One Tragic Night

by Mandy Wiener

  But Dixon remains confident, despite his experience on the stand. Prior to the judgment, he’s impervious to what the judge’s finding might be on his credibility (and ultimately Masipa did not mention him) and is self-assured enough not to doubt his credentials despite the public mauling. He says he’ll be back to testify another day.

  ‘Why not? I’m not scared. That was my job. If you are scared of something like that, you don’t do it. However, I do know that there are plenty of forensic scientists who would not testify on things like that. In fact, a lot of people would rather put a finding of “undetermined” than make a statement which could lead them to go to court.

  ‘If the police employed me and paid me for 18 years and when there was a problem people came to me because if nobody could solve it I might have a chance because of my particular skills and expertise, why must I doubt now because I am outside the police? I went to the dark side and now everything I do is suspect because I’m siding with the evil forces,’ he jokes, his sense of humour showing itself again.

  While he gives an assurance that he hasn’t been scared off, one can’t help but suspect that he might seek refuge here, in his inconspicuous office hidden in the botanical gardens, surrounded by his rocks and soil and microscopes. For a while, he might busy himself with editing the South African Clivia Yearbook again or doing analysis for groundbreaking research – until that ‘frisson’ of excitement courses through his veins once more and he’s lured back to another crime scene.

  The Gunshots

  Thomas ‘Wollie’ Wolmarans is tall and grey haired, with a moustache to match. He has bucketloads of experience, spending 20 of his 60 years working in the South African Police (SAP) force but now operating as a private ballistics expert. He works out of a shooting range in Pretoria and is occasionally known to invite journalists over to demonstrate his opinions on a case, followed by a sit-down in the quaint coffee shop next door. There’s no mistaking his passion for his craft.

  Over the course of his lengthy career, Wolmarans has conducted more than 10 000 forensics investigations and has testified in over 500 cases in South Africa and neighbouring countries. He has almost unrivalled experience with firearms, which he accumulated in the South African Defence Force, in the Forfeited and Confiscated Firearms Section of the SAP, at the South African Criminal Bureau and during time spent seconded by the police’s Ballistics Unit to Zimbabwe (Rhodesia at the time). Since 1977, he has given expert evidence in various fields, including ballistics, microscopic identification of fired bullets and cartridge cases, photomicrography (the examination of firearms), and the photography and reconstruction of crime scenes. He retired from the SAP in 1992 and has since practised as a private and independent forensic consultant. In 2000 he was employed by the United Nations as a crime scene officer for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Countless hours firing weapons have damaged his ears and left him with tinnitus, making communication with him challenging at times.

  Wolmarans had been sitting in on the trial since day one. Through Roux’s cross-examinations it was evident he would be called to challenge many of the state’s findings, particularly those of Captain Mangena. Wolmarans and Mangena shared a respectful and collegial relationship, with the elder man saying that Mangena referred to him as ‘Oom’, the Afrikaans moniker for ‘Uncle’, while he used the term of endearment ‘my seun’ (‘my son’) when talking to Mangena.

  The witness had with him his report, dated 23 April, which meant it was compiled and submitted to Oscar’s defence team after the accused himself had testified, and after fellow expert witness Roger Dixon had spent time in the box. The timeline caused problems for both Wolmarans and the defence – why had Wolmarans compiled this report so late, and did it mean he was tailoring it according to the evidence that had gone before? In addition, was this why he and Dixon had shared a beer once the geologist had finalised his testimony?

  Oscar’s defence team hired Wolmarans on the day he killed Reeva – Thursday – but he only had access to the crime scene on the Sunday at around 3:30pm after the police had concluded their investigation and relinquished control over the house.

  The house had been secured by a company called Platinum Risk Solutions and the key was handed to the ballistics expert. Wolmarans’s first task was to do a walk-through of the house, wearing protective clothing and taking photographs as he went. Colleagues from CSI Africa, a private forensics company, arrived a couple of hours later and began doing a fingerprint investigation of the scene. Wolmarans noted that the main bathroom door, through which Oscar had shot Reeva, had been removed.

