Liesl slept on peacefully; I had always marvelled at her ability to sleep through any amount of noise but to wake up at the slightest squeak from one of our sons. I slipped out of bed quietly and grabbed a pair of jeans. I dressed in the passage and took my pistol from the safe. I tucked it in the waistband at the back of my jeans. Torch in hand I slowly opened the sliding door onto the veranda and stepped out into the night.
The geese were quiet now, which was unusual. They usually took some time to settle down after a disturbance. I ducked behind some azaleas on the terrace and snuck up on the goose’s nest. When I turned the light on, I saw them. They were dead or in the throes of dying; that much was obvious from their grotesquely splayed wings and broken necks. Their blood-stained wings fluttered in the night air, but they were dead.
I swung the torch around, looking for the killer and two dogs rushed past me towards the corner of the yard. The first jumped up and was able to drag itself over the wall, but the second hit the wall three-quarters of the way up and fell back towards me. I found to my surprise that I had run after them and had the gun in my hand. I aimed the light and the gun at the dog and followed it as it tried a second time to clear the wall, but it hit the wall somewhat lower than at its first attempt and again landed at my feet. After a third attempt it surrendered and cowered in the corner, heaving and panting.
The light shone on the dog; it was a bitch, heavily pregnant. I took careful aim. She turned and squirmed in the light. I squeezed the trigger but nothing happened. I shook the gun and squeezed the trigger a second time but still nothing happened. The safety catch was on. I released it and took careful aim again. She looked at me with fearful, guilty eyes. I pulled the trigger, but there was no power in my shaking hand.
I slipped the safety catch back on and waited for the rush of adrenalin to pass and my ragged breathing to return to normal. The bitch lay down after a while, panting, feathers stuck to the side of her jaw. I stood there for a long time before I walked away and opened the gate and watched as she slunk off into the night. Then I fetched some plastic bags and picked up the bodies and the bloodied feathers. The dead geese were limp and warm to the touch. It was not going to be easy to tell the boys their pets were dead, killed by a neighbour’s dogs.
I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to work out how to tell the boys when Liesl walked in; I had not heard her bare feet on the stone tiles. The gun lay on the table in front of me. She stood at the door with her hand at her throat. Her eyes went from the weapon on the table to me. I told her about the geese. She sat down with me. We had a cup of tea.
‘You are going to have to dispose of the geese and tell the boys,’ I said. ‘I just don’t have the strength for it right now.’
Liesl nodded. ‘They’ll be sleeping when you leave,’ she reminded me.
I should have remembered.
‘Take a shower and come back to bed. You have a hard week ahead,’ she said.
I looked down and saw that my feet were dirty and my hands sticky with blood and feathers.
They came for me too at six o’clock, James Murray and the Judge.
‘Put on your day clothes, no shoes and no underwear,’ they said.
‘It’s not my turn,’ I pleaded.
‘Everyone gets a turn. Today it is yours,’ they said.
When I didn’t move they dragged me out of my warm bed. I looked down and saw that I was dressed already, exactly as they wanted, in my day clothes. I couldn’t see my shoes. Where were my shoes?
They tried to take my fingerprints at the table in the passage but I fought them off. I clamped my hands firmly under my armpits and twisted from side to side, shouting at them, ‘Leave me alone, it’s not my turn!’ But they held on and tried to drag me away. They couldn’t hang me without taking my fingerprints, could they? They forced me to the floor and I landed on my side, my knees drawn up into my abdomen and my hands still clamped under my armpits. I tensed up for their next assault.
I felt a cool hand on my cheek. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ Liesl said and held me. She pushed her fingers through my hair until I fell asleep again.
I woke up aching all over. Liesl’s face was only inches away, her big questioning eyes staring at me.
‘You have to get out of this case,’ she said again, this time at the airport, and kissed me goodbye. I was ready to board my flight.
‘I have to get the case out of me,’ I said. I tried to make a joke of it, but she knew me too well to let me get away with it.
My wife smiled knowingly and walked away.
