Palace of Justice
56
Our second expert was Marianne Schlebusch, a psychologist who looked younger than her years, a smallish brunette with closely cropped hair. She gave detailed evidence of all the tests and evaluations she had performed before we turned to the topic of automatism.
‘Dr Schlebusch, could you please explain the phenomenon of automatism to the Court? We are interested in its medical and psychological aspects, please.’
Marianne Schlebusch closed her report and gave us a lecture.
‘Automatism is related to conditioned responses,’ she said. ‘You can condition a person to behave in a particular way in any given set of circumstances. At the same time,’ she cautioned, ‘you cannot do something in a state of automatism that you cannot do in a normal, functioning state, such as riding a bicycle, playing the guitar or driving a car.’
They must have wondered where we were going when she got closer to the point.
‘Killing can become a conditioned response, even killing on a grand scale,’ she said. ‘That is what we do with soldiers not far from here, just on the other side of the hill where the reservoir stands,’ she pointed out. ‘We train soldiers so that they will instinctively behave in a desired way when they are on the battlefield. The problem,’ she said, ‘is not so much in the training; almost all men can be conditioned to that extent. The problem lies in the unlearning. The problem reposes in the inability of the returning soldiers to adjust to civilian conditions when they come home after lengthy periods of combat.’
I asked her to give some examples and she said she would mention three.
‘After the First World War,’ she told the Court, ‘a disproportionate number of returning soldiers were hanged in Britain for crimes they had committed shortly after their return. At the time their condition was not understood and they were treated as ordinary criminals and some of them were executed. The second example has its roots in the Vietnam War. Returning American soldiers exhibited such varied and severe psychological disorders that the War Veterans Administration was still struggling to cope with their treatment nearly twenty years later. These men could suffer consequences for a very long time, from an inability to sleep or to concentrate or to maintain a conversation. They have violent mood swings, and react to the slightest provocation with excessive violence. They relive their experiences in the jungles of South-East Asia in the form of flashbacks day and night, at the most unpredictable times. Many resort to drugs and large numbers have committed suicide.
‘The same problems became apparent here in South Africa as soon as the first of our soldiers started returning from the war in Angola,’ she said. ‘That was in 1975, but we only started taking notice in about 1980.’
I didn’t have to prompt her and took the opportunity to watch Judge van Zyl and the Assessors closely. The journalists on my left were scribbling furiously.
‘It is now more than thirteen years since we got involved in that war,’ she said, ‘and at 1 Military Hospital we have whole wards dedicated to the treatment of the psychological scars of those soldiers. Do you want me to explain?’ she asked.
I wasn’t sure whether she was asking me or the Judge, but Judge van Zyl nodded and she continued.
‘Let me explain in more detail what happened to them,’ she said.
I looked behind me to see how Pierre de Villiers would react to this evidence. He sat entranced, his eyes on the witness box. I saw the man next to him digging an elbow into his ribs and Pierre frowning, irritated at the interruption. I had to turn my own attention back to the witness box.
Marianne Schlebusch spoke evenly, in a soothing tone, sure of her way and confident in her knowledge. ‘First we train them to handle their weapons expertly, in all conditions,’ she emphasised. ‘We drill them night and day until they can literally fire their weapons with deadly accuracy under any circumstances. We make them practise in wet and dry conditions, in sunlight and in the dark, to fire slowly and also quickly, at visible and also at hidden targets. We make them practise shooting at static targets, and then we teach them how to shoot accurately at moving targets and targets that appear suddenly, by surprise. They learn to live, eat, sleep and even to go to the toilet with their weapons always at the ready.’
I was concerned that she was taking too long to get to the point, but when I looked at the Judge and his Assessors they were watching her intently. I let her give her evidence free of interruptions from me.
‘In the second phase,’ she said, ‘we train our soldiers to react in a particular way to the circumstances they would encounter in the field. Every man in the platoon is given a specific role and not only must he perform under all conditions, the rest of his platoon must know that they can rely on him to do his job while they do theirs. For example, they are taught that if they are on patrol at dawn, they must set up a perimeter and arrange their sleeping bags so that they form the spokes of a wheel with every soldier facing outwards. And then we train …’ She corrected herself, ‘No, we order them to shoot everyone and everything that moves outside their circle. In the field at night they lie in that situation of heightened tension and anticipation of danger and we have found that they do shoot anything that moves outside their circle, whether it is a genuine threat or not. The training pays off, but now and then it has unintended consequences. Soldiers conditioned in this way have shot members of their own platoon who had slipped out for a cigarette and they have shot many innocent civilians who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
The Judge was beginning to fidget. Marianne was taking a bit longer than I had planned and I asked her to deal more specifically with Leon Labuschagne’s case.