  The following day Wolmarans returned to the house. As part of his routine, he inspected the bloody toilet bowl. The private expert donned a pair of surgical gloves and fished around with his hand to find any evidence the police might have overlooked. To his surprise, he discovered a piece of the lead core of a bullet. While feeling around in the toilet bowl he also recovered a small piece of tile that was missed by the police’s forensic investigators. A mere visual inspection of the bowl would not have turned up anything because it was filled with blood.

  This discovery was used in the bail application to cast additional doubt over the police’s handling of the crime scene, and asked questions about the state’s case in light of the fact that items had been overlooked. On the Tuesday, Wolmarans handed the bullet fragment to then investigating officer Captain Hilton Botha at the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court.

  Wolmarans again returned to the crime scene on 8 March 2013, the same day that Captain Mangena and the other officers reinstalled the toilet door for their own tests. The private ballistics expert merely observed and took a few pictures as the policemen took control of the situation, although Wolmarans requested a sample fragment of the meranti door. The piece was handed to him by Captain Mike van Aardt and placed in a sealed evidence bag with the number ΡΑ60011432811 marked ‘Boschkop 110/2012’. Wolmarans later handed the piece over to his fellow defence witness, Roger Dixon.

  Wolmarans drove out to the Silver Woods estate one further time, in November 2013, as the defence team was preparing for trial. The toilet door was rehung in the bathroom by two police officers, in the presence of Van Aardt, Dixon and members of the legal team. A week later, Dixon and Wolmarans visited the Forensic Science Laboratory in Silverton to examine exhibits that had been collected from the crime scene, such as the gun, bullets, Reeva’s clothing, the cricket bat and the toilet door.

  When Wolmarans was first hired by the defence on Valentine’s Day in 2013, two major disputes between the state and the defence showed up in the bail application: firstly, that Oscar was allegedly on his prosthetic legs when he shot Reeva; and secondly, whether he stood about 1.5 metres from the toilet door when he fired the shots. These two issues were no longer in dispute when Wolmarans was called to take the stand in May 2014. In fact, Mangena in his own evidence pointed to the fact that that these had been resolved.

  Wolmarans wanted to explain to the court how a firearm worked, and asked Mangena, while gesturing towards him from the witness box, whether he could use his gun. ‘I do not know if it is permitted, My Lady. I will make it safe and I can explain the gun to you how it works.’

  Nel appeared as bemused as Mangena and the rest of the experts, who looked at each other, shrugging their shoulders. ‘We’ve got a crack team,’ said the prosecutor, ‘but we do not have any guns, My Lady.’

  Masipa appeared relieved. ‘You do not have any? It is a good thing.’

  ‘My Lady, then I will explain it with photos,’ said Wolmarans, his show-and-tell cut short.

  ‘I would prefer that,’ said the judge.

  The expert explained to the court how a semi-automatic handgun operated – and that it would fire as quickly as the user could pull his finger – before explaining the dynamics of hollow-point ammunition.

  Wolmarans said the ammunition used by his client was not Black Talon, but rather Ranger ammunition – also manufactured by the Winc
hester company, but of a lighter grain. This was contrary to what Oscar had confirmed to Nel under cross-examination: ‘Who fired at her with Black Talon ammunition?’ asked Nel. ‘I did,’ Oscar said in response.

  It was unclear why the expert had not discussed this type of ammunition loaded into the handgun with his client prior to drafting his report.

  The defence expert read through his report, often referring to photos taken by Mangena and a Captain Motha and explained that he took measurements of his own of the door and related marks inside the toilet cubicle. But he believed it was unlikely that the door would have been reconstructed with absolute accuracy, which would in turn influence the authenticity in determining the bullet trajectories. Wolmarans was thus undermining Mangena’s findings, telling the court that while the state’s expert came to certain conclusions, there were no certainties, and added that the angle at which the projectiles struck the door would have caused substantial deflection and the bullets would have strayed from a direct path.

