Steeped in Blood

by David Klatzow

  In order to commit a crime, a person must have been negligent or must have mens rea – the guilty mind, or the knowledge of wrongdoing that constitutes part of a crime. If you are unaware of your state of mind and the consequent danger in operating machinery, you cannot be held liable. The state was not happy with this line of questioning, and a second psychiatrist, who was even easier to question, was brought in.

  Matthee was acquitted largely because the case was founded in sand. He was not a well person, and justice was served.

  Since the answers are not always obvious or easy to establish in my line of work, an innovative approach is sometimes needed. This was key in a case I handled in 2010, when a badly burnt-out car and body were found. An insurance claim of around R20 million was at stake, and I was called in to determine whether the body belonged to the person whose life was insured.

  The fire had been so intense that the body was burnt beyond recognition. A petrol fire will burn at just under 1 000 ºC and will leave only ashes in its wake. When the paramedics had tried to remove the body from the car, it had crumbled to dust. The pathologist could estimate only that it was a male body, based on the shape of the pelvis. There was no further way of identifying the body, which was of course vital if the insurers were going to pay out the life insurance.

  I took the car to a concrete surface and started sifting through the remaining ashes, using a fine sieve similar to a kitchen sieve to look for clues. After four days of sifting, I found something resembling an amalgam filling. I placed it under an electron microscope, where I identified that the chief elements of this item were silver and mercury – also the main elements of amalgam. In this way, I confirmed that it was indeed an amalgam filling.

  By finding the amalgam, I knew that the body belonged to someone who could afford restorative dentistry. Occasionally insurance companies find themselves in situations where an unidentifiable body is found. In such cases, these bodies have been planted deliberately; they are unclaimed bodies – John Does – used fraudulently to obtain insurance payouts. Basic dentistry involves removing rather than restoring teeth, and unclaimed bodies seldom have restorative dentistry.

  The next step was to approach the insured man’s dentist and to examine the man’s dental records and any available X-rays. By comparing the amalgam to dental X-rays belonging to the insured man, I could show that the body did, in fact, belong to him. The petrol fire had been hot enough to destroy a human body, but not to destroy amalgam, which melts at a much higher temperature of around 1 500 ºC.

  Patience, innovation and some menial work paid off in this case. Looking beyond the obvious, I was able to do what was necessary to put together the jigsaw pieces left behind by nature.

  CHAPTER 24

  CREATIVITY KNOWS NO BOUNDS

  ‘Different people of different times and places have fundamentally different realities.’

  – GIAMBATTISTA VICO,

  Italian philosopher, rhetorician and jurist

  It has never ceased to amaze me how people attempt to fool the system; their levels of creativity are sometimes impressive. The lure of money, whether through an insurance claim or through some form of ‘compensation’, is a strong driving force in many people’s language.

  Several years ago, a shopkeeper in Holmdene in the Eastern Transvaal thought that a threatening letter, coupled with a devastating fire that destroyed his business premises, would guarantee him sympathy and some extra cash. I was called in to investigate the fire on behalf of the insurance company.

  Arriving at the remains of the building, the very agitated owner told me that his business had burnt down and that it was dreadful. After some careful investigation, I realised that the place had clearly been deliberately torched. I asked the fellow, ‘Can you think of anybody who might have wanted to do this to you?’

  His response was immediate: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was the UDF.’ I asked him how he knew this, and he replied, ‘Well, they sent me a threatening letter.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What did they say in the threatening letter?’ He still had the letter, which he produced for me to scrutinise. The spelling and grammar were atrocious. The letter started out with ‘Dear Kullie’ and went on in graphic terms to describe what they were going to do to him, including burning down his business (see Appendix I). It appeared to have been written by someone almost illiterate.

  I sat him down and dictated a statement for him to write, interspersing various words that had been misspelt in the letter. It was a no-brainer: in the same handwriting as that which appeared in the letter, he misspelt the words in exactly the same way. Needless to say, his claim was not paid.

  Claimants who exaggerate the extent of their loss are also not uncommon. In the late 1990s, a farmer in Vereeniging, near Johannesburg, suffered a great loss of teff – a type of grass for feeding cattle – when the building in which it was stored burnt down. I was called in by IGI Insurance, an insurance company that later went bankrupt, to investigate.

  I made the trip to the farm and was intrigued by the fact that there was very little residual ash left, meaning that there had to have been far less teff than the many hundreds of tons for which the farmer was claiming. ‘How much teff was here originally?’ I asked him. In response, he gave me a detailed description of the vast amount of teff that had been lost.

  After doing my homework, I asked why other farmers could get a maximum growth of three to three and a half tons of teff per hectare, while he was getting six to seven tons per hectare. Smiling, the farmer said to me, ‘Well, you see, the reason is that I irrigate day and night. I’m on a big dolomitic dome; there is a vast amount of water underground here and we’ve got big pumps. The secret to this is irrigation!’

