INLSA
06/01/2012 The father of the Tukkies student recalls the last day that he spent with his son. Days later his teenage boy was dead and his son’s mother gang-raped and mutilated Picture: Thobile Mathonsi
‘Burn. May you burn in eternal hell. May you feel the pain you have brought me, the terror, the agony. May you never know peace.”
Fighting back tears, a Limpopo mother wept yesterday as she spoke for the first time of her terrifying two-hour ordeal on Tuesday afternoon that changed her life forever, after her estranged husband lured her to his rented house in Modimolle in Limpopo.
Speaking by telephone from her bed at an undisclosed Gauteng hospital, the woman who, along with her daughter and other relatives cannot be identified because of the sexual nature of the crime, cried as she recalled how she was forced to listen to her 20-year-old son made to plead for his life before being executed with a single shot to his head.
The woman, a financial consultant in the Limpopo town, had been stripped naked and bound to the bed by three casual workers her estranged husband had hired to remove palm trees from the garden
After he killed her son, he went back into the room and forced the men at gunpoint to rape her multiple times and then mutilate her with pliers, knives, a screw driver and even an angle grinder, digging them into her body and driving nails into her chest.
A screwdriver lies on top of several family photographs, including one of the rape victim, on a table in the suspects Modimolle home. It is believed that he may have been planning to use the screwdriver in the attack as well. Pictures: Thobile Mathonsi
INLSA
Then they fled in his white Toyota Fortuner.
None of them has been found as police launched a national manhunt, putting out an alert on all the country’s borders and following up leads among the many rumours.
Last night, the police believed the suspect was short of money.
A policeman close to the case said officers knew the suspect was desperate. “We know he is short of cash. He contacted a friend in Modimolle looking for money. He is around, but because he knows we are looking for him he is constantly on the move.
“We are playing a game of cat and mouse and desperately trying to close the net before he is gone,” he said, adding that the former Namibian national was thought to have several passports.
He phoned his matric-age daughter, who was on her way to spend the last week of her school holidays with him, shortly after orchestrating the attack on his estranged wife, confessing what he had done and warning her not to come. “I am dead inside,” she said yesterday,
“Cold and numb. I can’t understand it. I just want answers. I want to talk to him but at the same time I want nothing to do with him.
“He’s my dad and I love him, but I don’t understand. I am so confused, hurt, angry and sad,” she said.
The biological father of the young Pretoria University student who the man killed, said he had no words to express his horror or loss.
“I cannot exact revenge. It is not in my hands but God’s, and you must meet God.
“Even if not now, eventually you must meet God and answer for what you have done,” he said.
Fighting back tears, the father said he knew his son was in a better place where he was meant to be.
“You are safe now. You will be protected and looked after. Go well my son,” he said, staring at the last photo he had of him on his cellphone.
Yesterday a blood trail ran through the passage of the house where the attacks occurred, leading into a bedroom, the door partially broken off its hinges, blood smears along walls and a ransacked bathroom. Photographs of the woman and the homes of friends and family lay sprawled upon a dining room table. Also at the house was a box of .38 special ammunition; a cupboard filled with porcelain dolls, and messages of eternal love and the danger of ending a relationship scrawled across the couple’s wedding photograph.
The suspect, a local meat distributor, former Bloemfontein sheep farmer and Prieska sheriff, had lured not just his estranged wife, but her son and her daughter to the house.
Described by the woman’s friend as obsessively jealous, the man is believed to have begun planning to wipe out his wife’s entire family, but leave her alive to live with the aftermath.
“He was jealous and totally obsessed with her.
“He would follow her and watch her constantly.
“He wanted her to be with no one else but him.
“It was either him or no one,” he said.
The suspect’s plans were thwarted when his stepson arrived at the house with a friend.
The suspect sent the boy’s friend on an errand to buy cooldrinks before executing his stepson.
The friend said as he left his student friend, who had had a bad feeling about the meeting, the suspect laughed strangely and gave him a “weird” look.
“I wish I had stayed or convinced him not to go; I wish I had done something to save my friend.”
After maiming his wife, the suspect reportedly raced off to Bela Bela to hunt down his teenage stepdaughter and his in-laws, all of whom he blamed for his marital problems.
His blame issues led his wife (the mutilated rape victim) to leave last February and get a domestic protection order against him.
Yesterday, the student’s father held his head in his hands. “He was my everything. When my sisters phoned to say that the ‘boertjie’ had shot a kid, I knew it was my son. When the cops phoned minutes later and told me to run and hide my daughter I knew my son was dead. I knew he was gone,” he said.
The police are confident they will arrest the man. Limpopo spokesman, Brigadier Hangwani Mulaudzi said: “It is a matter of time.”
Modimolle detective head, Colonel Simon Mogale said they knew he was alive.
“He is alive… for now. We just have to find and catch him,” he said. – Pretoria News Weekend
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