A book of facts and prejudice

Few books have received as much media coverage in a very long time as Antony Altbeker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree on the sensational trail of Fred van der Vyver on a charge of murder – accused of having killed his Stellenbosch student girlfriend, Inge Lotz. The book does not only show how deeply flawed the investigation of the murder and prosecution process was, but it also controversially and disappointingly puts on trial religion, Afrikanerdom, apartheid and even the late advocate, Percy Yutar.

Way back in 1968, as a second-year journalism student at the then most Calvinist of all institutions – the Potchefstroom University of Christian Higher Education (PU for CHE) – I read a book that would change my attitude toward the death sentence for the rest of my life. Never again, not even the majority inside the parliamentary caucus of the then National Party in the mid 1990s, of which I was then a member, could persuade me otherwise.

The book was The Trial of Steven Truscott by Isabel LeBourdais, published in 1966, which dissected the trial and conviction in Canada of Steven Truscott for the murder of Lynne Harper in 1959. Truscott, who was only 14 at the time, was originally sentenced to death. It was later commuted to life imprisonment.

The book attacked the rapid police investigation and trial, calling into question a justice system that many people then considered infallible.

The book did enough to convince me that there was sufficient doubt that it could not justify taking the life of Truscott – in fact, that there can hardly ever be no doubt at all to justify such a sentence.

Intelligence and faith

This came after already gross generalisations about Afrikanerdom and its relationship to church and religion. Portraying, for instance, the Dutch Reformed Church as the only one of significance among Afrikaners and charismatic internationally linked churches among them as something very recent.

Fact is, that for example, the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) of South Africa, which is part of the worldwide Pentecostal movement, was founded in 1908.

Altbeker writes: “Fred’s intelligence and the depth of his faith have always seemed to me to stand in some contradiction.

“How is it, I have wondered again and again, that a man might be an actuary – a career in which a facility to finding and analysing empirical evidence is pretty much the only thing that matters – and yet believe in the literal truth of the Bible?”

It is also not the only time that the reader is confronted with information, or rather an own opinion, which is irrelevant to the substance of the book. On page 282, Altbeker launches an attack (loaded with contradiction itself in terms of his self-confessed atheism) on Percy Yutar, who was the chief prosecutor in the Rivonia treason trail that would eventually see Nelson Mandela sent to jail for 27 years.

Stating that as a child, he attended the same synagogue as Yutar, he writes: “For liberal Jews, Yutar was something of an embarrassment. He was a man, I was given to understand, who had come to the conclusion that Jews in the Diaspora had to be seen as dependable friends of power, and who, in giving expression to this view by becoming a prosecutor for the apartheid state, had abandoned essential elements of Jewish morality.”

It may not fit in with Mr Altbeker’s apparent rigid – and may I say, misguided –  perception of Afrikaners and their institutions as narrow-minded and verkramp by default. But at that same PU for CHE, in my final year, I took Professor Wimpie de Klerk – who was then deeply involved in organised Calvinism – to task in a reply on an exam paper. My gripe was that I was expected to argue that the evolution theory and the Bible were irreconcilable – and for me, it was not. He gave me a distinction!

In the end, however, I am pleased that I did finish reading the book. When in one's mind one filters out all the irrelevant and distracting issues, it does give a clear picture of how things can easily go wrong in our justice system – why we should always stay vigilant to ensure that the checks and balances stay firmly in place.

The main story line of the book does provide a gripping account of the unfolding court drama and the collapse of the case of the prosecution due to a botched and sloppy police investigation.

Truscott’s end

It turns out that he had an unblemished institutional record and, in 1969, was released on parole and lived in Kingston with his parole officer, then  in Vancouver, for a brief period of time before settling in Guelph under an assumed name. He married and raised three children.

Maintaining his innocence throughout, Truscott in November 2001 filed an application for a review of his conviction. On 28 August 2007, after review of nearly 250 fresh pieces of evidence, the court declared that Truscott's conviction had been a miscarriage of justice. He was at that stage 62 years old.

On 7 July 2008, the government of Ontario awarded him 6.5 million Canadian dollars in compensation.

Truscott came from a modest blue-collar family and one of the main thrusts of LeBourdais’ 1966 book was the extent to which the dice were loaded against an ordinary citizen when he comes up against the resources of the state.

It was widely reported, also by Altbeker, that Van der Vyver’s family has spent in the order of R10 million on his defence. In the process, they had to sell their farm.

Among the many speculations in Altbeker’s book, there is one missing: What would have happened to Fred if he had come from a family of modest or little means?