Poisoning your intimate partner may be seen as a ‘clean’ way of eliminating him or her, and every thirty or forty years arsenic seems to raise its head in popularity. I have had a number of clients approach me over the years on the suspicion that they were being poisoned by their partner. Ninety per cent of the time there are innocent explanations for the symptoms they are experiencing – arsenic produces symptoms very similar to those of gastro-enteritis – but, once in a while, poison is a reality. (In the famous 1932 case of Daisy de Melker, the pathologists were fooled into thinking that her first two husbands had died of gastro-enteritis. It was only when her son died and his body was later exhumed, together with the husbands’ bodies, that traces of arsenic and strychnine were found.)
A few years back, a dentist in Stellenbosch became very ill after eating poisoned chocolates. At around that time, I was visited by a woman who was convinced that her boyfriend was trying to poison her. He had given her a beautiful box of chocolates and had encouraged her to eat them all herself. She became desperately ill afterwards and came to see me.
I took a statement from her and, from what she described, I suspected that it was a case of arsenic poisoning. I was not sure what I was dealing with here because of arsenic poisoning’s mimicking of gastro-enteritis. This poison is easily identifiable in a person’s hair, so I took hair samples from the woman and analysed them – she was loaded with arsenic! I called her and asked her to come in and see me. I told her my findings, and she looked visibly shocked. She then asked me if I thought she should go back to him. I looked at her in disbelief and said, ‘Madam, that is a no-brainer!’
People do strange things in relationships. One fellow came to see me, suspecting that he was being poisoned. He had seen his girlfriend sprinkling something over his curry one evening and, after he ate it, he fell violently ill. He had managed to get hold of the bottle and brought it with him, wanting to know if the contents were toxic.
One of the problems with analysis of this sort is that there are about four million organic compounds, and a significant number of those are toxic. Many of these substances are used in herbal remedies that are readily available.
There was a minute amount of the substance used by the girlfriend left in the bottle, and I was at a loss as to where to start, so I placed it under a microscope and had a look. In the corner I found a tiny pair of insect wings, so I put the contents back in the bottle and went to see Dr Zumph, a medical entomologist at the South African Institute for Medical Research. He identified it as a wing from the cantharides beetle, otherwise known as the Spanish fly. Among other medical uses, this beetle is ground up and used as an aphrodisiac, but it contains a corrosive substance called cantharidin. The dosage should be minuscule; a harmful dose can cause painful urination, fever and sometimes a bloody discharge. In some cases, it can prove fatal. This man had clearly been given too much of this substance, which caused his illness. Whether his girlfriend had administered it by accident or purposefully, I will never know!
The truth, it has been said, is often stranger than fiction, and I recall a rather amusing case where a woman came to see me with a problem. She drank Johnnie Walker whisky, and couldn’t understand why the first few drinks always tasted fine, but then started to taste terrible. She suspected that her husband was trying to poison her, and brought the bottle of whisky for me to analyse.
I ran extensive tests and could find nothing. I then heated a small sample and the strong smell of a urinal began to emanate from it. I took a sample and tested it, and I found it to be full of urine! Her husband waited each time until she had had a few drinks, and then urinated in the bottle – probably just to irritate her! I told her that she was unlikely to die.
I see all kinds of people and all manner of things in my practice. The veneer of civilisation drops away so easily; all that is left is the plain truth about people and how they deal with life and relationship problems. Mine has been a varied practice – it has certainly never been boring!
CHAPTER 20
BENT COPPERS?: THE MURDER OF INGE LOTZ
‘There are those state agencies who are so blind to the possibility of innocence that they ignore or withhold evidence consistent with it as irrelevant.’
– GEOFFREY ROBERTSON,
human rights lawyer, author and broadcaster
Around 10 p.m. on the evening of 16 March 2005, the Lotzes received the message that all parents dread: their daughter, Inge, had been found brutally murdered in her flat in Stellenbosch. The tragedy of this beautiful young woman’s death is impossible to quantify. Even more tragic, however, is that the subsequent criminal investigation stands out as one of the worst police investigations ever to have taken place in South Africa, leaving her killer roaming free. Whether it was stupidity, dishonesty or a combination of both on the part of the police we will never know for certain, but every mistake that could have been made was made in this case.
Inge’s boyfriend, Fred van der Vyver, was arrested for the murder, and I was called in by his family to investigate on behalf of the defence team.
The story starts with a young couple, Frederik Barend van der Vyver and Inge Lotz, who started dating at Stellenbosch University in 2004. Inge was highly intelligent, making strides through the academic world with her studies towards a master’s degree in mathematics. She had the world at her fingertips: not only was she bright, but she was attractive and likeable.
Fred was also mathematically gifted, having obtained a scholarship to study actuarial science from Old Mutual. He was working for the financial services company at the time of Inge’s murder. It was their common interest in mathematics that had brought Fred and Inge together: they had met through the Department of Mathematics at Stellenbosch, and a relationship had developed between them. Inge’s parents knew Fred well, and the relationship had all the hallmarks of one that could have ended in marriage. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be.
