Maruschka Robinson and JP Malan have been charged with the murder, robbery and defrauding of Dustan Blom who was killed in his home and left in the boot of his car in a parking lot at Montecasino on September 2013.
It was reported that the pair have pled not guilty to the murder and robbery charges but pled guilty to defrauding the victim.
On 20 April, a member of the police cyber crime operational support unit provided the South Gauteng High Court with thousands of pages of text messages between the accused.
The messages were downloaded from Robinson’s phone and present a picture of the pair’s affection for each other while plotting against Blom, with whom Robinson was living at the time.
One of the messages from Malan to Robinson read, “You think he is awake? Did you give him the ‘G’ [the drug GBH]?” The message was sent less than a day before Blom’s death.
It is alleded that the pair often spiked Blom’s drinks with a drug called GBH to incapacitate him before stealing money from his bank account by using his debit card.
On 21 April, the court heard from a forensic pathologist who said he concluded that Blom had been strangled due to a fractured hyoid bone in his neck and the fact that when he was found his tongue was up against his teeth, a common sign of death by asphyxia.
Robinson’s lawyer, however, countered that strangulation would require moderate to heavy force to fracture Blom’s hyoid bone. He implied that a woman of Robinson’s size would not have had the necessary strength to break the bone.
However, Malan’s lawyer said that when his client first saw Blom’s body, he had seen him lying in a pool of blood which suggested that something other than strangulation must have caused the bleeding.
He further argued that pathologists were unlikely to pick up traces of GBH in the blood samples taken by police. He also stated that if Blom had been drugged and unconscious before his death, excessive force would not have been required to subdue him.
Read our previous story, Monte Murder case postponed again.
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