Steeped in Blood

by David Klatzow

  CHAPTER 12

  ORDERS TO ELIMINATE, NOT ILLUMINATE

  ‘The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.’

  – MARTIN LUTHER KING JR,

  leader of the African-American civil rights movement and Nobel Peace Prize winner

  Getting rid of a problem rather than solving it was often the chosen path in the dark days of apartheid. Numerous ‘strange’ deaths occurred, and the official versions of stories were blatantly touted as the truth, while the struggle organisations had their own accounts of events. It was only many years later that the actual truth would come to light. As an independent forensic scientist, I found investigating many of these murders to be extremely frustrating.

  The deaths of the Cradock Four were cases in point. The bodies of Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mhlauli were found in the Eastern Cape on 29 June 1985, sparking a huge outcry from the Anti-Apartheid Movement and liberation fighters. The four had been active members of the UDF, so their deaths were not likely to have been an accident.

  Matthew Goniwe, who was thirty-eight years old, hailed from Lingelihle, a black township outside Cradock. He trained as a teacher at the University of Fort Hare, and his teaching career spanned areas such as the Transkei, Graaff-Reinet and Lingelihle.

  He was passionate about his community, but ran into trouble with the authorities when he was arrested in 1977 under the Suppression of Communism Act. He spent four years in jail in Umtata, during which time he obtained a BA degree from UNISA, majoring in education and political science.

  Goniwe played a central role in the formation of CRADORA, the Cradock Residents’ Association – an unofficial township organisation – as well as CRADOYA, the Cradock Youth Association. At the time of his death, he was also the rural organiser for the Eastern Cape region of the UDF, and he was an associate member of the Black Sash.

  In March 1984, Goniwe and a number of others were arrested under Section 28 of the Internal Securities Act, and were held in Pollsmoor Prison. They were released without being charged in October 1984. From that point onwards, Goniwe was under constant police surveillance.

  On the morning of Thursday 27 June 1985, Goniwe, Calata, Mkhonto and Mhlauli left Port Elizabeth to head home to Cradock after attending a UDF meeting. The next morning, Goniwe’s wife phoned Port Elizabeth to find out what had happened to the men, as they had not returned home. Goniwe’s gutted car was found on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth that afternoon. In the evening, Sparrow Mkhonto’s body was discovered near the road to Perseverance, a few kilometres from the burnt-out car.

  Sicelo Mhlauli’s body was found on Saturday 29 June in the sand dunes near Bluewater Bay, on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, and the following Tuesday, after an extensive search by members of the police and the Defence Force, the bodies of Goniwe and Calata were discovered in the dunes, lying near each other on their backs, with burnt arms outstretched. The bodies were so charred that it was difficult to see whether they had been mutilated.

  I was approached by Molly Blackburn, from the Black Sash, to investigate this case. The ‘official’ explanation of the deaths was that the four men had been killed by their own informers, which everyone intuitively knew was nonsense.

  The evidence that I found told an entirely different story. When I examined the car, I could see that it had been driven away from where Goniwe was shot. It was clear when looking at the car that he had been shot by someone taller than him, as the seat had been set right back on its tracks. We also knew that Goniwe would not have stopped for anyone except the police. None of this added up.

  The involvement of the police in the investigation was predictable – their body language and attitude showed that they had no interest in investigating these murders. They seemed to know what had happened. The dockets were empty, and we had limited access to the evidence; the police used every tactic in the book to prevent us from getting to the truth. There seemed to be no such thing as an independent police forensic person. The sham of an investigation was a waste of everybody’s time, and it was one of those cases where the truth emerged only many years later.

  Some fourteen years afterwards, in 1999, George Bizos revealed at the TRC hearings the minutes of a state security council meeting in March 1984, in which a reference was made to Goniwe by the former apartheid government minister Barend du Plessis. The minutes indicated that certain ‘agitator’ former teachers be ‘removed’. Du Plessis later stated that he was referring to the redeployment of Goniwe due to the political climate in Cradock. But the truth did come out, eventually.

  Cases like this cast a terrible shadow over the state at the time. It was the same with the David Webster murder (which I discuss in Chapter 14). People started to assume that the state was responsible for all kinds of atrocities, even when it was not.

  Another tragic and frustrating case in which I was involved was the Piet Retief massacre on 8 June 1988, an event that was typical of the unspeakable things that occurred during the years of ‘total onslaught’.

  One of the methods used to fight the unholy war of apartheid was to capture certain of the ‘enemy’ and offer them a stark choice – summary execution or the opportunity to turn collaborator and work for the security police. This happened predominantly at Vlakplaas, but also elsewhere, as discussed in Chapter 9. It was not much of a choice, and most took the latter option and betrayed their former comrades to become askaris.

