Rohde’s lawyers to grill pathologist on cause of death
Senior defence advocate Graham van der Spuy last month unpicked the pathologist’s flawed time of death methodology and after extracting an admission from Coetzee-Kahn that he had got the time of death wrong, Van der Spuy triumphantly declared: “Your evidence is not worth the paper it is written on!”
Coetzee-Khan’s autopsy pointed to Rohde as a murder suspect and a wife batterer. The allegation has since been contested in affidavits from Susan’s mother and sister who say the bruises flagged by Khan were the result of a handstand gone wrong.
This unexpected unravelling of the State’s key witness was compounded by testimony this week from Susan’s therapist and the Rohdes’ marriage counsellor, in particular, which painted a picture of a woman emotionally struggling who could quite conceivably have committed suicide – even though they didn’t see her as a suicide risk.
Her medication regime alone rang warning bells: self-medicating, her GP noted two months before her death, with a friend’s Dormicum for her chronic insomnia and then substituting that with a prescribed cocktail of Stilnox and Urbanol.
That this came from the script pad of Susan’s botox doctor, without the appropriate psychiatric due diligence, alarmed the defence.
“I can give you hundreds of scientific articles, peer-reviewed, confir med, known associations between Benzodiazepine and an increased risk of suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts,” said advocate Van der Spuy in his cross-examination of Dr Lize-Maré Steenkamp.
“My assessment,” she countered, “was that she was not a severely depressed patient who was suicidal. Only an anxious girl dealing with life stresses and who was seeing a psychologist.”
Significantly she was not only ignoring her marriage counsellor’s advice not to text-bomb and get in Jason’s face. She also didn’t heed the psychologist’s now prophetic caution not to try masquerade a united front at her chief executive husband’s annual company conference at Spier where his ex-mistress was also scheduled to attend.
The defence will still have a mountain to climb this week to prove that the ligature marks on Susan’s neck were not staged and that she did die in an upright position consistent with hanging rather than manual strangulation.