‘What I think happened here is very similar,’ she said. ‘Over the last eighteen months before the events at the reservoir Labuschagne was invested with a conditioned response. He had already become expert at handling and firing his pistol, but the prison also conditioned him to kill. It doesn’t matter that the killing was lawful; he still had to overcome the natural inhibition we all have to killing a human being.’ She slowed down as she spoke with emphasis. ‘His active and very physical participation in the killing process, coupled with the tasks he had to perform in preparation for the killing, such as taking the measurements and calculating the drops to the nearest inch, cleaning and servicing the gallows equipment, turned him, in his subconscious mind, into a killer. In his own mind he sees himself as a killer.’
I stole a glance at Labuschagne to see how he was reacting to the evidence. He sat with his head up and eyes closed, but I could not help noticing that he was on the edge of the wooden seat in the dock. He might have feigned disinterest, but he wasn’t fooling me. He had stopped rocking.
Marianne took a sip of water before she continued. I had to lead her evidence by asking the appropriate questions, but she needed very few cues from me.
‘How did you say he sees himself? And could you explain, please?’
‘He sees himself as a killer,’ she said, ‘but he is at war with himself over that. And then we have the disintegration of his psyche in the weeks before the incident at the reservoir. This escalated dramatically in the last two weeks before the tenth of December. His wife left him together with their child and all his efforts to see them were thwarted. His emotional attachment to Wessels made matters worse when he was required to assist with that execution. The sheer number of executions and the other things that went wrong in that last week brought him closer and closer to the point of breakdown. His emotions were running amok and, to top it all, he had suffered a head injury that was severe enough for him to lose consciousness. He was dehydrated after all that physical exertion in the sun at the cemetery, then there was the drive in the rainstorm, the aggressive response from the other driver and their reckless game of tag all the way to the reservoir. All of these contributed to bring him to the point where he was on the verge of a mental breakdown. He was,’ she said, ‘at the end of his reach and on the verge of the
disintegration of his psyche.’
She paused again and took another sip of water.
The spectators craned their necks to hear better as Marianne explained that something must have happened at the reservoir to push Labuschagne over the edge into an abyss of such depth and blackness that even psychologists and psychiatrists could not predict with any degree of accuracy how he would respond to any new stimuli.
‘Some event must have occurred that triggered a violent, conditioned response,’ she said. ‘The fact that the dead bodies were arranged in a neat line next to each other shows that in his subconscious mind he was at work in the gallows chamber. The trigger event does not have to be an important or otherwise significant event. It could be something ordinary, an everyday occurrence, entirely innocent on its own.’
I waited for Judge van Zyl to finish his note taking and then asked Marianne for her concluding opinions.
She started by expressing the opinion that Labuschagne had acted in a state akin to an acute catathymic crisis. She explained that as a condition where the person in the grip of the crisis acted in accordance with the overwhelming dictates of his emotions and lost intellectual control over his actions.
‘Such a person would have no memory of the events because the memory function of the mind is an intellectual function,’ she explained, ‘and when the intellect is turned off, the memory is also turned off. That is why he cannot remember what happened at the reservoir, his mind was literally absent,’ she said.
‘Were there any other indications of a loss of memory?’ I asked.
‘He also has no memory of the newsworthy events of that week,’ she added. ‘We had three significant events and during our psychometric testing he has demonstrated no memory of any of them. But that loss of memory is of a different nature. It had been caused by Labuschagne’s progressive loss of grip on reality. His mind was too preoccupied with other things to concern itself with the world outside.’
Judge van Zyl asked what the events were. She mentioned President Reagan’s historic meeting with Mr Gorbachev in Reykjavik; the South African Airways 747, the Helderberg, crashing into the sea near Mauritius; and a female spy who had been caught and tortured by the Zimbabwean police. These events had made the news worldwide, but when she ran her tests Labuschagne had no memory of them.
‘This shows,’ she said, ‘that he was no longer in touch with reality during that last week; he was disengaging from the reality with which he could not cope. His memory of events that week is fragmented.’
I thanked her and sat down in anticipation of the cross-examination, but Judge van Zyl asked a question I had not considered.
‘What do you say about his interaction with Tsafendas? How did that affect his state of mind, in your opinion?’
‘M’Lord,’ she said, ‘the fact that he believes what Tsafendas told him, and that Tsafendas appears to him to be sane, shows that what the rest of us know to be insane nonsense, he experienced as logical and truthful. His mind was beginning to play tricks on him, a very sure symptom of the beginning of dissociation, the breakdown of the psyche that led him to complete psychological disintegration at the reservoir.’
After a long and pensive pause the Judge told James Murray that he could start his cross-examination.
It was war, but not one fought with anger and aggression. No, James Murray was too good for that. He employed subtlety and guile. We were in for a torrid afternoon and would have to wait and see if our expert witness could defend her opinion.
‘There had to be a trigger event, you said, a final trigger event that set in train this cascade of killings, right?’ Murray looked at Marianne Schlebusch for confirmation.
‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘Although the stress had built up over time and through a number of different events and circumstances, there still had to be a final event or stimulus that caused his psyche to break down completely. It doesn’t have to be a big event, but it has to be significant in the sense of being in consonance with the cause or causes of the disintegration of his psyche.’
