One Tragic Night (81 page)

The suggestion from Roux's line of questioning was clear.

Van Rensburg said the bathroom was photographed as they found it. ‘The first priority is to take photos as you receive it. Afterwards then you start with the investigation. Then you start touching in the room, because it has to be seized, you cannot just leave it there and you have to investigate further.'

Van Rensburg said he eventually left Botha and Van Staden to continue their investigation, but again made it clear that only he and the two others had access to upstairs until the photos were taken.

With the deft subtlety of an experienced advocate, Roux produced a piece of evidence to blow Van Rensburg out the water: an affidavit signed by another police officer, Sebetha, who had said in his statement he arrived on the scene together with a Constable Khoza. He said that when he arrived the paramedics
were still working on Reeva. Sebetha was also responsible for writing the so-called A1 statement, usually made by the first person to arrive on the scene. So why didn't Van Rensburg write it if he was first on the scene? The witness dismissed the contradiction, but provided no explanation for it.

Roux read from Sebetha's affidavit: ‘I proceeded to the upper building where I noticed droplets of blood come from the upper building upstairs.'

‘Amazing,' said Van Rensburg. ‘I say amazing.'

‘What is “amazing”? Could you explain?'

‘Because he did not went up there. He was not before me on the crime scene.'

‘Yes. Well, let us read …'

Sebetha described finding a ‘stainless 9 mm Taurus in the main bathroom' – a claim that appeared damning in that it blatantly contradicted Van Rensburg's version of events. ‘The only explanation that I can give to M'Lady is that he got information and he wrote his statement, the A1 statement on hearsay. He was not in the bathroom.'

In fact, Van Rensburg was so sure he was the first police officer on the scene he urged the court to obtain the AVL records from the police vehicles. The AVL system is a satellite tracking system that shows the exact location of police vehicles at any given time.

Despite Roux going to great lengths to raise questions as to whether Van Rensburg had been first on the scene, both Oscar and neighbour Carice Viljoen testified that Van Rensburg was the first officer to walk in and introduce himself.

Roux took issue with a number of the photos taken at the scene, adamant that they revealed aspects of police tampering during the investigative process. One of those images was of the colonel kneeling on the right side of Oscar's bed fiddling with the cables – one that would become crucial later in the trial.

Roux also had problems with the photos taken of the white iPhone and that they did not state in the caption that a towel had had to be moved in order for the phone to be visible. The problem for the advocate was the defence's ability to rely on photos presented by the state as a true reflection of the crime scene in its untouched state. He referred to pictures of the duvet – the first merely listed the date, while the photo of it folded out made it clear in the caption that it had been moved. Without an explanation in the caption, who was to know that a scene had been altered?

Van Rensburg took pains to emphasise, however, that these were not part of the first set of photos taken at the scene and were thus not representations
of the untouched scene. The scene was preserved for the original photos and then the investigation started. ‘So then you move stuff to complete your investigation,' he stated.

Nel was quick to correct the discrepancies. After all, his case against Oscar relied heavily on the photographs. He showed that all electronic photographs contain metadata, an electronic signature. And the photos the defence was using were not from the official photographer. This metadata proved key to leading police photographer Bennie van Staden through his evidence-in-chief and the timing of his movements that morning.

Bennie van Staden's fair hair is thinning on the top. He has 21 years' experience in the police service, eight of these years as a photographer. When he arrived on the scene he found Oscar in the garage with his brother Carl.

Van Staden's evidence was a tedious exercise, but necessary in a criminal trial in order for the prosecution to gather details of each photograph on the record. The photographer had put together a total of 1 147 photos spanning 15 albums, and he had retrieved the metadata for just about every album he compiled.

Van Staden was also responsible for collecting a primer residue sample from Oscar to establish whether the accused had in fact discharged a firearm. Despite Oscar confirming he had washed his hands – after obtaining permission from Van Rensburg – Van Staden attempted to retrieve samples from Oscar's hands and arms. He then proceeded to photograph the accused.

Starting with photo 155 in the first album, which covered the untouched crime scene as police claimed to have found it when they arrived, the photographer walked the court through the images.

Van Staden took his first photo that morning at 05:12am, depicting Oscar standing in the garage, his shorts soaked in Reeva's blood, and his prosthetic legs spattered too. The next few pictures in the album, focusing on the prosthetic legs, were taken at 7:39am – two and a half hours later. It became clear that while the pictures appeared in a numbered sequence, they were not necessarily in chronological order.

The series of pictures from here followed from the entrance to the house, into a sitting area and then to where Reeva's body lay at the bottom of the staircase. There were close-up photos taken of Reeva's head, bruised eye, elbow and hip as well as the marks on her back. The timeline shows it took
nearly 15 minutes for the police to roll her body into different positions to get the shots. The tour of the house following the blood trail resumed and Van Staden carried on up the stairs, snapping photographs as he went. At 5:58am the photographer captured an image of the bedroom looking towards the balcony door. In the foreground was the grey duvet crumpled on the floor and a pair of denim jeans folded inside out. A silver tripod fan could be seen blocking the exit to the balcony – Van Staden stated that when he found it, it was switched off. There was light outside, dawn had arrived.

