Blood on Her Hands: South Africa's most notorious female killers

By Tanya Farber

Murder has always fascinated us, and when women are the masterminds, the intrigue grows exponentially. Not only are female murderers much rarer than male killers, but their crimes usually also involve a more sophisticated type of plotting.
In Blood on her hands, award-winning journalist Tanya Farber investigates the lives, minds and motivations of some of South Africa's most notorious female murderers, from the poisonous nurse Daisy de Melker, to the privileged but deeply disturbed Najwa Petersen, to the mysterious Joey Harhoff who died before revealing where the bodies of her victims (including her own niece) were. Farber sets each case against the backdrop of the different eras and regions of 20th and early 21st century South Africa the women operated in. Her writing style is lighter than the subject matter might suggest and Blood on Her Hands will keep you reading until late at night – probably with your light on.
The women featured also include: Dina Rodrigues, Phoenix Racing Cloud Theron, Marlene Lehnberg, Chane van Heerden and Celiwe Mbokazi.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Release date: Jun 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781868429271

Tanya Farber

TANYA FARBER is an experienced journalist who currently works at the Sunday Times. She has won international journalism awards (including two Lorenzo Natali Awards from the European Union for Human Rights Journalism and one CNN African Journalism Award), and locally has won print feature writer of the year at the Vodacom Journalism Awards. Tanya has a MA degree in journalism from Wits University, co-wrote photographer Alf Kumalo’s biography with him (Alf Kumalo: Through my Lens), and has also written two resource books on writing and journalism for the Open Society Foundation.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Meet Daisy de Melker, who ‘lovingly’ prepared a flask of strychnine-laced coffee for her son. She is very different from Najwa Petersen, who carefully planned a ‘house robbery’ to eliminate her musician husband. Chané van Heerden placed her victim’s facial skin in the freezer for preservation, yet Phoenix Racing Cloud Theron wished to dispose of her mother’s body before it was even cold. And Dina Rodrigues? She ‘wouldn’t harm a fly’ – but then went and organised a hit on a baby.

Women are not paragons of virtue who cannot commit murder. Nor are they always insane when they do deliberately cause death. And the women with ‘blood on their hands’ are not homogeneous.

Ironically, the idea for this book came to life during the trial of a male murderer. For months, I had reported on the Henri van Breda trial in the High Court in Cape Town. The young man’s parents and brother had been brutally axed to death in January 2015 at their luxury home outside Stellenbosch. His badly injured sister survived the ordeal but had no recollection of the attack.

There was a bottomless curiosity among readers about the trial, and obvious questions began to well up in my mind as to why this could be. Was it the family’s wealth? The brutality of the attacks? The familial nature of it? Basically, what makes one murder trial more fascinating than another? Out of these questions came some uncomfortable answers. Whether we admit it or not, there’s an insatiable hunger for tales of murder that sit outside the norm, and that’s where female murderers come in.

Statistically, female murderers are major outliers, making up only five per cent of all killers. Also, they seldom match the more common masculine narratives of impulsive violence. With the careful planning that often goes into murders committed by women, we’re drawn to their interior world in a way that we are not with their male counterparts. We find ourselves trying to fathom what they were thinking.

The result is that archetypes have proliferated over the centuries – black widows, femmes fatales, sexy assassins, creepy nurses, baby-faced butchers, to mention but a few. These archetypes dictate how we think or write about such women but leave little room for the minutiae of an individual’s life, psyche and act of murder.

In the pages of this book I have, I hope, let each story speak for itself. Before going into the hard facts of each case, I’ve begun it with an up-close-and-personal imagining of the interior world of the murderer and what a day in her life and mind might have looked like; this has required a measure of poetic licence on my part.

The final chapter gathers insights from local and international experts, analysis, data and other stories from across the globe that resonate with those from our own shores.

There are also many other South African women who are labelled ‘murderers’ but whom I’ve deliberately left out of this book. They include the woman who takes the law into her hands after years of savage abuse by her partner; or the single mother living in abject poverty in a shack who leaves her newborn baby at the bottom of a bin because she sees no way out of her situation; or the mother who kills her tik-addicted son because he is destroying everything in his path …

The women in this book could not, in my opinion, blame their circumstances for what they did.

Tanya Farber

Cape Town

May 2019

CHAPTER 1

DAISY DE MELKER

Germiston, 1932

One morning in late February, a middle-aged woman with a downturned mouth and deep blue eyes pulled back the covers of her bed with more vigour than usual.

