Behind the Pretoria fresh-produce market we turn onto a gravel road leading into the veld. We’re in a dismal no-man’s-land between the suburbs: the sweaty armpit of the city.
There’s a menacing silence. In places, the grass is burned black.
Then we arrive – at the police tape, at the manhole, set among bluegums and weeds and rubbish, into which young Sheldean was thrown. If the perpetrator had not pointed out the place, you realise, she might never have been found.
At the mouth of the shaft lies a fresh bunch of pink flowers.
Into this pitch-dark hole, all of ten metres deep, her body was tossed.
Like Alice, she fell into a hole – down, down, tumbling to the bottom.
But there was no Wonderland for this little girl.
The wind gusts through the bluegums, and you know: no one deserves a death like hers.
And no one deserves a life like hers.
“Tuinrand” says the decorative lettering on Sheldean Human’s dark-blue school shirt.
It’s an ordinary school photograph of a little girl with blonde hair cut straight across her forehead. Big blue eyes, gold earrings, an animated, gap-toothed smile.
She was only seven years old. It was her first term in grade two – a time when the M in her ABC should have stood for Mommy or Mouse – not Molest and Murder.
Pink was her favourite colour. It was the colour of her bike, the colour she was wearing when she walked down the road on Sunday afternoon, 18 February 2007, never to be seen alive again.
Other grade two children in the country would have already been in pyjamas, brushing their teeth, on their way to bed, when Elize Human discovered her daughter was missing. Elize couldn’t find her with any one of the thirty-seven other residents at their commune in Pretoria Gardens. Neither was she with Uncle Flippie, on whose mattress on the floor she liked to sit and chat.
She was nowhere to be found.
After a while, Elize went to the police station, while family and friends began to scour the streets of Pretoria. They searched well into the small hours, but found nothing.
The next day more people in the neighbourhood joined in the search. The day after, even more. The whole of Pretoria was up in arms. Sheldean’s disappearance touched people’s hearts.
Women in pink T-shirts held protest marches. Prayer chains were set in motion, fists were raised against crime in the country. Elize was inundated with pink sympathy. She made the front pages nearly every day, this mother with more mileage on her face than years in her life.
At the commune in Ernest Street, buckets of flowers were lined up against the fence. There were ribbons, rosaries, and candles melting in the sun.
Sheldean Human.
Sheldean’s mother, Elize Human.
Elize Human and a friend in T-shirts worn by the support group.
The police had only one suspect. Andrew Jordaan (26), a skinny, soft-spoken newspaper vendor, had been playing in the park with Sheldean and her friend on the afternoon she disappeared. He was questioned and questioned again. And arrested.
For two weeks he indignantly, arrogantly protested his innocence. He had had nothing to do with the missing child. He knew nothing. He even passed a lie detector test. The police finally realised they would have to release him for lack of evidence.
In a last-ditch effort, Captain Bone Boonstra phoned Piet Byleveld. The suspect was being released the next day, he said. Would Piet be willing to have a go? Of course Piet would.
“One more thing,” Boonstra said, “in Jordaan’s room we found newspaper clippings about you and the Leigh Matthews case …”
When Piet Byleveld pointed the nose of his silver Mercedes in the direction of Pretoria on his way to see his new client, masses of cosmos were flowering exuberantly at the Irene off-ramp. He still remembers that chaos of colour.
It was symbolic of his career at the time. In full bloom. After his big breakthrough in the Leigh Matthews case in 2004, he’d become used to seeing the title “supercop” precede his name in the media. He had become famous as South Africa’s ace detective.
He didn’t know it that afternoon, but in October 2007, he would be promoted from superintendent to director, skipping the rank of senior superintendent – something which, with its strict protocol, was almost unheard of in the police service. Piet was astonished when Commissioner Selebi summoned him to give him the news. His serial-killer successes had earned him this promotion, Selebi said, because “our own” Byleveld was probably the best serial-killer investigator in the world. When the SAPS ranking structure changed, he became brigadier. Later, in 2008, he was also awarded the SAPS’s coveted Commendation Medal.
“Just have a look at the back of the medal,” he tells me one day. “It says 007. It means I’m only the seventh person in the police to receive this medal.” And he gives me a 007 wink.
But here at Casa Piet in Roodepoort there are no Martini cocktails. Only Amstels. His expensive liquor he keeps under lock and key in a special built-in, glass-fronted cabinet Elize had made for him.
