Stellenbosch: Murder Town: Two decades of shocking crimes

By Julian Jansen

In Stellenbosch: Murder Town author and journalist Julian Jansen goes behind the headlines. With unprecedented access to police files and hours spent hours talking to victims’ friends and relatives, he reconstructs the full stories, revealing new details of some of the most controversial cases South Africa has known.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Sep 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9780624091837

Julian Jansen

JULIAN JANSEN is oorspronklik van Lusikisiki in die Oos-Kaap en het in die Strand in die Wes-Kaap grootgeword. Hy is 'n oudonderwyser en het agtien jaar lank Aardrykskunde en Geskiedenis aan twee Helderbergse skole onderrig. Daar het hy 'n positiewe verandering in "stout" leerlinge se gesindheid bewerkstellig deur hulle op berguitstappies liggaamlik en geestelik uit te daag. Die afgelope tien jaar is hy 'n verslaggewer in die Sondagkoerant Rapport se Kaapstadse kantoor - met 'n kort onderbreking in 2009 toe hy die Wes-Kaapse LUR vir Gemeenskapsveiligheid se woordvoerder en toespraakskrywer was. In 2010 kry hy eervolle vermelding in die Mondi Shanduka-pryse se afdeling vir harde nuus. Dit was vir sy deel in 'n span wat berig het oor die moord op die Britse bruid Anni Hindocha en die aanklagte teen haar man, Shrien Dewani. In 2013 ontvang hy Rapport se Spesiale Redakteursprys vir sy beriggewing. Hy fokus meestal op misdaadberiggewing, maar geniet dit ook om stories te skryf oor die triomf van die menslike gees oor teëspoed asook oor gewone mense wat ongewone dinge doen.

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9780624089810_FC

Julian Jansen

Tafelberg

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who shared information for Stellenbosch: Murder Town.

This book is dedicated to the families of each of the victims whose story this book tells.

INTRODUCTION

When the Winelands become bloodlands

Stellenbosch is internationally renowned as a town of wealth and wine, a place of exceptional scenic beauty and beautiful people. It is home to South Africa’s business aristocracy, erudite academics and students who are destined for great things.

But the idyllic image presented in travel brochures and on social media veils a dark side. Amid the ancient oak trees, blue mountains and historic wine estates lurks the same evil that has made South Africa a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world.

When Stellenbosch’s veil is ripped off, the public find it hard to avert their eyes from the gruesome face that is exposed. Murders in the town often receive extraordinary media coverage, especially when the victim is wealthy or a young person in the bloom of their life, for it is precisely these killings that most starkly illustrate the contrast between Stellenbosch’s public image and the reality.

Even in a country that has become inured to crime, it resonates widely when a promising student’s life is brutally cut short before they have had the chance to realise their potential. Hence names such as Inge Lotz and Hannah Cornelius are imprinted in the national consciousness.

‘In South Africa, we co-exist with crime, it’s like white noise – you’re constantly aware of it. There are also places where you imagine crime would never occur. There is a perception that university residences on campuses such as Stellenbosch, Potchefstroom and Grahamstown (Makhanda) are safe,’ comments Tim du Plessis, retired head of current affairs at kykNET and a former editor of Rapport.

‘Then there is the element of human tragedy when the victim is a student. In such a case you think: Here is a talented person who was preparing themselves for a bright future, someone with expectations. The parents might have struggled to get the child to university … and then the child is killed in the bloom of youth.’

Professor Lizette Rabe, retired chair of the Journalism Department at Stellenbosch University, says readers have an ‘intense appetite’ for high-profile crimes in Stellenbosch. She cites the example of the murder of the wealthy wine farmer Stefan Smit. Like many of the notorious murders in Stellenbosch, the Smit case contains all the elements of a gripping crime novel. Smit’s widow, Zurenah, is suspected of having hired a team of hitmen to kill her husband. On top of that, Zurenah and Smit’s daughters from his first marriage are feuding about his estate, and there are allegations about a will that was forged prior to the murder …

‘It sounds like a Deon Meyer story, but it’s real life,’ says Rabe. ‘The people in question are all actors in the story, except that it is real. It’s almost addictive in a certain sense; you can’t get enough of it.’

