Nelson Chisale was dead before he was thrown to lions near Hoedspruit in January last year, a Bloemfontein pathologist told the Phalaborwa Circuit Court on Tuesday.
Dr Leon Wagner was testifying in defence of Mark Scott-Crossley (37), who is on trial for Chisale’s murder with Simon Mathebula (43).
Both have pleaded not guilty of the killing.
Blood was conspicuous by its absence on Chisale’s shirt, which was found in a lions’ den shortly after he went missing, Wagner told the court after examining the shredded remains of his shirt and trousers.
It would have been ”impossible” for the lions to tear the shirt as they had without also tearing the flesh of Chisale — as they tend to do in a feeding frenzy, he testified.
If Chisale’s heart was still pumping blood at the time, Wagner would have expected blood stains indicating this. Typically, clothing soaked in blood becomes hard, with a specific colour and smell.
”This is absent from the shirt shown to me,” Wagner testified, adding that he has undressed a couple of thousand bloodied bodies over the years.
The only place where blood was visible was on the collar of the shirt, the result of bleeding that was to be expected of panga wounds inflicted to Chisale’s head.
There was no blood at the edge of the tears.
Had Chisale been alive when he was thrown to the lions, Wagner would have expected the shirt to be completely drenched in blood, ”which I do not find here”.
”I am convinced no circulation was present in the person wearing that shirt when this incident of being thrown to the lions occurred,” Wagner told the court.
Apart from the shirt, police found a shaft of human long bones, a ripped pair of khaki trousers, a skull with no mandible, fragments of rib, vertebrae, pelvic girdle and a finger at the camp.
They were identified as the mortal remains of Chisale from a fingerprint sliced from the left index finger discovered in the lions’ encampment and compared with fingerprints of Chisale on record at the Department of Home Affairs.
Chisale (41) was buried at his birthplace at Maboloka village, in Brits, North West, last March, after a court found that the dignity of his family outweighed the right of his alleged killers to a fair trial, following an urgent application by the defence to stop the funeral to enable a forensic pathologist to perform tests on Chisale’s body to determine the time and cause of his death.
Examining a photograph of Chisale’s skull, boiled clean of any soft tissue and then submerged in hydrogen peroxide, Wagner identified a linear mark on the side ”most probably” caused by the sharp edge of a panga, but emphasised that he could not determine its full extent as he had not been able to examine the skull from the outside and the inside.
Told that Chisale had two panga wounds on his head and a third at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, Wagner testified that although wounds inflicted in that area bleed most profusely, those sustained by Chisale might indeed have stopped bleeding through normal coagulation.
However, had Chisale still been alive, he would have expected the injuries to start bleeding again when he was loaded on to the back of a bakkie and driven 20km to 30km on mainly gravel roads to the lions’ camp.
That only drops of blood — and not a pool of blood — were found on the back of the bakkie indicated to him that Chisale was ”probably transported when he was already dead”, Wagner told the court.
In testimony earlier in the trial, state pathologist Dr Donald Mabunda told the court he could not tell from Chisale’s bones whether he was alive when thrown to the lions.
Informed that the bones were recovered in a lions’ camp, he concluded that the cause of Chisale’s death was that he was ”mauled by lions”.
He found no marks other than ”some scratches” on the skull. While these could have been caused during the mauling, it was equally possible they were caused by an instrument like a panga, he conceded in cross-examination. — Sapa