Picture 68 became the centre of a contentious argument between the state and the defence and was key to allegations of crime-scene tampering, as well as alleged discrepancies in Oscar's version. It was a tight frame of the grey duvet lying on the floor, the pair of denim jeans and, to the right in the picture, a small black fan, unplugged with its cord coiled up next to it. The next picture in the sequence, with the caption ‘duvet cover spread open by me in the main bedroom', was taken at 7:34am. Subsequent pictures show close-ups of blood spatter on the duvet.

The photographer followed the trail into the bathroom and captured images of the bat, the blood, a crumpled mat and the silver weapon, its hammer cocked back and the safety mechanism off.

Close-ups were taken of the black phone found next to the firearm, followed by photos of the white phone, initially not visible, that was found underneath bloodied towels. Van Staden said he had picked up the towels, after he had photographed the area, as part of his investigation of the scene to check whether there were any exhibits. He did the same with the cricket bat – after photographing it as it was found, he turned it over to reveal the signatures on the other side.

He then moved on to the inside of the toilet cubicle. A wooden door panel had come to rest close to the wall on the right, while a magazine rack was positioned closest to the back wall, with one of its legs in a pool of blood. The position of the magazine rack proved critical later in the trial because, according to the defence, it was the cause of the ‘third startle' that triggered Oscar to shoot reflexively.

The toilet lid was up – the underside of which was spattered – but the toilet seat was down. This is where Reeva came to rest with her right arm and head. Van Staden photographed the three ricochet cracks against the tiles and small shards of projectile on the floor before he finished documenting this section of the house.

The sun had risen significantly over the horizon when Van Staden took a
picture of the side entrance to Oscar's house at 6:27am. He also photographed several buckets of paint near a service entrance, evidence of renovations that had been taking place at the house. Oscar's two dogs – a light brown American pit bull terrier named Silo, and Enzo, a black-and-white bull terrier – made an appearance in one image as they ate pellets from a silver dish near a back door. Another photo, taken from the garden, looks up at the bathroom window where Oscar believed an intruder had gained entry. Below the window on the paving was, inexplicably, a pair of blue denim jeans – a curious sight that piqued interest on social media but was never questioned in court. There was also a photograph that featured several ladders stacked on top of one another in the backyard. This was the last picture in the album.

Van Staden said he had asked Botha to clear the scene before he went through the house taking the pictures, and while he was doing his work upstairs he was alone. At one point Aimee and Carice Viljoen joined him upstairs when they collected clothes for Oscar from a passage cupboard but they were prohibited from entering the bathroom.

Was Van Staden really on his own on the morning of 14 February, enjoying undisturbed access to the scene while taking photographs? That was top of Roux's questions for the policeman because he did not believe him. He worked to show the court why.

Van Staden disputed Hilton Botha's claim in his affidavit that the photographer arrived on the scene shortly after 5:00am – he said he checked his watch to establish that he arrived at 4:50am. Van Staden said he greeted Botha, who explained what they believed had happened, before he showed him around the house. After that he proceeded to the ground floor where he found the accused.

Roux questioned his process in determining which photos made it into the album. During an overnight adjournment Roux asked that Van Staden fetch his master copies of the scene photos to present them in court. The officer arrived with 16 CDs with his photos stored on them. Van Staden's testimony thus became an intense game of ‘Spot the Difference' as he was repeatedly shown two images of a scene, with items displaced in one of the photographs, in an attempt to prove that there had been tampering. It had become evident during the photographer's evidence-in-chief that his albums did not represent a chronology of events. Without the captions with picture times,
an uninformed viewer could look at one picture and then the next in which something had moved and deduce that the scene had been altered. It wasn't clear that in some instances 90 minutes elapsed between the pictures – one set represented the untouched scene, while the other documented the investigative process. It appeared that, to some degree, the defence had inadvertently, without knowledge of the timeline of when the images were taken, deduced that there had been tampering in some scenarios.

Roux quizzed the photographer about an image that showed the cricket bat lying face down in front of the basin with bloodied towels to the left of it. A spent cartridge was also visible near the bat's handle. Along the spine of the bat was the brand name ‘Lazer'. Roux asked Van Staden to identify which letter in the brand name intersected with the line created by the tile grouting beneath the bat – ‘E', said the witness.

Roux then requested Van Staden to look at the same area but in a different picture. The wider shot showed the bat in the far top-right corner and included the firearm and cellphones on the mat in front of the shower. Which letter intersected with the tile line in this photo? ‘R', responded the witness.