I felt my pulse. Ninety-six. It would return to normal only when the Judge and Assessors had taken their seats. The worst time is always just before the beginning. The nerves would dissipate once we had started, I knew.
The better prepared for a trial I am, the more nervous I always am at the start of it. Perhaps it is the knowledge that comes with preparation, that I am not completely in control, that there are risks, that there will be surprises, that a single witness or a single piece of evidence can determine the outcome, and that I may be helpless in the face of it. A trial isn’t over until the last witness has answered the last question.
I prayed for the Judge to come in so that we could start.
The white noise made by the spectators who had filled the gallery behind us was interrupted by a door being unlocked, followed by heavy footsteps on stairs. I turned to see the cell sergeant coming up the stairs with Leon Labuschagne behind him. The sergeant led our client into the dock and told him to sit down. Labuschagne obeyed every order with a wordless nod and sat down in the dock with his head down. I was five or six paces away from him, but he did not acknowledge my existence.
DAY ONE
Defence: 4 October 1988
Execution: 26 November 1987
V3208 Simon Ramoatshe Moatche
V3421 Joseph George Scheepers
V3615 Johan Christiaan Wessels
V3695 Jim Kgethang Mokwena
Maximum Security Prison
9
The seven escorts followed hard on the heels of the Prison Medical Officer as they took the stairs down into the pit room below the gallows chamber. The doctor swung a stethoscope like a lasso in his hand, a cigarette dangling between his lips. He was still a young man, with the lean body of a medical school student, but his face was prematurely old, lined with the creases of too many examinations of assault and rape victims, of countless autopsies on the broken bodies of adults and children who had died unnatural deaths, and of witnessing too many executions.
Two of the escorts were still breathing heavily from their prior exertions. The others took the stairs equally gingerly. By the time they reached the bottom the doctor already had the earpieces of his stethoscope in place and, out of habit, warmed the disc between his hands as he took up a position in front of the first hanging body.
The escorts scampered around the doctor, each to his designated prisoner, and quickly unbuttoned the prisoners’ shirts to expose their pallid chests. As the escorts held the prisoners steady the doctor moved briskly down the line and listened perfunctorily for a heartbeat. He had heard the prisoners’ necks break a few minutes earlier and did not waste any time pronouncing them all dead. He turned on his heel and left.
Upstairs the Warrant Officer spoke to the officers behind him and they followed the doctor out of the gallows building to the admin offices. The usual procession of doors had to be unlocked to let them through and locked again behind them. They had some paperwork to complete before they could retire to the staff common room for tea or breakfast.
At first none of the men in the pit room or in the gallows chamber moved. The pit room was bare except for seven coffins stacked in the corner, two trolleys and a hose-reel connected to a faucet. It was the same size as the gallows room but had no windows. The dead men hung above the pit and spun slowly on their ropes. Blood, excrement and urine continued to drip into the pit.
The escorts stood in a cluster around the bodies, watching the fluttering limbs.
The Warrant Officer was dismayed at the inaction.
‘Roer julle gatte daar onder! Kry hierdie fokkers van die toue af!’
The escorts sprang into action. Each removed from his breast pocket a name tag and tied it to the big toe of his prisoner. Then they assembled in the corner and put on rubber gloves and Wellingtons. When they were ready a key was thrown down from above and one of the escorts stepped behind the bodies and began to unlock the handcuffs. One by one he threw the handcuffs in a bucket. The other escorts followed him down the line and stripped off the white hoods, shirts and trousers. They dumped everything in the pit. When all the bodies were naked, an escort pulled the hose reel up to the line while his colleagues stepped well out of the way. Then he turned the water on and hosed the bodies down where they hung. Soon the pit was a mess of soiled clothing and body waste. The man with the hose expertly steered the waste into the drain while another picked up the items of soiled clothing one by one with a stick and placed them in a plastic drum for dispatch to the prison laundry. The escorts stood aside for a moment as the last bit of water swirled into the drain.
In the gallows chamber above, two of the standby warders threaded a length of rope through a pulley attached to the beam overhead and threw one end into the pit room. Then they moved the pulley along the beam until it was directly above the first body. Below two of the escorts moved a heavy wooden trolley over the pit and under the body while another slipped the rope around the body of the prisoner and fastened it around the dead man’s chest. As soon as he was ready he stepped back and raised his thumb; the two men above promptly pulled the naked body back into the gallows chamber.
Within a few minutes the prisoner was back where he had started, at eye level with the Warrant Officer in the gallows chamber. There one of the standby warders held the prisoner steady while another struggled with the hanging rope. The noose had cut into the prisoner’s neck and the rubber grommet was slippery with blood. After a great deal of swearing and manoeuvring the rope was slipped back over the prisoner’s head.
When the prisoner was lowered back into the pit room his head was flopping grotesquely on his chest, his neck muscles stretched and torn and the vertebrae crushed. The two escorts watching from below expertly caught the descending body by the hands and feet and slung it onto the wooden trolley in one movement. They untied the rope around the prisoner’s chest and passed it on to the next pair of escorts. As they wheeled the trolley to the stack of coffins in the corner, a second body was already ascending into the gallows chamber. When the first pair of escorts reached the coffins they took down the top one and placed it on the floor. One slid its lid aside while the other hauled the trolley over. Then they unceremoniously tipped the body into the coffin. It landed face down and they left it so. One of them shoved the trolley with his foot towards the pit where the next pair of escorts caught it just in time to receive the second body from above.
