Steeped in Blood

by David Klatzow

  Many years later, before 1994, a laboratory belonging to Armscor burnt down in Pretoria. I was asked to investigate the laboratory. Being cautious, and because the process of investigating a fire involves crawling around and sniffing things, I wanted to make certain that there was nothing toxic in the laboratory. I turned to the head of the laboratory and said, ‘I need to sniff around your laboratory. Please bring me a shovel.’ I duly dug around and finally discovered a foul smell. It smelt to me like butyric acid, so I asked the laboratory head if it was, in fact, what I thought it was.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It is. In fact, this is the place where the butyric acid used in the Regina Mundi church incident was produced. We used to manufacture those foul-smelling things for the forces.’

  It was going way beyond acceptable limits for the National Party to spray such substances all over a church, no matter what the political persuasions were. I wasn’t prepared to analyse the fire any further for the laboratory people because, as far as I was concerned, there was a conflict of interest – I had acted for the Regina Mundi church. Because the church had placed itself on the other, opposing side of the political spectrum, they had been subjected to these dirty tricks. I felt it my duty to reveal to everybody the fact that the Armscor laboratory had done this. Politics is such a dirty game; I did not want to be involved with any organisation that had stooped to using such dishonest techniques in a place of worship.

  Political overtones and filthy tricks had a strong impact on Henry Burt, the first white person to be convicted of the ‘necklace’ murder of a black man. Necklacing entailed placing a petrol-filled tyre around the neck of a victim and setting it alight, and was fairly common in the apartheid years. Burt’s trial and conviction caused quite a stir in its day.

  Henry Burt was a young fitter and turner who lived with his girlfriend, Moekie, in Laezonia, near Lanseria Airport. In 1986, the body of a black policeman was found necklaced in the veld about 15 kilometres from Henry’s home, near a place that would later turn out to be Vlakplaas. During the police investigation, it was established that Burt and another man had given the policeman a lift shortly before his death.

  The police questioned Burt and the other man, who then, suddenly, went to the bank one day, withdrew all his money, left his house, his car and all his possessions, and fled to England. Burt was eventually taken into custody for questioning, where he was tortured almost to the brink of death. He suffered electric shocks, mock suffocations and other cruel methods of torture. After verifying his alibi, the police released him later that evening.

  The next morning, Burt went to the Pretoria Murder and Robbery Unit to make a statement. He took a tape recorder with him in the event that any pressure was placed on him, or he suffered further torture. After making the statement and going for medical treatment, an attorney advised him to apply for an interdict against the police that would prevent them from any further acts of brutality. The interdict was granted at 8 p.m. that evening, after which Burt started criminal proceedings against the police.

  Burt’s civil case against the police seemed to trigger grossly intimidating behaviour by them – they would arrive at his house with no search warrant, force their way in, scratch through his possessions and leave chaos in their wake. About three weeks after the policeman’s body had been found, the police decided to take Burt’s car in again. They told him that the forensic department would ‘definitely find something this time’.

  And ‘find’ something they did. On the second investigation of the car, the police discovered fresh specks of blood on the edge of the back seat – almost as if someone had cut their finger, releasing tiny drops of blood. The car had bucket seats in the front and a bench seat at the back that could be removed to be cleaned.

  The previous investigating officer, who had assaulted Burt, was no longer on the case. His successor came to see Henry at work, and asked him whether he would be prepared to withdraw the charges against the police. He also wanted to know how much money Burt had in the bank. He threatened Burt with arrest and a murder charge if he did not give him a statement explaining how the back seat of the car had come to be covered in the deceased’s blood. Unable to comply with the investigating officer’s request, Burt was arrested for the murder of the policeman.

  The issue of blood testing played an enormous role in this trial. I was brought in by the defence to advise them on the analysis of the blood and the interpretation of the results, as well as on the non-specificity of luminol for detecting blood.

  The police expert testified that, after finding the blood spots, he had examined the entire back seat of the car using the luminol technique. Luminol identifies haemoglobin by fluorescing in the dark. It is very sensitive, detecting haemoglobin traces down to the rate of one part in six million parts (i.e., one part of blood diluted six million times). Using this technique, the police expert could show that the entire back seat had been covered at some stage by haemoglobin, or, as the police expert put it, ‘primate blood’. The sample was too minute to obtain a blood group, but they deduced that the chances were good that the blood was that of a human.

  The court was faced with the picture of a seat having been fully exposed to blood and so thoroughly washed that the blood could be detected only faintly by luminol. I was not convinced that there had ever been blood on the seat – I could not understand the presence of the blood drops or the test result. At the time of the second examination of the vehicle, the blood drops would have been there in full view – anyone could have seen them. Yet the police had scoured the car several times on their first examination and did not see any blood: they had found it only after the interdict. I believe that the drops of blood could only have got on the back seat by being planted there afterwards, which I told the court.

