Steeped in Blood by David Klatzow; Sylvia Walker

Author:David Klatzow; Sylvia Walker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Steeped in Blood
ISBN: 9781868729227
Publisher: Zebra Press
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

POST-MORTEMS: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE TOTALLY INEPT

Disabling Professions

– IVAN ILICH,

Austrian philosopher, book title

Investigating a crime – getting as close to the true sequence of events as possible – is like solving a puzzle. One of the critical steps in this process is the post-mortem. Sadly, in South Africa, the quality of work in this arena is far from ideal. I have been outspoken on this issue over the years, which has not earned me any popularity: it seems we are expected to keep quiet when we see things going wrong. I refuse to do that, and, as such, am often labelled public enemy number one.

In the 1980s, the post-mortem conducted on young activist Ashley Kriel was appalling. It failed to address the issue of whether or not the gunshot that had killed Kriel had been a contact shot. As I mentioned in Chapter 10, I am certain that there was a second bullet, the presence of which would have had significant ramifications at the inquest. Yet the scientist who carried out the postmortem simply never looked for it or did not report on it.

Some post-mortem reports that I have seen have been blatant lies. One such case involved a policeman accused of shooting a suspect who had been running away. I was hired to defend the policeman. At the time, it was considered acceptable behaviour for a policeman to shoot and kill a fleeing suspect, and the pathologist’s report reflected this: there were records showing that the pathologist had opened the body before he examined the bullet wounds in the back. This did not cohere with the report at all, because if he had conducted the post-mortem as he said he had, the organs would have fallen out when he turned the body over to study the bullet wounds! The pathologist had simply not conducted a post-mortem: his report was a patent lie. He was eventually cross-examined and admitted to his dishonesty.

At every crime scene, you, as the forensic investigator, have to start off with a high index of suspicion. If you accept too easily that a death appears to be natural, you fall into the trap that the British police did with Harold Shipman, who murdered old ladies after persuading them to change their wills in his favour. The police in this case had initially failed to find sufficient evidence to bring charges, assuming that the old ladies had died of natural causes. Instead, they had been poisoned by Shipman, their doctor, who had administered lethal doses of diamorphine and then forged their medical records to indicate that they had been in poor health.

A ‘crime’ can be downgraded to a natural cause of death; it is impossible, however, to go back to suspecting a crime if your starting point is that the death occurred as a result of natural causes.

Many people are clothed when they die. A post-mortem should be started with the clothed body in order to understand how the death took place. The clothing

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