Steeped in Blood (35 page)

The fire had been so intense that the body was burnt beyond recognition. A petrol fire will burn at just under 1 000 ºC and will leave only ashes in its wake. When the paramedics had tried to remove the body from the car, it had crumbled to dust. The pathologist could estimate only that it was a male body, based on the shape of the pelvis. There was no further way of identifying the body, which was of course vital if the insurers were going to pay out the life insurance.

I took the car to a concrete surface and started sifting through the remaining ashes, using a fine sieve similar to a kitchen sieve to look for clues. After four days of sifting, I found something resembling an amalgam filling. I placed it under an electron microscope, where I identified that the chief elements of this item were silver and mercury – also the main elements of amalgam. In this way, I confirmed that it was indeed an amalgam filling.

By finding the amalgam, I knew that the body belonged to someone who could afford restorative dentistry. Occasionally insurance
companies find themselves in situations where an unidentifiable body is found. In such cases, these bodies have been planted deliberately; they are unclaimed bodies – John Does – used fraudulently to obtain insurance payouts. Basic dentistry involves removing rather than restoring teeth, and unclaimed bodies seldom have restorative dentistry.

The next step was to approach the insured man’s dentist and to examine the man’s dental records and any available X-rays. By comparing the amalgam to dental X-rays belonging to the insured man, I could show that the body did, in fact, belong to him. The petrol fire had been hot enough to destroy a human body, but not to destroy amalgam, which melts at a much higher temperature of around 1 500 ºC.

Patience, innovation and some menial work paid off in this case. Looking beyond the obvious, I was able to do what was necessary to put together the jigsaw pieces left behind by nature.

‘Different people of different times and places have fundamentally different realities.’

– GIAMBATTISTA VICO,

Italian philosopher, rhetorician and jurist

It has never ceased to amaze me how people attempt to fool the system; their levels of creativity are sometimes impressive. The lure of money, whether through an insurance claim or through some form of ‘compensation’, is a strong driving force in many people’s language.

Several years ago, a shopkeeper in Holmdene in the Eastern Transvaal thought that a threatening letter, coupled with a devastating fire that destroyed his business premises, would guarantee him sympathy and some extra cash. I was called in to investigate the fire on behalf of the insurance company.

Arriving at the remains of the building, the very agitated owner told me that his business had burnt down and that it was dreadful. After some careful investigation, I realised that the place had clearly
been deliberately torched. I asked the fellow, ‘Can you think of anybody who might have wanted to do this to you?’

His response was immediate: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was the UDF.’ I asked him how he knew this, and he replied, ‘Well, they sent me a threatening letter.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What did they say in the threatening letter?’ He still had the letter, which he produced for me to scrutinise. The spelling and grammar were atrocious. The letter started out with ‘Dear Kullie’ and went on in graphic terms to describe what they were going to do to him, including burning down his business (see
Appendix I
). It appeared to have been written by someone almost illiterate.

I sat him down and dictated a statement for him to write, interspersing various words that had been misspelt in the letter. It was a no-brainer: in the same handwriting as that which appeared in the letter, he misspelt the words in exactly the same way. Needless to say, his claim was not paid.

Claimants who exaggerate the extent of their loss are also not uncommon. In the late 1990s, a farmer in Vereeniging, near Johannesburg, suffered a great loss of teff – a type of grass for feeding cattle – when the building in which it was stored burnt down. I was called in by IGI Insurance, an insurance company that later went bankrupt, to investigate.

I made the trip to the farm and was intrigued by the fact that there was very little residual ash left, meaning that there had to have been far less teff than the many hundreds of tons for which the farmer was claiming. ‘How much teff was here originally?’ I asked him. In response, he gave me a detailed description of the vast amount of teff that had been lost.

After doing my homework, I asked why other farmers could get a maximum growth of three to three and a half tons of teff per hectare, while he was getting six to seven tons per hectare. Smiling, the farmer said to me, ‘Well, you see, the reason is that I
irrigate day and night. I’m on a big dolomitic dome; there is a vast amount of water underground here and we’ve got big pumps. The secret to this is irrigation!’

I asked to see his electricity bills so that I could check that he had, in fact, been running these pumps. ‘Well,’ the farmer said, ‘unfortunately I had a farmhouse fire a year and a half ago and all my records were burnt.’

‘Oh, okay,’ I replied. ‘That’s not a problem. Take me down to the poles that supply the electricity. You’ve got a transformer up the pole and that transformer has a number. I can go to Eskom with that number and they’ll give me your bills.’ I wanted to read the power ratings from the pumps so that I could work out how much electricity the farmer had used and for how long the pumps had been running.

He was a bit put out by this and said that he could not take me to the poles then because he had to go to church. I returned to Johannesburg, planning to go back to the farm the next day to have a look at the electricity poles. Before I could return, however, the farmer phoned the insurance company and told them that he was unhappy about my presence on his farm. His words were, ‘
Jy kry daai fokken Dokter Quincy van my plaas af!
’
Quincy
was a popular TV programme at the time that revolved around a medical examiner who single-handedly solved gruesome murders and other forensic cases, so I took this as an inadvertent compliment!