  I asked to see his electricity bills so that I could check that he had, in fact, been running these pumps. ‘Well,’ the farmer said, ‘unfortunately I had a farmhouse fire a year and a half ago and all my records were burnt.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ I replied. ‘That’s not a problem. Take me down to the poles that supply the electricity. You’ve got a transformer up the pole and that transformer has a number. I can go to Eskom with that number and they’ll give me your bills.’ I wanted to read the power ratings from the pumps so that I could work out how much electricity the farmer had used and for how long the pumps had been running.

  He was a bit put out by this and said that he could not take me to the poles then because he had to go to church. I returned to Johannesburg, planning to go back to the farm the next day to have a look at the electricity poles. Before I could return, however, the farmer phoned the insurance company and told them that he was unhappy about my presence on his farm. His words were, ‘Jy kry daai fokken Dokter Quincy van my plaas af!’ Quincy was a popular TV programme at the time that revolved around a medical examiner who single-handedly solved gruesome murders and other forensic cases, so I took this as an inadvertent compliment!

  Based on my calculations of the size of the farmer’s crop and the amount of ash that was left, as well as the farmer’s fraudulent misrepresentation of the claim, the insurance claim was repudiated successfully. (As an interesting aside, the farmer was charged with fraud of a political nature at around the same time.)

  Human frailty is a strange business, and people do strange things. I examined a house in the late 1990s that had allegedly been burgled. On closer inspection, it appeared that the burglars had not broken in, but broken out: the window, which had been forced, had clearly been forced from the inside – the bruising of the wood that was visible on the inside could never have been inflicted from the outside.

  There had been no need to break out because there had been a key in the door. If anybody had been inside in the first place, they simply would not have had to break out. After some investigating, I managed to get hold of the owner’s wife to ask her whether she had any tools. She hauled out what appeared to be the family tool box and gave it to me, and inside I found a fairly substantial screwdriver. I looked at the scre
wdriver and saw paint that seemed to match the paint of the window on its end. I took the paint from the screwdriver and some paint from the window and could easily show that it was one and the same. In addition, the dimensions of the screwdriver fitted the marks on the bruised wood. The criminal had managed to use and return the tools that belonged to the household in order to escape from the burgled premises. I think not!

  Quenching your thirst on a hot summer’s day could hold some surprises – or at least that’s what Hilton April of the Strand claimed when he allegedly found a mouse in his can of Coca-Cola.

  April purchased a 450 ml can of Coke on 31 January 2003, opening it as he was leaving the shop. As he took the first sip, something didn’t taste right. After the second sip, he felt a ‘slimy tail’ on his tongue. On investigation, he saw a mouse inside the can, which he removed with a pair of tweezers.

  April then contacted Coca-Cola, claiming that he was ill because of the incident and saying that he wanted financial compensation for future pain and suffering. Coke approached me, as this type of claim is not uncommon.

  The mouse was still completely intact and in reasonable shape (see photo). It seemed to have been recently deceased, and there were no signs of decomposition. The manufacture date on the underside of the can showed that it had been left in the factory for six weeks before April had bought it.

  I conducted an experiment: I went out and bought six mice and took them to the production line at the factory. After euthanising the mice with chloroform, I took six tins – Sprite and Tab cans, so as not to cause confusion – and inserted a mouse into each one. I then allowed each can to be filled with Coke and had the cans sealed. I marked each one with the production date.

  After six weeks had passed, I opened the cans. There was no trace of the mice: they had all completely dissolved. The contents of the cans consisted of a thick, sludgy mess. The reason for this is quite simple: Coke contains phosphoric acid, which had dissolved the mice in their entirety. I was able to prove that there was no way a whole mouse could have ended up in the Coke can at production and been whole a full six weeks later.

  Unfortunately for Hilton April, he was charged with fraud and received a five-year suspended sentence. Frequently people try to make a fast buck with a trumped-up story, but science shows up the truth each and every time.

  Some of the fire investigations in which I have been involved have demonstrated a quirky side of human nature – one that ensures the protection of their pets at all costs. One such case involved the burning down of a haberdashery shop in Edenvale, Gauteng. Candles had been placed in saucers full of petrol around the shop, so it was quite clear that this had been a deliberate fire. The interesting aspect to the case was that the shop was well known for the parrot that lived on the premises.

  On the day before the fire, the owner had taken the parrot to have its nails clipped. He arrived at the veterinary surgeon’s rooms, and the vet offered to do the job immediately. ‘No, no, I can’t take him back with me now,’ the owner said. ‘Please make certain that I can come back tomorrow and pick him up. Will you keep him overnight?’ That was the very night that the fire took place and the property burnt to the ground! Needless to say, the outcome of the case was not in favour of the shop owner.

  A second, similar case involved a very ‘motivated’ parrot. A farmer’s house in the then Eastern Free State had been completely destroyed in a blaze. During my investigation, I discovered that the parrot that normally lived in the living room in the house had been found safe and sound the next morning on the front lawn. I remember saying to the farmer, ‘Did you lock up?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied.

  ‘And what happened about the parrot? Was the parrot left where it was normally left?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I put the sheet over the parrot cage in the normal way, and I put the parrot to bed.’

  ‘And that was in the front lounge?’

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded.

