Shepherds and Butchers

by Chris Marnewick

  I later heard they were looking for me, but they did not tell me that. I then took other things there. The car was gone then. I then took these trousers, socks and shoes I’m wearing now. (Brown trousers, brown socks and brown shoes.) I took two blankets and went and sold them. I put my own shoes around the corner of the house. I burned my own trousers. I left my shirt in the toilet. I then put on another shirt. I decided to leave because I was afraid I would be caught. I locked the house and threw the key through the window.

  I rambled about the smallholdings looking for liquor. The money ran out and I decided to look for work. I was thinking that I had done a strange thing. I looked for work at a certain Italian’s place. That was the Wednesday. I encountered his wife and children. They ordered me to stop. I was afraid they would call the police. An old woman said I should come the next day. Then I came across the detectives. They were driving a white car. I thought they were looking for me but they drove past. I saw them going in at the Italian’s place. I left and asked for a place to sleep. I slept.

  The next day I went to the Italian. I went into an African woman’s room. The Italian came and asked me if I was the one looking for work. I said yes. He left me and walked away. Then some other people came there and arrested me. I went with them and asked what I had done. I was afraid to tell them. I thought they were going to hit me. At the police station they said I must just tell the truth, they won’t hit me. I said I would and told only the truth. A photograph had been taken of me. They asked if I was the person in the photograph. I said the photograph wasn’t clear.

  Then I was brought here. That is all.

  On 16 February 1987 the Court convicted Mokwena on all four counts and imposed the death sentence on each of the murder charges, and ten years imprisonment on each of the robbery and rape counts.

  Mokwena was hanged with Moatche, Scheepers and Wessels on 26 November 1987. He was twenty-seven years old.

  I tried to make sense of the four cases I had read.

  What did these men have in common? Was there a pattern? I listed similarities and distinctions in my mind. Had there been mistakes in the tactics adopted by defence counsel in those trials and could Wierda and I avoid making them?

  Moatche, Scheepers and Wessels had killed in gangs.

  They were young men, in their late teens or very early twenties.

  Wessels, I thought, had been quite drunk, but not so Moatche and Scheepers, and Mokwena had been stone cold sober.

  Mokwena was a loner, but like the others he was a young man.

  Scheepers, Wessels and Mokwena had also raped their victims. In each case the rape was across the racial divide. Scheepers and Wessels, white men, had raped African women. Mokwena, an African man, had raped a white woman.

  I thought about motives.

  Greed was present in the case of both Moatche and Mokwena.

  And what about killing simply to avoid detection? Undoubtedly Scheepers and Wessels had done so. Mokwena also admitted as much.

  It was more difficult to find a motive in the rape cases. What motive could a man have for rape? Rape is a crime of violence, my professor had said, it does not belong in the chapter dealing with sexual offences. He was talking about his own book on criminal law.

  If the professor was right, then Scheepers, Wessels and Mokwena were involved in some power play when they raped and killed their victims. I also thought about the apparent desire in all of these men to confess their crimes. Why would anyone in their position want to confess as soon as they are confronted by authority? Mynhardt had even gone to surrender himself at the police station and so had Wessels and his friends. Mokwena had made no real effort to escape.

  In the end nothing made complete sense, but the one factor that stood out above all others was the utter contempt these men had for the lives of their victims. They were so bent on killing that they did not pay much heed to the danger to their own lives either.

  It wasn’t easy to work up any sympathy for the killers, but I worried that Labuschagne would soon join them in the registers.

  DAY TWO

  Defence: 5 October 1988

  Execution: 3 December 1987

  V3473 Kanton Klassop

  V3564 Willy Jacob Mpipi

  V3565 Johannes Mohapi

  V3574 Johannes Stefanus Delport

  V3680 Jomyt Mbele

  V3681 Case Rabutla

  V3682 Clifton Phaswa

  Maximum Security Prison

  18

  The hanged men’s relatives were escorted into the chapel as a gang of prisoners were let into A1 Section to clean the cells of the Pot and to gather the dead men’s belongings. The cleaning gang considered themselves lucky as they were allowed to keep any consumables they found, such as a bit of tobacco, if they were lucky, or an unopened packet of biscuits. Prison gear like shoes and socks, underwear and pyjamas would be sent to the laundry to be recycled and issued to the next intake. Personal belongings would be bundled up and given to the relatives after the funeral service.

  The chapel formed the hub linking the two wings of B Section and was situated in the shadow of the building housing the gallows and the pit.

  Nearer my God to Thee

  Nearer to Thee

  The escorts sat in the back pews and sang and prayed with the bereaved, asking for peace in the afterlife, for love in the present one, and for salvation for those who had done what they had done. There was some sobbing, but for the most part the tears had been shed long before, during lonely nights in distant parts when the relatives of the condemned men had thought of their loved ones and had waited for this awful day to arrive. That day had now arrived in full. In a way it granted the relatives release, it freed them to think of happier times long gone when their sons and brothers were children doing the silly things that boys do to catch a parent’s eye or to amuse a sibling.