  In the Piet Retief case, information arrived in the hands of the security police that certain ANC cadres – members of MK – were planning to cross the border from Swaziland into South Africa on a given date. A ‘secure’ vehicle driven by an undercover askari was arranged for the MK members by the security forces, and they were duly picked up. They were driven to an ambush site on a lonely part of the road outside Piet Retief, a sleepy hamlet close to the Swaziland border. The askari then, using the pretence of relieving himself, left the car, and the security police stepped out from the shadows and riddled the vehicle – and all those in it – with bullets.

  No attempt had been made to arrest the occupants of the vehicle prior to the ambush. The result of the shooting was a set of bulletriddled corpses, and the normal falsified affidavits were prepared for the inquest. The photographs included in this book illustrate the savagery with which these killings were performed. Some time after the inquest, one of the constables who had been on duty at the Piet Retief police station that night unburdened himself to Max du Preez of Vrye Weekblad, and an article revealing what had happened was published on 26 January 1990.

  I was called in after the article appeared by the attorneys acting for the families of the deceased, and I went up to the scene. We asked to see the car in which the killings had taken place. During the examination of the car at the Piet Retief police station, I found a bullet that had not been removed by the police during the original examination. I asked the policeman overseeing us whether I could remove the bullet, and he attempted to obtain higher authority. The legal team for the families contacted the magistrate in charge of the inquest, but there was silence from all concerned.

  I took the bull by the horns and cut the bullet out of the seat. The angle at which it had entered the seat would have serious consequences for the police version of the story. I also wanted to perform ballistic comparisons on the bullet. No sooner had I arrived back at my laboratory in Johannesburg with the bullet than I was visited by Krappies Engelbrecht, by then a general in the police force. He instructed me to hand over the bullet and threatened me with prosecution for tampering with a crime scene. I was forced to give it to him.

  Of course, nothing more was ever heard of the bullet.

  The problem in this case was access to evidence. When one party has sole access to the evidence, it can be manipulated in any way. Government agencies should not have this privilege. In the United States and the United Kingdom, private forensic agenc
ies are allowed access to all evidence, and the investigations can take place openly, standing up to the scrutiny of the public at large.

  Nothing was conducted in the open during the apartheid years. The magistrate at the hearing of the Piet Retief massacre issued veiled and not-so-veiled threats about charging me with obstructing the course of justice. It has never ceased to astound me just how dishonest and politically servile the state officials were. They forgot their oath of office to uphold the law of the land, and in many instances they were so politically motivated that it was beyond reasonable belief.

  Our counsel in the Piet Retief matter was Zac Jacoob, who was blind, but who constantly amazed me with his incredible courtroom acuity, eyes or no eyes. He made use of a little Braille typewriter, and he had a phenomenal memory. His work on this doomed case was excellent, despite the somewhat inevitable outcome, given the time and circumstances.

  It was clear from the angles of the gunshots that this was nothing more than cold-blooded murder of people that the police considered politically undesirable. There was room to arrest them; the laws were robust enough to deal with any crimes committed by such state officials. But the police had learnt well from Steve Biko and others, and they wanted to eliminate rather than illuminate. A report in Vrye Weekblad at the time said that the policemen stood around drinking sherry while the bodies were being booked into the mortuary, attesting to their utter callousness.

  At the TRC hearings some years later, I stated to Bishop Desmond Tutu and Alex Boraine that these atrocities could never have happened without connivance at all levels of the public service, including police, prosecutors, magistrates and some of the judges. Many of the judges and magistrates behaved impeccably during those times, and several sought to frustrate the worst of the apartheid legislation by their interpretation of the law. There were, however, those who saw it as their duty to twist and bend the law, the evidence and anything else to achieve results that were in line with the wishes or needs of their political masters.

  These were insecure times for me. The state loathed me with a passion and never appointed me to act in any matter. They regarded me as someone who tried to pervert the course of justice. People like Lothar Neethling must have known of the involvement of the police in underhand activities, and he knew I would doggedly pursue true justice. I became ever more vocal in my beliefs and started tape-recording the policemen I spoke to. I would walk up to them with a microphone and record them openly as I asked them questions, something with which they were extremely uncomfortable.

  The state was not above eliminating adversaries. One particular incident severely rattled me. Shelona, our son James and I were on our farm for the weekend. While I was busy putting up a fence quite a distance from the farmhouse, a car pulled up and a man climbed out. As he swaggered towards me, I could see the bulge of a pistol on his belt. He was Afrikaans, and wanted to know where the owner of the farm was. When I asked for his name, he refused to give it to me. I informed him that the owner was not there. The man said that he had heard that the farm was for sale, to which I replied that it wasn’t, asking him where he had learnt that. The lady at the bottle store in town had told him, he responded.

  As soon as the man left, I went to the only bottle store in town and asked the woman there whether she had discussed the sale of my farm with anyone. She denied having spoken to anyone about such a thing. I went straight back to the farm and relayed the incident to Shelona. We felt extremely uncomfortable and unsafe, especially because James was just a baby at the time. That evening, leaving the house lights switched on, we packed James into the car and drove to a friend’s house with our car lights off. We never went back to the farm, and we sold it years later. Those were very scary times for me, both personally and for us as a family.