Nearly forty years of Piet’s life may have disappeared into other people’s dockets, but at last the farm boy from the Waterberg was getting his dues.
Earlier, Elize showed me her rock of an engagement ring, set in white gold, and told me that Piet had been so nervous when he proposed that he had dropped the ring. His proposal had not happened on the Thames River, as Piet had planned, but on the roof of a London hotel. Theodore and Virnalize were also present.
Piet had hidden the ring in a red rose. When the big moment arrived, he handed her the flower but he trembled so much that the ring fell out and landed with a thud on the floor.
“And then I said yes. What a perfect moment,” Elize gushes, blushing.
It was difficult, however, for Esmie to accept his new relationship, says Piet.
When he retired, Elize organised a party for him on 3 July 2010. It was a swanky affair with 300 guests, also celebrating his sixtieth birthday. A Johannesburg daily published an article about it, accompanied by a large photograph of the two lovebirds.
On his retirement, Piet decided to make their relationship “official”. “I didn’t want to live a lie any more,” Piet explained. “I’d lived one long enough.”
For Esmie, alone with Meisie in the townhouse in Weltevreden Park, it was a bitter experience, seeing, on the front page of a newspaper, her estranged husband gazing lovingly into the eyes of another woman. On the day of Piet’s party, she poured out her heart in an interview with the Saturday Star. She spoke of Piet’s “drinking problem” and his “affairs with other women”, but added that she still loved her boerseun.
Things had turned belly up when he’d started working at Brixton Murder and Robbery, she said. His personality changed, and he began chasing other women. He had humiliated her.
For all these years, she told Saturday Star, she was the one who had stuck with him through all his difficult cases. She, too, had been the target of death threats. “But I went on being a good wife – cooking and cleaning for him, washing and ironing his clothes.”
When he read the article, Piet was furious. To add insult to injury, just two weeks after his divorce had been finalised in September 2010, a Sunday paper revealed his “transgressions” with various women, his arrogance, and claimed that his image was not as “Omo clean” as he would have people believe.
“I won’t even stoop so low as to respond to that,” Piet says and the topic returns to a miserable Andrew Jordaan, sweating in his cell at the Hercules police station, waiting for Piet’s famous “confession” interview.
On Piet’s arrival, he shook Jordaan’s hand – as polite and civilised and humane and calculated as only Piet Byl knew how to be.
When Jordaan realised he was dealing with the top cop of the SAPS, he instantly became nervous.
“Yes, he got a huge fright!” Piet grins.
He booked Jordaan out. Inspectors Magina and Shezi put him in cuffs and shackles and took him to the Brixton police station.
After the Unit for Serious and Violent Crime in Alexandra had been closed down, Piet had arranged for its members to move into the offices of the former Murder and Robbery Unit at the Brixton police station. Piet himself was back in his old office. He can’t think of an office anywhere in the world he would rather work in, Piet says.
At ten past two in the afternoon Jordaan was waiting for Piet in the interrogation room at Brixton.
It was make-or-break time. Piet excused his colleagues, saying that he wanted to speak to Jordaan in private.
“I offered him a cigarette and the two of us sat there, smoking.”
Initially Piet spoke to Jordaan as if he were making a new friend. “First I buttered him up and said I would look after him; there wouldn’t be any problems.”
Jordaan told Piet that, despite growing up poor, he had a good relationship with his father and stepmother. He lived in a back room on their property in Vom Hagen Street. He and his father delivered papers in the mornings. That was how he made a living.
When Piet was satisfied that Jordaan was at ease, he began to question him:
“Andrew, why are there newspaper clippings of Leigh Matthews and me in your room?”
“You’re my hero for solving Leigh’s case. I’ve always dreamed of being a detective myself.”
“Have you travelled a bit? Have you ever been to Durban?” Piet was throwing out feelers, because he knew about a similar unsolved murder in Durban.
“Yes, I’ve stayed with people in Durban.”
“Durban girls are pretty, aren’t they? How do you feel about girls?”
“No, I like girls.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Yes, but we broke up a long time ago.”
“And have you had sex?”
Jordaan nodded.
“Have you ever had sex with underage girls?”
“No!” Jordaan was immediately on guard.
“Do you know Elize Human?”
“Yes, I often go there. And I know Sheldean well.”
