V3769 Sizwe Goodchild Leve

35

Lungile Tandamisa, Sizwe Leve and Vuyani Pikashe robbed and murdered Mrs Anita Webber.

Mrs Anita Webber was a forty-one-year-old housewife who lived with her husband and two children, twelve and fifteen years old respectively, in a suburban house in Paarl. On Thursday 19 June 1986 Mr Webber went to work and the children went to school. Mrs Webber had previously invited a neighbour, Mrs Aletta Ferreira, to come over for tea at ten-fifteen that morning. Mrs Ferreira told the Court that she had seen three men working in Mrs Webber’s garden and when the agreed time approached she went across to the Webbers’ house. She pressed the doorbell after hearing something in the Webbers’ bedroom. She called to Mrs Webber when there was no response. Then she saw three men coming out of the garage. One of them said, ‘Madam is in the kitchen. She just paid us.’ She went in but could not find Mrs Webber in the house. She left and called her husband. They returned to the Webbers’ house and eventually found Mrs Webber’s body in the garage. There was a wire ligature around Mrs Webber’s neck which Mr Ferreira untied. They called the police, who arrived promptly. When a detective picked up a blue tracksuit top next to the body, the handle of a knife fell out of it.

The Senior District Surgeon was called to the scene and he certified that Mrs Webber was dead. He also performed the post-mortem examination on her body the next day and found four groups of serious injuries. In his opinion any one of these on its own could have caused Mrs Webber’s death. The first of these injuries consisted of an eight-centimetre-deep stab wound on the chest, on the right side, which had penetrated the right lung and caused it to collapse. Secondly, there was a five-centimetre-deep stab wound on the left side of the neck, the blade of the knife impacting on one of the vertebrae and cutting into it. The blade of the knife was still in the wound; it had the inscription SABLE  and the cutting edge was seven point one centimetres long. Although the blade had missed the carotid artery, there was some bleeding in the sheath of the carotid. Thirdly, ribs six, seven, eight and nine on the left and one, two and three on the right side of the chest were fractured. In the fourth place, there were internal bruises on the neck associated with a central depression around the neck caused by the wire ligature. The bruising was deep enough into the structures of the neck to affect the trachea and bony elements of the neck. The hyoid and thyroid cartilage bones were fractured. All of these injuries were suffered while the deceased still had a heartbeat.

These were but the main injuries. Mrs Webber had been struck so hard on the left eye with some blunt object that she would have lost her sight in that eye had she survived. There were fourteen stab wounds altogether, including a further one to the neck and eleven to the chest. According to the pathologist the most brutal force would have had to be used to inflict the injuries he had found, but after the ligature had been tied around Mrs Webber’s neck she would have expired from lack of oxygen within minutes.

The three accused were arrested soon after the discovery of the body. Each was linked to the scene by forensic evidence and by admissions made to the police, to the Magistrate before whom they first appeared, and at the trial. Tandamisa’s palm print was found on the left rear side-window of the car at the house. Hairs matching Leve’s were found on a blue tracksuit top next to the deceased’s body. He later admitted to having left that tracksuit top at the scene. The handle that had fallen out of the tracksuit top when the body was discovered matched the blade found embedded in the deceased’s neck. A fingerprint matching that of Pikashe’s left ring finger was found on a transistor radio that had been discarded in the shrubbery next to the house.

Leve took a senior police officer to the scene and explained what had happened:

When we were opposite the gate a white woman on the cement block (pointed out) called us. We went to her. We entered the yard and met her halfway. She asked if we were looking for work. We said yes. She went to fetch weeding implements. We weeded here (pointed out). She went into the house. She came out again. She asked my friend to work under the tree. She took a bucket and rinsed it under the tap. My other friend who has not yet been arrested then said we should grab the woman. We all agreed to grab her. She was back from the tap and went in through the garage door. We followed her.

Inside the garage I grabbed her by the arm. The man who has not yet been arrested stabbed her with a knife. I took the knife from my friend and stabbed her again with the knife. The knife fell and my other friend who has been arrested picked it up and stabbed her again. The knife broke. I held her again while the one who has not been arrested went to fetch a wire while I was holding her by the neck. My friends tied her up with the wire.

We entered the house through the window. We searched the room. Each searched a different room. My friend who is not here told us he had found twenty-four rand. My other friend who is now at the police station peeped out the window and said someone was coming. We climbed through the same window and found another white woman in front of the house. She asked us where the madam was. We said she was in the back yard. She went into the house and we ran away.

