Rohde legal team to go in guns blazing

JASON Rohde’s defence team are expected to pull no punches on Monday when they continue cross-examining state pathologist Akmal Coetzee-Kahn.

They will question his findings about what caused the death of Rohde’s wife, Susan – the central pillar of the State’s case – with the same efficiency that last month extracted a concession that he hadn’t known what he was doing when he miscalculated Susan Rohde’s time of death.

Senior defence advocate Graham van der Spuy last month picked apart the pathologist’s flawed methodology for arriving at a time of death and, after extracting an admission from Coetzee-Kahn that he had got the time wrong – not just in the Rohde matter but in about 50 other cases as well – Van der Spuy declared: “Your evidence is not worth the paper it is written on.”

Coetzee- Khan’s autopsy fingered Rohde as a murder suspect and a wife batterer. The latter allegation has since been rubbished in affidavits from Susan’s mother and sister, who said the bruises flagged by Khan had been 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 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, confirmed, 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 LizeMaré 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.”

The defence will have a mountain to climb next week to prove the ligature marks on Susan’s neck had not been staged and that she did die in an upright position consistent with hanging rather than manual strangulation.

There’s also Coetzee-Khan’s bloodless neck dissection – which could not be repeated in the defence’s secondary autopsy – detailing haemorrhages indicative of manual strangulation as well as the smoking gun: a thyroid cartilage fracture.

Jason Rohde