Steeped in Blood (21 page)

The case of the Mandrax dealers in Kempton Park illustrated the extent to which the state forensic department bent the rules in the testing procedures. A matter ended up in the Kempton Park Magistrates’ Court, and when I looked at the results of the state’s analyses, I realised that they were too good to be true.

We had used Neethling previously to establish the ground rules for the Mandrax case: in an earlier trial in Cape Town, I specifically had questions posed to Neethling that we could use as a point of reference in this trial. I had asked things like, ‘Is it possible to get the same results each time?’, to which the answer was, of course, ‘No.’ If one didn’t ask the questions so pertinently, and in such a focused manner, the police experts would lie.

In the Mandrax matter, all seven test results were identical, which is simply not possible. To test the substance, a solid solution of it
is made by grinding a small amount with pure potassium bromide. The powder is then compressed into a tablet, which is placed in the infrared spectrometer. When you analyse a substance using potassium bromide, you never quite get the same result: each result will be slightly different due to noise on the baseline – you find ripples on the line that are never quite the same, such as a fingerprint. The only explanation for the identical results in this case was that the state analyst had taken a single reference sample and repeated the test seven times, using the same reference sample, instead of taking seven different samples. I caught them flat-footed!

The analyst in the Mandrax case was lazy, so he had cheated. His laziness resulted, in part, in the drug dealers being acquitted. I have never been pro drug dealers, but I do believe in fairness. Even a drug dealer is entitled to a fair defence, and there is no excuse for having the evidence against you tweaked. It was no wonder Neethling detested me.

The accused in the Mandrax factory case were eventually convicted on something completely different: one of the chemicals that they had purchased had no other use than to manufacture Mandrax, which ensured their conviction. One of the accused set up another Mandrax factory to pay for his defence, and he was prosecuted for that as well!

Neethling eventually left the police laboratory and was replaced by Hein Strauss, a more honest man with whom I developed a healthy working relationship. Neethling died recently of prostate cancer, but he will always be reviled for the role he played in perverting justice during the apartheid era.

Laziness on behalf of the state forensic department has resulted in reasonable doubt over a man’s innocence more than once. A few years ago, in the early 2000s, a man in Swaziland was accused of murdering his cousin. His defence was that there had been a third person in the house at the time: he said that he had attacked the third person, injuring him, and that his cousin had died in the
battle. The third person managed to escape, even though he was injured.

The murder scene bore evidence of a bloody fight. There appeared to be multiple bleedings, with about fifty different blood splashes all over the place. An expert was sent down from Pretoria to carry out the analysis because Swaziland had no forensic department of its own. A young man who had trained in 1994 conducted the DNA analyses on the blood splashes, but to save money he analysed only four of them. All four contained the blood of the deceased. He testified to this in court.

The fact that he had taken such a limited number of samples meant that the version told by the defendant could not be ruled out. Testifying in the trial, I had no choice but to say, ‘Well, my lord, the defence has always been that there was another person who was injured and who bled. If your lordship were to ask me whether his blood could have been in the fifty samples that weren’t analysed, my answer to your lordship is that I cannot rule that out.’

There are no short cuts in forensic science. It’s about doing the job properly so that there can be no doubt as to the meaning of the results. The judge in the lower court in Swaziland convicted the young man and sentenced him to death. The case was taken on appeal, and a full bench noted the concerns I’d expressed about the lack of completeness of the analysis done by the state forensic expert. They reversed the sentence, and the man was acquitted of the crime.

The authorities had so many dirty tricks up their sleeves in the late eighties – sometimes it defied logic. One such instance concerned the foul smell emanating from the Regina Mundi church in Soweto.

Regina Mundi was at the centre of political resistance to the National Party in the townships. A large gathering at the church had been planned, but on the Friday before the meeting, a foul smell permeated the entire place. The priests came to see me for help.
Fearing poison, they brought some items with them that displayed this foul smell, so that I could examine them.

I discovered that these items contained a substance called butyric acid, among other things. A short-chain fatty acid produced by bacteria as part of their metabolic process, butyric acid is one of the compounds that releases the smell of unwashed feet and unwashed people, and also, incidentally, gives some of the taste to cheese. It is not fatal and it is in no way poisonous, unless you drink vast quantities of it. I was able to reassure the priests quite happily that they could clean out the church and use a bit of deodorant, but that no lasting harm would come from the butyric acid.

Many years later, before 1994, a laboratory belonging to Armscor burnt down in Pretoria. I was asked to investigate the laboratory. Being cautious, and because the process of investigating a fire involves crawling around and sniffing things, I wanted to make certain that there was nothing toxic in the laboratory. I turned to the head of the laboratory and said, ‘I need to sniff around your laboratory. Please bring me a shovel.’ I duly dug around and finally discovered a foul smell. It smelt to me like butyric acid, so I asked the laboratory head if it was, in fact, what I thought it was.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It is. In fact, this is the place where the butyric acid used in the Regina Mundi church incident was produced. We used to manufacture those foul-smelling things for the forces.’

It was going way beyond acceptable limits for the National Party to spray such substances all over a church, no matter what the political persuasions were. I wasn’t prepared to analyse the fire any further for the laboratory people because, as far as I was concerned, there was a conflict of interest – I had acted for the Regina Mundi church. Because the church had placed itself on the other, opposing side of the political spectrum, they had been subjected to these dirty tricks. I felt it my duty to reveal to everybody the fact that the Armscor laboratory had done this. Politics is such a dirty game; I did not want to be involved with any organisation that had stooped to using such dishonest techniques in a place of worship.

Political overtones and filthy tricks had a strong impact on Henry Burt, the first white person to be convicted of the ‘necklace’ murder of a black man. Necklacing entailed placing a petrol-filled tyre around the neck of a victim and setting it alight, and was fairly common in the apartheid years. Burt’s trial and conviction caused quite a stir in its day.