Guilt followed me through the gates to the departure lounge. I had been home for three days, a long weekend at that, and couldn’t remember any meaningful interaction with my sons.
I caught the six-thirty flight from Durban and Wierda picked me up at the other end at seven-thirty. We made small talk until we got to the outskirts of Pretoria. I was desperately tired. We were driving past the old prison in Potgieter Street.
‘What have you decided?’ Wierda wanted to know. ‘What are we going to do today?’
I thought about it as we passed the prison complex. I looked for the sign that had been there when my father and I had come into the city from Johannesburg many years earlier.
PRETORIA SENTRAAL GEVANGENIS
PRETORIA CENTRAL PRISON
I turned to look back as we passed the last few buildings of the complex, but the sign was no longer there. I felt a strange disappointment.
We had four witnesses to call: Magda Labuschagne, who in all likelihood was going to be an unwilling witness; the principal of Labuschagne’s high school, who had volunteered to give evidence; and two experts, Marianne Schlebusch and Dr Shapiro.
‘I think we should call the wife and the principal first, and then the two experts. That way the experts can use the facts established by the wife and the principal to support their opinions,’ I suggested. ‘What do you think?’
Wierda agreed. ‘Yes, I could go along with that. We need to finish with a strong witness.’ He caught my eye. ‘I think we are going to need to finish strongly if we are to stand any chance of winning.’ This perfectly echoed my own view.
We drove in silence until Wierda parked his car in the basement of his chambers. ‘Shall we have some breakfast?’ he asked.
‘Good idea,’ I said, ‘and you can talk me through the next case.’
The case took me right back to where I had started earlier that morning, in the province of Natal, to a remote place an hour or so south of Durban.
V3663 Joseph Gcabashe
V3664 Mnuxa Jerome Gcaba
51
Four men, all in their early twenties, broke into the home of Mr and Mrs Jeffreys and robbed the elderly couple. In the process they injured Mrs Jeffreys and killed Mr Jeffreys.
Mr and Mrs Jeffreys owned and ran the Oribi Gorge Hotel about twenty-four kilometres inland from Port Shepstone. Mr Jeffreys was eighty-one years old and suffered from emphysema. During the night of 4-5 June 1986 the couple went to bed at about midnight after Mrs Jeffreys had unlocked one of the external doors to enable an employee of the hotel to come in early the next morning to light the fire in the kitchen.
At about two o’clock in the morning four men wearing balaclava masks burst into the bedroom and attacked the old couple in their beds. One of the intruders stabbed Mr Jeffreys in the back and Mrs Jeffreys suffered a cut on the ring and little fingers that severed the tendons and rendered those fingers permanently useless. Mr Jeffreys had a revolver, which he raised towards the attackers but did not fire. He was overwhelmed and disarmed. The intruders then ransacked the room. One took Mrs Jeffreys’ purse, which had two hundred or three hundred rand in it. They removed the safe keys, the kitchen keys and another set of safe keys from the purse.
Mrs Jeffreys asked what they wanted and one of the intruders replied, ‘We want money and firearms.’ She offered to show them where the money was. One of them held a knife to her back and threatened to kill her if she made any noise.
She led them towards the veranda and pushed Mr Jeffreys ahead of her. Once the intruders were outside she slammed the door shut and they ran off into the night. Mrs Jeffreys telephoned her son Kenneth who lived about a hundred metres away. He, in turn, called the police. The police put Mr Jeffreys in their car and drove at speed to the Port Shepstone Provincial Hospital. By the time they arrived Mr Jeffreys was dead.
He had died of a stab wound high up on his back between the right shoulder blade and the spine, penetrating his right lung and causing it to collapse. The progressive accumulation of blood in his chest cavity had led to an inability to breathe. In effect he had died of a lack of oxygen. There was a small wound on his left shoulder, probably inflicted with a screwdriver. He had defensive wounds on his forearms consistent with a struggle and with being held by the arms.
