Murder accused Fred van der Vyver was questioned closely on Thursday on how he came to know that his student girlfriend Inge Lotz had been stabbed.
Van der Vyver (25) was under cross-examination in the Cape High Court after his defence team was given permission to reopen its case to present his testimony.
Lotz was bludgeoned and stabbed in her Stellenbosch flat on March 16 2005.
Prosecutor Carine Theunissen, with a police psychologist taking notes at her elbow, put it to Van der Vyver that it was strange that when he was interviewed by a police officer only hours after the killing, he was unable to remember who told him she had been stabbed.
Van der Vyver told the court his flatmate Marius Botha definitely told him on the night of March 16 that Lotz had been murdered.
He heard about the stab wounds from either Botha or from two other friends, Wimpie Boshoff and Christo Pretorius, later during the course of the same night.
As he recalled Pretorius’s evidence to the court, a police officer had told Pretorius outside Lotz’s flat that it could not have been suicide — which Pretorius, who discovered the body, initially thought was what had happened — and was definitely murder.
It was quite possible that the police officer had also mentioned the stabbing to Pretorius.
Van der Vyver was also questioned about why he took out a DVD of The Stepford Wives on April 18 from the same Stellenbosch video shop where Lotz rented it on the day of her murder.
He said a private investigator hired by the Lotz family had told him she took out the DVD and suggested he view it.
The investigator told him this before he was made aware that the police claimed to have found his fingerprints on the DVD cover, a find which would have destroyed his alibi.
However, he rented the DVD after hearing about the alleged prints. He said he had never watched The Stepford Wives before, and did not view the rented copy either before returning it to the shop.
Asked about the shop assistant’s testimony that he commented to her that it was ”strange that she should have taken out a video like this one”, he said he could not remember specifically why he would have said that.
Possibly he had found it strange that Lotz would have taken out a DVD when he had been expecting her to work that afternoon.
Theunissen also questioned him in detail about whether Lotz set her cellphone on silent or vibrate mode, and whether he had ever been unable to get through to her.
Her questioning has a bearing on Van der Vyver’s testimony that he became worried about Lotz on the evening of her death when he was unable to reach her by phone at her flat.
Van der Vyver told the court that while it was possible that Lotz sometimes went out without his knowing, on that evening he had expected to speak to her, and had expected her to be at her flat.
At one point Theunissen chided Van der Vyver for speaking ”particularly softly” — but was herself asked by the judge soon after to repeat a question he did not hear. — Sapa