‘IF it bleeds, it leads.’ The phrase originated in the early days of broadcast journalism, but it’s no less true today.
‘For me, it’s become synonymous with our ever-increasing obsession with true crime,’ writes Nicole Engelbrecht, the voice (and brains) behind the popular local podcast True Crime South Africa, in the intro to her new book, Samurai Sword Murder: The Morné Harmse Story.
‘The more shocking and sensational, the more we appear to be drawn to know every detail.’ But why? She can’t speak for her listeners (and readers), but Nicole’s motivation is two-fold: to remember the victims, so often forgotten in the aftermath, and to try to make sense of it all – to understand the why.
First impressions
‘True crime has always been an interest of mine,’ says Nicole. ‘When I was little, I read mystery books. I think at that age, that’s the true-crime equivalent: the whodunnits. Then, as I got older, I realised that these things are actually happening to real people in the real world.’
She was in Grade 8 when it suddenly became all too real. A classmate’s little sister was kidnapped and later found murdered in Boksburg, Nicole’s home town. ‘They were a Polish immigrant family and they’d moved to South Africa about two years before,’ Nicole says. ‘And then around the time I left school, another one of our schoolmates was murdered in her university dorm. I think that got me thinking about 8-year-old Ewa Nosal again. It was one of the first cases that really got me researching and figuring out how to find this information.’
Was the murder ever solved? ‘Yes. He was a serial offender, and they figured out that he had killed another little girl in the area a couple of months before. They arrested him and he hanged himself in prison before the case could go to trial. So the family had some finality, although they never got to hear him say, “I did it.” But they know it was him; there was evidence.’
When she left school, Nicole dreamt of
