At the end of an emotional day of testimony, murder accused Fred van der Vyver on Wednesday formally denied that he killed his student girlfriend Inge Lotz.
His cross-examination is expected to begin in the Cape High Court on Thursday morning.
Van der Vyver was in the witness box for the second day, following a successful application by his defence team to reopen its case to hear his testimony.
Battling at times to control his emotions, Van der Vyver told the court how, after a day at work at Old Mutual in Cape Town, he became concerned when he was unable to contact Lotz at her Stellenbosch flat.
His flatmate, Marius Botha, phoned a friend who lived in the same apartment complex as Lotz to check on her, then met Van der Vyver where he was waiting outside Lotz’s parents’ home in the Cape Town suburb of Welgemoed.
”I can remember Marius told me Inge is dead and she was murdered,” Van der Vyver told the court. He said he could not remember the precise phrase Botha used, ”but those three words stuck with me”.
”I was shocked; I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t say anything. I put my back to the wall, collapsed and began to cry.”
His voice breaking, he said Botha met Lotz’s mother at her front door, and though he did not hear what he said to her, she began to scream.
He denied testimony by Botha that it was he, Van der Vyver, who told the mother her daughter had been murdered in her flat. ”It did not happen like that,” he said.
Van der Vyver said that when a private investigator hired by Lotz’s parents to probe their daughter’s death told him that ”they” — which he assumed meant the police — had found a hammer, he told the investigator he had a hammer himself, which he believed was under the seat of his bakkie.
When he checked a few days later, the hammer was still there.
The court has heard that Lotz gave the ornamental hammer, which has a bottle opener instead of a claw, to Van der Vyver as a gift. Though forensic blood tests on it proved inconclusive, the state maintains it ”cannot be excluded” as the murder weapon.
Van der Vyver said that at the suggestion of the same investigator, he underwent a lie-detector test, which he passed.
He also rejected a claim by a police witness that SMSs to him from Lotz showed that she was trying to allay jealousy on his part. One of these had followed an occasion where Lotz and Botha teased him about being a nerd, because he was studying so hard. The teasing had not bothered him at all, he said.
At the end of his testimony on Wednesday, his advocate, Henri Viljoen, formally asked him whether he murdered Lotz. ”No, your honour,” he told Judge Deon van Zyl.
He gave the same reply to questions on whether he ever touched a DVD cover that the police claimed bore his fingerprints, and whether it was his shoe that left a bloody print in Lotz’s bathroom.
”Did you use your ornamental hammer to kill her?” asked Viljoen.
”No, your honour,” replied Van der Vyver.
”He has already said he didn’t murder her,” interjected Van Zyl, and a ripple of laughter went round the court. — Sapa