With a staunch Dutch Reformed background, Fred was a highly religious person. He was an active member of His People Christian Church, a charismatic church with a strong belief that the Bible is the undiluted word of God, and he took his religion seriously, living his life accordingly. I was led to understand that he never had a conventional sexual relationship with Inge in the form of full penetrative sexual intercourse, but that there had been significant petting between them.
Like any couple, Fred and Inge had their ups and downs. It appeared that, prior to Inge’s murder, there had been some kind of lover’s tiff between them: Inge had written a letter to Fred in which she apologised for the argument, yet they appear to have parted amicably on the morning of the fateful day on which Inge was killed. Fred left her flat that day and proceeded to a second-hand furniture shop to purchase a bookshelf for a friend. Since Fred drove a light pick-up van, he was able to transport the bookshelf, and he was going to deliver it to his friend later.
Unaware of the horrific events that would ensue, Fred then drove to work in Pinelands, where he clocked in at Old Mutual at 11.05 a.m. The advanced access-control system – the only way to enter or exit the building – monitors staff’s photographs as they move through the turnstiles: these records proved that Fred was in the Old Mutual building from the late morning onwards. He was in meetings for the rest of the day, finishing somewhere between 5 p.m. and 5.10 p.m. Fred then logged on to his computer at 5.14 p.m., and technical evidence indicated that he sent and read emails at this time. The access-control system showed that he left the building at 6.11 p.m.
Leaving work, Fred went home to his flat in Pinelands, where he had supper before delivering the bookshelf to his friend, who lived in the same block of flats as him. At 7.10 p.m. he received a call from Bennie Schoeman. The call, which registered at the Old Mutual 1 tower serving the area around Fred’s flat, lasted for more than eight minutes.
While delivering the bookshelf to his friend that evening, Fred parked in a no-parking zone and his wheel was clamped. This event, as irritating as it must have been
for him at the time, ultimately played a critical role in his defence, as there was a record of his having spoken to the security staff at around 7.45 p.m., when he requested that they unclamp his wheel.
Fred simply could not have had enough time to drive the roughly thirty-kilometre trip from Pinelands to Stellenbosch to murder Inge. If Fred had left work just after 6 p.m., as the access-control system at Old Mutual indicated, he would have had to drive in peak-hour traffic to Stellenbosch, have words with Inge, murder her, clean up the blood splatters on himself and get back to Pinelands in time for his phone to register at Old Mutual 1 at 7.10 p.m. and to have his wheel clamped at around 7.30 p.m. Considering these time frames, this simply isn’t possible.
Fred knew that Inge was planning to stay at home to study that evening. They SMSed frequently; the last message he received from her was at 1.36 p.m. Fred SMSed Inge a few times that evening and couldn’t understand why she was not replying. He became increasingly anxious, and at around 9 p.m. he called Mrs Lotz, SMSing her a short while later. Fred’s flatmate, Marius Botha, then arranged for another friend, Christo Pretorius, who lived close to Inge, to go and investigate while Fred departed for the Lotz home to get the keys to Inge’s apartment.
Fred collected the keys and left the Lotz house, heading for Inge’s flat. Just after he left, however, he received a call from Marius asking him to turn back and wait at the Lotzes’ house, as Marius wanted to speak to them. Fred and Mrs Lotz then waited for Marius, who arrived just before 11 p.m. to break the devastating news: Inge’s body had been found lying bloodied and lifeless on the couch in her flat.
The police arrived on the crime scene shortly afterwards. There followed a series of events that can best be described as a catalogue of blunders.
It is sacrosanct in forensic science that the scene of the crime is cordoned off immediately. Anyone entering the scene must be properly clothed with footgear, overalls and other kit so that they do not contaminate any crucial trace evidence that could be the sole basis on which to build a case. The first mistake made in the Lotz investigation was that the crime scene was not cordoned off properly. Policemen traipsed in and out of the flat so freely that when a blood-stained print was discovered, the investigating officer had to take all his men to one side to see if one of their shoes had made the footprint. That is appalling, and should never have been allowed: the very basic principles of forensic investigation were broken at the outset.
Inge’s flat was not broken into and nothing had been stolen, and she was skimpily dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. It appeared from these factors that she knew her killer. Later, at the trial, it became obvious that Fred had been the main – and sole – suspect from the beginning. In all fairness to the police, the people closest to a murder victim should always be on the list of suspects: many murders are committed by people intimately involved with their victims, as their emotions overwhelm the normal social rules governing human behaviour. It is therefore quite acceptable that Fred was placed in the frame of suspects, but he should not have been the only one. The police should have examined the evidence and decided whether it incriminated or eliminated him. It appears that this did not occur.
As Fred was the one and only suspect, the police investigators believed that he had to be lying, for whatever reason. Once a crime investigator makes up his or her mind in a forensic investigation without looking at the facts, he or she is liable to make every mistake in the book. That’s exactly what happened.
After Fred had left her flat earlier that day, Inge had gone out at around 3 p.m. and bought a hamburger and chips from the local Steers. She had also rented a DVD, The Stepford Wives – a sadly ironic choice in the light of what was about to happen to her – but we will never know whether or not she watched the film before she was murdered. She was last seen alive by tilers arriving at her complex at around 4 p.m.
