She identified her uncle from the gaps between the teeth of a skull she was shown in Phalaborwa mortuary, Fetsang Jafta told the Phalaborwa Circuit Court on Friday.
Jafta was testifying in the trial of three men accused of killing her uncle, Nelson Chisale, by feeding him to lions on January 31 last year.
”I looked at the skull and I could identify him because of that; because of the gap, because his body was not there,” said Jafta, a hospital nurse from Lethlabile, North West.
Looking at a police photograph album of the human remains found in the 20ha lion enclosure at Mokwalo White Lion Project near Hoedspruit, Jafta testified: ”This is the skull I identified as my uncle’s.”
When alive, he was tall, bearded, had a long face and long teeth, and an average body, she told the court.
He had a natural gap between his front teeth. The gaps between the others were also natural — not from the removal of teeth — but narrower than the one in front.
Taking out photographs of him, she told the court he had liked checked shirts.
Mark Scott-Crossley (37), Richard ”Doctor” Mathebula (41) and Simon Mathebula (43) are accused of murdering Chisale after seriously assaulting him when he arrived at the Scott-Crossley smallholding to collect pots after being dismissed in November 2003.
Her uncle did not come home and she later heard that someone had been murdered in the area where he had been working, but Jafta did not recognise the name of the alleged killer.
Later, after being summoned to Phalaborwa by the police to check whether the person was her uncle, she phoned his employer, Shaun Scott-Crossley, Mark’s elder brother. A woman named Sarah answered and told her to call the police, but did not say why.
After that the woman switched off her cellphone.
There were whispers from the packed public gallery as spectators rose in their seats, craning their necks for a glimpse of the shredded remnants of the clothes that Chisale (43) was wearing when he was killed.
Pulling on surgical gloves, biological crime investigator Superintendent Ian van der Nest used a razor to open the sealed exhibit bag containing the clothes, and pulled out a shirt he found in the encampment after the incident.
”If you look at the pocket, the collar area and sleeve, you see the remains of a long-sleeved, collared, checked shirt,” he said, describing the scrap of black-and-khaki cloth in his hands.
”There is discoloration, but I can’t say what it is,” Van der Nest testified. A label inside the remains of the shirt identified at as a size large of the make ”Gentleman European”.
He took the ripped trousers out of the bag next. The material hung from his hands in strips.
They looked as if they were khaki-coloured, he told the court, pointing to one of the only patches of unstained material still intact behind a pocket.
He had tested the stains on the trousers and they reacted positively for the possible presence of blood.
Also in the bag were the remnants of a brown belt with a silver buckle.
Van der Nest could not say how the clothing had been torn. There could be ”various causes”, he said.
Asked by state prosecutor Ivy Thenga whether the damage could be ”associated with tearing by hands”, he replied that tearing so extensive ”required a lot more force”.
The hearing resumed on Friday following Judge George Maluleke’s cancellation of Scott-Crossley’s bail on Thursday over an altercation in which he grabbed the shirt of witness Forget Tsako Ndlovu and muttered something to him at the close of proceedings on Tuesday.
The case continues on Monday. — Sapa