Soon the escorts were all working in pairs with assembly line efficiency. In the corner an escort removed the tag from his prisoner’s toe and tied it to the handle of the first coffin. His companion used a hammer to drive the screws through the lid. As the blows rained down, another pair of escorts arrived to tip a second body into its coffin. At the pit the third pair was tying the rope around the chest of their body. With the first prisoner in his coffin, the pair of escorts returned to the pit and took their place under the fourth body.
While the escorts were disposing of the bodies in the pit room the paperwork was being attended to downstairs. The four officials who had to sign them sat down at a table and passed the documents down the line for signature. The first one was for the prisoner at the head of the line on the trapdoors, Mnuxa Jerome Gcaba:
CERTIFICATE OF DEATH
I hereby certify that I have examined the body of
MNUXA JEROME GCABA V3664
who has been executed and that he is dead.
----------------------------
MEDICAL OFFICER
The undersigned declare that on this day
10th of December 1987 in Central Prison, Pretoria
MNUXA JEROME GCABA V3664
was executed.
-----------------------------
DEPUTY SHERIFF CHARGED WITH EXECUTIONS
-----------------------------
MEDICAL OFFICER
-----------------------------
COMMANDING OFFICER
-----------------------------
EXECUTIONER
/mo.
The Commanding Officer deferred to the Medical Officer, who had to sign twice. The Deputy Sheriff and the Executioner patiently waited their turn.
The Deputy Sheriff Charged with Executions took the batch of signed documents and put them in a folder. The top one was for Gcaba and advised the Court that its order had been carried out:
1/4/14 4533
OFFICE OF THE SHERIFF
OF TRANSVAAL
PRIVATE BAG X67
PRETORIA
0001
10 December 1987
Registrar of the Supreme Court
Private Bag X9014
PIETERMARITZBURG
3200
THE STATE versus MNUXA JEROME GCABA
I beg to inform you that the abovementioned condemned prisoner
who was sentenced to death at SCOTTBURGH
on 12 DECEMBER 1986
was executed today.
The death warrant and certificate of death are enclosed.
-------------------------------
SHERIFF OF TRANSVAAL
An hour after the trapdoors had dropped their load into the pit room the paperwork in the admin offices was complete and the seven coffins were ready to be taken down to the chapel. The officers went to breakfast with the Sheriff, the Executioner and the Medical Officer. The escorts had time only for a quick cup of tea in their staff room before they had to rush off to their next task.
V3208 Simon Ramoatshe Moatche
10
Wierda and I received the trial records of the thirty-two men who were hanged between 26 November and 10 December 1987 from Pierre de Villiers on the second day of the trial, just before the close of the prosecution case. We had to read them at night and during the breaks as we could not afford to lose concentration during the hearing. Side by side the case files stood almost a metre wide.
I looked at the files in the stackers on the floor in my hotel room. What was there in these files that would shed light on the matter at hand? Was there anything to explain our client’s conduct? I wasn’t sure that I would find the answer in those files, but I had to read them all.
The first four were hanged on 26 November 1987. I made a note of their names:
Moatche
Scheepers
Wessels
Mokwena
I also made a list of the officials:
Executioner
Head of Pretoria Central Prison
Head of Maximum Security Prison
Deputy Sheriff Charged with Executions
Medical Officer
Warrant Officer in Charge of Security
There must also have been at least seven warders, with four acting as gallows escorts and three on standby duty, but their names did not appear anywhere in the records Pierre had given me.
I started with Moatche’s case. The main documents would tell the story:
Indictment. Statement of facts. List of witnesses.
Post-mortem report. Plans. Photographs.
Judgment. Sentencing reports. Sentencing.
Death warrant.
Sheriff’s return. Identification statement. Death certificate.
I read Moatche’s case with great care, looking for unusual features. I did not have to search for long.
INDICTMENT
1. EDWARD PHATAK TSHUMA of 255 Difateng Section, Tembisa, a Black male and South African Citizen aged 20 years;
2. SIMON RAMOATSHE MOATCHE of 187 Difateng Section, Tembisa, a Black male and South African citizen aged 21 years; and
3. JACOB SESING of 300 Difateng Section, Tembisa, a Black male and South African citizen aged 18 years are guilty of the crimes of:
COUNT 1: MURDER: IN THAT the accused on or about 19 March 1983 and at or near LAMANDLELA STATION in the district of KEMPTON PARK unlawfully and intentionally killed WILLIAM MATUTULE, a Black male.
COUNT 2: ROBBERY WITH AGGRAVATING CIRCUMSTANCES AS DEFINED IN SECTION 1 OF ACT 51 OF 1977: IN THAT the accused on or about 19 March 1983 and at or near LAMANDLELA STATION in the district of KEMPTON PARK unlawfully assaulted WILLIAM MATUTULE, a Black male, by stabbing him with knives and then and there by force and violence took from his person and possession an unknown amount of money, his property or in his lawful possession, and thus robbed him of the same.