The DVD and a fingerprint became the centre of a heated debate. Fred’s alibi was always that he had been nowhere near Inge’s flat that afternoon: he had been at Old Mutual from eleven o’clock in the morning until just after six in the evening. The police claimed to have found a fingerprint on the DVD cover that belonged to Fred’s left index finger, implying that he had been at Inge’s flat after 3 p.m., precisely when he professed to have been at work. Had this been true, it would have blown his alibi right out of the water.
When the other fingerprint expert and I examined the fingerprint, there appeared to be a number of irregularities. The first was that it appeared not to have been taken off a flat rectangular surface. Folene, a type of sticky tape, is used to lift a fingerprint. When you pick up a fingerprint, you also pick up the background – the substratum behind it. If a print comes off a wooden surface, for example, you will pick up the wood grain as well; if the surface has curved edges, these will be seen on the lifted print too.
There were curved lines on the folene lift of the fingerprint we examined in the Lotz case. It could not have come off a DVD cover, which is flat and has only straight edges on the outer surface where the print was found. It is impossible to lift a curved line off a straight-edged surface. When I spoke to the police about the fact that this fingerprint had clearly been lifted from a curved surface, they were defensive.
One would also have expected other fingerprints – Inge’s, for example, and those of the shop assistant – to be present on the DVD cover, but only one person’s print was lifted, and it belonged to Fred. This pointed to another strange, but obvious, fact: there was only Fred’s fingerprint present. There should have been additional prints on the underside of the DVD cover, as it is impossible to hold a DVD box with only one finger.
To make matters worse, the police returned the DVD to the DVD shop, failing to retain it as a vital piece of evidence. The DVD cover should also have been photographed where it was found, as should the actual fingerprint before the cover was moved. In addition, the DVD container should also have been photographed in situ after it was dusted for prints. These are the most elementary of forensic procedures, yet they were simply not carried out. A policeman merely pointed out where he had found the cover. Handled correctly, this piece of evidence alone could have convicted the murderer.
The fingerprint blunder doesn’t end there. After the police’s approach had come under severe attack by the defence, the police took the print to their central lab for examination by Roger Dixon, the control forensic analyst at the police’s forensic science laboratory. He came to the same conclusion as us: that the print came from a curved surface. This certainly suggests that this evidence was tendered by the police in bad faith – how could they have made such an elementary mistake, and one of such enormous proportion?
Another piece of ‘damning’ evidence was raised against Fred – a bloodstained mark on the bathroom floor in Inge’s flat. It would certainly have been damning had it been justified. The police employed in-house footprint ‘expert’ Bruce Bartholomew to examine the mark. He found it to be a mark made by Fred’s shoe, and the police were adamant that this was indeed the case.
One has to understand how this type of comparison – between the sole of a shoe and a print – is done. Before you compare two marks, they have to have the same class characteristics. There are thousands of Hi-Tec trainers (or Caterpillar boots, or whatever the case may be) with the same pattern on the underside – this is called the ‘class characteristic’. Marks that do not share class characteristics escape comparison. Thus, a mark made by a shoe with a diamond pattern cannot be compared to a shoe with a club-shaped pattern on the underside, as the print clearly could not have been made by that shoe.
Fred’s shoe had a specific pattern on the sole that, according to the police, seemed to match that of the bloodstained mark. Given that there are many thousands of shoes sharing the same pattern on the underside, there has to be a match in ‘individual characteristics’ between the print and the shoe. These come about through individual wear – a piece of glass that may have cut the sole at a given spot, or damage from
treading on a nail in a specific place or way. The chance of two people making the same marks on the soles of their shoes is so minuscule that it can be accepted as being impossible. It follows that, if the individual characteristics are identical, one can accept that as proof positive that the marks match.
In the case of Fred van der Vyver’s alleged footprint, there were no individual characteristics on the print. The police hinged their allegation on the fact that there were purportedly three specks of dust on the shoe sole, which, they said, made a specific imprint that showed up in the print.
This was further complicated by the unsatisfactory way in which the mark was compared to Fred’s shoe. When you lift a fingerprint (or footprint, or any other kind of print) from a surface, you get a mirror image of the actual print. You need to compare the lifted print to an inverted image of the actual print, which is obtained by inking the suspect’s finger and taking a print. You cannot compare the finger to the lifted fingerprint.
For some reason, the police didn’t make an inked print of Fred’s shoe. Their argument was that they didn’t want to disturb the three specks of dust that they alleged were present on the sole of the shoe. These three or four specks of dust were critical to their argument that this was Fred’s shoe. Bartholomew merely compared the photo of the blood mark on the floor to a photo of the surface of the shoe. This is not the way to do it.
Inge’s attack and murder were frenzied. She had been assaulted with at least two separate weapons and had been violently stabbed – there was blood everywhere. Whoever had carried out this terrible act would have been covered in minuscule specks of blood. Forensic science is very good at identifying tiny spots of blood, even if they have been washed off the surface in question. Considerable scrubbing is required to remove blood from clothing completely, particularly from shoes, which have many nooks and crannies in which blood can lodge and stick.
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