“Now tell me, Andrew, about that day Sheldean went missing … ”
Piet noticed Jordaan was sweating. “And he was chain-smoking. I knew then that he was my man, I just had to get him to confess.”
Jordaan told Piet he had been at the park that afternoon with Sheldean and her friend. They wanted Kentucky chicken and he – nice guy that he was – went to buy them some. Then they returned to the park, where he played with them on the swings.
A twenty-six-year-old child with ungainly long legs on a swing.
A twenty-six-year-old paedophile on the swings with his quarry.
When Piet asked about Sheldean’s clothes, Jordaan described her denim skirt and pink T-shirt.
“What was the colour of her panties?”
“No, I don’t know. Oh yes, they were pink.”
“Did you push her on the swing?”
“Yes, her friend too. On the merry-go-round as well.”
“At the swings, did you push them from the front or from behind?”
“From behind.”
“Now, Andrew, how on earth do you know she was wearing pink panties if you were standing behind her? You wouldn’t have been able to see her panties.”
Jordaan’s face blanched. “No, I did push her from the front once.”
After they had played in the park, Jordaan took the girls home and left, he told Piet.
“Why did you carry Sheldean home?”
“She was barefoot.”
Piet began to put on the pressure.
“But someone saw you and Sheldean at the gate? Sheldean had her arms around your neck.”
“Yes, she knocked my cap off my head and I told her she was cheeky for her age.”
Piet took a wild chance and said: “Listen, Andrew, someone saw her running after you …”
Jordaan hesitated for a moment. “Yes, it’s true. She came to say goodbye and asked to come with me. She didn’t want to stay with her mother any more, because she didn’t give her food.”
“Is that so …” Piet kept silent for a long moment.
Almost paternally, he said to Jordaan: “I can see you’re terribly nervous, Andrew. What’s bothering you?”
Andrew looked at Piet, shamefaced. “Yes …”
Now Piet confronted him: “Andrew, I know you killed her. I’m not going to tell you where I got the information, but I know the facts. You killed her, didn’t you, and you dumped her body somewhere? In a dam or something.”
Piet looks at me. “Then Andrew wiped away a tear. And I knew I had him. He said because he had so much respect for me he would tell me everything. He trusted me.”
It took Piet three weeks to catch Donovan Moodley. And only thirty-six minutes to break down Andrew Jordaan.
Piet sat listening as Jordaan spun out his story, stuttering, little by little. He had crossed the railway line with Sheldean, Jordaan told Piet, and they’d walked into the veld. When he was certain there was no one near, he grabbed her and pushed his fingers into her vagina. She fought back, kicking him between the legs.
He wasn’t expecting that, and he saw red. Furious, he grabbed her by the throat and throttled her. He kept it up until her body went limp. When he saw she was dead, he pushed his fingers into her vagina again.
Later he tossed her down a manhole.
“I kept bombarding him: Did you rape her as well? He kept denying it, though I’m convinced he did.”
Jordaan agreed to point out the crime scene. He wanted to get it off his chest because it bothered him, he confessed to Piet in tears.
Piet arranged for a police photographer, and Captain Mike van Aardt agreed to oversee the pointing-out process in his capacity as an independent officer.
At a distance, Piet followed them from Brixton to Pretoria. He was worried because it was getting late and he wanted to find the body while there was still some daylight left.
While he was waiting for Jordaan to point out the scene, Piet parked under a tree. He stood in the shade, smoking one cigarette after another to pass the time.
“I was going out of my mind. At half past five Mike phoned. Relief. Jordaan had done the pointing out. But there was no sign of Sheldean’s body at the entrance to the manhole.”
Later, on a photograph from the docket, I look at a tearful Jordaan pointing at the manhole.
In the failing light, Piet followed Van Aardt’s directions to a place behind the Pretoria Technikon, from where he continued along a gravel road.
Piet waited until Van Aardt had left with Jordaan. “If he caught even a fleeting glimpse of me at the murder scene, he could claim in court that he had been intimidated.”
Night began to fall. Piet searched, but found no sign of the body.
Then he became aware of a smell he knew only too well. The unmistakable smell of a decomposing body. Sheldean. She was there, he knew it.
Hurriedly Piet sent for the dog unit which was stationed in Soshanguve. Spotlights were erected. The men were lowered on ropes to the bottom of the manhole.
No sign of her there either.
A large stormwater pipe led away from the hole, they noticed. They followed the pipe to where it ended.