  The police may have used some blood left from the post-mortem of the necklaced man. Yet their submission that the seat had been covered with blood and cleaned – which meant that it must have been removed, soaked, scrubbed and rinsed at least two or three times – would have ensured that the spots of blood would have been washed out. The theory was that the victim had been carried from where he was killed to where he was necklaced, fitting in with the state’s theory of blood on the back seat.

  After three weeks in the Pretoria Supreme Court, Henry Burt was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death. He spent two years on death row. He always protested his innocence, and eventually his sentence was commuted to twenty years on petition to the state president.

  At the TRC, Henry Burt was declared a victim of gross human rights violations, and was paid R30 000 in compensation, a pittance if one considers the course of events that robbed a young man of his life and his future. He had clearly not been guilty, yet he had been convicted on circumstantial and false forensic evidence. Burt and I are still in contact every now and then. He has managed to get on with his life.

  Justice Human was on the bench at Burt’s trial. If you mention his name today in legal circles, people say, ‘to err is Human’. He is dead now, but he was a typical National Party man, in court to do the government’s bidding. The trial was so full of holes: the cause of death was never determined; there was no DNA to show that the blood sample belonged to the deceased. There was never any proper explanation as to how this murder happened. Yet Justice Human would never have found Henry Burt innocent. A policeman had been murdered, and someone had to pay: the police, whether black or white, were paramount in those days.

  This case continued to bother me, in particular the luminol test, which delivered such damning proof of haemoglobin. Moekie, Henry’s girlfriend at the time, knew nothing about the murder, yet it was in her car that the blood spots and evidence of ‘primate blood’ was found. She was a paraplegic who took part in paraplegic games. Henry had made fibreglass coverings for the stainless-steel rims of her wheelchair so that she had better traction for her hands when playing sport. The fibreglass was moulded over the rims, and Henry had sanded them down so that they were smoo
th and comfortable. I discovered many years later that polyester resin from fibreglass gives a positive luminol result. This could have been a logical explanation to the whole case.

  Luminol testing has proved to be accurate and incredibly useful in reaching the truth. In the eighties, I was asked by Cape Town advocate Paul Hoffman to assist with the matter of a Malay messenger, who had been shot and killed by the police. They had mistaken him for a criminal and had ordered him to stop moving. In those days, if the police told a coloured man to stop, he ran. They were entitled to shoot to make an arrest, but, in this case, they shot him in his head.

  An action was brought against the police, and I worked with luminol and the blood stains on the man’s shirt. The police claimed that the criminal they were chasing and had shot was wearing a striped shirt. Yet the man who was killed had been wearing a blue shirt at the time. Even though the shirt had been washed, I was able to show, using luminol, that the shirt worn by the innocent dead man had been covered by his blood.

  The defendant’s advocate in the case was Jeanette Traverso, who subsequently went on to become a judge of the Supreme Court and is now Deputy Judge President of the Supreme Court in Cape Town. My testimony was accepted, and the police were forced to pay compensation to the widow.

  These were difficult days. As an independent forensic scientist, I always had to be one step ahead of the so-called police experts. This was not always easy, as the techniques and methods they used changed all the time, presenting challenges and frustrations. From a forensic point of view, though, these years were interesting – I was always kept on my toes.

  CHAPTER 16

  POST-MORTEMS: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE TOTALLY INEPT

  Disabling Professions

  – IVAN ILICH,

  Austrian philosopher, book title

  Investigating a crime – getting as close to the true sequence of events as possible – is like solving a puzzle. One of the critical steps in this process is the post-mortem. Sadly, in South Africa, the quality of work in this arena is far from ideal. I have been outspoken on this issue over the years, which has not earned me any popularity: it seems we are expected to keep quiet when we see things going wrong. I refuse to do that, and, as such, am often labelled public enemy number one.

  In the 1980s, the post-mortem conducted on young activist Ashley Kriel was appalling. It failed to address the issue of whether or not the gunshot that had killed Kriel had been a contact shot. As I mentioned in Chapter 10, I am certain that there was a second bullet, the presence of which would have had significant ramifications at the inquest. Yet the scientist who carried out the postmortem simply never looked for it or did not report on it.

  Some post-mortem reports that I have seen have been blatant lies. One such case involved a policeman accused of shooting a suspect who had been running away. I was hired to defend the policeman. At the time, it was considered acceptable behaviour for a policeman to shoot and kill a fleeing suspect, and the pathologist’s report reflected this: there were records showing that the pathologist had opened the body before he examined the bullet wounds in the back. This did not cohere with the report at all, because if he had conducted the post-mortem as he said he had, the organs would have fallen out when he turned the body over to study the bullet wounds! The pathologist had simply not conducted a post-mortem: his report was a patent lie. He was eventually cross-examined and admitted to his dishonesty.

