Murder accused Fred van der Vyver told the Cape High Court on Monday that he never used the ornamental hammer that the state says could have been a murder weapon.
Van der Vyver, accused of bludgeoning his student girlfriend Inge Lotz to death in her Stellenbosch flat in 2005, was starting his second day of cross-examination.
He told the court that Lotz’s parents gave him the hammer, which has a bottle opener instead of a claw, as a Christmas gift, the first he had ever received from them, in 2004.
He was in East London with Lotz at his parents’ home when he unwrapped the gift and, on the trip back to Cape Town, put it under the seat of his bakkie and forgot about it.
When a private investigator hired by Lotz’s family after her death told him police had found a hammer at her flat, he volunteered the information that he also had a hammer, which he thought was in his bakkie. When he later checked, it was still under the seat.
Asked by prosecutor Carine Theunissen what his reaction was when the investigator told him about the hammer in the flat, Van der Vyver replied: ”My reaction was precisely what I said to him.”
He said though he drank beer occasionally, he could not remember that he ever used the hammer to open a beer, and he had never taken it into his Pinelands flat.
When police — wanting to do forensic tests on his bakkie — asked if he had anything valuable in it, he showed them the hammer.
Replying to another question from Theunissen, he said he could not remember ever touching the hammer when there was blood on his hands.
Van der Vyver appeared confident and self-composed in the witness box, at one stage stopping Theunissen halfway through a question so he could comment on one aspect at a time.
Earlier, before the start of the day’s proceedings, lead defence advocate Henri Viljoen objected strongly when a newspaper photographer took a photograph of Van der Vyver in the courtroom.
Viljoen raised the matter with Judge Deon van Zyl, who said he had told the newspaper, Die Burger, that he would allow photographs only with the agreement of the state and defence teams.
Van Zyl forbade the newspaper to publish the photograph, and said if it did, he would have its editor in court. — Sapa