Professor Lorna Martin – South Africa’s first woman to head a forensic medicine department – not only spends her working life in mortuaries, she also visits them when she’s on holiday.
Martin spoke to Spotlight’s Biénne Huisman about working on headline-catching cases and the new high-tech Observatory Forensic Pathology Institute in Cape Town.
“Forensic scientists act as custodians of the dead,” she says. “We speak for them, explaining what happened in their last moments, so justice can be done.”
For 35 years, Martin has bent over metal trolleys with saws and scalpels and tools dissecting bodies, capturing her observations in reports, pondering knots and ligatures and testifying in court.
Her work has often been in the headlines. Her autopsy of a decomposing 14-year-old girl’s body found DNA links to Diepsloot serial killer Lazarus Mazingane, which helped authorities convict him in 2000.
On 20 January 2003, she entered the Sizzlers massage parlour in Sea Point where nine men had been tied up and killed. In 2007, she told a legal inquest that the late British cricket coach Bob Woolmer had died of natural causes, contesting an original report of manual strangulation.
Shiny new facility
Over the past decade, Martin has been a driving force behind the state-of-the-art Observatory Forensic Pathology Institute (OFPI), now spanning three storeys adjacent to Groote Schuur Hospital, and which replaced Cape Town’s 1957 Salt River Mortuary that was notoriously outdated and overfull, and described as a health hazard.
The OFPI has four large dissection areas, with a ceiling height of 5m for ventilation and space for six autopsies each, plus an extra ventilated and secure BSL-3 (Biosafety level 3) section for dealing with deaths from TB and other contagious pathogens.
The nearly R300m facility, which integrates provincial health’s Forensic Pathology Service and academic training, is finally operational.
“Because of limitations in staff and other resources, we do between 15 and 20 autopsies daily. On any given day, we have between 20 and 30 autopsies waiting to be done. On Mondays, maybe up to 40.”
The old Salt River Mortuary was officially decommissioned in December. “Toward the end, it was held together with duct tape and elastic bands,” she says. That notwithstanding, they completed 4 500 autopsies last year. Under Martin’s watch, a team of 10 doctors perform up to three post-mortems each per day.
Martin has headed the division of forensic medicine at the University of Cape Town (UCT) for the past 20 years. At the time of her appointment in September 2004, aged 39, she was the first woman head of forensic pathology in South Africa.
City’s underbelly
To a pathologist, a city’s underbelly is revealed – human bodies become demographics detailing its public health hazards and most vulnerable citizens. For all the high-profile post-mortems Martin has done, what cuts deepest for her are the women and girls who die violent deaths.
“What stays with me is not what most people think of as the ‘gruesomeness’ of the job,” she says, “but rather the deed that ended someone’s life. I’ll always wonder how people can do these things to each other… I am disturbed by the lack of dignity or sanctity in those deaths.”
It is not unusual for her to wander around hardware stores looking for objects that may have inflicted particular abrasions or wounds. “I was in Scotland working in Dundee for nine weeks. There was one murder in that time. And the young man who’d been killed was beaten – he was kicked and stomped on. We found that the pattern of the abrasion on his head was the perfect imprint of one of the suspect’s shoes.”
From Newcastle to Hillbrow
Born in the United Kingdom to an electrical engineer father and a secretarial mother, Martin’s childhood veered between England, Zambia, Malawi and South Africa, where she matriculated at St Dominic’s Catholic School for Girls in Boksburg in 1982.
She says her early considerations to become a veterinary surgeon were quelled because this qualification was only offered in Afrikaans (at the University of Pretoria’s Onderstepoort campus).
Instead, she enrolled for medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand.
In her fourth year, an extraordinary teacher, Dr Patricia Klepp, would inspire Martin’s passion for forensic medicine – a journey which officially started in Hillbrow in 1991, where she took a job as district surgeon.
“There was so much action in Hillbrow,” she remembers. “So much change, I mean there were those bombs. As a GP, I used to examine all of the people who were in cells.
“There was a lot of torture still. People alleging they’d been tortured by police, especially at Brixton (Police Station). And when they died you had to prove or disprove it. Another thing we saw was sexual assault survivors, which was also just unbelievably bad. It was so inhumane – no dignity, no privacy, it was horrible.”
At the time, SAPS had offices at the Old Fort prison complex in Hillbrow, and its adjoining mortuary – incarceration site of several high profile political prisoners – is, today, the setting of South Africa’s Constitutional Court.
Back then, the law required drunk drivers’ blood to be tested at all hours – with district surgeons called out at night to do so – while rape survivors had to wait until 2pm on week days for help. She recalls arriving at the Hillbrow police offices on Mondays at 2pm to find a line of 25 to 30 women waiting on wooden benches to be examined for assault.
In 1993, she helped kickstart a 24-hour service for rape survivors, also assisting police in devising a standard sexual assault examination kit.
In 1996, she moved to Cape Town, where her 1999 Master’s dissertation at UCT was on rape and rape homicide. Here her mentors included Professor Lynette Denny, former head of UCT’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Together, they developed guidelines around the medico-legal management of rape survivors that would inform national policy.
Only 54 registered forensic pathologists in SA
Martin says there are only 54 registered forensic pathologists in South Africa, with some of her former students now heading pathology services around the country.
She collaborated on the third Injury Mortality Survey: A national study of injury mortality levels and causes in South Africa in 2020/21 (published last year), which notes an estimated 52 884 injury deaths in that time countrywide; with homicide (41.8%) and transport-related deaths (22.1%) as leading causes, and suicide at 12.8%. It found that the most suicides occurred on Mondays.
For her, the OFPI is a dear ambition realised.
In response to questions from Spotlight, Western Cape Health & Wellness spokesperson Megan Davids said despite an initial capacity of 165, at the time of decommissioning the Salt River Mortuary had space for storing only 84 bodies, while the new OFPI can accommodate 405. Currently, the OFPI does not have a backlog in autopsies, with 19 cases awaiting post-mortem examination, which roughly equates to 1.5 days.
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