  Despite the fact that I was labelled an ‘ANC man’, I always tried to carry out my investigations with the utmost impartiality. In one case, two young activists were killed at Duduza in the East Rand. It was alleged that the police had murdered them by shooting them, and the community was livid. At the post-mortem, it was clear that there were hand-grenade fragments in their brains, but also interesting was that their hands had been blown off. The truth was that the security forces had infiltrated these ANC groups and tampered with the hand grenades, substituting the four-second detonator with an instant detonator, so that when the pin was pulled out of the grenade, it went off immediately.

  I was never there to favour one side or another – I was there simply to ascertain the truth. In this case, the two activists had not been murdered; they had died as a result of the hand grenade going off in their hands. I suppose it was a murder of sorts, but they should not have been tossing hand grenades around in the first place.

  As time progressed, we seemed to be getting closer to the truth, but I was often on the wrong side of the fence. This caused me no end of worry. It would have been easy for the state to take me out at any point, and I do not understand why they didn’t – perhaps I simply didn’t cause enough damage. My personal safety, however, was a genuine concern of mine.

  In 1988, I went to London on an Anglo American scholarship to study fingerprinting. I recall speaking to various individuals, particularly media people, about my concern for my safety. Their advice was to ‘hide under the light’, and that became my method of protecting myself – I worked on my public profile, making sure that people knew what I was doing and what I looked like, and I interacted with the media on a regular basis. This ensured that people knew about me, and would ask questions if anything happened to me.

  I also made sure that I never went off on solo investigations without informing someone of my whereabouts. I remember one instance where I was asked by Geoff Budlender to go to a place where a witness said they had found a mass burial site. I knew that if I found it, I would not come back alive. I called Advocate van Nieuwenhuizen and told him that if I was not back by 3 p.m. that afternoon, he should send a search party. I called Helen Suzman and told her as well. Fortunately, in that case, the witness cancelled and we never went.

  The 1980s were dangerous times, politically and personally. Fortunately, normality started returning to South Africa in the early nineties, and I began to feel safer in my ongoing quest for the truth.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAIL

  ‘Anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.’

  – RICHARD RORTY,

  American philosopher

  Are they real or are they fake? That was the million-dollar question asked in 1987 in a huge legal wrangle over a collection of early Japanese stamps. My training and experience in the world of forensic science came into full force as I endeavoured to find scientific evidence that would answer this thorny question.

  The story of the Japanese stamps started long before I became involved in the matter. A man by the name of Cyril Abrahams worked for Sterns, a chain of jewellery stores. He decided to start his own business, and obtained a significant overdraft facility with the then Barclays Bank in Pritchard Street, Johannesburg, to do so. After a while, the overdraft started reaching alarming proportions, and the bank manager contacted Abrahams to ask him to provide some security for the loan.

  Abrahams went to see the bank manager, taking with him an A4 stamp collector’s book, filled with stamps. He explained to the bank manager that this was a valuable collection of early Japanese stamps, which would more than cover his overdraft facility. The bank manager accepted the book of stamps as security and locked it in the bank vault.

  Abrahams’s overdraft continued to grow, to the point that it was well over a million rand, a significant amount of money, especially in the 1980s. The bank wrote Abrahams a polite letter asking him to settle the overdraft or reduce it to a more acceptable level. He replied that he was unable to do so, and correspondence travelled between the two parties as the bank became increasingly edgy about the risk they were carrying.

  Fi
nally, the bank decided to sell the stamps. After insuring the book of stamps, they sent them to Christie’s in London with a request for the stamps to be sold for one and a half million rand, from which Christie’s would take their commission before paying the bank the balance. Christie’s wrote a very polite letter back to the bank, saying that they thought the bank was being over-optimistic, as the stamps were all forgeries. The London art dealers estimated the value of the stamp collection to be about two hundred rand.

  The stamps were sent back to South Africa, and the bank informed Abrahams that they were forgeries. Furious, Abrahams went down to the bank to examine the stamps. After taking a look, he declared that they were a clear forgery, and that they were not the stamps he had handed to the bank months before. According to him, there had been foul play. Abrahams started legal proceedings against the bank for one and a half million rand.

  Representatives from the bank arrived on my doorstep in a state of considerable agitation. I examined the facts surrounding the case. When Abrahams had given the stamps to the bank as security for his growing overdraft, they had been valued by a stamp dealer, Tibor Major. As part of the valuation process, photocopies had been made of all the stamps, page by page, which had been signed by both Major and Abrahams, agreeing that each page was a copy of the original stamps in the book.

  Abrahams went to a huge amount of trouble to prove that these copies did not match the stamps in the book that the bank was now presenting as a forgery, implying that the bank had substituted the original stamps with worthless ones. His argument centred on the fact that, when you photocopy, there is an enlargement, which should be equal across the length and breadth of each stamp. He measured certain marks on the stamps and the copies, arguing that the ratios should be the same. Because there were differences in measurement, he claimed, these were not the stamps that he had given to the bank.