testified in as a private, independent expert and that he had not even ventured into this field in several years since leaving the police.
At first, Dixon gave evidence that seemed to support the case for the defence. He testified about how Oscar’s bedroom was pitch dark when the lights were not on and that he would not have been able to see Reeva getting up and going to the bathroom. He also believed it would not have been possible for Oscar’s neighbours, the Stipps, to have seen him through his bathroom window without his prosthetic legs on. Johan Stipp had testified he had seen a man without a shirt walking past the window. In addition, Dixon testified that a mark on Oscar’s prosthetic leg was consistent with attempts to break down the toilet door while wearing his prostheses.
The geologist also attempted to bolster the defence’s version about the bruises on Reeva’s back and what had caused them. The prosecution’s witnesses claimed that the bruises on her back came from a projectile but Dixon believed the abrasions were caused by the magazine rack in the cubicle. He believed they were consistent with horizontal abrasions as if she had fallen back onto the rack.
The state’s witnesses had contended that Reeva was facing the door and talking to Oscar when she was shot. Dixon, however, contested this, claiming that she was standing at an angle to the door with her right arm slightly raised. This supported the defence’s version that she was about to leave the cubicle and was reaching for the handle.
When Dixon moved onto ballistics evidence, it surprised many watching the developments in the courtroom. Experienced expert Wollie Wolmarans was expected to take care of this realm of evidence, but it became clear that Dixon and Wolmarans had worked on the case together and this seemed to prompt the geologist to step beyond the area of his own expertise and into Wolmarans’s field.
Dixon and Wolmarans were at the crime scene together in March 2013, when Mangena and his colleagues rehung the door for them to inspect it in loco and a week later they visited the Forensic Science Lab for further inspection of the exhibits. Dixon identified the various marks on the door, as well as a critical third mark higher up on the door, which he said was one of the three marks made when the bat struck the door. Vermeulen, however, had discussed only two marks and did not include the third one in his report.
Dixon took an identical door from Oscar’s house – the pantry door, made of the same meranti wood – and conducted tests in which the door was str
uck with the cricket bat, as well as fired bullets through it, in order to replicate the effects that would arise when it is hit, damaged and abused, ‘in the fashion which is evident on the door’. He was responsible for hitting the door, and while testifying complained that he still had pain in his left forearm from the exercise – indicative of how recently the test had been conducted. ‘It takes a lot of force to break that door,’ he said.
The defence forensics team conducted the tests at a shooting range at night. In a scene reminiscent of the YouTube video discussed during Vermeulen’s testimony, microphones and recording stations were placed at 60 metres and 180 metres from the door.
With Dixon in the witness box, the recording made at the 60-metre spot was played to the courtroom. Oscar plugged his ears with his index fingers and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking down at the ground. After some awkward technical difficulties trying to get the sound clip to play on the laptop, three banging sounds were heard first, followed by four similar sounds in quick succession. They did seem to sound like gunshots, but what was also clear in the clips were the sounds of crickets or frogs chirping in the background.
Dixon explained that the first three strikes of the cricket bat were done by pulling the blade over his shoulder, but for the four shots in rapid succession he wielded the bat as if he were in the classical cricket batsman posture, striking at the bottom end of the door.
These clips were played again in court the following day, as were the gunshots clips, first at the 60-metre point and then at 180 metres. They sounded very similar to the bat striking the door, but what was notably different was the sounds of the bugs in the background, which were much less pronounced.
‘Does that accord with the test that you attended?’ asked Roux.
‘The first ones were the cricket bat, at 60 and 180 and the second ones were the gunshots at 60 and 180,’ said Dixon – an answer he came to regret in cross-examination.
