by Mandy Wiener
It’s over. I’m not going to dissect it. If you have regrets, it means you did something wrong. If you’re pleased, it means you beat somebody and that’s not what it’s about. I am aware there has been quite a lot of commentary. These were all highly influenced by other factors. I’m not worried about it. I’m being honest. I’m working accurately to the facts. The world could see this: I wasn’t against being televised. I was accused of not having integrity. That’s Mr Nel’s opinion. He was trying to get to me. You know what they say: all’s fair in love and war.
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.
Jack of All Trades, Master of ‘Nine’
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’.
‘It is a fact that because we are adversarial, the parties have two strongly opposing sides. You will not lead evidence which is not supportive of your main premise. So, any evidence which weakened your case, you will leave out, won’t you? I think everybody who participates in the court case has an obligation. However, it is my experience that that is often not the case. It could be that the prosecutor is going on the evidence that is presented by the investigating officer, I have known investigating officers to manipulate physical evidence in order to secure a conviction. I have testified against those people.’
During his time at the SAPS, there were a number of occasions when Dixon was called upon to watch the watchmen – to do tests that ultimately revealed that officers had manipulated evidence. The most notable of these is the role he played in the investigation into the murder of Stellenbosch student Inge Lotz. He did the tests on the infamous fingerprint ‘folien’, which showed that the police had lifted prints off a drinking glass rather than a DVD case. This was seen as critical to acquitting Lotz’s boyfriend Fred van der Vyfer.
Dixon left the police at the end of 2012, after 18 years of service, the majority of time as a colonel. He left the service because of the way the Forensic Science Lab was being run. ‘I had one instrument there that after 18 months I still couldn’t get an order number to have it repaired because the whole process was so poorly managed and incompetent. I was totally frustrated fixing up other people’s mistakes. I wasn’t able to do what I wanted to do and what I was employed to do, which was to be a forensic scientist.’
When he joined the University of Pretoria in January 2013, he had no intention of ever working as a private forensic scientist. He was a divorcee with two adult children and a new career and new life. That all changed when Oscar shot Reeva.
‘I was sitting having lunch at the restaurant on campus, under the trees, nice and pleasantly relaxed in work attire – shorts and sandals,’ Dixon remembers wistfully, ‘and I got a phone call on the same afternoon as the bail hearing judgment and I was asked if I was prepared to get involved.’
The call came from private ballistics expert Wollie Wolmarans.
‘He was the main forensic person who was organising that and I was asked if I would be prepared to be part of it because there were things that needed investigation that they weren’t expert on. I must admit, just that got my heart racing and I felt that frisson of excitement,’ he says animatedly. ‘It is one of the reasons why being a forensic analyst and going to crime scenes and whatever … it’s changing all the time, the investigations are not years of research and whatever. It’s different and it’s exciting. So I thought about it …’
Within hours Dixon found himself sitting in his car outside Oscar’s house at Silver Woods, listening to Magistrate Nair delivering his judgment on the car’s radio. He was waiting for the investigating team to arrive and to have his first look at the scene.
Together he and Wolmarans, working initially with private ballistics specialist Wessie van der Westhuizen, carried out their investigations. Dixon occasionally met with Oscar during consultations with his legal team in counsel’s chambers. ‘He was very tense. Very nervous. Sort of … very down. Not a happy chappy,’ says Dixon candidly.
With the stakes so high in this trial, was there a point when he thought the state might resort to dubious tactics?
‘Suspicious, maybe, maybe not … because sometimes things would appear in public which can only be attributed to a certain person or event and there were no outside witnesses to it. So, yes, maybe it’s just pure coincidence,’ he hints. ‘As a precautionary measure, because the matter had been raised – I don’t know who came up with it – we tended to switch off our phones or leave them in the car or whatever when we had meetings and discussions. The possibility is always there. It’s really unfortunate, though, that one has to do this, because that implies that nobody is trustworthy. And that’s bad, our society today is rather sick.’
Following the investigations, Dixon’s role was to ‘pull it all together’, which is why he was the first defence expert to testify. ‘I presented an overview of the sequence of events in the bathroom. I put it all together. I did the interpretation of the crime scene. I’m looking at a logical sequence of events based on physical or chemical properties. As I said, I am not an expert in this specific thing … however, what I do is I interpret the crime scene, I interpret the interaction based on scientific principles. All right, wood breaks. Who’s an expert in the breaking of wood? Show me one. No. You’re a scientist. You do research. You look at the literature. You take wood of the same thing and you test it. You recreate the situation, you have to … you know, apples with apples, which in the Oscar Pistorius case with the door, for instance, the police did not use the same door for their tests; they used another door. A different ammunition.
‘Now all of a sudden, what I am doing by grabbing a cricket bat and hitting a door, I’m not qualified to do that. Excuse me? I’m not a professional cricketer, no. How many professional cricketers – by the adulation from the TV public, they must be qualified – how many of them go around hitting doors with a cricket bat? How many people have actually heard a door being hit by a cricket bat? Now a door of a specific type in a specific situation? You show me please where you have a qualified expert in that?’
Dixon gets a little worked up at this point – after all, this was one of the key criticisms of his testimony, that he was a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. He finds a joke to counter this, saying he’s a ‘jack of all trades, master of nine’. He’s also quick to respond to the ‘I used my eyes to measure the light’ mockery.
‘In today’s day and age, people think that machines and instruments are the be-all and the end-all. What instrument analyses a crime scene?’
But what about his assertion that he works on fact alone, and not on interpretation?
‘I interpret the facts, to come up with an expert opinion, which is my interpretation of the events – but it is all based on facts. The interpretation is the end result of considering the facts,’ he insists.
‘Fact,’ he continues wi
th emphasis. ‘If I see something move, it moved. That’s not interpretation. It moved. That’s a fact. I cannot say how fast it moved unless there was a mark and another mark and I know the distance and I’ve got my watch out and I clock it. Therefore I saw it move, and I saw it move at that speed because I have recorded it. Now, if I am looking with my eyes, what am I doing? I am recording a scene and I am interpreting the signal via my brain. Now if I have a lens on my camera and I have a recording medium and a memory card, what is the difference? The difference is that the eye is far more powerful than a camera lens. A camera lens is limited. With the eye you see more.’
While Dixon defends his own abilities with conviction, he’s critical of the conduct of the police investigators. ‘The first thing you do on a crime scene is you don’t touch it. You record everything properly first, then you examine and you work out what you are going to do. That is a crime scene. You can preserve it intact. There is no reason to take a door off and take it somewhere else. There might be some test you need to do in the pristine state and now it’s no longer in the pristine state, and how do you know that will have an effect? You never know. The only evidence we had of the original state was from the earliest photographs which the police took, which I only saw later on in the case.
‘If I had still been in the Forensic Science Laboratory and I had been involved, and I had to examine the stuff, I would have given the same story that I have given now. My story was quite contradictory of some of the evidence presented by one of the witnesses for the state.’
Dixon won’t name the witness, but it’s obvious that his biggest gripe is with the ballistics. Captain Chris Mangena was the state witness who dealt with that. It’s a recurring theme when speaking to those on the defence team.