One Tragic Night (59 page)

‘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 with 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.

But Dixon remains confident, despite his experience on the stand. Prior to the judgment, he's impervious to what the judge's finding might be on his credibility (and ultimately Masipa did not mention him) and is self-assured enough not to doubt his credentials despite the public mauling. He says he'll be back to testify another day.

‘Why not? I'm not scared. That was my job. If you are scared of something like that, you don't do it. However, I do know that there are plenty of forensic scientists who would not testify on things like that. In fact, a lot of people would rather put a finding of “undetermined” than make a statement which could lead them to go to court.

‘If the police employed me and paid me for 18 years and when there was a problem people came to me because if nobody could solve it I might have a chance because of my particular skills and expertise, why must I doubt now because I am outside the police? I went to the dark side and now everything I do is suspect because I'm siding with the evil forces,' he jokes, his sense of humour showing itself again.

While he gives an assurance that he hasn't been scared off, one can't help but suspect that he might seek refuge here, in his inconspicuous office hidden in the botanical gardens, surrounded by his rocks and soil and microscopes. For a while, he might busy himself with editing the
South African Clivia Yearbook
again or doing analysis for groundbreaking research – until that ‘frisson' of excitement courses through his veins once more and he's lured back to another crime scene.

Thomas ‘Wollie' Wolmarans is tall and grey haired, with a moustache to match. He has bucketloads of experience, spending 20 of his 60 years working in the South African Police (SAP) force but now operating as a private ballistics expert. He works out of a shooting range in Pretoria and is occasionally known to invite journalists over to demonstrate his opinions on a case, followed by a sit-down in the quaint coffee shop next door. There's no mistaking his passion for his craft.

Over the course of his lengthy career, Wolmarans has conducted more than 10 000 forensics investigations and has testified in over 500 cases in South Africa and neighbouring countries. He has almost unrivalled experience with firearms, which he accumulated in the South African Defence Force, in the Forfeited and Confiscated Firearms Section of the SAP, at the South African Criminal Bureau and during time spent seconded by the police's Ballistics Unit to Zimbabwe (Rhodesia at the time). Since 1977, he has given expert evidence in various fields, including ballistics, microscopic identification of fired bullets and cartridge cases, photomicrography (the examination of firearms), and the photography and reconstruction of crime scenes. He retired from the SAP in 1992 and has since practised as a private and independent forensic consultant. In 2000 he was employed by the United Nations as a crime scene officer for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Countless hours firing weapons have damaged his ears and left him with tinnitus, making communication with him challenging at times.

Wolmarans had been sitting in on the trial since day one. Through Roux's cross-examinations it was evident he would be called to challenge many of the state's findings, particularly those of Captain Mangena. Wolmarans and Mangena
shared a respectful and collegial relationship, with the elder man saying that Mangena referred to him as ‘Oom', the Afrikaans moniker for ‘Uncle', while he used the term of endearment ‘my seun' (‘my son') when talking to Mangena.

The witness had with him his report, dated 23 April, which meant it was compiled and submitted to Oscar's defence team after the accused himself had testified, and after fellow expert witness Roger Dixon had spent time in the box. The timeline caused problems for both Wolmarans and the defence – why had Wolmarans compiled this report so late, and did it mean he was tailoring it according to the evidence that had gone before? In addition, was this why he and Dixon had shared a beer once the geologist had finalised his testimony?

Oscar's defence team hired Wolmarans on the day he killed Reeva – Thursday – but he only had access to the crime scene on the Sunday at around 3:30pm after the police had concluded their investigation and relinquished control over the house.

The house had been secured by a company called Platinum Risk Solutions and the key was handed to the ballistics expert. Wolmarans's first task was to do a walk-through of the house, wearing protective clothing and taking photographs as he went. Colleagues from CSI Africa, a private forensics company, arrived a couple of hours later and began doing a fingerprint investigation of the scene. Wolmarans noted that the main bathroom door, through which Oscar had shot Reeva, had been removed.

The following day Wolmarans returned to the house. As part of his routine, he inspected the bloody toilet bowl. The private expert donned a pair of surgical gloves and fished around with his hand to find any evidence the police might have overlooked. To his surprise, he discovered a piece of the lead core of a bullet. While feeling around in the toilet bowl he also recovered a small piece of tile that was missed by the police's forensic investigators. A mere visual inspection of the bowl would not have turned up anything because it was filled with blood.

This discovery was used in the bail application to cast additional doubt over the police's handling of the crime scene, and asked questions about the state's case in light of the fact that items had been overlooked. On the Tuesday, Wolmarans handed the bullet fragment to then investigating officer Captain Hilton Botha at the Pretoria Magistrate's Court.

Wolmarans again returned to the crime scene on 8 March 2013, the same day that Captain Mangena and the other officers reinstalled the toilet door for their own tests. The private ballistics expert merely observed and took a few pictures as the policemen took control of the situation, although Wolmarans requested a sample fragment of the meranti door. The piece was handed to him
by Captain Mike van Aardt and placed in a sealed evidence bag with the number ΡΑ60011432811 marked ‘Boschkop 110/2012'. Wolmarans later handed the piece over to his fellow defence witness, Roger Dixon.