The four accused were rounded up quickly. Their campaign had not been well planned. They had made their intentions clear to local workers and they had left vital clues at the scene. The way they fled when Mrs Jeffreys slammed the veranda door in their faces also testified to a bumbling approach to robbery. They wore balaclavas to avoid recognition, but one of them left a clear palm print on the doorframe at the hotel.
At the trial they all recanted, saying they had been tortured by the police and told what to say. They gave most improbable, inconsistent versions of what had happened. There was insufficient evidence against Skofu Dlamini and he was found not guilty. Joseph Gcabashe was linked to the scene by his palm print and possession of the keys they had taken from the scene. He had also admitted to the Magistrate that he had participated in the robbery. The Court convicted him of murder, housebreaking with intent to rob and robbery, with aggravating circumstances. Jerome Gcaba and Bhekisisa Dlamini were similarly convicted on the strength of their admissions to the Magistrate. Gcabashe and Gcaba were also convicted of assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm to Mrs Jeffreys.
The Court found that there were no extenuating circumstances as far as Gcabashe and Gcaba’s conviction on the murder count was concerned and, by a majority decision, held that there were extenuating circumstances as far as Bhekisisa Dlamini was concerned. He appeared to have taken a lesser role and may have acted under the influence of the other accused.
On 12 December 1986 the Court sentenced Gcabashe and Gcaba to death on the murder count. Then, almost in the same breath, the Judge sentenced them to death on the housebreaking charge also. The Judge sentenced Gcabashe to eighteen months imprisonment for the assault upon Mrs Jeffreys, and Gcaba to two years. Bhekisisa Dlamini received ten years imprisonment on the murder charge, eighteen months imprisonment for the assault and eight years imprisonment on the housebreaking charge.
The Appeal Court confirmed the death sentences on the murder count but determined that the death sentences on the housebreaking charge could not stand because the Judge had made an elementary error. The Appeal Court therefore set aside the death sentences on the housebreaking charge and substituted in their place fifteen years imprisonment.
Gcabashe and Gcaba were hanged on 10 December 1987. Gcabashe was twenty-three years old. Gcaba was twenty-four.
Pretoria Zoo
52
We were in court, robed and ready, waiting for Judge van Zyl and the Assessors to enter. Wierda was ready to lead the first witness of the day. We were hoping to finish the evidence during the course of the day and to start the closing addresses the next day.
I turned in my seat and studied Labuschagne. He was sitting head down in the dock. He must have felt my eyes on him and looked up. He did not blink. I tried to read in his eyes the state of his mind. Sullen, bored, withdrawn, uncommunicative, listless, are the words that sprang to mind. He looked at me with what I saw as insolent indifference. I was suddenly sick of him.
Wierda stirred next to me. ‘Where are your car keys?’ I asked him on an impulse. I had to get out of there. I needed to sit down on my own somewhere and think.
He absentmindedly reached into his pocket without taking his eyes off the notes he was studying. ‘Here,’ he said, holding them up.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you at the lunch break.’
‘Where are you going?’ he asked, suddenly alarmed.
‘I need to take a long walk,’ I said. I relented a little when I saw the consternation on his face. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back by lunch and you’ll still be busy with the first two witnesses.’
Wierda nodded.
‘Where can I go to get away from the noise?’ I asked him.
‘The zoo is your best bet, at this time of the day, I think,’ he said after a pause.
I left the car in the zoo’s parking lot in the care of a self-appointed car guard, a young man with a toothy white smile on his face and township dust in his hair. I gave him fifty cents and promised him another fifty if the car was still in the same place on my return. He offered to wash it for an extra two rand fifty, payable on my return. I said I would be some time and paid him in advance.
There was a high wall around the zoo to shield it from the world outside.
At the main entrance I paid and picked up a brochure. After studying the map on the wall I turned hard right and immediately encountered some desultory looking vultures sitting on dead tree stumps in front of an artificial rock face made of cement and river sand. A huge Defence Force helicopter thundered overhead, but the birds in the cages didn’t stir.