  ‘Well,’ I asked, ‘can you explain to me how the parrot got out onto the front lawn and escaped the fire?’

  The farmer said, ‘Well, that parrot must have been very motivated.’

  Despite the fact that they are prepared to cheat their insurance companies, very seldom will people murder their pets in cold blood. In the midst of fraud, there is a little corner of the human heart that cannot bring itself to murder a pet that has been a friend for many years.

  CHAPTER 25

  OPINIONS, LIES AND SIMPLE TRUTH

  ‘Science is founded on the conviction that experience, effort and reason are valid; magic on the belief that hope cannot fail nor desire deceive.’

  – BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI,

  British anthropologist

  I am not here to win favour, and I have never been afraid to speak my mind. I have always believed in honesty and in the truth, and in saying things that others think but are too afraid to say openly, perhaps. There are always two or more opposing versions of the facts: I believe in slicing through all the confusion and evaluating the evidence from a purely scientific point of view. In some cases this is easy; in others, not so. Whatever the situation, however, I will investigate and present the facts as I find them.

  The media has not always been kind to me, and in the early 2000s I crossed swords with Robert Kirby, the playwright and columnist. The battle started out innocently enough, with Kirby writing a few articles about my interest in the Helderberg plane crash in the Mail & Guardian. I replied to his allegations, and the war became personal. He took great pleasure in lampooning my name and labelling me a conspiracy theorist. In one particular article, which related to the tsunami tragedy of 2004, he blatantly made fun of me, referring to me as ‘David Glutzow’ (see Appendix J).

  I was not afraid to speak my mind in the race debate over blood donation, something that drew even more negative press my way. The incident occurred a few years ago, in 2004, when Thabo Mbeki donated blood but failed to complete the relevant blood-donation questionnaire. As a result, a full unit of blood was not drawn, and that which was taken was discarded. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who was Minister of Health at the time, became distressed, saying that the non-use of the blood amounted to racism. This sparked a heated political debate over whether the South African National Blood Transfusion Service (SANBS) should be classifying blood from black donors as high-risk blood, which it was doing at the time.

  In the South African Medical Journal (SAMJ) of April 2004, it was reported that the chief executive officer of SANBS said that the average risk of a black South African being HIV-positive was at least 100 times greater than that of a white compatriot. This is fact, not fiction. Because black donors were such a high-risk group, the race question was asked in a questionnaire prior to donation to protect the recipients of donated blood. This is not a situation unique to South Africa: the officials at the French Blood Transfusion Service were prosecuted at one point for allowing high-risk groups to donate blood.

  I made the points publicly that race had nothing to do with this issue, and that while around 15 to 20 per cent of blood donors are black, the vast majority of recipients are also black. We know that the overwhelming majority of people infected with HIV are found in sub-Saharan Africa, an area that comprises 17 per cent of the world’s population. To put the whole population at risk for a political gesture is plainly irresponsible.

  The onus is on the medical profession to ensure that the blood given to recipients is as safe as possible – from a medical rather than a political standpoint. At that stage, the RNA fingerprinting technique – a complex process that had to be conducted on an individual basis – was not available in an automated form. SANBS was simply acting in the best medical interests of its patients.

  What really upset me at the time was that nobody would support me. The SAMJ article stated that asking for the race of blood donors had nothing to do with racial stereotyping. Many of my colleagues supported the article off the record, but would not do so openly. I took a lot of criticism o
ver this issue at the time, as did the head of SANBS, Anton Heyns, but it was necessary to say what needed to be said, despite the consequences.

  Another matter about which I have always been outspoken is the government’s interference with medicine. I would venture to say that the ANC-led government has managed to damage the state of medicine in this country significantly. It has interfered with the forensic science laboratories to the point that they have become non-functional. There are very few handwriting experts in South Africa today, and few people are skilled in fire investigations. I know of no other independent forensic practices that operate like mine in bringing together a number of branches of science and basic medical knowledge of anatomy and physiology.

  The state forensic laboratories are now largely defunct as a result of the increasingly poor training of analysts. As an upshot of this, the backlogs in analyses are having a massive negative effect on the work of the law courts. Delays become so excessive that the state is often forced to drop charges – many judges are expressing concern over this situation.

  One of the main problematic issues in the field of medicine is that admission to study medicine is based on demographics. The secondary and tertiary education systems are so flawed that many of the graduates do not receive a decent education. Standards, in my opinion, have dropped, and I would not feel comfortable with anyone who graduated from medical school post 1994 treating me. (Similarly, I have seen attorneys who have graduated in recent years who are functionally illiterate – they cannot string a coherent sentence together. The level of university education is poor, to put it mildly.)

  A solution to our shortage of doctors has been the ‘importing’ of foreign doctors. I recently heard from a very reliable source – a surgeon and good friend – of a Cuban doctor in South Africa who had performed a tonsillectomy through the front of the patient’s throat. What is normally a minor routine procedure was turned into a major operation with huge risks and a lengthy recovery time. This is but one example of the type of medical care that patients are receiving in South Africa at present. The state-run medical services have had to pay out billions, literally, in compensation for botched medical procedures.