Grim year of child murder trials
Jasmin Lee Pretorius, 4, was kidnapped and raped by her 27-year-old uncle in Brakpan. File picture: Dumisani Dube
Bongi Chauke was snatched from her bed and found murdered near her Soshanguve home. File picture: Herbert Matimba
Linda Hope is accused of murdering her stepdaughter, aged two and a half. She was due to go on trial yesterday (Monday) but never pitched at court. A warrant is out for her arrest
Zelda Venter reflects on 2015, which was a particularly shocking year regarding murder trials involving child victims.
Pretoria - After two decades of court reporting, I have heard pretty much all.
I take a murder trial in my stride, getting annoyed with the lies told by serial rapists, even after being positively identified through DNA evidence as the culprits.
However, there is nothing that can ever prepare me to handle a trial involving the brutal killing of a child. This was particularly a grim year regarding murder trials involving child victims.
Some of the trial judges appeared to have been affected by what they encountered - especially the gruesome pictures they saw. Within a few days of each other, Judge Mohamed Ismail presided over two of the most gruesome child killing cases and said he had the displeasure of hearing details of how a small child was raped and then brutally strangled.
Judge Ismail said he was at a loss for words at the brutality with which the children were killed.
One of these little victims was Jasmin Pretorius, in a trial which left all involved reeling in shock.
The only person seemingly unaffected was the killer, Sarel du Toit.
On each occasion Du Toit, 23, entered the high court in Pretoria via the holding cells in the basement with a bowed head. He remained this way and made absolutely no eye contact with anyone, including the judge, until he was taken down to the cells again.
The only time he spoke - barely audible - was when he pleaded guilty to raping and then strangling little Jasmin, 4, in her father’s Brakpan flat.
The child had visited her father, together with her older sister, for a few days.
Du Toit, who is her uncle, went out drinking with the father one night. When the night ended the latter went to sleep at his girlfriend’s home, while Du Toit fetched the sleeping child from her father’s bed.
He took her to his room, raped the child who dearly loved him and then strangled her. He stuffed her body under his bed and assisted the family and police the next day in searching for her.
Not even two life imprisonment terms meted out to him could prompt him to show any emotion.
Chillingly similar was the trial a few days later of Ben Maselane from Winterveld, north of Pretoria, who raped and strangled little Sibongile Chauke, 7.
The child was sleeping with her sister in her mother’s shack. Maselane dug a hole in the ground next to the shack to gain entry.
When he saw the near-naked child sleeping, he carried her to a nearby veld and raped her, before strangling her with his shoelaces.
Not satisfied that she was dead, he tied her tiny body to a pole and set it alight. Maselane also led the community and the police in a search for the child, whom he knew. He too, received two life sentences.
In both cases the families wanted to know why the children were killed, but no answers were forthcoming.
In sentencing the men, Judge Ismail each time told them “you are fortunate we no longer have the death sentence”.
Another victim who died a brutal death at the hands of an adult, was Christabelle Labuschagne. She died after being forcefully hit by her stepmother, Linda Hope. This child’s “sin” was that she messed the carpet with her lunch.
This infuriated Hope, who beat her until she limply fell to the ground.
Hope realised she had gone too far, and tried to wake the unconscious child by splashing her with water.
Hope entered into a plea-bargain agreement with the State and pleaded guilty to murder, in return for an 8-year-jail sentence.
Another man sent to jail to serve three life sentences for killing his two children and wife was former Siyabuswa traffic chief Joseph Selala. He shot all three execution-style while they were sleeping in their beds.
Khomotso, 12, Lethabo, 8 and their mother Vicky Masemola died instantly.
Selala’s defence was that he was not the killer. The family speculated about the motive - some said he had been abusive before, while others said he was jealous of his wife.
A suicide note, written in Selala’s handwriting, was found in the bedroom, in which he referred to his wife as “a b***h”.
Sentencing him, Judge Bert Bam said it was a senseless, horrific and terrible crime.
Then there was the teenager who blamed the devil for killing his mother, grandmother, brother aged 6 and baby sister.
The spindly 14-year-old hacked the four to death and received a total of 80 years’ imprisonment.
He pleaded guilty to the killings and explained how he first killed his mother.
She was sleeping when he hacked her and when she woke up, she tried to run away. She tripped and fell and he hacked her to death.
He then turned on his sleeping brother and hacked him to death in his bed, before killing his sleeping grandmother.
The teenager then grabbed his sleeping baby sister and ran into a veld with her, where she too, was hacked to death.
He told a probation officer that he felt unloved and rejected and that the devil told him the only answer was to kill his family.
Next year promises to be much of the same in the criminal courts, with details of how five children were allegedly tortured at the hands of their father, likely to unfold in May during the trial of the man dubbed the Springs monster, and his wife.
They were allegedly held captive in their home by their father, some were allegedly brutally assaulted, while others were said to have been both raped and assaulted.
The judges all had the same message: the courts would not tolerate this type of behaviour.
Pretoria News
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