She wasn’t there.
But about forty metres further, the dogs became frantic. They had found something.
She was lying on her stomach. Sheldean.
This old sniffer dog’s nose literally led him to the little victim.
Piet immediately took control of the crime scene. It was cordonned off with yellow police tape, and police officers kept guard. No one besides Piet and the forensic experts was allowed entry.
“Sheldean’s body was swollen; in places the skin was broken. The water and two weeks of hot weather had accelerated the decomposition process. Her face was unrecognisable. The only way we could identify her was by one gold earring and her denim skirt. And a tuft of blonde hair over her left ear.”
Piet arranged for Superintendent André Neethling, who knew Elize Human personally, to fetch her from Ernest Street. They took her to the provisional control room at the Hercules police station, where he and a chaplain broke the news to her. Hysterical, she ran blindly down Sannie Street. They finally had to drive her to hospital in a police car and have her admitted.
Her little china doll – as she referred to Sheldean – was broken.
Piet arranged for Elize’s friend, a nurse, to identify the body. “I didn’t want the aunt or the mother to do it. Rather not.”
Under the spotlights, the forensic team inspected every millimetre of the ditch for hair, blood – anything that could possibly be linked to the crime. Piet stood by, continually reminding the men what to watch out for.
At ten they called it a night. Sheldean’s body was removed from the stormwater ditch and loaded into the upright white hearse for transport to the Pretoria morgue.
Early the next morning the forensic team was back. Shortly afterwards they found Sheldean’s pink shirt and torn panties, in the mud, halfway down the drainage pipe.
A day later, on 7 March, Piet drove to Pretoria in the early morning to attend Sheldean’s autopsy. “I was curious to see whether the pathologists, against all expectations, could determine the cause of death. And whether she had been raped.”
Body 369/07 lay on the shiny autopsy table. “It was hopeless. When the doctor started with the post-mortem, her head came off. It couldn’t even be determined whether the fragile neck bones had been broken. We had to rely on Jordaan’s confession: death by strangulation. Neither was it possible to establish whether she had been sexually abused. No DNA evidence was found during the post-mortem or earlier, at the murder scene.”
Piet remained in control of the case until Jordaan’s first court appearance, after which he handed over the docket to Mike van Aardt to prepare it for the trial.
The trial began on 25 March 2008. Andrew Jordaan sat in the dock in the Pretoria High Court like Rodin’s Thinker, chin in hand.
In his other hand was a copy of the Quiet Time Bible for Men. He smiled broadly at the reporters filing into the courtroom. His family came over to chat. He was suddenly a celebrity, basking in the spotlight.
Madelein Herbst, who lived in a flat on the same property as Jordaan, testified that he had knocked on her door at half past seven that Sunday evening. He was trembling, quite beside himself. When she asked what had happened, he said that he had beaten up a cop after the police had searched him for drugs and slapped him around.
Outside the court it was a circus at times. There were hundreds of protesters in pink T-shirts and hordes of photographers; posters with slogans like “Burn, bastard, burn!” were waved in the air while Jordaan’s photograph was set alight. And at the centre was the grieving mother in a new fiery red hairdo, mourning stiff-lipped behind her dark glasses, clad in a pink T-shirt with Sheldean’s school photograph printed on the front.
A benefactor had donated a car, Sheldean’s funeral had been paid for in full, and donations were pouring in.
Piet was in court every day during the hearing. “As the days passed, a different picture emerged of young Sheldean.”
She was not just the bubbly pink poppet her mother had presented to the world. Barely a week before she died, she had fainted from hunger while at school. She was apparently given only three meals a week at home, and she survived on the school’s lunches. Sheldean was a neglected little girl.
Don’t ask about everything that happened to Sheldean in her short life, Elize Human told me in an interview shortly after Andrew Jordaan had been charged with her daughter’s murder. To the question whether Sheldean had been abused before, her mother replied, “No comment,” and added that everything her young daughter had had to endure touched a raw nerve in her.
Besides photos and press cuttings of Piet and Leigh Matthews in Jordaan’s back room, there were books and files with photographs of naked women, most of them blonde. On one photo the subject’s genital area was covered with a photo of a different person’s genitals, without any pubic hair. Andrew appeared to have liked blonde girls – very young blonde girls.