Just to the left of her wardrobe was a chocolate-brown dress that she’d laid out on an armchair; placed neatly on top of it was a hat – almost brown but leaning more towards the colour of cream of mushroom soup. At 46, the woman had ceased to imagine herself in the glamorous slimline dresses drawn in fine detail on the sewing patterns sold in the shop down the road. For starters, they were tailored at the waist to such an extent that, on the rare occasions she had ventured to wear such a style, she felt as if she was in prison. That’s not to say the brown summer dress and hat weren’t some version of that style. They were just more – she paused to think of the word in her head – practical. The ideal outfit for the day that lay ahead.

Before putting on the dress, she made herself a strong cup of coffee and opened the window as wide as it would go. She remembered Robert, her late husband, always complaining that she liked to keep the house cool. If the roof could open, you would pull it back too, he used to tell her. Poor Robert. His glasses still sat on a small bookcase nearby. But the book he’d been reading, a detective novel, was just the perfect thickness to prop up the one side of the bed to even things out a little. She’d slipped it under one corner of the base and was delighted at how, for the first time since she’d witnessed violent convulsions on the mattress, the bed didn’t feel as if it were tilting towards the South Pole. Come to think of it, it had always felt lopsided to her, even before the convulsions, even back in the day when the person on the other side was not Robert but her first husband, William – the one who’d bought the house in the first place and whose plumbing tools still sat in a metal box in the shed. Poor William.

She looked in the mirrored panel of her wardrobe, pulled the mushroom-soup hat over her head, and picked up her handbag. Walking down the narrow passage in a house that felt smaller every day, she glanced into the kitchen. She thought of how she’d rinsed her son Rhodes’s blue coffee flask and stacked it on the drying rack the night before. There it still stood, next to the butter dish Robert had bought her at the department store. Or was it William who’d bought it? She couldn’t recall.

She also glanced into her son’s bedroom, off to the left, and felt her anger rise. After all she’d done for him! How she’d squandered her money on motorbikes for him and that trip to Europe! And now this: the unmade bed, the plate that hadn’t been taken to the kitchen, the perky cat sitting on the sill with no clue what a slovenly … She stopped herself just short of swearing out loud. He was, after all, her flesh and blood. As had been the little twins. And her two other children. The dearly departed.

Leaving the house, she adjusted the collar on her dress. Not quite the picture on the sewing pattern, she told herself, but glamorous enough nonetheless. Hollywood will add the glitz later, she told herself, waving to someone’s gardener as if she were a movie star on the red carpet and he an adoring fan. This added a bounce to her step, and as she made her way down the street, she thought of her son and the plan in her mind. The prospect made her walk with even more determination than before.

After a while, however, she could feel blisters developing on her feet. She was wearing a pair of velvet shoes, not quite the right size, that she’d bought just after William’s untimely death.

Now she put her mind to the plan. Unusually, she had some distance to cover. Also unusually, she had no shopping list folded in her handbag; she would pass the butcher, the dairy and the greengrocer without so much as a sideways glance. Today, there was just one item she was after, and for that purpose she need only visit the chemist.

As she walked, she could feel the sun reddening her skin, but got some reprieve as soon as she boarded the first of two trams as she made her way into Johannesburg. It was a warm day, typical of February, with the temperature hovering around 25 °C. A few clouds were gathering for a possible afternoon thunderstorm that could burst just as quickly as it would end.

Daisy imagined herself taking a broad brush dipped in pale blue paint to the skyline, easily covering all that displeased her with one flick of the wrist. How hard could it be to remove all the things one detested from this world, she asked herself.

Earlier, on her way out of Germiston, she had noticed that even more factories had sprung up in the industrial area on the outskirts of the town, pumping out grey smoke. The factories weren’t visible from her house; she could pretend to be living anywhere. But seeing them today had seemed to trap her inside the confines of a life too ordinary.

Later, after she got to Johannesburg and boarded another tram for the last leg of the journey, the conversations of fellow passengers automatically drew her in, but what she really craved was silence – the same thing she craved every day when her son returned from work, trampling heavily across the kitchen floor, with the large satchel on his back sometimes dragging a mug or two off the counter.

After catching one more tram, she finally arrived in Turffontein, not far from the racecourse, near her old home. Eager as she was to get to her destination, she first allowed herself the small indulgence of a 15-minute detour to visit the house at 22 Tully Street, which she had once called home. With a quickened step, she almost trotted down the road, the brown material of the dress now clinging to her legs as she moved. She turned the corner, and there it was – the double-storey, gabled house she had occupied with William.

