Higgins and Lady were winning their fight for life and the media storm had passed. Meanwhile, Pieter de Jager had become obsessed with the questions of who had attacked his rhinos and why, where the horns were now, and whether the police would catch the poachers. He wanted answers and he wanted to know what action was being taken.
The initial police presence had looked impressive. A police general, officers of the Hawks specialist crime unit, investigators from CapeNature and a forensic team had all quickly arrived, cordoned off the area and gone about their business. However, when Pieter had given his affidavit to the Hawks captain, he had found it necessary to query why the investigation was being headed by an inexperienced, low-ranking officer. He had been assured the constable would receive help and supervision from experienced senior officers.
Police trackers had worked the ground and discovered the tracks of three men and the place at which they had cut the fence and left the reserve, but there was no sign as to where the poachers had entered Fairy Glen. The reserve isn’t difficult to access and one suspicion was that one or all three of the poachers might have masqueraded as clients and gone on a game drive, or even stayed at the lodge.
On Wednesday, four days after the attack, Pieter got a call from a friend who is a vet. This contact, who acted in confidence and on the basis that his identity would not be disclosed, gave Pieter names of suspects, a description of the vehicle they had used, and the location of where the horns might be.
Pieter called the police colonel in Cape Town and was told he was busy with an investigation, but would pass the information to the investigating officer (the constable) who would report progress to Pieter by 7.30 the next morning. Pieter went to bed hoping the police were acting on the information and that he would get news soon.
The next day was taken up with getting Higgins eating again and by evening Pieter remembered he had heard nothing from the police. They already had suspects’ names, the description of a vehicle, and even an address – what more did the police need? Pieter began to wish he could take matters into his own hands and do the police work himself. He went home and once again got on the phone to the police. He expressed, in no uncertain terms, his frustration and disappointment, and demanded to know what use had been made of the information he had passed to the police 36 hours earlier. Trails go cold and Pieter knew that it wouldn’t be long before this trail was too cold to follow.
His irate phone call produced a reaction and 15 minutes later Officer Fritz from the Hawks rang him. Fritz had an air of efficiency and competence about him and Pieter felt that at last he had an investigating officer who would make progress. They agreed to meet at 9.00 the next morning.
The new investigating officer was 30 minutes early for the meeting, and Pieter started by quizzing him closely about his experience and background. Pieter himself is an ex-police officer, so when Fritz explained his background in the Murder and Robbery unit in Brixton, Pieter was able to evaluate the calibre of the new man.
Now in possession of all of Pieter’s information, Fritz left to follow up the potential leads. The address Pieter had been given for the suspects was in Elands Bay on the West Coast. The police went there and the vehicle was discovered in the garage, but the suspects were not there and there was no evidence to link those who had lived in the house to the poaching of Higgins and Lady. It was nearly a week since Pieter had given the information, and a week and a half since the attack, and the trail had gone cold.
Next came a bizarre twist when a relative of one of the suspects – a man known to Pieter – turned up at Pieter’s office asking to borrow a small sum of money for petrol. The suspects were small-time game dealers working on the fringes of legality. What was one of them doing coming to ask Pieter to borrow a small sum of money? Pieter’s suspicion is that the man was trying to show him that he had no money and therefore wasn’t part of the gang. Pieter called the police and the man was arrested at the gates of the lodge. Police enquiries revealed that he was wanted for game-dealing irregularities in Limpopo province and he was transferred there. Pieter is convinced that, had the police investigation moved faster and been more competent, the poachers would have been caught. He had given the police hot information from a reliable source and days had been wasted. Ten days after the poaching incident Higgins and Lady were slowly recovering, and Bottie and Pieter’s family persuaded him to go on a planned Christmas break.
Pieter had thought it weird when the man turned up to borrow money but things got even more strange when, on Christmas Day at the family’s holiday house, he got a call from a man named Mike who said he worked in exports and wanted to talk about the poaching incident. Mike sounded credible and, when he called Pieter a second time asking him to take a parcel back with him to Worcester (near Fairy Glen), Pieter agreed. The parcel was to be delivered to the holiday house at 7.00 the next morning. Mike had not made it clear whether there was any connection between the parcel and the poaching, and Pieter spent an anxious 10 minutes waiting at the gate for it to arrive.
The parcel carrier turned out to be an elderly woman called Suzy and the parcel was a parrot! It appeared that Pieter was merely being asked to do an innocent favour for his potential informant. As he drove back up from the gates with the parrot in its cage on the seat beside him, he found himself trying to talk to it and wondered whether he was going mad. He discussed the police investigation with the parrot, and asked the bird who Mike was but made no more progress with the parrot than he had with the police!
On the drive back to Fairy Glen, surrounded by his family, he got a ‘number withheld’ call: ‘Careful, you’re playing with fire and you’ll get burnt’. The threat was clear but was it in relation to anything specific? Was he being warned off following up with Mike? When they got back to Worcester the parrot was collected by a woman who also conveyed a message from Mike, confirming a meeting the next morning at 11.00 and giving Pieter the address.
The main lodge at Fairy Glen
A plastic refuse rhino
A view across the Fairy Glen reserve
With officer Fritz next to him, Pieter knocked on Mike’s door at the appointed time. Mike is blind and he has two glass eyes, which he took out at the beginning of the meeting, saying, ‘My eyes have already been removed because I saw too much’. Pieter and Fritz exchanged glances, and Pieter wondered if he had perhaps strayed into a lunatic asylum. However, the fear and tension that Mike transmitted were real and both men felt it. His eyes were not his only injuries – his arms had light scars on them and his wrists bore the telltale marks of having been slashed. Mike’s troubles had apparently started when he took a new partner – a Chinese man – into his import/export business in Cape Town. Mike said he began to give information to the police about some of his partner’s activities that worried him. Now he spoke of no longer fully trusting the police, and of having ‘handled a rhino horn’ that had been exported only a week earlier.
The meeting was tense and disjointed, and Mike said he wouldn’t talk more fully unless he was guaranteed immunity from prosecution and given police protection. Officer Fritz pointed out that such guarantees were not easy to get and he would need a lot more hard facts. Mike refused to co-operate further without the protections he had asked for, and another trail hit a dead end.
Pieter believes Mike was genuine and had information of real value, but that he was also muddled and badly frightened, and was not prepared to give the police enough information up front to guarantee his protection.
Was the blind man aware of the suspects based on the West Coast? Had they poached the horns to fulfil an order from his Chinese colleagues? The horns weighed approximately 11kg; at that time rhino horn was worth around R495,000 per kilo. Had the poachers been partners in the venture, or were they just hired hands? Their night’s work could have earned them R5,000 each, R50,000 each – or much more. Pieter and the police still have many questions, but few answers. At the time of writing – one year and six months after the attack – neither Bottie nor Denis, nor any other staff members at the reserve, had been asked by the police to give a statement. At the time of the attack the rand was worth R9.80 to the US dollar and R14.60 to the pound sterling.