Pikashe gave more information about Leve and Tandamisa’s actions. He told the police that Leve had grabbed the deceased from behind after following her into the garage. Leve then threw her down on the garage floor and sat on top of her with his knees on her chest and throttled her with his hands while Tandamisa was hitting her in the face with his fists. Tandamisa told Pikashe to look for some wire and he found a piece in the garage and tied it around the deceased’s neck. Tandamisa then stabbed the deceased next to the heart with the knife. When Tandamisa stabbed her again, the knife broke. Pikashe’s version explained the broken ribs and the severe injury to the deceased’s left eye.

Tandamisa also admitted involvement, but implicated Pikashe in the stabbing too. At his first appearance in court Tandamisa told the Magistrate that all three of them had stabbed the deceased with the same knife. He admitted that he was the one handling the knife when its blade broke off in the deceased’s neck.

The Court convicted each of them on both counts – murder and armed robbery – as charged in the indictment. This meant that the death sentence was available on the robbery charge, if the Court in its discretion deemed it appropriate. On the murder charge, however, the Court would be obliged to pass the death sentence unless there were extenuating circumstances present or a particular accused had been under the age of eighteen at the time of the murder.

The District Surgeon had earlier conceded under cross-examination that he had examined both Pikashe and Tandamisa to determine their respective ages, and that both of them could have been under the age of eighteen years at the time of the crimes concerned. The Court sentenced them to twenty years imprisonment on the murder charge and to ten years imprisonment on the robbery charge. The sentences were to run concurrently.

According to Leve’s own evidence the plan to break in somewhere had already been hatched the night before they killed Mrs Webber. The Court held that there were no extenuating circumstances in respect of Leve and sentenced him to death on 26 May 1987. He received a further sentence of ten years imprisonment on the robbery charge.

He was twenty-three years old when he was hanged on 8 December 1987 and had spent six months under sentence of death.

‘Why do you think they killed her,’ I asked Wierda, ‘when there were three of them and they could so easily have held her down and taken what they wanted?’ I had asked a similar question about Mr Marx.

‘I’m fucked if I know,’ he said with unexpected vehemence. Then he added, ‘And I don’t care either. We are wasting our time and energy with these cases. We should find out why our client killed those guys at the reservoir instead. We still don’t know.’

Wierda looked at me with his head cocked to one side. ‘We know nothing at all. We are running headlong into a dark tunnel with no idea what is going to come out of his evidence, and here we are, reading and discussing cases that happened in Cape Town.’

I ignored his outburst. ‘No, there must be a reason. It might not be a good one, but it should at least be comprehensible.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think they were scared. They were just scared and the thing escalated as the events unfolded.’

‘Isn’t that what happened at the reservoir, that panic set in, and that the thing was not planned?’ I suggested.

Wierda did not answer, but he had given me an idea about an alternative argument, one that would help us to establish extenuating circumstances if our client were convicted. But there were flaws in Wierda’s premise.

‘I don’t buy that,’ I said immediately. ‘They had planned to tie her up before they followed her into the garage. That means it was premeditated, doesn’t it?’

‘No,’ said Wierda, sticking to his guns. ‘There was a fair degree of overkill here. They held her down, strangled her and stabbed her until the knife broke off in her body. They even took turns. It is as if they were caught up in an event beyond their control.’

‘There has to be some rational explanation for this kind of behaviour.’

Wierda was not to be put off so easily. ‘They are animals, not in control of their actions like you and me. They hunt in packs. They don’t give a damn about anybody’s life, their own included.

‘Isn’t that what happened with the others?’ he asked and then answered his own question, ‘Let’s start with Scheepers, and Wessels, and Moatche. A gang behaves differently to the way one would expect of its individual members. That much I have learnt from my previous cases. As soon as there is a gang all reason goes out the window. And what about those three in the Free State? What were their names again, Marotholi and the other two? Didn’t they behave in exactly the same way? And what about those guys in Leeuwkop?’

I did not have an answer. Perhaps Wierda had a point and, instead of debating the motives of the killers they had hanged during those last two weeks, we should have been searching for a motive for our client’s actions. Wierda had spoken with vehemence, and I had listened in silence. Roshnee, as usual, did not participate. Even if Wierda’s theory of mob psychology were able to account for the ease with which our client had become part of the execution team at Maximum, it still did not provide a rational and cogent account for his actions at the reservoir.

At the reservoir Labuschagne had been alone, and finding a coherent reason for his actions was not easy.