Steeped in Blood (19 page)

This was a fascinating case and illustrated yet again the multifaceted approach necessary when investigating a problem. On the face of it, it seemed a simple comparison, but digging deeper, there were other issues that came into play: I had to understand the impact of paper and how it could have changed the dimensions of the photocopies, how the printing process could have impacted on the stamps and the copies, how the basis of comparison works – that similarities are easy to explain, but differences are very difficult to explain away. On top of all of that, I had the immense good fortune to have discovered a book of which there are probably only a few copies left in the world, in which I found out about the Japanese symbol for a facsimile.

I was so intrigued by the case that I offered to buy the book of stamps from Barclays for the amount that Christie’s would have given them. I still have it in my possession today.

The work of a forensic scientist can be extraordinarily varied, yet it always centres on solving a particular problem, no matter what shape or form it takes. The answer always lies in the detail. Despite the fact that there are some heavy odds at times and the obvious facts sometimes seem to be the only plausible solution, it’s a fascinating business in which to be involved.

‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’
Who will guard the guards themselves?

– JUVENAL,

Roman poet

One of the major frustrations of the late 1980s and early 1990s was that the state police policed themselves. Allowing the fox to guard the hen house never works.

In August 1988, a massive bomb rocked Khotso House, the former headquarters of the South African Council of Churches (SACC). Placed near the lift shaft, the bomb reduced the entire building to rubble. Fortunately, no one was killed. An ANC supporter, Shirley Gunn, was falsely accused of the bombing, and spent more than two months in prison with her infant son after her arrest. During the presentation of evidence at the TRC, horrific facts were presented about her imprisonment, one of which was that the police had removed her sixteen-month-old son from her for eight days and then used tapes of him crying to torture her.

It emerged years later, at the TRC, that Adriaan Vlok – Minister of Police at the time of the bombing – had, on the instruction of P.W. Botha, arranged for the demolition of the building, as it was seen as a ‘house of evil’ used to store hand grenades, limpet mines and other weapons. I was not aware of these allegations at the time, and during my investigation I saw absolutely no evidence of any weaponry kept at Khotso House.

I was asked by the SACC to investigate the bombing. From the outset, I could see that it was yet another cover-up case. The attitude, body language and actions of the police investigators betrayed the fact that they were merely going through the motions of an investigation. They knew the truth, but were determined to hide it at all costs. In addition, evidence was concealed. The case, ultimately, was a disgraceful reflection on those people who were supposed to be serving and protecting the citizens of the country at that time.

In the case of the Khotso bombing, as in many other cases then, the police issued incorrect and misleading press statements, falsely arrested people, and tried to create an entirely artificial picture while they were planning and executing bombings, murders and torture. Years later, I prepared a report for the TRC on the failure of forensic science services during this era.

Similar institutional failures occurred after the assassination of David Webster, who was gunned down in cold blood on 1 May 1989. His assassination followed the same pattern as so many of the state-sponsored murders in which I had been involved, where political opponents were viewed as outlaws by the state and were simply taken out.

Webster was born in 1945 in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), and he later immigrated to South Africa with his family. After deciding to follow a career in anthropology, he joined Wits as a lecturer in 1970. Because his doctorate focused on the traditional anthropological topic of kinship, he was exposed to the effects of migrant labour, particularly in the southern Mozambique region.
This steered him in the direction of related issues: he began to explore with zest the social history of tuberculosis and the social causes of malnutrition. Living with the people as a researcher, his academic critique of government policies led to anti-apartheid activism.

In 1976, Webster was invited to lecture for two years at the University of Manchester, after which he returned to Wits. It was the detention of some of his students in 1981 – specifically Barbara Hogan – that was to catapult him into the role that eventually resulted in his assassination.

Webster worked for the Detainees’ Parents’ Support Committee, a support group for relatives of detainees and banished people. In addition to assisting with tracing banished and detained family members, he organised regular social gatherings, known as ‘David Webster tea parties’. At these meetings, families of detainees could share information and pool ideas on how to find those who were in prison or had disappeared at the hands of the state.

Webster, who was involved in the End Conscription Campaign, the Five Freedoms Forum, and the Detainees’ Education and Welfare Organisation, interacted with many anti-apartheid activists, and was a dynamic activist himself. In the late eighties, he wrote a research report with his partner, Maggie Friedman, about repression under the state of emergency, exposing the increasing state repression and how liberation movements were finding new and creative methods of resistance. I never quite understood why he was seen as a threat so large that he had to be removed from society. He was one of my wife Shelona’s lecturers at the time of his death, and we knew him as a quiet, gentle, scholarly man of unquestionable integrity.

On 1 May 1989, just nine months before Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, Webster and Maggie Friedman returned to their home in Troyeville, Johannesburg, after buying plants from a nursery. A car pulled up, and Webster’s name was called out. As he turned to
see who it was, a gunshot was fired and he fell to the ground, clutching his chest. He called out to Maggie that he had been shot, and that she should get an ambulance. A few minutes later, he was dead.

I was contacted within an hour of the shooting to investigate on behalf of the Webster family. I immediately went to the crime scene, accompanied by Shelona, who had known Webster well, and found it swarming with police. The investigating officer was Colonel Floris Mostert.

