She stated that she has done 13 000 autopsies and supervides thousands of others in her career.

She said that she projected images of Inge’s head wounds onto a screen then superimposed photos of the ornamental hammer over the wounds. She concluded that the dimensions matched.

She said that the other wounds could have been caused by the bottle-opener end or the flat side of the hammer.

But it was the last comments which seemed to destroy all her previous evidence. She said that the hammer could not be excluded as the murder weapon…but neither could the tens of thousands of other hammers in the Western Cape!

Before she even entered the witness box, Judge Anton Veldhuizen said that he did not know how much further her testimony would take the matter.

After the testimony he went on to say:

“Where does that take us?”

One has to wonder why they even bothered to put Dr Liebenberg on the stand if they knew that she would say that.

It feels to me that the state’s team does not expect to win this case, but are probably hoping that the R46-million claim for malicious prosecution will be drastically reduced.

To me it appears that not only will Fred win the case, but will also probably be rewarded close to, if not exactly what he is claiming.

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His story is pretty much the same as during the trial, where he spoke about their last night together, his problems with his brother and the letters Inge gave him the next day.

He also spoke about his day at Old Mutual in Pinelands and how he was there until after 6pm. This included the so-called afternoon “window period” in which the State claimed in the criminal trial that he would have had opportunity to drive to Stellenbosch and commit the crime.

For me personally, this “window period” has never been properly explored. As I pointed out in the original trial, there is a couple hours window that are not accounted for.

I don’t think that Fred could have done the whole trip, murdered Inge, cleaned up, then gone back to work all composed as the window is very small. However this is still the one little detail which provides a niggle of doubt and I wish that it was addressed properly.

Many people I have spoken to are pretty supportive of Fred now. Most are talking about how the cops and prosecutors lied.

“The scary thing is that there seems to be no oversight of the prosecution beforehand that would have stopped this. Cope lie , proscutors can see they lie and know they will be found out to be lying yet still go ahead …. the logic is childish, never mind the bigger point that the whole lot of them are so morally bankrupt they wanted this guy in jail when they knew he did not do it” said one commenter.

When watching the developments surrounding the Anni Dewani murder case, you can see the cops making suggestions that her husband Shrien was involved – even though there is no evidence pointing there as of yet. Is this the same kind of thing?

One has to wonder how many innocent people are languishing in prison because of lying cops and prosecuters who do not expose the lies. One also has to wonder whether people like Agliotti are in the same ship.

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Prof Jan Lotz has confirmed that he has been informed by the police commissioner that the matter had been referred to the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigations in Pretoria.

“It was my impression that there was no real action by police to bring this matter to a close.” he told reporters. “I am convinced that this was a premeditated murder, one that was well-planned and committed by someone close to her”.

“We believe it was probably one of five people, and I believe that all five of those people were at Inge’s funeral. What is needed, is that someone should sit down and really apply themselves to chasing the guilty party from his hiding place.”

“Whatever comes out that can help to identify the murderer, will give the answer and create the space for us and for Fred to go on with our lives.”

Let us hope and pray that the Hawks will investigate the case properly and bring the perpetrator to justice!

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Prof Jan Lotz said to reporters:

“It began in October last year, then abated for a while, and has now begun again.

“The messages effectively say that I was not Inge’s father, and that (deleted) was her father.

“It starts in the middle of the night and all times of the morning. To say that to a woman is probably going as low as you potentially could go.”

“You feel you’re dealing with something so appalling, so threatening… that it’s probably better to stay out of its way.”

The police had been alerted and he believed they knew the identity of the sender, but as of yet, no one had been arrested. How surprising!

But wait, it gets worse! Sources in the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions’ office differed as to whether the case was still being investigated….

It is disgusting that the police and prosecutors are not acting on this! Mrs Lotz does not deserve to be targeted by this sick person and it is the DUTY of the police to bring this individual to book.

In fact, in light of the current court case, they should be bending over backwards to catch the person.

The Lotz family will not be attending the civil court. Prof Lotz has said that he is not involved in the proceedings.

He was critical of the police saying:

“My wife and I spent 10 months in the (Western) Cape High Court… so it’s a place we wouldn’t want to visit again

“But the only way that this thing can be brought to a final conclusion, for Fred and ourselves, is for the killer to be found. It has to happen.

“We’ve waited for five years, and I’m sorry to be critical, but what we have experienced is total inactivity from the SAPS. I’m seeing nothing – no committed effort to get to the bottom of this.

“As far as my wife and I are concerned, the last five years have been frozen in time. It’s impossible to go on like this – but we will only be able to move on when the killer is found.”

Police – get of your @#$%$ asses and actually DO something about this!

