V3770 Stanley Smit

37

Smit broke into Miss Catherina Hanekom’s house and indecently assaulted and killed her. He was charged with housebreaking, rape and murder.

The deceased was an unmarried woman in her forties. She lived alone at 26 Park Street, Moorreesburg. She was feeble-minded and physically deformed with what was described as a pigeon chest. She was small, weighing about fifty kilograms and was about one point six metres tall. Although she was able to perform some of the rudimentary daily chores of her household and personal care she needed the assistance of a social worker and a neighbour, Mrs Wahl, for more demanding tasks. Miss Hanekom received a monthly disability grant from the State. She received help with her financial affairs as she was incapable of handling those responsibilities herself.

Mrs Wahl was away for the weekend of 30 August 1986. When she returned on 3 September she went to the deceased’s house. She found the front door open and, upon entering, found Miss Hanekom’s body under some blankets in the bedroom next to the bed. She went to the neighbours and they called the police.

The police found a trail of blood from the telephone in the passage to the body. It was plain that the deceased had been dragged from the telephone to her bedroom. There was blood on the sheets of the deceased’s bed and spattered blood on the headboard of the bed and the wall above the bed. There was a pool of blood on the linoleum floor at the feet of the body and smeared blood on the walls of the passage. Some fingerprints were found on the frame of the front door and on the inside of the door itself. The rest of the house was fairly neat and tidy, with no obvious signs of a struggle or ransacking.

When the blanket was removed from the body it was noted that Miss Hanekom had been partly undressed. Her panties had been removed and were found on the floor near the door. Several injuries to her frail body were visible to the naked eye. These were more fully explained by the pathologist who performed the post-mortem examination.

He described the injuries as follows:

In the back of the chest was a two-centimetre oblique incised wound, eleven centimetres from the posterior midline and nine centimetres below the prominent spine of the seventh cervical vertebra. The track of the wound could be followed forwards and medially and slightly upwards passing through the third left inter-costal space, through the upper lobe of the left lung, through the edge of the aorta and onto the back of the sternum at the front. The total length of this wound was eighteen centimetres. On the left side of the neck just below the left ear was a three point five centimetre stab wound through the carotid and internal jugular. Miss Hanekom had also suffered a broken nose. There were abrasions of the back of the head. The left lung had collapsed and there was some bleeding on the right side of the brain. Blood was found in the airways.

Miss Hanekom had died of the stab wounds of the chest and neck. She had been subjected to a systematic and cruel beating before she died.

The fingerprints taken at the scene were those of the accused. Smit gave evidence at his trial. He blamed his conduct on drugs and liquor – the usual scapegoats of a desperate defence.

The Court rejected this version for a number of reasons. It was inconsistent and self-contradictory. It didn’t match Smit’s actions in the house; they were the actions of a calculating mind. Smit also told the Court that he had spent some time with a certain Jakob Afrika, but the latter was actually in police custody at the time given by Smit. Smit kept changing his evidence to match the known objective facts and it was soon apparent that his evidence on the effects of alcohol and drugs on his state of mind was also a pack of lies.

The Court found that on all the acceptable evidence it was clear that Smit had entered the house with the intention of committing a crime. When he encountered the frail Miss Hanekom he first beat her mercilessly with some blunt object, breaking her nose and causing bleeding of the one side of the brain. Then he stabbed her in the back with a knife and dragged her, feet first, to the bedroom. There he removed her panties and indecently assaulted her. Then he stabbed her on the side of the neck. When blood from this last stab wound spurted onto his clothes, he pulled some blankets over the body and, after taking some precautions to ensure that no one would notice anything untoward at Miss Hanekom’s house for a while, he left.

The Court convicted him of housebreaking, indecent assault and murder. The inquiry into extenuating circumstances revealed none. Smit had been nineteen and a half years old at the time he murdered Miss Hanekom. His relative youth did not in itself constitute an extenuating circumstance. The Court found that he had killed in order to avoid detection, which was an aggravating factor.

On 5 June 1987 Smit was sentenced to three years imprisonment on the house breaking charge and a further twelve months imprisonment for the indecent assault he had committed. He was sentenced to death on the murder charge.

Six months after being sentenced Smit was hanged, on 8 December 1987.

He was not yet twenty-one.