I spent a long time looking for the bullet as I tried to piece the crime together. The bullet was likely to have passed right through Webster, and would have ended up somewhere on the premises. Wollie Wolmarans, the police forensic ballistics expert, assisted me. He was another one of the scientifically inept people in the police force, but he was a good foot soldier and did what he was told to do. Mostert also assisted us in the search, and we overturned flowerpots and such, combing the entire area. Eventually the police brought in a sniffer dog to help us look.

I didn’t have sight of the body or clothes, and after many frustrating hours of searching, I insisted on seeing Webster’s clothing. The moment I saw his blood-stained T-shirt, I realised that the shot that killed him had to have been a shotgun wound, so the pellets would still be in him. Pellets would have gone straight into the body and not emerged out the other side. It was blatantly clear that the police, including Mostert and Wolmarans, must have known about the weapon and had kept us running around on a wild-goose chase while they covered their bases.

It was always obvious that there were crimes the police wanted to solve and crimes they didn’t want to solve. Again, the telltale signs were there – they were milling around, failing to make proper notes, and were disorganised. Basically, they were treading water until everyone went away, when they would cover everything up.

Webster’s assassination was a politically organised crime, and the police knew who the killers were from the outset. This murder
was the subject of seven investigations, including the Harms Commission of Inquiry and an internal military inquiry, but no one was prosecuted at the time – an utter waste of time and money. I removed myself from the case once I had identified the body and established that the murder had been police-initiated. Nobody was found guilty of the crime.

The Harms Commission started making inroads into these political murders and started the process of unveiling the hit squads. The commission found that the CCB was run by a number of people inside the police force, and that Staal Burger, Wouter Basson and many others knew the true facts. Their involvement infiltrated all ranks of the police force, including the Brixton Murder and Robbery Squad.

The problems with the Harms Commission were multifaceted. Judge Harms could not absorb the mindset of the people with whom he was dealing. When Dirk Coetzee gave evidence in London in 1990 relating to the existence and activities of hit squads, Judge Harms could not contain himself and cried out, ‘This is all bullshit!’ When Judge Harms wrote his report, he found no evidence of hit squads. Part of the reason may have been that the terms of reference of his commission were very narrow, but perhaps he simply could not bring himself to believe that his fellow Afrikaners in the police force could perform such atrocities. The result was that the hit squads appeared to have got away with murder.

However, the truth behind David Webster’s killing came out years later, when Ferdi Barnard, a CCB member, bragged to a TRC amnesty applicant that he had murdered Webster. He was eventually arrested and prosecuted for the crime, and a more just jailing of an individual cannot be conceived.

Barnard had been paid to murder David Webster, and had rented a room at the Oribi Hotel down the street from Webster’s house to keep surveillance. On that fateful May day, Barnard drove down Eleanor Street, leant out of the car window and fired the shot.
He is indeed the lowest piece of scum that I have ever had the misfortune of encountering, a cold-blooded murderer who showed no remorse or emotion for what he had done, and who was not worthy of cleaning the shoes of the man he had murdered.

The police never investigated the Oribi Hotel surveillance, nor did they follow up on any clues or try to determine who had paid for the murder. Their plain disinterest mirrored the attitude they had exhibited after the Cradock Four murder, when they knew, too, that the culprits were among their own.

The Elim church fire was another textbook case of foxes in the hen house. Eight children died on the night of 12 March 1992, when the church building became an inferno, leaving many of the children trapped in the dormitories on the third floor.

The old Elim church in Sunnyside, Pretoria, was semi-derelict. Jeremy Kruger, a community-spirited man, had decided to convert it into a shelter for street children, with the aim of providing the children with food and some kind of support structure. Kruger obtained donations of blankets, beds and rudimentary cooking equipment, and ran the shelter as a community project.

Some of the children had had run-ins with the local police, and a particular altercation with a policeman from the Sunnyside police station had taken place. One day, this police officer caught one of the children allegedly stealing from a car, and he chased him, wanting to arrest the boy. The child ran straight to the Elim church building, where a number of his friends ganged up on the policeman. The end result was that the policeman jumped out of a window and broke his ankle. This was to have tragic ramifications a short while later.

On the night of 12 March, the children living in the old Elim church woke up to flames and choking smoke. There was no way to get out of the third-floor dormitory, where many of them slept, as the doors were locked. Some of them jumped out of the window, sustaining injuries, while one boy hung out of the window
and directed others to slide down his body to safety. Amidst the flames, panic and chaos, eight children died in the blaze and many others were seriously injured.

The police enlisted Gawie Basson from the CSIR to investigate the fire, as they lacked a proper fire investigation team. Lawyers for Human Rights, an independent human rights organisation, called me in. From the beginning, it appeared obvious that this was no accident. The various signs were present, one of them being the speed with which the fire had developed. As mentioned in
Chapter 4
, deliberate fires develop much quicker than accidental ones, as they are normally set to burn in a number of places at the same time. They also burn at a lower level, starting slowly and burning upwards, following the path of heat. This fire seemed different: it appeared to have crept around on the ground. There was also the inexplicable fact that the fire had spread to a pile of wood in the church. All of this pointed to the obvious fact that the fire had been started deliberately.

The next logical question related to who would have wanted to set the building alight. The policeman from the Sunnyside police station was the prime suspect, as he had been seen in the area at the time of the fire. When he was confronted, he claimed to have been nowhere near the place, saying that he had been at home the entire evening.