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Prof Saayman testified that the ornamental hammer which police say was the murder weapon was ‘unlikely’ to have been the weapon to murder Inge Lotz.

He told the court that the hammer had a striking surface only 22mm across, whereas the wounds to Inge’s skull were clearly much larger than this.

He went on to say that in his opinion, the wounds were rather caused by a rigid “linear or cylindrical” object.

Asked by Van der Vyver’s advocte Dup de Bruyn about the likelihood “on the probabilities” of the hammer being the murder weapon, he said: “No. Not used.”

Although this testimony is not yet as electrifying as Bodziak’s testimony, we could still hear more; particularly on the experiments the police conducted on the pig carcass.

At this point, one has to really wonder why the state did not settle this matter out of court. Surely they do not want their incompetance in this case to be highlighted once again?

The case continues.

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He testified that Superintendent Bruce Bartholomew flew to Florida in June 2006 to get his opinion on a bloodstain that Bartholomew had matched to a sports shoe belonging to Van der Vyver.

He tetified that the ‘evidence’ brought over by Bartholomew was woefully inadequate for him to form any opinion.

Asked by advocate Kosie Olivier whether there could have been a misunderstanding during the Florida consultation, Bodziak said he did not know how this was possible, because they had “over and over again” gone over the fact that there were no features in the mark that could be linked to the shoe.

He sent Bartholomew away to do further tests in south Africa.

Bartholomew arrived with the footwear and two CDs which contained the photographs of the blood marking and particularly the heel area of the shoe which Bartholomew said contained “sand grains” , they were not scaled and were only “3×5 inches (7,5cm to 12,5cm) big”.

“Bartholomew alleged there were three small pieces of debris (sand) lodged in the shoe and I explained to him that the debris was too deep in the shoe to make a marking,” said Bodziak, adding that it was these grains of sand that Bartholomew had theorised as one of the main links between the marking in the blood stain and the shoe.

Bartholomew believed that the “three white spots” in the blood had been made by the sand which was lodged in a 5mm deep groove, he said.

According to Bodziak, Bartholomew had a ‘theory’ that perhaps the person who had been wearing the shoe stood on one foot while putting on the other shoe, thereby exerting pressure on the shoe which forced the sand to touch the ground.

“We made some impressions of the opposite shoe and were unable to make the (same) impression (that appeared in the blood marking).

“With normal weight, we tried to force the print of the entire area.

“We jumped off table tops … but the sand grains were just too deep.

“ it wouldn’t make an imprint because it is protected by a surrounding robust area (on the sole),” he said.

Bodziak said that after they had established that it was impossible to make a print of the area, Bartholomew had seemed very concerned”.

“He seemed to concede at the time that it was a flaw in his examination, said Bodziak.

Later on he was contacted by Van der Vyver’s advocate, Dup de Bruyn and given Bartholomew’s report.

He told the court that he had been “shocked” by Bartholomew’s report on their consultation.

Bodziak read out his e-mail response to De Bruyn at the time: “I was shocked and amazed at how many lies are maintained in that report.

“Only the shoes and very small pictures were shown to me, which were not suitable for examination.”

The report had also said that Bodziak had confirmed the print.

“There could be no identification based on the grains of sand. We spent a long discussion on this,” said Bodziak.

“Looking at the blood mark alone, you could not tell whether it was made by a shoe print at all.”

He said even an attempt to align the blood mark with the shoe indicated that it “did not correspond”.

“There was nothing that I could have agreed upon with Bartholomew,” he said. “You don’t have to be an expert to see that some of the shoe markings in the blood were not there”.

Esentially what we heard in court was:

1) Bartholomew had already formed the opinion that the shoe DID leave the mark before even running tests.

2) Nothing that Bodziak said changed his opnion that Fred’s shoe was linked.

3) Bartholomew went to Florida totally unprepared and with very little evidence to present to Bodziak.

4) Bartholomew deliberately lied in his report about the meeting and the conclusions reached.

5) Bodziak testified that Bartholomew had not wanted to linger over their meal following their meeting because he wanted to take his wife to Disneyworld that afternoon. One wonders what his priorities were!

Basically my feeling is that Bartholomew had already decided that Fred was guilty and that the evidence pointed to him. Even though a renowned world expert told him it was not possible, he refused to believe it as he already had his theory. He then went further and lied in his report to ensure that Fred was brought to trial.

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The long awaited ‘second trial’ in the Inge Lotz case is well underway. I say ‘second trial’ because most of us who have followed the case will be scrutinising everything said.

Will the spotlight on the police investigators and prosecution team give us further clues to the truth?

One thing that is blatantly obvious is that after 5 years of police inaction, we can infer that they still believe that Fred was their man. Is this mindset jeapardising any possibility of the real killer being caught?

