S.Africa: Moodley shot Leigh Mathews with dum dum bullets

[This guy is a jerk - to put it very mildly. Sadly, the parents say little. The Mum is obviously highly distressed. Personally, I think Moodley is just another S.African scum bag criminal who should have ended his life swinging on a rope. Sadly, the bastard will be back on the streets within our life times. Jan]

Donovan Moodley used dum-dum bullets - which are designed to inflict maximum damage to a target - to murder Leigh Matthews.

Police ballistics expert Inspector Jean Nieuwenhuys, testifying on Wednesday in Moodley's Johannesburg High Court trial, in aggravation of sentence, said his observations at the scene where Matthews's body was found a year ago had shown that she had not been murdered at the spot where she was discovered.

This contradicted Moodley's explanation of his guilty plea on Monday, when he said he had left Matthews' body where he shot her.

He testified that Matthews had been shot four times - once in the neck at close range, and three more times from a greater distance.

Nieuwenhuys said that he conducted tests on Moodley's licensed 9mm pistol by taking the firearm and firing shots into a target "until I got the same kind of results" as he had observed with her corpse.

Gunpowder residue marks on Matthews's skin had indicated that that shot was fired at close range.

"Tattooing is when the gunpowder physically penetrates the skin in a kind of burn mark. The tattooing present is in those fine dots that you see on the photograph (of Matthews's remains).

"The finding of that was ... the shot that hit the deceased in the neck was fired from not more than 300mm," Nieuwenhuys testified.

He said Matthews and Moodley had possibly been standing when she was first shot, in the head.

"The shots were in such a manner that the deceased must have been lying down when three of the shots hit her. She must have been standing when the one hit her in the head. Shots to the neck and chest were fired one after the other in a short period."

The average distance from which the three shots to her head and chest were fired, "worked out at 2.4m". The trajectories showed they had been fired in quick succession.

Nieuwenhuys said Matthews's killer had used dum-dum bullets, which were intended to cause maximum trauma to her.

"The bullet used its energy to create maximum damage to the body, and that's why it stayed in the body and didn't penetrate. The bullet was what is known on the street as a dum-dum. It was a hollow point," he said.

Nieuwenhuys said his examinations of the spot in Walkerville where Matthews was found, as well as of the body and the murder weapon, had led him to conclude that she had been killed elsewhere.

"I am of the impression that the deceased was not shot at the scene indicated in Walkerville.

"The firearm ejects spent cartridge cases to the right, and this did not tally with the distances and positions (of the cases) that were pointed out to me. The positions where the spent cartridges were found also do not fit with the direction of the wounds found on the deceased," he said.

"Had the deceased been shot on the scene and she was close to the position (in which she was found), the cartridge cases would been further to her right and further away from her."

Under cross-examination, he was asked if there was any tall grass at the range where he tested the weapon. Nieuwenhuys said there was not, and he conceded that tall grass could have deflected the cartridge cases, affecting where they landed.

He also admitted that he had not attempted to take fingerprints from the cartridge cases.

This article was originally published on page 1 of Daily News on July 27, 2005

Source: Independent Online (IOL)

URL: http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click...