Twenty-one months ago Tracey Thomson appeared to have won her battle with drugs and her mother, Carol Thompson, could once again sleep at night. But then on March 11 this year, the 24-year-old from Kempton Park disappeared and failed to come home.
‘We alerted the police and engaged the community in a search for Tracey; we distributed flyers everywhere so that people knew she was missing,†said Carol.
The next day Tracey’s car, a metallic green Opel Corsa, was located on a highway near Bapsfontein. Eight days later, a farmworker discovered her partially naked body, a rope tied around her neck, in a mealie field near the site of her abandoned car.
For the Thompson family, this marked the beginning of a continuing nightmare.
Two uniformed officials identified the dead girl from the flyers and tried to summon a mortuary van, photographer and detectives.
The photographer took four photographs, one of the mealie field and three of Tracey, all from the same angle. The two detectives on call failed to appear.
By the time a mortuary van arrived to transport Tracey to Germiston mortuary, crucial investigating time had elapsed and no detective had examined the scene.
A post-mortem completed almost a month later revealed that, in his autopsy, the district surgeon had failed to dissect or remove any internal organs. A sex kit was not used and a toxicology report was not completed.
And, according to Carol, no effort was made to search the vehicle for fingerprints. She adds that police appear to have made no effort to search for the girl.
The investigating officer received Tracey’s docket on March 20, the day after she was found. But when the case was transferred to the North Rand serious and violent crime unit, it became evident that the previous investigating officer had made little headway.
No witness statements had been taken. The rope that may have been used to strangle Tracey had gone missing from the state mortuary and, without it, the cause of death could not be established with certainty. A sex kit containing nail scrapings, DNA and swabs had not been protected, while the preliminary autopsy report was never collected.
In addition, the docket had not been filled in correctly, organ and urine samples were never sent for testing, and the time of death had not been established.
By September, the Thompson family had lost all faith in the police and decided to take matters into their own hands. They hired a private pathologist, Patricia Klepp, who completed a sex kit, forwarded stomach contents and toxicology to the forensic chemistry lab and collected additional evidence from Tracy’s clothes and a crack pipe found in her pocket.
Klepp’s findings gave the investigating officer a chance to redeem himself. But he again failed to turn up for the post-mortem and did not collect Klepp’s evidence.
The crime unit confirmed what the Thompsons already knew — that inexperience, unprofessional behaviour, lack of skills and incompetence were to blame for the bungling. An internal investigation was promised.
The unit did its best, thoroughly interviewing suspects, conducting door-to-door visits to identify witnesses, completing the docket and asking the chief specialist of the forensics and pathology division at Wits University, Professor HJ Scholtz, to review both post-mortems.
His findings confirmed that the primary cause of death was strangulation. Finally, investigators were able to reconstruct the scene of the crime and to refer the docket to the Tembisa Magistrate’s Court.
On October 30, an inquest was held and the docket was perused by magistrate WJ Schutte, who ruled the cause of death was strangulation.
He added that the crime unit had done everything in its power to investigate the case and asked for investigations to continue.
Unfortunately, on September 18, the North Rand serious and violent crime unit had been officially disbanded as part of the South African Police Service’s policy of deploying members of specialised units to struggling police stations.