Lotz: Fingerprint 'not faked'
2007-02-26 14:49
Cape Town - There was a clear fingerprint on a DVD cover found on the scene of the murder of Stellenbosch student Inge Lotz, a police fingerprint expert told the Cape High Court on Monday.
The expert, Inspector Mariaan Booysens, also denied that she had been given instructions to fabricate a print.
Booysens was giving evidence in the trial of Lotz' boyfriend Fred van der Vyver, who is accused of bludgeoning her to death with a hammer on March 16 2005.
The fingerprint, which the State is expected to link to Van der Vyver, is crucial to the prosecution's bid to destroy the young man's alibi.
His high-powered defence team has however claimed it was planted, while the DVD cover itself has gone missing since being taken into the custody of the police.
Booysens told the court she was called to Lotz' flat on the outskirts of Stellenbosch the day after the killing, by which time the student's body had been removed.
She found fingerprints
With two colleagues, she dusted the flat for fingerprints, concentrating her own efforts on the lounge, where Lotz' body was found.
She noticed "certain loose articles" including a DVD cover, a DVD and a glass on a low table.
She powdered all three, and observed identifiable prints on both the DVD cover and the glass.
She pointed these out to one of her colleagues, a constable Swarts, who lifted the prints in her presence.
Under questioning from prosecutor Christhenus van der Vijver, she said that when she arrived on the scene, she had no specific suspect in mind.
"Did you have the thought to plant a fingerprint, or were you told to fabricate or plant a fingerprint somewhere?" asked Van der Vijver.
"No, my lord," replied Booysens.
Another witness, tiling company owner Rodney Gillion, told the court that on the day of Lotz' murder he went to the Shiraz flats complex where she stayed to do two tiling jobs.
When the first job, at flat number four, was finished, he went on to flat 21 to arrange the next one.
A young woman - whom he did not identify, but by common cause was Lotz - opened the door.
Gillion told the court that even though the security gate was locked, he found it "strange" that she opened the door without first checking who was outside, particularly as she had not been expecting him.
In a statement he made to police shortly after the killing, which was read out in court, Gillion said he had been "shocked" when she opened the door to him.
"I then told her she had to be careful who she opened the door without checking," he said in the statement.
He said in his testimony that Lotz took him through the flat to show him the two tiles on the balcony that needed to be replaced.
They had been damaged when a carpenter, fixing a lock on the balcony door, dropped a screwdriver.
He spoke to Lotz for about ten minutes about what she was doing, and she told him she was doing a masters' degree and hoped she would get a job when she finished.
"I told her, just put your trust in the Lord, and He will provide," he said.
Lotz told him she had to go to classes starting at 10:00, so he could not do the job just then, and she left.
An arrangement was made to get a ladder, so his workers could access the balcony that way, but just as the ladder arrived some hours later, Lotz returned, and let them in through the flat.
One of Gillion's employees, Arthur Kanus, told the court that before he began fixing the tiles, he helped Lotz carry shopping bags and a DVD player in a box from the boot of her car up to her first-floor flat.
When he had replaced the tiles, a job which took about ten minutes, he called to Lotz, who was in the bedroom, to say he was finished.
She was talking on a cellphone as she showed him out and locked the security gate and closed her front door.
Asked how he knew she locked the gate, he said: "The key was in the gate."
The case continues on Tuesday.
- SAPA