I walked fast and tried not to think of the case. I passed two chimpanzees in a large cage. They sat as far apart as the cage would allow, facing opposite directions like a couple in dispute over some domestic arrangement. The male sat hands on knees, the female with folded arms. With lifeless, unblinking eyes they watched the few visitors passing by.
I walked faster, past the camels and the llamas, towards the flamingos. The camels had taken all the shade under the tree in their enclosure and the llamas were forced to lie in the sun. It was getting hot and I flung my jacket over my shoulder. The flamingos were separated by colour, the white and the pink. They were exercising, marching up and down, sifting through the silt in their ponds with their beaks, silently, with exaggerated movements of their skinny legs. They lifted their feet high as they stepped over imaginary hurdles under the surface of the pond. I saw small, numbered rings on their legs.
I took a wrong turn and arrived at a water fountain. I was watching the birds frolicking in the water when I became aware of a presence behind me. A row of cages held a variety of exotic birds. A scarlet ibis whose colours matched the Judge’s robes exactly stared at me with accusing eyes. It was flanked by two grey females, as colourless as he was garish.
I walked away; there was no escape for me in the detail of the fauna and flora of the zoo. There was so much birdsong but not a sound from the ones behind bars. It was as if they had been forbidden to talk. It was a mistake to come here, I thought.
On the way up I came across a gorilla in a large enclosure with a cement-lined moat. The large silverback sat on the cool cement of the moat with his back against the wall, with folded arms and protruding lower lip, sulking, staring at nothingness, like a petulant child. I stood directly in his line of sight but he didn’t acknowledge my presence.
The big cats had the pride of place, at the highest slope of the koppie overlooking the Apies River. I was sweating profusely by now. The sun was in my eyes and there was just a hint of a breeze behind me. Above their moats the big cats had cages of brick and mortar with heavy steel bars. A catwalk, enclosed on all sides by inch-thick steel bars, allowed their keepers to study them from all angles and to dart them with anaesthetics when necessary. A group of American tourists came along with a warden in a prison-green uniform. ‘This is where we keep the most dangerous predators,’ said the warden.
The nine-metre-high stone turrets at the top of the walls matched the guard towers of Maximum exactly in style and purpose and, most of all, in their menacing overseeing presence. I could not see into the dark interior of the warden’s enclosure a
t the top of the nearest turret, but I felt the presence of men with guns in the shadows inside. There was no corner of the cats’ enclosure where their keepers could not keep them under constant surveillance.
It was a long walk back to the car, although downhill. The path under my feet was smooth, but the earth on either side was dry and scuffed. Inside the pens it was worse. The animals had trampled the earth to a powdery dust and I saw that in every enclosure their hooves had beaten a single track along the inner perimeter, their pen an exercise yard of sorts. The only greenery was high up, near the tops of the few surviving trees, above the reach of the rhino and the antelope. In the elephant enclosure the bark had been stripped from the trees. Now and then an animal looked wearily at me, following my progress with grudging acceptance, stomping a hoof on the hard ground, scratching in vain for something to eat, but the place was barren. I felt shame and embarrassment.
Why did I come here? I asked myself. I should have gone to a bar and had a beer instead. The truth is that I was still seeking answers. There had to be a good reason for Leon Labuschagne to have killed those men at the reservoir.
The gorilla was still sitting in exactly the same place and the same pose as when I first passed his enclosure. He was utterly disconsolate.
I decided to hurry back to court.
Guilt overcame me, thinking of Labuschagne. Had I misjudged his attitude by so wide a margin? Wouldn’t I be disconsolate if I were in his position? Had I mistaken despair or shame or the absence of hope as sullenness, indifference, insolence even?
At the main entrance the attendant thrust a pack of forms into my hands. ‘Please fill this out and provide your name and address.’ For a moment I thought I was required to sign out and would have to wait for him to unlock the door, but it was only a form asking me for my comments on my visit to the zoo. I wrote a sarcastic comment: Now I get it. It’s like a prison for animals.
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