“Prosecutors in the Inge Lotz trial were “deliberately deceived” by police investigating her case, who “withheld information” from them that would have stopped the prosecution of Lotz’s boyfriend, Fred van der Vyver.” according to Dup de Bruyn, the advocate for Fred van der Vyver on the opening day of the civil case for damages amounting to about R46 million.

“(Police) willfully made statements which were willfully false in material respects but for which the prosecution would not have been undertaken.”

Police had also “willfully made inadequate inquiries or none at all when the questions and inquiries cried out for investigation”.

“(They) dishonestly prejudiced the judgment of the prosecuting authority and in so doing, precluded an unfettered exercise of the prosecuting authority’s discretion,” De Bruyn said.

In the coming weeks, four witnesses will be called by the van der Vyver team:

1) William Bodziak

2) Prof Gert Saayman

3) Fred van der Vyver

4) Not sure….probably one of the fingerprint experts

Another advocate, Henri Viljoen, SC, told Judge Veldhuizen that police officers had “wrongfully and maliciously instituted a trial against Van der Vyver”.

“This case will be a little different because it was preceded by a long criminal trial,” he said. “This means that a lot of what was said there will be used here

One has to wonder how the state is going to counter these allegations. One thing is certain, we are going to hear a fair bit more than during the original trial!

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By: Antony Altbeker

(To be released in all major bookshops and on Kalahari.net by 24 May 2010)

In June 2005, Fred van der Vyver, a young actuary and the son of a wealthy Eastern Cape farming family, was charged with murdering his girlfriend, Inge Lotz, allegedly bludgeoning her to death with a hammer as she lay on a couch in her lounge.

The case against Van der Vyver seemed overwhelming. His behaviour at the time of the murder appeared suspicious and incriminating, and a letter, penned by Inge on the morning of her death, suggested that the two had been fighting.

But it was forensic evidence that seemed to prove his guilt: his fingerprints were found at the scene, one of his shoes was matched to a blood stain on the bathroom floor, and traces of blood were found on an ornamental hammer that had been given to him by the victim’s parents.

And yet, in one of the most sensational and controversial murder trials in South African legal history, Van der Vyver’s lawyers sought to turn the tables on the police, accusing them of fabricating evidence and lying to the judge.

In Fruit of a Poisoned Tree, prize-winning author Antony Altbeker takes you into the heat of this epic courtroom battle. Altbeker’s eye-witness account of the trial presents the reader with all the evidence and testimony of the trial, while also placing it in the context of a society and a justice system that are
being stretched to breaking point.

It was the most sensational murder trial of the past two decades. For ten months during 2007, Fred van der Vyver stood trial, accused of using an ornamental hammer to bludgeon his girlfriend Inge Lotz to death.

When the trial began in February 2007, a guilty verdict seemed certain: the police had found his fingerprinst at the scene, the alleged murder weapon had been found in his car, and a blood stain on the bathroom floor had been matched to one of his shoes. Yet, after a high-profile trial, in which some of the world’s leading forensic investigators testified, and which cost his family more that R10 million, Van der Vyver was acquitted.

But the story is far from over. It has already attracted the attention of the world’s largest association of professional forensic investigators, the International Association for Identification (IAI). The outcome of the trial, however, was rejected by the family of Inge Lotz, who have only recently withdrawn a law suit against him. Van der Vyver, in turn, is suing the Minister of Police for nearly R50 million, alleging that all the evidence against him was fabricated by detectives.

Acclaimed author Antony Albeker sat through the entire trial and, in Fruit of a Poisoned Tree, he explores the extraordinary circumstances in which the justice system failed both Fred van der Vyver and Inge Lotz. Part courtroom drama, part investigative journalism, Altbeker enters the heart of the challenges confronting the judicial system in South Africa today.

Fruit of a Poisoned Tree is Antony Altbeker’s third book about crime and justice in South Africa. His first, The Dirty Work of Democracy, won the Recht Malan prize for non-fiction and was short-listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton award. His second, A Country at War with Itself, is widely regarded as one of the most authoritative accounts of the reasons for South Africa’s crisis of violence and of what to do to rectify it.

Praise for Fruit of a Poisoned Tree:

“Fruit of a Poisoned Tree is an important contribution to understanding the textures and dynamics of
certain aspects of South African culture and specifically of the machinations of the criminal justice system.
Altbeker excels in his relentless and meticulous re-arguing of the Lotz murder case, obsessively picking
through evidence and testimonies, like a latterday Sherlock Holmes, and bringing into play not only an
astute judgment of facts and character, but also offering a compelling analysis of the degeneration
of the investigative prowess of law enforcers.

