Expert testifies in Rohde trial

FORENSIC expert Reggie Perumal, who performed a second autopsy on Susan Rohde’s body and found it was likely she had died after hanging herself, took the witness stand yesterday in the murder trial of her husband, Jason Rohde.

Susan was declared dead after she was found hanging, with an electrical cord around her neck, from a hook behind the bathroom door in a suite she shared with her husband at the Spier Wine Estate in 2016.

A state pathologist found she had died from a lack of oxygen after manual strangulation and smothering, but a second autopsy, conducted a week later by Perumal, suggested her injuries were consistent with ligature strangulation. This tied in with Jason’s version of events, that he found his wife hanging by the electrical cord.

Yesterday, defence advocate Graham van der Spuy asked Judge Gayaat Salie-Hlophe if the court would allow him to expand on Perumal’s qualifications and previous experience.

Perumal told the court he had performed more than 10 000 autopsies and had supervised a number of them throughout his many years in the field. The court heard that Perumal, part of the team investigating the second scene of the 2012 Marikana massacre in North West – in which police shot dead 34 striking mineworkers and injured 78 others – had helped perform autopsies on 17 of those slain.

He told the court he had testified in many high-profile cases in South Africa, and ahd been hired by Oscar Pistorius to attend Reeva Steenkamp’s autopsy in 2013. .

Earlier, State prosecutor Louis van Niekerk told Rohde they would argue that he and his wife did not sleep on the night in question. “After you came back from Jolene (Alterskye), you continued with the argument, and at one stage you got so fed up that you just wanted her to shut up,” he said. Alterskye was Jason’s mistress, who had been at Spier Estate on the night leading to Susan’s death. Jason interjected: “That is not true, advocate. I’m not a murderer.”

“You got so fed up that you smothered her and when you noticed she was not breathing you panicked and you tried to stage her suicide,” Van Niekerk continued.

Van Niekerk told the court on Monday post-mortem results showed no signs that Susan had hung herself. The matter continues.