The events of the evening of 19 March 1983 started innocently enough. Tshuma, Moatche, Sesing and Tshuma’s female companion, Elizabeth Radebe, were drinking at a party in Tembisa. There they hatched a plan to rob some people. The three men were already armed with knives. They caught a train to Leralla. At Leralla the train stopped before starting the return journey. The foursome stayed on board. They had found no one to rob on the outward journey. Then Mr William Matutule, a working man in his thirties, boarded the train at 21:20.
During the journey Moatche, Tshuma and Sesing went from carriage to carriage searching for a suitable victim. They roughed up a number of passengers but found no one with any money. One potential victim eluded them by running to the front of the train.
When they saw Mr Matutule disembarking at Lamandlela Station a few minutes later, Tshuma, Moatche, Sesing and Elizabeth Radebe followed him. The station was deserted. The three men ran after Matutule while Elizabeth watched from a distance. The men caught Matutule at the stairway of the pedestrian bridge. They demanded money from him. He was unarmed and protested that he had no money. Sesing held him while Tshuma and Moatche went through his pockets. When they found nothing, Tshuma said that they had wasted their time. They then took out their knives and started stabbing Matutule. He tried to escape by running up the steps but he was caught halfway across the pedestrian bridge and dragged down to the station platform. The men continued to stab Matutule indiscriminately and repeatedly. He eventually collapsed and fell down between the platform and the railway line. Matutule died of internal and external bleeding as a result of multiple stab wounds. In the frenzy Tshuma had accidentally stabbed Sesing in the arm.
The three killers left the scene with Elizabeth Radebe and went to another party.
Mr Matutule’s body was recovered by the Railway Police just before midnight. The police found a thirty-metre trail of blood from the top of the pedestrian bridge down the steps to a large pool of blood on the platform. The post-mortem report listed eighty-seven stab wounds. Matutule had been in the prime of his life and had been killed for nothing.
The killers were arrested soon after the murder when Tshuma and Radebe’s relationship ended in some acrimony and she went to the police and reported what she had witnessed. After their arrest Tshuma and Moatche pointed out relevant places at the scene, which indicated that they had personal knowledge of events and facts only the killers could have known. They also admitted to having stabbed Matutule but put the blame on Sesing who, they said, had stabbed Matutule repeatedly. They claimed that they had inflicted only minor injuries in defence of Sesing.
Sesing was arrested later when he was released from hospital; he had been shot in the leg during an unrelated incident and still had a fresh stab wound in his arm. He claimed from the outset to have an alibi, but the evidence was unable to sustain that defence. His alibi defence contradicted that of Tshuma and Moatche.
On 11 July 1984 the three men were convicted of murder and attempted robbery with aggravating circumstances. The Court found that Tshuma had been the ringleader in the planning and execution of the attack upon Matutule and that each of the accused had probably inflicted an equal number of stab wounds. The Court turned to the question of whether extenuating circumstances were present in respect of the murder conviction.
Tshuma had been almost nineteen, Moatche twenty and Sesing seventeen years old when they killed Matutule. After an extensive review of case law and other authorities with regard to the effect of youthfulness and intoxication on the matter and a discussion of the concept of inherent vice, the Court found that the accused had acted out of inherent vice. They seemed to fit that category of township youth who were described in an Appeal Court judgment as men who st
abbed for the sake of stabbing. The Court also found that they had planned the crime carefully and that robbery had been their motive. They had clearly acted in pursuit of a common purpose. Liquor had played no discernible role in their behaviour.
Tshuma and Moatche were both sentenced to death on the murder count and to eight years imprisonment on the attempted robbery count. Sesing was given fifteen years imprisonment for the murder and eight years imprisonment for the attempted robbery. The two terms were to run concurrently.
Tshuma and Moatche’s appeal was dismissed and on 28 February 1985 the Department of Justice wrote to say that the State President had declined to grant them clemency.
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE • DEPARTEMENT VAN JUSTISIE
REPUBLIEK VAN SUID-AFRIKA • REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA
CONFIDENTIAL
Veritasgebou/Veritas Buildings
Privaatsak/Private bag X81, Pretoria, 0001.
’Justisie’/’Justice’
28 2923 – 146 mej A Muller
Verwysing/Reference
9/5/4 – 3510 (R/2)
The Registrar of the
Supreme Court of South Africa
Private Bag X8
JOHANNESBURG
2000
1986-02-28
CAPITAL CASE: THE STATE VERSUS (1) EDWARD PHATAK TSHUMA
(2) SIMON RAMOATHSE MOATCHE: MURDER
The State President has decided not to grant clemency to the above-named.
………………………….
DIRECTOR-GENERAL: JUSTICE
By right Moatche and Tshuma should have been hanged within a week, but their families made further representations to the State President. They spent another nineteen months in the death cells before the State President’s decision was made known on 20 November 1987. There were two letters. The one advised that in Tshuma’s case the State President had decided to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment. The other advised that Moatche had not been granted clemency. No reasons were given for the decision.
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