It is a chilling revelation of the rotten state of the administrative capacity and the professional bankruptcy
of policing in South Africa. This is obligatory reading for those interested in the current state of the nation.
It reads like a thriller and is utterly un-put-down-able. It leaves the reader with serious food for thought.
It almost convinces one that fiction has become redundant in this country.”

– Marlene van Niekerk, author of Triomf and Agaat

“It’s a legal thriller, a murder mystery, a social commentary, a bit of history and a travelogue of the
most sensational court case of the past decade. It is exhaustively researched, beautifully written,
totally mesmerising and absolutely riviting. My wife is reading it now
– I’ll have to fix my own dinner for the next few nights.”

- Deon Meyer, author of Blood Safari and Thirteen Hours

“South African literature has not seen true crime of this standard for a very long time.
Antony Altbeker has married an expert’s knowledge of the criminal justice system with a storyteller’s
flair for narrative and suspense. The result is a book that provides rare insight into the often
compromised nature of our courts, yet reads like a high-voltage thriller. If you thought you knew
something about the Inge Lotz murder trial, Altbeker has come, like a master decoder,
to disabuse you of that notion.”

- Kevin Bloom, journalist and author

“Altebeker’s narrative of the Inge Lotz murder trial is both shocking and riveting, and beautifully written.”

- Peter Harris, author of In a Different Time

R195.00 • 978-1-86842-333-0 • April 2010 • TPB • 233x152mm • 320 pages • SA rights

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………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

We would appreciate it if you would publish the enclosed press statement on behalf of our client in your publications as soon as possible.

We thank you in anticipation.

BRIAN LOWE
LOWE & PETERSEN ATTORNEYS
………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

LOTZ & LOTZ v FB van der Vyver

We have been requested by our client, Mr Fred van der Vyver, to issue the following statement:

For the past few months, a campaign has been waged in the press against our client Mr. Fred van der Vyver in which it has been stated and reported widely that Porfessor and Mrs. Lotz, the parents of Inge Lotz, have found “new evidence” against Mr van der Vyver. Most of these statements have been made by a Ms Dani Cohen as spokesperson for Prof & Mrs Lotz.

Among the statements so made is the allegation that “new, crucial evidence” has been found against Mr van der Vyver to “establish he murdered Inge”.

As a consequence of these press statements Counsel for Mr van der Vyver requested further particulars for trial to the claim instituted against him by Prof. and Mrs. Lotz, referring specifically to Ms Cohen’s statements and requesting the plaintiffs to set out fully what new material fact or facts plaintiffs will rely upon in their action.

In response to such request, the legal representatives of Prof. and Mrs. Lotz’s have replied as follows:

“There are no new material facts upon which the plaintiffs intend to rely.”

Both the request for particulars and the reply thereto are filed at Court.

A letter reserving Mr van der Vyver’s rights against Prof and Mrs Lotz, and Ms Cohen, in regard to the above defamatory statements and the damage that Mr van der Vyver is suffering, will soon be served on the attorneys of Prof and Mrs Lotz.

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Some people have claimed that this is similar to the OJ Simpson trial but there are big differences. In the OJ trial, there was always an element of doubt as to the juries findings. These doubts were based on race issues (evident in juror statements after the trial), evidence that was not presented and even some doubt concerning evidence that was presented in the trial. In the van der Vyver case, the case was far more compelling that he was in fact innocent of the charges.

Personally I think that suing after the case has been decided is wrong and really should not be allowed. I am talking about when a ‘not guilty’ verdict is reached only. A civil court could reach a different decision to a criminal court, because while the latter had to find a suspect guilty “beyond reasonable doubt”, a civil court could find a suspect guilty on “the balance of probabilities”. Doesnt this fly in the face of what a criminal trial is all about?

We all acknowledge the pain and suffering caused to victims families and we whole heartedly sympethise with them. However a civil trial, after the criminal trial has found a defendant ‘not guilty’, somehow suggests spite on the part of the victims family. It also hows that they are not satisfied with the result of the criminal trial, which of course in this case is to be expected. One wonders why they do not rather sue the police for running a shoddy investigation.

I do not think that the Lotz’s reached this decision on their own. As Dup de Bruyn, Fred’s advocate said, he knows who is behind this action and what their motive is. I feel that the Lotz family are now being used by other individuals in order to further their own agenda.

My personal feeling is that the Stellenbosch police are possibly behind it. If the civil action works in the Lotz’s favour, then they will be ‘redeemed’ in the eyes of not only the family but the community at large. This could be just a mere case of disaster management strategy. They can gain credibility because of it – a case of ‘the fish didn’t really get away’. This would somehow justify their investigation.

It would be very interesting if this motive did come out in the court case, because if it is the cops, they will have an aweful amount to lose on this gamble!

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