One Tragic Night (54 page)

Although Vermeulen was tasked with studying the steel plate soon after the shooting, its existence astonishingly remained out of media reports until the trial. Information and pictures of the steel plate came as a shock to the court – it had become public knowledge that police discovered the broken door and the cricket bat in the bathroom, but not this plate. The shiny square piece of metal, measuring about 30 centimetres on each side, is used to cover a hole in the tiled brick structure that supports the bath and gives a plumber access to the drainpipes. If one were standing close to the toilet door, facing it, the plate would be located to the back and left at about ankle height. It appeared as if the plate had been kicked, but after Vermeulen's evidence it didn't feature again, with no explanation from Oscar's team, nor Nel asking for one. Vermeulen found that the steel plate had been bent after being struck by a blunt object, or a blunt object falling against it – and hard enough to have caused a faint vertical scratch – but he could not determine the type of object used.

On 30 April 2013 Vermeulen received a call from Mangena asking him to join him at the Forensic Science Lab to inspect the door. Taking a closer look, he identified two distinct marks – the compressed wood at an angle above the door handle, and a mark that was more like a hole through the door. Photographs were taken of this process and, during the trial, the album marked ‘Exhibit Y' contained 16 photos, mostly of Vermeulen conducting tests in what appeared to be a storeroom, where numerous shelves and items in boxes could be seen packed neatly away. The panels in the door were being crudely held in place with clear tape, and while Vermeulen wielded the bat, Mangena's hand could be seen holding up a measuring tape for the record.

Nearly a year after conducting these tests, while giving his evidence to the trial court, the investigator asked Judge Masipa if he could take off his jacket in court to demonstrate. Vermeulen wanted to replicate the April tests, as depicted in the photos taken at the Forensic Science Lab. He wanted to demonstrate how he matched up the various marks. ‘The investigation revealed that the cricket bat actually made a physical match with the marks, which is of undisputable confirmation that the bat was used to bash the door,' said Vermeulen. It was, however,
never in dispute that Oscar had used the bat to break down the door.

Incongruously dressed in his suit pants and tie, Vermeulen stood in front of the wooden panels, slightly to the right so as not to obscure the judge's view, holding the bat with both his hands against the door. It was a match. He then grabbed the bat by the handle and positioned himself where the person wielding it – and made the mark – would have been located, his left shoulder close to the door, but his arms slightly lowered. When Nel asked him to perform a mock swing at the door, it was clear from the demonstration that the bat would have struck the door a lot higher, approximately 1.85 metres high, but the mark on the door was about 1.53 metres high. The state would argue that for Oscar to have made that mark on the door, he would have had to have been on his stumps.

Nel asked the officer to position the bat against the mark, and questioned him about his body position and posture. ‘I would have been in an uncomfortable position, not a natural position,' said Vermeulen. ‘Even if I stood further away from the door, it would have been in a very uncomfortable and unnatural position for me.'

Vermeulen then pulled out a small stool, and balanced on it with his knees. This put him at approximately the same shoulder height as the accused on his stumps, and he swung the bat again. This time it matched up with the first mark on the door.

The second mark on the door saw the bat break through the wood, smashing out a large splinter, and becoming wedged between the panels – scratch marks on either side of the bat's toe confirmed this. He compared the marks and the way the bat fitted into the door to a nail being driven into a piece of wood – if you pull that nail out of the wood, it's difficult to merely just push it back in because the force of the hammer actually displaces and expands the wood. Vermeulen suggested that the bat was jammed through the door in this way.

But he insisted that for a person to have caused such damage to the bat and door, he would have been in a different position. Vermeulen once again gripped the bat by its handle with its face to his left, but this time stood in front of the door and facing it. He pulled his arms up over his right shoulder and whipped them forward as if he were attacking – the wooden corner of the improvised ram slotted snugly into the gaping crack in the door. Another match, but, like before, he said he had to be in an unnatural position to make the mark, except when he was lowered to about Oscar's shoulder height.

Vermeulen believed that while the bat was slotted through the crack, it was twisted to break the panels away. This would have allowed Oscar to pull away the other panels and peer inside to where Reeva was lying.

It was important for Vermeulen to demonstrate that a person in two different positions caused the two marks, and he further believed that whoever had caused them had a significantly lower shoulder height – like the accused without his prosthetic legs fitted.

Vermeulen told the court that apart from the two marks about which he had testified, there was only one other mark that drew his attention. That mark was located just below the door handle, but he could not confirm that the cricket bat or any other item had caused it. ‘It seems like it is a kind of a shaving or a mark that was caused by an object going kind of in line with the door, as opposed to a perpendicular direction. It is very difficult to confirm that it is in fact one hundred per cent what happened there. The other characteristic of that mark is that it is quite low, low down on the door, which is not a normal position where I would suspect a mark to be caused by a cricket bat, if someone wanted to break open the door,' he said.

This remark would come back to haunt the policeman during cross-examination.

During the adjournment, Advocate Barry Roux picked up the bat and, while surrounded by his own expert Wollie Wolmarans, attorney Brian Webber and Oscar, he swung it at the door but from various positions and different angles. Oscar was guiding his advocate, explaining how he wielded the bat that morning when he attacked the door, while Wolmarans directed the meeting's attention to a mark on the door, higher than those on which Vermeulen had concentrated. Oscar had been taking notes throughout the morning as Vermeulen was testifying. At one point he was seen folding a piece of paper that had a stick figure drawn on it, which appeared to be holding a bat standing in front of a door.

