In Fruit of a Poisoned Tree Anthony Altbeker writes about the most sensational murder trial of the past two decades. For ten months during 2007, Fred van der Vyver stood trial, accused of using an ornamental hammer to bludgeon his girlfriend Inge Lotz to death.
When the trial began in February 2007, a guilty verdict seemed certain: the police had found his fingerprints at the scene, the alleged murder weapon had been found in his car, and a blood stain on the bathroom floor had been matched to one of his shoes. Yet, after a high-profile trial, in which some of the world’s leading forensic investigators testified, and which cost his family more that R10 million, Van der Vyver was acquitted.
But the story is far from over. Dubbed by an American expert as “perhaps the worst case of forensic evidence fabrication in history”, it has already attracted the attention of the world’s largest association of professional forensic investigators. The outcome of the trial, however, was rejected by the family of Inge Lotz, who have only recently withdrawn a law suit against him. His career in tatters, Van der Vyver, in turn, is suing the Minister of Police for nearly R50 million, alleging that all the evidence against him was fabricated by detectives.
Acclaimed author Antony Albeker sat through the entire trial and, in Fruit of a Poisoned Tree, he explores the extraordinary circumstances in which the justice system failed both Fred van der Vyver and Inge Lotz. Part courtroom drama, part investigative journalism, Altbeker enters the heart of the challenges confronting the judicial system in South Africa today.
About the Author
Fruit of a Poisoned Tree is Antony Altbeker’s third book about crime and justice in South Africa. His first, The Dirty Work of Democracy, won the Recht Malan prize for non-fiction and was short-listed for the Sunday Times Alan Paton award. His second, A Country at War with Itself, is widely regarded as one of the most authoritative accounts of the reasons for South Africa’s crisis of violence and of what to do to rectify
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