  At every crime scene, you, as the forensic investigator, have to start off with a high index of suspicion. If you accept too easily that a death appears to be natural, you fall into the trap that the British police did with Harold Shipman, who murdered old ladies after persuading them to change their wills in his favour. The police in this case had initially failed to find sufficient evidence to bring charges, assuming that the old ladies had died of natural causes. Instead, they had been poisoned by Shipman, their doctor, who had administered lethal doses of diamorphine and then forged their medical records to indicate that they had been in poor health.

  A ‘crime’ can be downgraded to a natural cause of death; it is impossible, however, to go back to suspecting a crime if your starting point is that the death occurred as a result of natural causes.

  Many people are clothed when they die. A post-mortem should be started with the clothed body in order to understand how the death took place. The clothing needs to be examined in relation to any wounds on the body itself to reveal the context in which the injury occurred. For example, if the hands of a person who has been shot were above their head when they were killed, their shirt would have moved up. The position of the bullet hole in the shirt would not, therefore, correspond with the position of the actual gunshot wound on the body. So the position of the clothing in relation to the wound is extremely important, as it will provide the forensic pathologist with valuable information about the way in which the shooting took place. In addition, the manner in which blood spills onto the clothing is different depending on whether the victim was sitting, kneeling or lying down.

  Another crucial aspect of the post-mortem is that of microscopic investigation. Whenever two objects touch each other, there is a transfer of minute materials – something is always left behind, whether it is skin, hair or clothing fibres. This often requires microscopic research. The position and type of the fibres in relation to the clothing and the wound are also important – there may be a lack of burns on the body, for instance, because there was clothing in place. The wound ultimately has to be interpreted in terms of whether there was clothing on at the time of the shooting.

  Ideally, the body should be examined in situ. The hands of the deceased need to be examined, as do the wound, the clothing, and the scene of the killing and its surrounds. In the recent case of Chris Drummond, a high-profile property developer who was pushed off a balcony in Claremont in April 2010, I observed blood on the pillars nearby, so I thought there might have been a fight. When the state mortuary staff arrived to remove the body, they did not have any plastic bags to bag the victim’s hands. I would not allow them to move the body until the hands had been bagged, which I did myself, on the scene. This should have been done by trained, professional mortuary staff, not by me. The hands may have had bruising, material under the fingernails, blood or DNA on them, all of which would be vital evidence.

  The current post-mortem procedure in South African mortuaries begins with a person called a prosector, who opens the body, takes out the organs and lays them out on the slab. The major downside of this is that the body needs to be seen intact first.

  This was highlighted in a recent case I worked on, in which a man died as a result of a suture that had occluded his internal mammary artery, which was the main blood supply to the heart. Although a mammary is not normally a supply to the heart, in bypass surgery it is often used in this way, as was the case here. The man was eighty-two years old and was undergoing the surgery to replace his heart valve. The final metal suture – to pull the sternum together – was to be located close to the mammary artery. Normally, the surgeon would place a metal plate between the internal mammary artery and the sternum, but in this instance the surgeon did not use a plate, as the patient had scarring from a previous triple-bypass operation. The surgeon took a chance and put the suture right through the mammary artery, killing the patient on the operating table. The post-mortem did not reflect this fact, as the whole sternal plate was removed at the post-mortem and no one looked at it. The surgeon knew what he had done, though.

  Examining a body in its entirety to determine how the person died is a major part of forensic pathology: it should be done by a pathologist, not a policeman with little or no training, as is often the case. Frequently, crimes are taken at face value, with very little actual detailed investigation taking place. This simply does not serve justice, as I have witnessed time after time.

  When examining the scene of death in cases of suicide by hanging, the noose should not be removed from the body, as this evidence has to be compared
to the marks on the structure from which the noose was hung, as well as the marks on the skin. It may be possible that the person was hanged after they died, for example. If you disturb the noose and the evidence, the exact cause of death will be difficult to determine.

  Part of the problem with post-mortems is that families who wish to be present at these sessions find it very difficult to do so. Family representation should be encouraged, in my view. People like Jurie Nel, the chief forensic pathologist at Stellenbosch University, would always insist on the family obtaining magisterial approval, despite the fact that he could decide who attended the post-mortem on his own authority. The pathologists have also always tried to keep me out on the basis that I am not medically qualified. Even when I represent families, it is almost impossible for me to observe the post-mortem; in the past I have been allowed to examine the body only when the pathologist was finished with it.

  The most important thing for a forensic pathologist to remember is that he is a man of science. If this critical piece of investigation is done badly, it leaves wiggle room, in my opinion – and the state pathologists like to have wiggle room.

  The blatant laziness in performing proper post-mortems was illustrated vividly by the death of Isaac Miggels, a young boy who supposedly drowned in 2004. A story appeared in the press about this boy, whose body had been found in the Faure Dam in the Western Cape. Miggels, who was eight years old at the time, had been out with friends when he died, and the pathologist from Swellendam found that he had died as a result of drowning.