Hammer murder accused Fred van der Vyver has lost a quarter of his weight since his girlfriend Inge Lotz was killed, the Cape High Court heard on Thursday.
The revelation was made by the senior advocate in his defence team, Henri Viljoen, in closing argument.
Van der Vyver (25), an actuary at Old Mutual, is charged with killing master’s student Lotz in her Stellenbosch flat in March 2005.
Viljoen told the court Van der Vyver had lived under a cloud of accusation since then, and his trial had been accompanied by the widest possible publicity.
The question, even if only implied, in the media and among the public, was: ”Why would he be charged if he did not do it?”
Viljoen said the state version that his client had slipped away from work that afternoon, undetected by Old Mutual’s security systems, driven through to Stellenbosch, and killed Lotz with multiple hammer blows and 20 stab wounds in a rage over a quarrel that morning, was ”like something out of Franz Kakfa”.
”I don’t think I have ever used these words in a court. It is grotesque. But that is a fair description,” he said.
The state had failed to prove its case against Van der Vyver, his defence team told the court.
Viljoen said one of the key pieces of evidence was a fingerprint of Van der Vyver’s, allegedly lifted from a DVD cover found in her flat and rented at a time that would have destroyed Van der Vyver’s alibi that he was at work when she died.
However, Viljoen said, the directorate of public prosecutions had told the defence team in a letter in December last year that it had no intention of using the fingerprint as evidence.
Attached to the letter was a report from a police forensic expert from Pretoria, which said two parallel lines seen on the lift were consistent with a drinking glass, not with a DVD cover.
Nor, according to the expert, was the background density of the aluminium powder on the lift consistent with a DVD cover, which retained a large amount of powder, probably due to static build-up in the plastic.
This refuted the evidence of the constable who actually did the fingerprint lifts at Lotz’s flat.
Viljoen said the testimony of overseas experts brought in by the defence showed beyond doubt that the controversial print did not come from the cover.
On the probabilities, there was no connection between a blood mark on Lotz’s bathroom floor and Van der Vyver’s shoe, while the state had failed to prove that an ornamental hammer he owned was the murder weapon.
The case was postponed to November 6 for further submissions from the state. — Sapa