‘And he says,’ Murray paused and pointed with his arm in the direction of the dock, but without looking, ‘he claims that he does not remember what happened at the reservoir to cause him to act as he did.’ It was a statement of fact rather than a question, and we could all still remember the defendant’s evidence vividly.
‘Yes,’ she confirmed.
‘So you can’t say with any degree of certainty what the trigger event was, can you?’
‘No, I can’t,’ Marianne conceded. ‘I have said so from the beginning. It’s in my written report too.’
‘And it follows,’ said Murray, the terrier in action, ‘that if you can’t say what the trigger event was, you can’t be sure there was a trigger event, doesn’t it?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘there must have been a trigger event. Something must have happened that in his mind was linked to his work in the prison.’
‘Even though you can’t tell the Court what that trigger event was?’ said Murray. Sarcasm and incredulity dripped from his words.
Marianne Schlebusch whispered the answer but stood her ground. ‘Yes.’
‘Your opinion depends to a large extent on the credibility of the defendant, doesn’t it?’ Murray suggested.
‘Yes.’
‘And he could easily fake a lack of memory, couldn’t he?’
‘He could fake it, but not easily,’ she said, responding to the challenge. ‘All of our tests have built-in lie detection processes.’
Murray leaned down to speak to Sanet Niemand. She handed him a slip of paper and he studied it carefully before he read the question she had given him.
‘And if he has successfully misled you, as you have just conceded was possible, then the meticulous arrangement of the bodies at the reservoir after he had killed them would take on a very sinister aspect, wouldn’t it? It would mean that he was sending a message to the world, wouldn’t it?’
Marianne considered the question carefully before she responded. ‘Only if he has successfully misled me and had beaten all the subtle traps in our tests,’ she said. ‘But the prospects of that happening are remote.’
Murray shrugged – I don’t think he meant anyone to notice – and tried another approach.
‘There is also the accuracy of the shooting to explain,’ he said. ‘You’ve not explained that. How could anyone fire with that degree of accuracy while acting in a state of automatism?’
She had watched him intently as he framed the question. ‘M’Lord,’ she said slowly, ‘in a situation like this, when mental functions are disintegrated, the accuracy of his actions would depend on the mental explosion and the force of the explosion and the ingrained or learnt behaviour. Once the explosion has occurred, the learnt behaviour takes over. The accuracy of the shooting is learnt behaviour, which is a conditioned response, and the fact that the shooting was so accurate actually demonstrates that there had been such an explosion.’
Murray could not believe his ears. ‘Are you saying that the accuracy of the shooting actually supports your theory that he didn’t know what he was doing?’
‘Yes, M’Lord,’ she said. ‘Who would be able to shoot so accurately in the circumstances that must have prevailed at the reservoir, unless the shooting was a conditioned response?’
Murray tried to retrieve the situation. ‘But you would still have to have a trigger event that sets the conditioned response in motion, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I’ve said so.’
‘And you have said that you don’t know what the trigger event was.’ He was rubbing it in.
‘Yes.’
Murray started a new line of cross-examination quietly and without fanfare. ‘You only have his word for what happened at the reservoir, don’t you?’
Marianne Schlebusch took her time before she replied. ‘I don’t know that anyone else can tell us what happened there,’ she said.
‘What I’m getting at,’ said Murray, ‘is that if his
version is found to be untrue or unreliable your opinion will have been based on an incorrect set of facts.’ It was a statement, not a question, but it invited an answer.
‘I haven’t caught him in a lie.’ She shook her head and wiped a hand across her brow. ‘Everything I have heard during the trial is consistent with what he has told me.’ She gave Murray a small concession, ‘But what you say is true in principle.’
Murray turned a page in his notes. Marianne Schlebusch watched him with the eye of a trained observer. I wondered what she thought of him and, for that matter, of me. She stood watching Murray and her eyes drifted down to the notes on his lectern. Her attitude said, How many more questions do I have to answer? We were all exhausted; I wasn’t the only one.
Murray took his time before he embarked on his next topic. ‘The defendant collected a washer from the coffin of each prisoner he had escorted to the gallows. That we know from his own evidence. My first question is this: did he tell you about that?’
‘No.’
‘So you heard about that here in court for the first time?’
‘Yes.’
‘The defendant withheld that information from you.’
‘He didn’t tell me and I didn’t know to ask.’
‘His collection of those washers is inconsistent with your evidence that he was traumatised by the hanging process, isn’t it?’ It was a good point, I thought, but not unanswerable. What if collecting the washers was entirely consistent with his steady descent into inappropriate behaviour? And for that we could blame his work.
I watched Marianne closely. She scratched the side of her nose and turned towards Murray to engage him in the debate, but the Judge intervened to remind her to face the bench.
She obeyed immediately. ‘I disagree, M’Lord. Obsessive-compulsive behaviour of that kind is entirely compatible with the trauma that he suffered. In the beginning he might have collected the washers because his peers were doing it, but later he would have been unable to stop himself. The culture of the prison had become part of him.’
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