Amid the intense focus on the sensational aspects of the Stellenbosch murders, the spotlight falls on bigger issues in South African society as well.

‘What research shows – and many people refuse to accept it – is that where you have high levels of unemployment and poverty like in South Africa, it goes hand in hand with crime, particularly property-directed crime driven by desperation, for example theft, housebreaking and later robbery sprees,’ says Dr Johan Burger, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies.

The media coverage also results in South Africa’s often faceless crime statistics being made more tangible.

‘We as South Africans live with these images of torture, of serious crimes of violence and ultimately murder and rape, and then something is reported in the media, such as the Inge Lotz case. Here you have a girl, a beautiful blonde, young, a university student, a bright future ahead of her. In photos she is beaming with happiness. Then she is brutally murdered. Suddenly these statistics we are confronted with acquire a face, that of a lovely young girl,’ says Burger.

When the Winelands become bloodlands, as in the case of the De Zalze murders where the young Henri van Breda wiped out his wealthy family with an axe, the media coverage frequently spreads beyond South Africa’s borders. Triple axe murderer Henri van Breda SMILES in court as he awaits sentencing for killing his parents and sister [sic] in gruesome attack – as judge considers showing MERCY despite his horrific crimes, the British Daily Mail announced breathlessly in one of its many headlines about the case.

But this book is also about Stellenbosch’s lesser-known victims, those who did not make it into the BBC’s news bulletins – and, for that matter, were given only skimpy coverage even in South Africa. The poor farmworker Felicity Cilliers was a woman who had been forgotten by the world. Though her murder remained unsolved for 11 years, there was one man who never stopped fighting for justice. In the end, that made the difference.

A diverse miscellany of victims and killers emerges from the pages of this book. Each chapter is a reminder that Stellenbosch, despite all its glitz and glory, cannot escape many of the cardinal sins. What follows are 12 tales of jealousy, lust, anger, sloth and greed.

1

THE FRANSCHHOEK PASS MURDERS:

The day heaven became hell

It is a clear winter’s day in July 1999 at Jan Joubert’s Gat, a popular lookout point along the Franschhoek Pass. The sun is shining brightly and three young residents of Stellenbosch – a man and two women – are enjoying the Wednesday afternoon. Their bodies are swaying slightly to the beat of music and the smell of dagga hangs in the air.

The man is 25-year-old Dorian van Rensburg, an ex-pupil of Paul Roos Gymnasium and the only child of Professor Boet van Rensburg and his wife, Elizabeth. His father, a surgeon, is a former head of the Division of Surgery at Stellenbosch University. Dorian works on the family’s stud farm. His companions are two 21-year-old best friends, Marisa du Toit and Audrey Myburgh. Hailing from Pinetown and Durban, respectively, they moved from KwaZulu-Natal to Stellenbosch the year before because the Boland held great appeal for them. They are waitresses at Café Latinos and share a flat in the suburb of Paradyskloof.

The black two-door VW Golf in which the three friends drove to the lookout point stands close by. Its sunroof is open and their dance music drifts from the car’s CD player. The three young people are blissfully unaware that they are being watched – like prey being stalked by a predator.

Earlier that day, a group of five men had left Cape Town in a blue Ford Sierra and headed for the Franschhoek Pass. Their plan was to hijack a car.

At some point after 15:00, they spotted the black Golf and the three young people at the lookout point. Some of the men liked the ‘Golfie’, but others said a two-door car would not be suitable for other criminal activities. They drove on.

One of the men – the one who had initially come up with the plan in Cape Town – said after a while that the black Golf was ‘breaking his heart’, that he had long desired a car like that. So, they decided to return to the lookout point where the Golf and the young people were and stop there after all.

