Murder accused Fred van der Vyver and his girlfriend, Inge Lotz, were deeply in love at the time she died, the young man told the Cape High Court on Monday.
On the morning of her death on March 16 2005, they parted with hugs and kisses as he left to attend a class at the University of Stellenbosch, he said.
”I was very much in love with her,” he said.
Van der Vyver (25), who is accused of bludgeoning Lotz to death in her Stellenbosch flat, was under cross-examination for the second day.
He appeared assured and confident as he replied to questions from prosecutor Carine Theunissen on the events of that day and testimony by earlier witnesses.
One of them, a friend named Wimpie Boshoff, has told the court that Lotz informed him that morning that she and Van der Vyver had had a ”hell of a fight” and that it was over between them.
”Wimpie’s testimony does not make sense because it was definitely not over between us,” said Van der Vyver.
He said a paragraph in a letter she wrote him that morning, saying he had to show her how to be ”the perfect girl for you”, and that she felt she disappointed him, he understood as a reference to her wanting to support him in dealing with his own emotional problems.
A reference to his need for a girlfriend who was beautiful and did all the cooking was lighthearted, as shown by the smiley face she had drawn next to it.
He said that on occasion he cooked for them at her flat, and she had joked that cooking was not her strongest point.
Van der Vyver also told the court that Lotz’s parents gave him the ornamental hammer, which the state has suggested could be the murder weapon, as a Christmas gift in 2004.
The hammer, which has a bottle opener instead of a claw and his name engraved on it, was the first Christmas gift he received from them, and had sentimental value.
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, after Lotz was killed, a private investigator hired by her family told him police had found a hammer at her flat, he volunteered the information that he also had a hammer.
When he later checked, it was still under the seat.
When Theunissen asked 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 bottle-opener 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.
Earlier, before the start of the day’s proceedings, lead defence advocate Henri Viljoen objected strongly when a photographer for Die Burger took a photograph of Van der Vyver in the courtroom.
Judge Deon van Zyl later issued a ruling forbidding the newspaper to publish the photograph, and said if it did, he would have its editor in court. — Sapa