Henry Burt was a young fitter and turner who lived with his girlfriend, Moekie, in Laezonia, near Lanseria Airport. In 1986, the body of a black policeman was found necklaced in the veld about 15 kilometres from Henry’s home, near a place that would later turn out to be Vlakplaas. During the police investigation, it was established that Burt and another man had given the policeman a lift shortly before his death.

The police questioned Burt and the other man, who then, suddenly, went to the bank one day, withdrew all his money, left his house, his car and all his possessions, and fled to England. Burt was eventually taken into custody for questioning, where he was tortured almost to the brink of death. He suffered electric shocks, mock suffocations and other cruel methods of torture. After verifying his alibi, the police released him later that evening.

The next morning, Burt went to the Pretoria Murder and Robbery Unit to make a statement. He took a tape recorder with him in the event that any pressure was placed on him, or he suffered further torture. After making the statement and going for medical treatment, an attorney advised him to apply for an interdict against the police that would prevent them from any further acts of brutality. The interdict was granted at 8 p.m. that evening, after which Burt started criminal proceedings against the police.

Burt’s civil case against the police seemed to trigger grossly intimidating behaviour by them – they would arrive at his house with no search warrant, force their way in, scratch through his possessions and leave chaos in their wake. About three weeks after
the policeman’s body had been found, the police decided to take Burt’s car in again. They told him that the forensic department would ‘definitely find something this time’.

And ‘find’ something they did. On the second investigation of the car, the police discovered fresh specks of blood on the edge of the back seat – almost as if someone had cut their finger, releasing tiny drops of blood. The car had bucket seats in the front and a bench seat at the back that could be removed to be cleaned.

The previous investigating officer, who had assaulted Burt, was no longer on the case. His successor came to see Henry at work, and asked him whether he would be prepared to withdraw the charges against the police. He also wanted to know how much money Burt had in the bank. He threatened Burt with arrest and a murder charge if he did not give him a statement explaining how the back seat of the car had come to be covered in the deceased’s blood. Unable to comply with the investigating officer’s request, Burt was arrested for the murder of the policeman.

The issue of blood testing played an enormous role in this trial. I was brought in by the defence to advise them on the analysis of the blood and the interpretation of the results, as well as on the non-specificity of luminol for detecting blood.

The police expert testified that, after finding the blood spots, he had examined the entire back seat of the car using the luminol technique. Luminol identifies haemoglobin by fluorescing in the dark. It is very sensitive, detecting haemoglobin traces down to the rate of one part in six million parts (i.e., one part of blood diluted six million times). Using this technique, the police expert could show that the entire back seat had been covered at some stage by haemoglobin, or, as the police expert put it, ‘primate blood’. The sample was too minute to obtain a blood group, but they deduced that the chances were good that the blood was that of a human.

The court was faced with the picture of a seat having been fully exposed to blood and so thoroughly washed that the blood could be
detected only faintly by luminol. I was not convinced that there had ever been blood on the seat – I could not understand the presence of the blood drops or the test result. At the time of the second examination of the vehicle, the blood drops would have been there in full view – anyone could have seen them. Yet the police had scoured the car several times on their first examination and did not see any blood: they had found it only after the interdict. I believe that the drops of blood could only have got on the back seat by being planted there afterwards, which I told the court.

The police may have used some blood left from the post-mortem of the necklaced man. Yet their submission that the seat had been covered with blood and cleaned – which meant that it must have been removed, soaked, scrubbed and rinsed at least two or three times – would have ensured that the spots of blood would have been washed out. The theory was that the victim had been carried from where he was killed to where he was necklaced, fitting in with the state’s theory of blood on the back seat.

After three weeks in the Pretoria Supreme Court, Henry Burt was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death. He spent two years on death row. He always protested his innocence, and eventually his sentence was commuted to twenty years on petition to the state president.

At the TRC, Henry Burt was declared a victim of gross human rights violations, and was paid R30 000 in compensation, a pittance if one considers the course of events that robbed a young man of his life and his future. He had clearly not been guilty, yet he had been convicted on circumstantial and false forensic evidence. Burt and I are still in contact every now and then. He has managed to get on with his life.

Justice Human was on the bench at Burt’s trial. If you mention his name today in legal circles, people say, ‘to err is Human’. He is dead now, but he was a typical National Party man, in court to do the government’s bidding. The trial was so full of holes: the cause
of death was never determined; there was no DNA to show that the blood sample belonged to the deceased. There was never any proper explanation as to how this murder happened. Yet Justice Human would never have found Henry Burt innocent. A policeman had been murdered, and someone had to pay: the police, whether black or white, were paramount in those days.

This case continued to bother me, in particular the luminol test, which delivered such damning proof of haemoglobin. Moekie, Henry’s girlfriend at the time, knew nothing about the murder, yet it was in her car that the blood spots and evidence of ‘primate blood’ was found. She was a paraplegic who took part in paraplegic games. Henry had made fibreglass coverings for the stainless-steel rims of her wheelchair so that she had better traction for her hands when playing sport. The fibreglass was moulded over the rims, and Henry had sanded them down so that they were smooth and comfortable. I discovered many years later that polyester resin from fibreglass gives a positive luminol result. This could have been a logical explanation to the whole case.

Luminol testing has proved to be accurate and incredibly useful in reaching the truth. In the eighties, I was asked by Cape Town advocate Paul Hoffman to assist with the matter of a Malay messenger, who had been shot and killed by the police. They had mistaken him for a criminal and had ordered him to stop moving. In those days, if the police told a coloured man to stop, he ran. They were entitled to shoot to make an arrest, but, in this case, they shot him in his head.