A teacher from Paarl who had been at Jan Joubert’s Gat that afternoon in the company of four friends saw the Ford Sierra turning off to the lookout point just as he and his friends started driving back to Franschhoek.

One of his passengers recounted later that she’d been immediately concerned when she’d first seen the young people at the lookout point. ‘I actually became annoyed with the kids because I felt they weren’t really safe on their own.’

Her concern was not unfounded. Less than a month before, a man from Moorreesburg, Mark Rabe, had been robbed of his bakkie and shot dead on the same pass, barely 2km from where the three young people were relaxing.

The teacher said that something about the occupants of the Ford Sierra had made him uneasy. He still remarked: ‘Uh oh, these people are trouble.’ But he did not turn around.

* * *

Audrey Myburgh struggled up the steep mountainside at Jan Joubert’s Gat, her face contorted with pain. A bright red stain on her left side showed that something was seriously wrong. Groaning, she reached the parking area at the lookout point and staggered towards the tarred road. The driver of a Volkswagen minibus filled with tourists from Alaska saw the woman waving her arms and braked hurriedly. Audrey was trembling with shock, and a passenger draped a jacket around her shoulders. Another vehicle stopped, picked Audrey up and rushed her to Franschhoek to receive medical attention.

The bodies of Audrey’s friends, Dorian and Marisa, were found on the mountainside. She told the police haltingly what had happened: Men in a blue car had shot her and her friends. She gave them a description of the black Golf, as well as of their attackers’ blue Ford Sierra with its CY number plate.

Audrey was taken to Stellenbosch Hospital while police vehicles raced to the lookout point with blaring sirens. On their arrival at the scene, police officers and members of the Off-Road Rescue Unit, a crew of volunteer 4x4 owners, got to work. Using ropes anchored to 4x4 vehicles, they abseiled down the mountainside. Sergeant Ashley Malgas found Dorian’s body in a half-seated position. A few metres away, Marisa lay face down. Both had gunshot wounds to the head and were dead when the police arrived. As gruesome as the scene was, it told only half the story of the ordeal the three young people had faced that Wednesday afternoon. It would take the police a while to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Various items were found at the scene: a .38 bullet, a .44 Magnum bullet, a black cap, a pair of sunglasses, light-brown sandals, a small quantity of dagga in a cardboard container and a can of orange juice.

The Volkswagen Golf with its CL number plate had disappeared. Boland and Cape Town police stations were asked to be on the lookout for this vehicle and the Ford Sierra the attackers had used.

When the news of the murders broke, police officers who had been on foot patrol that afternoon recalled seeing a blue Ford Sierra and a Golf passing them at high speed. As they were on foot, they had been unable to pursue the vehicles.

That same afternoon, the police tracked down two cyclists in the Groendal suburb of Franschhoek who were probably the last people to have seen the three friends before they were attacked. Sarel Botha and Henry Pietersen provided valuable information. Botha recounted that he and five other ‘Rastas’ had arrived at the lookout point at about 15:00.

It was then that the black Volkswagen Golf arrived at the lookout point. Botha and his friends waved at the three young people in the Golf. Audrey and Marisa sat down on the parapet wall and called the cyclists over to them. The women told them they were originally from KwaZulu-Natal.

‘The one lady gave the other lady a stop of dagga and she rolled a zol, which they smoked in turn. The man didn’t smoke. They offered us a skyf too, but we declined,’ Botha related.

Shortly afterwards, the Ford Sierra arrived and drove slowly past the small group before leaving the lookout point again. The cyclists said goodbye and resumed their journey to Franschhoek.

While taking a breather on the pass during their homeward trip, the cyclists saw the Ford Sierra and the black Golf come racing past them. ‘They went round the corner so fast that you could hear the tyres screech.’