  The coffins lay side by side in front of the pews with name tags hanging from the handles and modest wreaths resting on the plain wooden lids. They took up the entire width of the room. The plain nondenominational chapel was full, with an escort and two relatives for each of the hanged men.

  The solitary prisoner in the cell adjacent to the chapel could hear every note of the hymns and every word spoken by the parson. In fact, he could easily have led the sermon himself, having heard it so many times since he was transferred here when Maximum first opened its doors to receive the condemned. The admin staff in their offices in B Section preferred not to hear the inevitable crying and wailing and had retired to their common room for tea and biscuits as soon as the sermon began. For them these men would cease to exist as soon as the administrative processes were completed and their photographs were removed from the office wall.

  There were two representatives of each family at the service and more family members were waiting in the parking area outside the main entrance. Trains from distant parts of the country had brought them here. The Department of Justice had paid for their tickets and for their overnight stay in cheap hotels. For most of them the train ride and the stay in a hotel were novel experiences. The train from Cape Town had taken two days to cover the one thousand eight hundred kilometres; the distance from the lower South Coast of Natal was only eight hundred kilometres but the journey had taken equally long as the elderly Zulu relatives of the condemned men had to catch a minibus from a distant rural area to Port Shepstone where they had to wait for the train to Durban, and then had to wait for the Johannesburg train that departed only the following day. Those who had come from the East Rand were used to train travel and had taken suburban metro trains and buses earlier in the morning.

  The seven escorts sat in the back pews; they had to keep an eye on the coffins as much as on the visitors. The parson rambled on in English though none of those present, neither the visitors nor the escorts, was English speaking. God had forgiven these men, he declared, but no one believed him. The escorts had witnessed the manner of death and had seen the broken bodies. When the parson called for everyone to
stand in prayer the escorts rose and bowed their heads with the families of the men they had helped to kill and then sang the last hymn with them.

  The parson finally brought the proceedings to a close and the bereaved filed past, hands stroking the coffins in a final moment of intimacy.

  In the main foyer an administration officer handed each family a small parcel containing the humble personal possessions of their departed relative, a Bible perhaps, and a few letters, the record of an appeal or a petition to the State President begging for mercy. The admin officer explained, through a warder acting as interpreter, that death certificates would be posted in a week’s time, and that the family could apply for details of the grave number and site after five years.

  Every item had to be signed for in the register.

  The visitors were made to march to the exit at the main entrance in a column of two’s, a posse of warders escorting them to the gate, the rifles on the guard towers aimed at them.

  They comforted each other in the parking lot. Eventually the visitors left as quietly as they had come to this place, as mystified and bewildered as they had been when their sons were arrested and later sentenced to die. They were left to wonder if this was the way things were always destined to be, and never to know the answer. The hymn played over and over in their ears and would haunt them for a long time to come:

  Nearer my God to Thee

  Nearer to Thee

  V3473 Kanton Klassop

  19

  Kanton Klassop was thirty years old when he faced charges of murder, rape, robbery with aggravating circumstances, two counts of housebreaking with theft, and arson. He insisted on conducting his own defence.

  The events started on 11 March 1985 when the Smith family of Port Alfred left their home early in the morning. Mr and Mrs Smith went to work and their daughter went to school. When they returned later in the day they found that someone had broken into their house and had stolen some of their possessions. The burglar had smashed a window to gain entry. They reported the matter to the police and gave them a list of the stolen items.

  On the morning of Friday 12 July 1985 Mrs Dorothy Gilder left for work. Her fifty-five-year-old domestic assistant, Mrs Girley Evelyn Ndzube, was left in charge of the house and was to engage in her usual household duties. Mrs Ndzube was to leave the key in a special hiding place when she had finished. However, when Mrs Gilder returned home in the late afternoon she found the house locked and the key not in its place. The kitchen window was open. Mrs Gilder called the neighbour’s gardener and the young man climbed through the open window to unlock the doors. He found Mrs Ndzube’s body on the floor in the kitchen. They called the police. There were signs of a violent struggle just inside the front door. The house had been ransacked.

  Mrs Ndzube’s body had been placed with her legs apart and a jersey and a brick over her private parts. A khaki jacket and a towel covered her head. When these were removed, she was seen to have suffered a number of chop-like blows of such severe force that the left side of her face and head was shattered. The blows had penetrated her skull and brain and completely destroyed the left eye and its socket. There was a pool of blood under her head. There were also signs that a ligature of some sort had been tied through her mouth and around the back of her head. There were injuries to her neck consistent with strangulation.

  There were signs that the killer had prepared a meal for himself in the kitchen while his victim lay a few feet away.

  The police gathered evidence from the scene. They found identifiable fingerprints on a powder-box on the dressing table in the bedroom, and on a cake tin, a wine carton and the bread knife in the kitchen. All of these items belonged to Mrs Gilder and had been in the house earlier in the day when she had left for work. They took blood samples and the pathologist took vaginal swabs and scrapings from under Mrs Ndzube’s fingernails. These would later prove to be inconclusive.