Roux wasted no time going for the credibility of the witness and the reliability of his tests. ‘Colonel, are you a certified tool mark examiner?'

Vermeulen revealed he was not, but said he had used a technique to obtain the match between the bat and the marks on the door as a tool mark examiner would.

‘Have you done microscopic imaging of the mark on the door?'

He had not.

Roux quickly turned to the experiments he had been conducting during the adjournment, putting it to Vermeulen that he could replicate the mark on the door by standing in different body positions, using different shoulder turns and
at varying distances from the door. The point Roux was making was that a person did not have to be in this ‘natural' or ‘comfortable' position – as described by the police officer – in order to replicate the mark on the door.

Roux asked Vermeulen once again to take the bat and wield it in front of the door as he had done earlier, but this time he should be down on his knees. The expert obliged. ‘Now do me a favour and lift your feet,' instructed Roux.

Down on his knees with the bat in his hands, Vermeulen lifted his feet, which were behind him, as if to precariously balance solely on his kneecaps. He immediately lost his balance and had to return his feet to the floor. Roux had attempted to demonstrate his client's inability to maintain his balance when on his stumps.

‘Could you hit the door with the bat?' he asked, seemingly satisfied his demonstration went well to prove his point.

Vermeulen wasn't biting. ‘Well, I do not know whether I would be able to do it if I grew up without legs.'

‘Would you want to try again?' urged Roux.

‘The other argument is also valid, M'Lady, if he had enough balance to fire a firearm, then I would suspect that he would have enough balance to hit a door with a cricket bat.'

Vermeulen declined to replicate the experiment proposed by the defence advocate, insisting that he was not used to walking on his knees; whereas the accused had spent a lifetime on his stumps. (Oscar later testified that when he fired the shots his back was against the bathroom wall, which would have provided him with stability.)

Roux interrogated Vermeulen's description and findings based on the assumption that the person hitting the door was in a ‘natural position', or in the ‘expected position', and to demonstrate his point, positioned the officer in front of the door in various positions. The policeman thus spent the morning taking the three or four steps between the witness box and door, wielding the bat on instruction from the defence advocate as he interrogated his findings.

In the varying positions – with his knees slightly bent, or his back bent forward – he had to concede that the bat did in fact match up to the mark, but he would always insist that this was in an unnatural position. But it raised the question – an unnatural position for whom? Could he speak for Oscar? Roux pointed out that with the policeman's additional weight and shortness, he had a different physique to the accused.

The state forensic analyst agreed with the defence that the door had been intact when it was shot – the bullets first, then the bat – which he confirmed by analysis of the damage. This is explained by a crack down one of the panels
through bullet hole ‘D'. The crack enters the hole at the top to the right and continues out the bottom left. Vermeulen explained that the crack would have carried on in a straight line down the grain of the wood if the hole had not been there. Wolmarans also later supported this theory.

This confirmed the defence's sequence of events – that Oscar first fired the shots through the door before bashing it down with the cricket bat.

True to form, Roux went on to direct his attack to police process, an age-old tactic of defence advocates. Invariably, questions will be raised during a criminal trial about whether or not police acted according to protocol; did they retain the integrity of the crime scene and properly preserve the exhibits?

Roux then asked about the door, telling the court that he would produce photographs that showed additional marks on the door that were not present on the day of the shooting, like the shoe prints. The unmistakable tread of boots – like those worn by police officers – had been trampled along the two centre panels of the door. It appeared as if these were caused by the fine dust kicked up from the tile grouting when the tiles fell off the back wall. The boots had perhaps transferred the dust on to the meranti wood. This would in all likelihood have happened on the crime scene when the panels were still lying around the bathroom. This suggested yet again carelessness and unprofessionalism on the part of the police, and Roux made a meal of it.

The defence advocate attacked every detail of Vermeulen's investigation in an attempt to establish any kind of reasonable doubt, such as the slight angle at which the door was leaned up against a cabinet in the labs on the test day could have altered the findings, and that Vermeulen did not compare photos of the door on the day of the shooting to the door when he was studying it.

The expert could not explain where the large splinters from the section broken out by the cricket bat had disappeared to. Vermeulen believed they were unaccounted for, possibly not collected at the scene. He explained that he did not seize the door at the crime scene on the day of the shooting; he was only handed the case weeks later, but he conceded that he never asked about the splinters because they were not relevant to his investigation. Roux presented a statement and photos to the court from a lieutenant-colonel at the Forensic Science Lab's trace analysis section who had, in fact, studied and compiled a report on the splinters that Vermeulen claimed he could not locate. Vermeulen insisted that the first time he had seen the splinters was in court.

To illustrate his point, Roux referred to the photos of Vermeulen and Mangena conducting the tests on the door – photo 480 in the albums – and asked the man to describe what he saw. The screens in the courtrooms came to life and showed
a picture of Vermeulen's arm holding the bat against the door, while Mangena, wearing blue gloves, held a tape measure against it.

But there was something else of significance. ‘Oh,' exclaimed Vermeulen, ‘there are some pieces of wood next to that …'

And there they were, in plain sight. The large splinters from the crack in the door had been removed from the body bag in which the door was being kept, and placed on top of the crumpled-up bag as the men inspected the door. For Roux it was all about testing the competencies of the experts and the thoroughness of their investigation in order to show the court that there could be doubt about their findings. Vermeulen accepted that this was an oversight on his part.