  Based on this, Wolmarans stated that any of the shots – ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ or ‘D’ through the door – could have caused ricochet ‘Mark E’ and subsequently deflected to ‘Mark F’. ‘Captain Mangena used a laser to connect B and E,’ explained Wolmarans. ‘The difficulty with that is that the straight connection between B and E ignores a possible deflection.’

  ‘If there was deflection, would that have been possible?’ asked Roux.

  ‘No, My Lady, as I said then it would have been on another place. So it was totally ignored.’

  On 26 March, more than three weeks into the trial, after Mangena had testified and been cross-examined – and also after defence witness Dixon had taken the stand – Wolmarans conducted live-firing tests on the pantry door taken from Oscar’s house. The test was conducted to establish the spread of wood splinters and bullet fragmentation. Wolmarans handed in the witness boards – the large pieces of cardboard placed behind the door to pick up secondary projectiles – to the court as an exhibit, and Masipa and her assessors studied them for several minutes as Wolmarans explained what he had established. The boards were marked ‘Black Talon’ because at the stage the tests were conducted, the expert was still under the impression that those were the rounds Oscar had used.

  Wolmarans said his tests proved that Reeva’s right upper arm must have been between 6 centimetres and 20 centimetres from the door when the bullet that struck her perforated it.

  Contrary to Mangena’s findings on the probable position of Reeva behind the door when she was shot, Wolmarans felt ‘it is not possible to determine with accuracy the sequence of the shots and the body position of the deceased’. He referred to a photo taken during the postmortem that showed a probe inserted into the hip wound on Reeva’s body. It appeared to show that the probe entered at an upwards trajectory, which appeared to support his theory of deflection. A study of the entry hole to the door and the entry wound by Mangena, however, found that the bullet was travelling in a downward trajectory. Wolmarans found that ‘Hole B’ resulted in the wounds to Reeva’s upper arm; that the head wound could have been caused by the bullet passing through holes ‘C’ or ‘D’ and that she was not in a standing position when they struck her. Further he argued that ‘C’ or ‘D’ could have been the projectile that damaged the webbing on Reeva’s left hand and that it was unlikely her hand was on her head at the time it was shot, as Mangena had so vividly re-enacted.

  Wolmarans studied Reeva’s black vest and agreed with the findings by pathologist Professor Saayman that the damage to the top and wounds below the deceased’s right breast were caused by a piece of fragmented bullet. But he found no damage to the back of the vest, or evidence that it had been struck by a projectile, as claimed by the state. Wolmarans said a bullet ricocheting off the wall would have spent all its energy, and would thus not be moving fast enough to have caused the two abrasions on Reeva’s back. He believed that the projectile that hit those two points was, in fact, the core he found in the toilet bowl along with a piece of tile.

  ‘The only reasonable manner in which the injuries to the back of the deceased could have been caused, was when the deceased was falling, probably during the firing of the shots and her back came in contact with a hard surface, which could only have been the magazine rack,’ he said. This reinforced Dixon’s version of events.

  Crucially, Wolmarans believed that Reeva fell back after being struck on the hip and was hit by other bullets in such close succession that she had no chance to scream.

  Notably absent in the evidence provided by Wolmarans was anything related to the alleged tampering of the crime scene. Oscar had told Nel during cross-examination that Wolmarans was amongst his expert witnesses who would testify about things being moved on the crime scene, but there was no mention of this. It illustrated the strength of the state’s witnesses in this regard, that perhaps Roux no longer believed that the allegations would stand.