Based on my calculations of the size of the farmer’s crop and the amount of ash that was left, as well as the farmer’s fraudulent misrepresentation of the claim, the insurance claim was repudiated successfully. (As an interesting aside, the farmer was charged with fraud of a political nature at around the same time.)

Human frailty is a strange business, and people do strange things. I examined a house in the late 1990s that had allegedly been burgled. On closer inspection, it appeared that the burglars had not broken in, but broken
out
: the window, which had been forced, had clearly
been forced from the inside – the bruising of the wood that was visible on the inside could never have been inflicted from the outside.

There had been no need to break out because there had been a key in the door. If anybody had been inside in the first place, they simply would not have had to break out. After some investigating, I managed to get hold of the owner’s wife to ask her whether she had any tools. She hauled out what appeared to be the family tool box and gave it to me, and inside I found a fairly substantial screwdriver. I looked at the screwdriver and saw paint that seemed to match the paint of the window on its end. I took the paint from the screwdriver and some paint from the window and could easily show that it was one and the same. In addition, the dimensions of the screwdriver fitted the marks on the bruised wood. The criminal had managed to use and return the tools that belonged to the household in order to escape from the burgled premises. I think not!

Quenching your thirst on a hot summer’s day could hold some surprises – or at least that’s what Hilton April of the Strand claimed when he allegedly found a mouse in his can of Coca-Cola.

April purchased a 450 ml can of Coke on 31 January 2003, opening it as he was leaving the shop. As he took the first sip, something didn’t taste right. After the second sip, he felt a ‘slimy tail’ on his tongue. On investigation, he saw a mouse inside the can, which he removed with a pair of tweezers.

April then contacted Coca-Cola, claiming that he was ill because of the incident and saying that he wanted financial compensation for future pain and suffering. Coke approached me, as this type of claim is not uncommon.

The mouse was still completely intact and in reasonable shape (see
photo
). It seemed to have been recently deceased, and there were no signs of decomposition. The manufacture date on the underside of the can showed that it had been left in the factory for six weeks before April had bought it.

I conducted an experiment: I went out and bought six mice and took them to the production line at the factory. After euthanising the mice with chloroform, I took six tins – Sprite and Tab cans, so as not to cause confusion – and inserted a mouse into each one. I then allowed each can to be filled with Coke and had the cans sealed. I marked each one with the production date.

After six weeks had passed, I opened the cans. There was no trace of the mice: they had all completely dissolved. The contents of the cans consisted of a thick, sludgy mess. The reason for this is quite simple: Coke contains phosphoric acid, which had dissolved the mice in their entirety. I was able to prove that there was no way a whole mouse could have ended up in the Coke can at production and been whole a full six weeks later.

Unfortunately for Hilton April, he was charged with fraud and received a five-year suspended sentence. Frequently people try to make a fast buck with a trumped-up story, but science shows up the truth each and every time.

Some of the fire investigations in which I have been involved have demonstrated a quirky side of human nature – one that ensures the protection of their pets at all costs. One such case involved the burning down of a haberdashery shop in Edenvale, Gauteng. Candles had been placed in saucers full of petrol around the shop, so it was quite clear that this had been a deliberate fire. The interesting aspect to the case was that the shop was well known for the parrot that lived on the premises.

On the day before the fire, the owner had taken the parrot to have its nails clipped. He arrived at the veterinary surgeon’s rooms, and the vet offered to do the job immediately. ‘No, no, I can’t take him back with me now,’ the owner said. ‘Please make certain that I can come back tomorrow and pick him up. Will you keep him overnight?’ That was the very night that the fire took place and
the property burnt to the ground! Needless to say, the outcome of the case was not in favour of the shop owner.

A second, similar case involved a very ‘motivated’ parrot. A farmer’s house in the then Eastern Free State had been completely destroyed in a blaze. During my investigation, I discovered that the parrot that normally lived in the living room in the house had been found safe and sound the next morning on the front lawn. I remember saying to the farmer, ‘Did you lock up?’

‘Yes,’ he replied.

‘And what happened about the parrot? Was the parrot left where it was normally left?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I put the sheet over the parrot cage in the normal way, and I put the parrot to bed.’

‘And that was in the front lounge?’

‘Yes,’ he nodded.

‘Well,’ I asked, ‘can you explain to me how the parrot got out onto the front lawn and escaped the fire?’

The farmer said, ‘Well, that parrot must have been very motivated.’

Despite the fact that they are prepared to cheat their insurance companies, very seldom will people murder their pets in cold blood. In the midst of fraud, there is a little corner of the human heart that cannot bring itself to murder a pet that has been a friend for many years.

‘Science is founded on the conviction that experience, effort and reason are valid; magic on the belief that hope cannot fail nor desire deceive.’

– BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI,

British anthropologist