Court clears German woman of New Zealander's murder

By MELANIE FINN

ARUSHA - A German woman has been acquitted of murdering her New Zealand husband after a trial that rocked the closely-knit community of this remote safari town and threatened to undermine the reputation of Tanzania's already battered judicial system.

Kerstin Cameron, 40, was found innocent of the charge of first degree murder of her husband, Cliff Cameron, 40, for which she had faced the death penalty by hanging.

In his four-hour opinion, Judge E K M Rutakangwa exonerated Mrs Cameron, suggesting that her husband, from Waikato, had committed suicide, and lambasted the prosecution for failure to produce more than the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.

He further implied that Cliff Cameron's body had been tampered with once it was returned to New Zealand so that a murder scenario could be concocted­ the final irony in a case laced with accusations of skulduggery and conspiracy.

The court case, which began on 13 March this year, was also a trial for the Tanzanian judiciary.

From the outset, both Mrs Cameron's defence and her detractors raised questions about the possibility of a fair trial in a notoriously corrupt and underfunded system.

For two months the dilapidated courthouse among Arusha's jacaranda trees resounded with the complex testimony of white forensic science experts.

The judge, two assessors and the attorneys grappled with issues never before presented in this country's courts such as "high-velocity macro blood splattering" and "blood drops with gravity run-off".

Wilfred Mirambo, Mrs Cameron's lawyer, said: "Most murder trials in this country are about someone killing someone in a beer shop, or killing over cattle theft.

"This trial was an exception ... and a challenge to all of us." Dozens of witnesses testified under a roof that threatened to collapse from rain.

Most trials, even for capital crimes, are over within four days, but the judge, who personally recorded the sessions in long-hand, seemed determined to give the controversial case a full airing and perhaps redeem some credibility for the country's judiciary.

In delivering his opinion, peppered with references to Shakespeare, Judge Rutakanwga was meticulous in discrediting the prosecution witnesses, including its forensic science expert, an American called Hayden Baldwin.

Mr Baldwin had based his conclusion of murder in a large part on three of a total of 13 grainy black-and-white police photographs.

The judge was particularly venomous in his criticism of the Arusha police who, in failing to secure the crime scene properly, had opened Mrs Cameron to suspicion from her husband's family.

No corroborating evidence, such as blood samples or blood splatter patterns on the surrounding bed and walls, was collected.

After less than two hours at the scene, the Arusha Criminal Investigation Department allowed the bedroom to be cleaned and the mattress to be burnt. Even the bullet was left to be swept away by Mrs Cameron's maid.

Arusha's municipal pathologist conducted a cursory post- mortem examination in which he concluded Mr Cameron had shot himself through the mouth.

After an initial embalming process in Nairobi, the body was flown to New Zealand five days later.

There, a final post-mortem examination, done at the behest of the Cameron family, and with Kerstin Cameron's approval, showed her husband had died of a gunshot wound to the forehead, with the bullet exiting the back of his head.

Judge Rutakangwa questioned the validity of the finding because it was made outside Tanzania.

His opinion reflected the anger of many in the community and judiciary that the outside influence of both the Cameron family and the New Zealand Foreign Office had been brought to bear on the case.

When the verdict was announced in the courtroom packed with Kerstin Cameron's expatriate and Tanzanian supporters, there was jubilation.

Mrs Cameron burst into tears and then embraced two of her children and her father, Gerald Loesser, a retired German businessman who has been ever-present since his daughter's arrest in Arusha on 5 May 2000.

Mrs Cameron's case has caused a sensation in the intimate community of this small safari town near Kilimanjaro ever since Cliff Cameron met his death on her bed on the night of 4 July 1998.

His death was ruled a suicide over the course of four separate investigations by both the Arusha and Dar es Salaam Criminal Investigation Departments.

But the Cameron family was not impressed and dispatched two private investigators to Tanzania who concluded that Kerstin Cameron had murdered her husband and conspired with her father and friends to cover it up.

The investigators' reports were forwarded to the New Zealand Foreign Office, which allegedly pressured Tanzania's Director of Public Prosecution to arrest Mrs Cameron despite the findings of the CID.

For the past year she has been incarcerated in the shabby municipal jail with 80 other female inmates.

Present at the trial was Cliff Cameron's brother, Lachlan, a former All Black, who was clearly overseeing the prosecution lawyers, handing them notes throughout witness testimonies.

Mr Cameron remained impassive throughout the verdict and quickly left the courthouse.

Kerstin Cameron's arrest provoked anger among her husband's many friends who believed the pilot and farmer had indeed killed himself.

Troubled by debt and alcohol, he was also having an affair with his best friend's wife, which many claimed contributed to his stress.

But a few believed otherwise. "Cliff was just not the kind of person to kill himself," claimed Berry Bale, a bar owner, who allied himself with the Cameron family.

Mr Cameron's parents, who had not had regular contact with their son for more than a decade, also testified that he was "not the kind of person to kill himself".

As Kerstin Cameron was plunged into the depths of Tanzania's judicial system, a Pandora's box of emotions opened for the small expatriate community.

The fact that Mrs Cameron was white and reasonably well-off offered her no protection from what Mr Mirambo termed "private prosecution by the Cameron family".

- INDEPENDENT