  The next day Mrs Gilder and some family members cleaned the house. Her son-in-law found the murder weapon under the bed in Mrs Gilder’s bedroom. It was a heavy meat cleaver. Tied to its handle was a school tie taken from the Smith’s house on 11 March. Blood traces on the cleaver matched Mrs Ndzube’s blood type. Mrs Gilder found that some items were missing from the house; these included a rare torch and siren combination her son-in-law had given her for use in case of an emergency.

  On 13 July 1985 the Smith family returned from an outing and found that their house had been broken into a second time. Various items including foodstuffs, bedding and crockery had been taken. Fires had been started in two separate places in the house and had caused some damage but had somehow been extinguished. Outside the broken window they found a torch and siren combination that did not belong to them. They again made a list and reported the matter to the police. The police took possession of the torch. Mrs Gilder and her son-in-law were able to identify it as the one that had been taken from her house the previous day.

  Klassop was arrested on 16 July 1985. He was living in the wild in a shelter behind some bushes although he also had a room at his mother’s house.

  Klassop had no answer to the circumstantial evidence. His fingerprints matched those taken at the scene of the murder. A number of items taken from the Smiths’ house during the two burglaries had been found in his possession. The explanations he gave were demonstrably false in a number of respects.

  The evidence suggested that Klassop must have entered Mrs Gilder’s house through the front door. Mrs Ndzube must have resisted him as signs of a violent struggle were found just inside the front door. Klassop was armed with the meat cleaver. He had carried it to the scene tied around his waist with the tie he had previously stolen from the Smiths. It could easily be concealed under his shirt or coat in that manner. The struggle had continued towards the kitchen. There Klassop put the tie around Mrs Ndzube’s face to overpower her and to stop her from calling for help. He then struck Mrs Ndzube with a brick and with the meat cleaver until she was dead.

  Klassop then searched the house and prepared to take a number of items with him. In the process he handled the items on which his fingerprints were subsequently detected. He took some food and ate some of it in the kitchen and the rest in the bedroom. Before he left he wiped the blade of the meat cleaver and threw it under the bed. He left the house after taking more food, a radio and tape combination, a towel and Mrs Gilder’s torch. There were indications that he had been disturbed before he could gather everything he had wanted to take. Some things were found wrapped in a bedspread in the bedroom. He had finished some wine too; the empty container was also found under the bed. The next day Klassop took the torch to the Smith’s house when he went to burgle it for the second time. He left the torch under the window by mistake.

  The Court acquitted Klassop on the rape count but convicted him as charged on the other counts. Klassop admitted to a long list of previous convictions. He was a serial burglar. All his recorded crimes had been committed in Port Alfred. The local police must have known him well.

  There were no extenuating circumstances. The Judge sentenced him to death on the murder count, to twelve years imprisonment on the robbery count, to three years on each of the housebreaking counts, and to three years on the arson count.

  Klassop arrived in Pretoria on 11 February 1986. Six weeks later he changed his mind about legal representation. It would take nineteen months before his final appeal was rejected.

  He was hanged on 3 December 1987. He was recorded as being thirty-two years old, although his criminal record suggested that he might well have been a few years older than that.

  Palace of Justice

  20

  The Court started on the stroke of ten. Judge van Zyl and his Assessors took their seats after the officials and the legal teams all bowed to them. The registrar reminded Labuschagne that he was still under his former oath. I muttered the customary ‘May it please M’Lord’ and turned to face the witness box squarely.

  We needed to place more of the dreary backg
round material before the Court, but the day would include some contentious evidence about the prison layout and routine. Wierda and I had anticipated some resistance to our next line of questioning and I needed to introduce the topic carefully.

  ‘I need to discuss with you the daily routine of the prisoners so far as you were involved. I am going to start with ordinary days; we can deal with your activities on execution days and on days immediately before execution days later.’

  Labuschagne nodded. I waited a moment for an objection but there was no movement from James Murray and the Judge did not stir either.

  ‘What was the daily routine in Maximum?’ I asked.

  Labuschagne looked refreshed after his night in the cells. He wore a dark suit, a clean white shirt and a black tie. The shirt was a size too big and the tie drew the points of the collar together, almost completely hiding the knot at his throat.

  ‘It starts with the bell at six,’ he said. ‘The prisoners have to get up then, dress in their day uniforms and tidy their cells. They have to wait in their cells until seven. At that time the day-shift warders come on duty and do the roll call.’

  ‘What duties did you perform during that hour?’ I asked. I wanted the evidence to concentrate not so much on the prisoners but on a warder’s activities.

  ‘It depends on your duty allocation for the day. You stand at a door with its key and let people in and out, or you stand around in the sections. Every time a prisoner moves to another place you have to search him on this side and they search him on that side. Apart from that there is nothing to do.’

  The answer was incomplete and I had to prod him a little. ‘And what would you be doing during that time if you had been posted to one of the guard towers or to the catwalks above the cells?’