The house, with its large bay windows, sunny voorkamer (front room), pressed-steel ceilings and wooden floors, had been built in 1903, by which time Turffontein was an established suburb thanks to its renowned racecourse, a Johannesburg landmark built in 1887. The racecourse had brought glamour, style and well-heeled crowds to the area, making Daisy feel cosmopolitan in a way her own mother could never have dreamed. The suburb was also the perfect place to bring up children.

As she stood there, she remembered Rhodes as a toddler, climbing up onto the window seat and staring out, with the ear of his fluffy bunny in his mouth. For a moment she felt a wave of tenderness, as if the intervening years had never happened and her life as a wife and mother still lay undiscovered in front of her …

The sharp bark of a dog brought her back to reality, and she turned in her velvet shoes and headed for the chemist.

Walking through its familiar ornate wooden doors, she felt almost dizzy with excitement. The smell of antiseptic and soap, the shelves stacked with plasters and painkillers, drugs to loosen the bowels or tighten them up, toxins, tonics, scissors, you name it … Almost aroused just by being there, she straightened her hat and walked towards the counter. There stood the pharmacist, Abraham Spilkin. As polite as ever, he told her how elegant she looked, and she beamed.

His tone made her feel like a lady who’d grown up in the dappled shade of an apricot tree on an expansive lawn with a governess at her side. Such thoughts brought stability to her mind, erasing the memories of being one of 11 children in a small town on the platteland. It was also a time when any opportunity ‘up north’ could suddenly lure parents and older siblings away.

‘What can I get you today, madam?’ Mr Spilkin asked.

Daisy quickly dropped the corners of her mouth, and said in a small, sad voice, ‘I have a very sick cat in my care, I’m afraid. The poor thing can hardly move for wincing in pain.’

The chemist suggested she visit the vet to see what could be done for the poor creature, but Daisy clarified that the kindest thing she could do right now for an animal in a living hell was to put an end to its misery. The kindly Mr Spilkin offered to do the deed for her, in case the prospect was too traumatic for her.

‘Thank you kindly for the most generous offer,’ Daisy said, ‘but I feel that the distance would be too far for the sickly animal to travel. Besides which, as a trained nurse, I’m more than capable of doing it myself, however much it’s going to break my heart, and I know just the right dose to give.’

Mr Spilkin carefully prepared the package, then took from behind the counter the poisons register – a compulsory record of the sales and purchases of dangerous substances. Arsenic, after all, wasn’t something to be trifled with. In England, the odourless, tasteless and colourless substance had gained notoriety as the poisoner’s tool of choice: the so-called inheritor’s powder had shown up in 237 cases in English courts between 1750 and 1914.

But this was clearly just about a sickly cat, and so Mr Spilkin passed Daisy the register. With a steady hand, she wrote, ‘Mrs DL Sproat, 22 Tully Street, Turffontein’. This wasn’t her legal name (by then she was Mrs De Melker), but she knew better than to betray herself in the register. Before Mr Spilkin could extend the conversation any further, she slipped her purchase into her handbag, thanked him, and quickly left.

The first thing she did when she arrived home was pull off the velvet shoes and soak her feet in a basin of warm, soapy water. The relief. The feeling instantly took her back to her nursing days in her early twenties. She had worked so diligently in a hospital in Johannesburg that she would forget about the tight-fitting shoes on her feet until her shift was over. Once home, just like now, she would let out a long but barely audible sigh of relief. It came back to her now – how she had decided one night, while staring at her toes in the murky water, that she would one day be married and leave the hard work of nursing behind her.

The cat, looking as spritely as ever, jumped off the windowsill and slunk past her. She could have sworn it knew what she was up to. After drying her feet with a fluffy cream-coloured towel, she climbed onto a chair in the kitchen with the package of arsenic held tightly in her hand. On the top shelf, just out of sight even as she stood on the chair, was an empty biscuit tin, the slightly rusted one with the navy-blue flowers along the lip. She felt for it, carefully slid it forward, and placed the tiny package directly behind it. There it would sit until five days later, when she prepared a flask of coffee for her son to take to work.

That trip to the chemist in her old stamping ground, where Mr Spilkin had served her at the varnished teak counter, would later seal Daisy’s fate at the end of a hangman’s noose.

The name Daisy de Melker would become synonymous with the cold-blooded modus operandi of a female serial killer. There have been few such women recorded across the globe, either before or after Daisy, which is strange when you consider the size of the world’s population.

Would the telltale signs of such a personality have shown up in the early years of a child’s life? Perhaps – unless they were buried under the noise and mayhem of a house teeming with children. How likely would it be that odd behaviour would attract the attention of parents trying to feed, raise and educate 11 children, as was the case in the household in which Daisy grew up?

