Posted by Dr Serena Coetzee on 12 Apr 2010, 13:22 (last modified on 13 Apr 2010, 10:55)

On the night of the 16th December 2006, Taliep Petersen, a famous South African musician and playwright, was murdered in his home.

Initially it looked like a house robbery that went wrong, but when the detectives from the South African Police Service started to investigate, it became clear that it was premeditated murder. This was based on the fact that the crime scene did not indicate the modus operandi of a house robbery. The detectives obtained the data from records of the cellular telephone from the deceased’s wife who was then identified as the prime suspect, and determined the person whom she contacted to arrange the murder.

The leading detective and the state prosecutor then requested the CSIR to analyse and map the movement and communication between the suspects and the state witness using the cellular telephone records. The aim was to use the mapped time and space information to corroborate the evidence given by the state witness with regards to the events leading up to murder. From these records, the communication lines between the suspects and the state witness could be established. Using the sequence of the calls and the geographic location of the base stations involved, it was then possible to map the communication between and the movement of the suspects through time and space. These maps were then handed in as evidence by the state as part of the court proceedings. These maps were one of the main contributors to the guilty verdict of the suspects and they were subsequently sentenced to imprisonment ranging from 7 to 28 years.