Botha recognised two of the men in the Golf. They had earlier been in the Ford Sierra. The cyclists rode on, and at the foot of the pass they saw the police vehicles racing up the road.

Although the killers got away that afternoon, their freedom was to be short-lived – thanks to painstaking donkey work on the part of the police and an exceptional stroke of luck.

* * *

It was just before midnight on the day of the murders, approximately two hours after the first report about the missing black Golf and the blue Ford Sierra had been issued on the police radio. Inspector Roland Gabriels had been searching for the two cars for two hours, and at that stage he was combing the streets of Athlone in his patrol car. Then came the breakthrough the police needed: from his vehicle, Gabriels spotted the blue Sierra 2.0LX parked in the open in front of a smokkelhuis (shebeen) in Lower Klipfontein Road, Silvertown.

He notified the police’s radio control immediately, and Inspector Herman Beckmann of the Murder and Robbery Unit in Bellville was dispatched to the scene. Inside the house, Beckmann and his colleagues found three men sitting on a bed. Two of them would eventually be linked to the Franschhoek Pass murders: David Williams (23) from Eerste River and Patrick van Schalkwyk (22) from Springbok. In the Sierra, the officers discovered Marisa’s ID book wrapped in newsprint, a wallet, a .45 pistol and a receipt for R80 paid for 13,65 litres of fuel. The fuel had been purchased with a petrol card marked ‘D.C. van Rensburg’ at a service station in Klipfontein Road.

The men were arrested, and the Ford Sierra was driven to the Bellville South police station for fingerprints to be taken.

Then came the momentous stroke of luck. During the trip to Bellville, a black two-door Golf drove past the Ford – the same Golf for which three young people had paid with their blood earlier that day. On seeing the Sierra, the occupants of the Golf thought their comrades were inside the car. They hooted and waved merrily, little knowing that the occupants of the Sierra were in fact police officers. The police played along and waved back.

At the red traffic lights at the Vanguard Drive/N2 interchange, about 2km from the smokkelhuis in Lower Klipfontein Road, the officers seized their opportunity. They stopped, jumped out and ran towards the Golf. The dumbfounded occupants were arrested. They were Morné Lakay (23), a panel beater from Athlone, and a 17-year-old boy.

* * *

On the Friday, two days after the murders, Captain Deon Beneke and Beckmann took Lakay to the smokkelhuis where his comrades had been arrested. The house was very dirty and in a mess. Lakay pointed out the place where a .22 pistol and two .38 revolvers were hidden. In a cupboard without doors, Beckmann found an Absa bank card with the signature ‘M. du Toit’ and Dorian’s wristwatch.

Meanwhile, a police captain had taken the 17-year-old suspect and his mother to the Franschhoek Pass where the boy was made to point out the details of the crime scene. On seeing the site where a bunch of fresh flowers had been placed, the boy’s mother became very emotional.

The fifth suspect in the case was 27-year-old Jehan Abrahams from Lentegeur in Mitchells Plain. He had been tracked down by Beneke and arrested on the Saturday after the murders. During Abrahams’s arrest, his wife handed a gold ring to the police. He had given it to her earlier and said he got it from a friend.

Next came a shocking discovery. It turned out that two of the suspects – Williams and the minor boy – were out on bail after having been arrested for the murder of Rabe, the man who had been shot dead and robbed of his Mazda Drifter bakkie on Franschhoek Pass the month before. Some of the suspects were also linked to hijackings and other violent crimes at tourist attractions in the Cape Peninsula and the Boland.

Williams, Abrahams, Lakay and the 17-year-old boy were eventually positively identified.

Williams did not want to make a statement and said he would speak in court. On 8 August 1999, he and Lakay escaped from the Groot Drakenstein Prison by fashioning a rope from four sheets they had torn into strips. They fled in a Nissan 4x4 that was parked nearby but were apprehended again that same day.