The answer is ‘not very’, and if you were to scour Daisy’s premarital life for any signs of psychiatric illness, the evidence plotted on a spectrum would only get as far as ‘restlessness’ and nowhere near ‘psychopathy’. For the latter, she would have had to display signs such as cruelty to animals, fearlessness when breaking rules, violent outbursts, manipulating others, and lying and stealing just for the fun of it. Daisy’s early life revealed no record of such traits. And yet, from the very day earmarked for her fairytale wedding, at the age of 21, the red flags of psychopathy begin to stand out.

Born to William and Fanny Hancorn-Smith in 1886 – the year Johannesburg itself was born – Daisy Louisa Hancorn-Smith spent her early life in the village of Seven Fountains, near Grahamstown, in today’s Eastern Cape province. The village had been established in the 1700s as a resting place for ox-wagons making their way across this vast landscape. The Dutch had called the area the Zuurveld. In 1820, farms that had been abandoned by them were allocated to poor British settlers who had been recruited by their government to strengthen the English population on the frontier of the Cape Colony. The name ‘Seven Fountains’ came from the profusion of natural springs in the vicinity.

Though Daisy’s family was not particularly poor, Seven Fountains never grew beyond its roots, and by the time Daisy was born, it was still a minuscule and undeveloped village surrounded by sparsely situated farmsteads. As is the case today, most of the local inhabitants were farmers.

In Daisy’s time, the Methodist church was the heart of the Seven Fountains community. There are no records of whether Daisy’s family sat in that church on the slow Sundays that linked one parochial week to the next, but what the records do show is that when Daisy was aged around eight, her father and two older brothers packed up and headed off to Bulawayo (in what was then Rhodesia), where land was being given to Britons for next to nothing. This journey, as well as the journey made by many others to Johannesburg on the hunt for gold, was commonly referred to as ‘going north’.

Two years later, several other families from Seven Fountains made the same trip to Rhodesia, and Daisy was sent along with them on the seven-day journey to be delivered to her father and brothers. It is not known why she left her mother at such a tender age, but one record¹ speculates that this may have been for her safety. Tensions were brewing between the British and the Boer republics, and there was talk of war. Another record states that Daisy’s mother had left the family by then and had married a man in Port Elizabeth, passing away shortly thereafter.² This would have been a major trauma for the young girl, and would also have necessitated her travelling ‘up north’ to join her father. Whatever the truth may be, her mother disappears from the record at this point.

In Bulawayo, she attended a farm school, and over the next two years two of her older married sisters also arrived in Rhodesia. Then, when she turned 13, she packed her bags once again, this time being sent off to board at the Good Hope Seminary in Cape Town, where she would wake up early each morning and get dressed in a prim black-and-white uniform and panama hat.

This notion of being shipped off for schooling elsewhere was not uncommon in those days. Many children left the homestead to attend school in more developed areas such as Cape Town. For Daisy, this was simply a part of life, and she remained at the Good Hope Seminary until she was 17. She had thus spent the better part of her teenage years in the company of fellow boarders rather than her own family.

In 1903, she returned to Rhodesia for a short spell, and then headed back to South Africa, this time to Durban, to enrol as a trainee nurse at the Berea Nursing Home. It was here that Daisy learned about medication, disease and the effects of different substances on the human body.

During her studies, she regularly travelled home to Rhodesia for holidays, and it was on one of these trips that Daisy met a young man named Bert Fuller, who worked in the native affairs department in the mining town of Broken Hill, in what was then Northern Rhodesia (today Kabwe in Zambia). Around the time of their whirlwind romance, Broken Hill was starting to flourish. In 1902, the discovery of lead and zinc deposits here had spurred the establishment of a fast-growing settlement. By 1906, the centrally located town was connected to the colony’s fast-expanding railway system.

Bert and Daisy were likely among the many young people on the lookout for entertainment in a town that was on the brink of a major growth spurt. Any outing after dark meant calling on a mlonda (watchman), who would hold a paraffin lamp in one hand and an assegai in the other, in case a wild animal decided to pounce. The mlonda would wait until the social event ended before walking the partygoers back home.

Another part of life here was the Anopheles mosquito, and it was the bite of a mosquito that would change the fate of the besotted young couple. Daisy and Bert were to be married in late October 1907, but by the time the big day arrived, instead of donning his wedding suit and saying his ‘I do’s’, poor Bert was prostrate in bed, overcome with a rapid pulse, high fever and extreme chills. The first day of their ‘happily ever after’ turned into a spectacle of death as Bert’s life came to an excruciating end, with Daisy by his bedside.

The doctors said he’d died from blackwater fever, a complication of malaria that rapidly destroys the body’s red blood cells, causes intense