  On the morning Nel was to start cross-examining Wolmarans, Captain Mangena arrived at court with a large brown cardboard box tucked under his arm and a nylon zipper bag slung over his shoulder. Before his cross-examination, Nel asked for a short adjournment to allow the state’s expert to ‘reconstruct something’ around the door exhibit in the courtroom. Mangena unpacked his box and bag to reveal a tripod, metal probes and various other pieces of equipment. He spent the next 30 minutes erecting the tripod, affixing a clamp holding a laser beam to it and moving it into position in front of the door. After much trial and error, he had lined up hole ‘B’ through the door with mark ‘E’ on the back of the mock-up toilet cubicle. When court resumed Nel invited Masipa and her assessors to view the reconstruction up close. As the judge walked around the door and the cubicle, aided by a court orderly, Mangena sprayed a fine mist from an aerosol can that was illuminated as the microscopic particles floated in front of the red laser beam, tracking the trajectory of the bullet that missed Reeva.

  Nel’s point of departure was to question the timeline of events in relation to defence witness testimony and the various tests conducted by the defence expert. Dixon had concluded his testimony on 16 April, but Wolmarans submitted his report to the defence team on 23 April – a report he claimed was in development since he was hired a year earlier. ‘In most cases I give a verbal report to the legal team and as it goes on and I got more information and things, I amended my report,’ he said, adding that he would on occasion send notes to the team, but they were not full reports. He conceded that he had not once prior to 23 April – nearly two months into the trial – furnished the defence team with a completed report.

  ‘So, are you telling me that before this trial started, you did not have a report that you furnished the defence?’ asked a gobsmacked Nel.

  When we contacted Wolmarans in the weeks before the trial started, in February 2014, he said he hadn’t consulted with the defence team in some time as he had undergone a back operation and wasn’t certain whether he would be required to testify. ‘That’s the million-dollar question. It all depends what happens with the trial. Sometimes in a trial you think you’re going to testify and then it happens that you don’t.’

  Nel clearly had Wolmarans on the back foot. The ballistics expert changed his response to say that there had been a previous report and that the most recent one was drafted so the legal team could assist him with his English. He also admitted that he did not keep a filing system of all his reports at his office, but rather had reports on his computer.

  The defence’s forensic experts appeared to be patching holes in their own case rather than punching holes in the state’s case.

  Wolmarans said he had met the accused only once, nearly a year earlier, when he took a few measurements, but he had never consulted with Oscar and never questioned him about what happened on the morning he shot Reeva. He said the athlete was, however, present at some of the consultations he had with the legal team, but the first he heard about how the shots were fired and the events as they transpired that morning wa
s when Oscar had taken the stand.

  Wolmarans said his findings were largely in keeping with those of Mangena about the sequence of the shots, their trajectories through the door and the way they were fired by the athlete. But he disagreed with Mangena about Reeva’s position in the cubicle when she was struck.

  Wolmarans also did not dispute Mangena’s findings on the approximate location of Oscar in the bathroom when he fired the shots, and said he believed that it was hole ‘C’ or ‘D’ that caused mark ‘E’.

  He stated that after shot ‘A’ hit Reeva she collapsed, but it was difficult to say how and where she collapsed. The expert asked Judge Masipa if he could enter the cubicle exhibit and, despite a recent major back operation, would try to explain the movement ‘in slow motion’. And so the witness removed his jacket and entered the cubicle. When he closed the door he was no longer visible to the court, but the judge and her assessors still had sight of him.

  By bending over and painfully flexing his stiff body, Wolmarans explained that as Reeva was falling she would probably have lifted her hands to protect her face – in the defensive position as illustrated by Mangena – and the bullet through hole ‘B’ would have struck her in the right arm.

  Nel said the difficulty Wolmarans had with the demonstration was that if a person were to line up the wound with hole ‘B’ at less than 20 centimetres from the door, there would be no place for Reeva’s head because the entire body would be too close to the wall. Nel believed that this location of the body was impossible. But the expert disagreed.

  Wolmarans often added a caveat to his comments, citing probabilities before asserting that knowing what really happened behind the door was impossible.

  ‘We know there were four shots fired through the door. Four cartridge cases were retrieved,’ he said. ‘I’m no doctor but it makes sense to me was that she collapsed. What happened behind that door, we will never know.’