Prof. van Rensburg, who in his capacity as a surgeon was frequently called out at night for emergency operations on people who had sustained gunshot or knife wounds in gang fights, said during a media conference he would like to ask his son’s killers what it had felt like that to shoot him in that way. Dorian had been his only child.

The appearance of his son’s alleged killers in the Paarl Magistrate’s Court attracted great interest, and relatives had come from as far away as London. Outside the court, hundreds of people protested against crime. Among those who participated were doctors, nurses, community leaders, primary-school pupils and victims of crime, as well as the mayors of Paarl, Wellington and Franschhoek.

The session in front of Magistrate Gaynor de Wee took place behind closed doors, as one of the suspects was a minor. After turning 18 during the trial, he would be identified as Heinrico (Turtle) Petersen. The five accused were charged with 10 counts that included murder, robbery and indecent assault.

The docket of the investigating officer, Captain Christo Mouton, contained a list of stolen items: a Swatch women’s watch, a pair of white sunglasses, a gold belly chain, a Nokia cellphone, a Siemens cellphone, a Pioneer radio/tape and CD player, loudspeakers and amplifiers, two gold earrings, a Swatch men’s watch, a Bossi men’s leather wallet, a gold and diamond ring, an Absa bank card, a petrol card, an unknown amount of cash and a black Volkswagen valued at R30 000.

In February 2000, the Western Cape director of public prosecutions decided not to prosecute Van Schalkwyk. The man from Namaqualand was going to testify for the state against the other four accused in terms of Section 204 of the Criminal Procedure Act. If he could convince the court that he was telling the full truth, he would be indemnified against prosecution. Because of fears for his safety, he was placed in a witness protection programme.

In August 2000, the high-profile case was transferred to the High Court in Cape Town, where it was heard by Judge Deon van Zyl.

In the courtroom, the full story of what had happened on that tragic day on the Franschhoek Pass unfolded. Van Schalkwyk’s statement to the police and his subsequent evidence before the court constituted the first part of the puzzle. According to him, he was unemployed in Springbok when Williams came to collect him in the Ford Sierra with a promise of work. In Cape Town, he was introduced to Lakay, Abrahams and Petersen.

It had been Williams’s plan to drive to the Franschhoek Pass that Wednesday to steal a car. He told them the pass was the only place where they would find ‘bait’ (a vehicle). His plan was to shoot dead the first person they encountered on the pass, throw the body down the mountainside and take their car.

On the Franschhoek Pass, Williams and Petersen showed the rest of the group the place where they had shot dead Mark Rabe in his white Mazda Drifter while he was sleeping. They had thrown his body down the mountainside and taken his bakkie – exactly the same modus operandi Williams wanted to follow again.

After their initial doubts about taking the two-door Golf, the five men decided to strike anyway. They went to wait elsewhere until the Rastas who stood talking to the three young people had cycled off. Williams said there were not enough bullets to shoot all these people. He wanted to make sure they left no witnesses alive.

After the cyclists had left, the attackers parked at Jan Joubert’s Gat. They started chatting to the three young people.

Lakay asked one of the women for a match. Then a shot rang out. Lakay shouted in English that he was a robber and that the three of them had to go and stand against the rock. Audrey and Marisa were nervous and fearful.

Lakay asked Dorian whose car it was. He replied that it was not his but belonged to a female friend, and he handed over the keys. ‘The next moment, Morné (Lakay) raised the firearm about two steps away from the man and shot the man through the head,’ Van Schalkwyk’s statement to the police read.

Dorian clutched at his head and fell face down. The attackers threatened the women and tried to force them to throw Dorian’s body down the mountainside, but he was too heavy and Williams and Abrahams helped them. The women were searched and robbed before Lakay pointed a firearm at Audrey and Marisa and shouted that they had to jump off the cliff.

Petersen also pointed a firearm at the women and shouted: ‘Jump!’ and ‘Come closer so that I can shoot you in your poes!’ While he was swearing at them, he shot Marisa