Sheldean’s little friend, who had been at the park with her that afternoon, testified in a separate room. Afterwards, she was brought into the courtroom to identify Jordaan. When she saw him she turned sharply but a moment later she pointed a small finger straight at Jordaan.
According to the head social worker of the police, Captain L’Marie Strauss, Jordaan had been indecently assaulting this child since the age of seven. This had carried on for six months, until Sheldean’s disappearance.
The friend’s evidence was damning, Piet says. She testified that she’d seen Jordaan look at Sheldean’s panties in the park. Twice she had told Sheldean “to sit properly”. She felt sure that “Andrew was going to take her to his room and to his bed, because I could see that he liked watching her vissie [little fish],” she told the social worker.
This poor child – the victim who survived – never told her mother about the abusive behaviour of Jordaan, who was also her godfather. Neither did she want her mother to see her statement or be present in court while she was testifying.
Just like Sheldean’s sad life story, this little girl’s story also unfolded in court. She too had been let down by society.
Most appalling was that her mother, in spite of the shocking revelations continued to believe irrevocably in Jordaan’s innocence. After Jordaan had been sentenced, she went up to him and kissed him. Afterwards she said that she would always believe in his innocence. Sheldean’s young friend was later removed from her parents’ care.
Andrew Jordaan’s advocate testified that Jordaan had had no proper care as a child. He had attended a special school, his mother had a drinking problem and he was later placed in foster care. He was an outcast, and always more at home in the company of children than adults.
Like his two victims, Jordaan was a product of his circumstances.
“That may be,” Piet mutters. “But there is always a choice. No matter how appalling your circumstances have been, how cruelly you were abused as a child, you can still choose whether you want to break the pattern. Or perpetuate it.”
Professor Wicus Coetzee, the clinical psychologist who evaluated Jordaan, testified that Jordaan was a paedophile, according to the diagnostic criteria specified in the DSM-IV manual for mental disorders. An IQ test showed that his intellectual ability was extremely low.
Professor Coetzee later told Beeld that he suspected that Jordaan’s low intelligence, in conjunction with his emotional immaturity, had resulted in an inability to attract the interest of mature women. He had probably experienced rejection from them, and found acceptance in the company of children.
Professor Susan Kreston of the Free State University’s Centre for Psychology and Law said in a presentation that seventy-two per cent of condemned paedophiles in prison showed no remorse. They would do it again. She doesn’t believe that paedophilia is hereditary, however. “They can choose not to offend. Paedophilia is not genetic. It’s not in your blood. It’s a choice,” she stressed.
Neither does Kreston believe that adult sexual transgressors can be completely rehabilitated. There is no successful treatment. There is no sense in therapy anyway if the offender does not admit his or her guilt, she said.
In an article in Beeld, Coetzee was reported to have said that in the course of three interviews Jordaan did not once admit that he knew anything about Sheldean’s death. It was like talking to a brick wall. He showed no emotion, though he cried now and then, sometimes inappropriately.
Jordaan admitted that he had smoked dagga on the morning of Sheldean’s disappearance. With his low IQ and emotional immaturity, he had not been able to control his impulses when Sheldean kicked him in the crotch. Acting Judge Chris Eksteen praised Piet for his excellent testimony, as well as his team’s professional handling of the case. If it hadn’t been for Piet, Andrew Jordaan would have walked out of the Hercules police station a free man. The police had had no DNA evidence to link him with the murder. Prior to his confession to Piet there had been only circumstantial evidence linking him to the child’s disappearance.
Judge Eksteen rebuked Sheldean’s mother, Elize, for her lack of responsibility as a parent. In his testimony, Jordaan repeated what he had intially told Piet – that Sheldean had wanted to go with him “because she didn’t get love and food at home”.
Eksteen asked whether that was not where the problem had originated: in her parents’ home. When the state prosecutor, Advocate André Fourie, and Jordaan’s legal representative, Advocate Philemon Tlouane, pointed out the lack of parental supervision, Elize Human stormed out of the courtroom in tears.
On 9 June 2008, Andrew Jordaan was handed a life sentence for the murder of Sheldean, an additional three years for abduction and ten years for attempted rape. For the rape of his godchild, he was sentenced to fifteen years plus an additional five for indecent assault. He will spend twenty-five years behind bars before he’ll be allowed to apply for parole, which will not necessarily be granted.
In a bizarre statement, Andrew Jordaan’s elder sister, Jacqueline Nortjé, told Beeld that it was impossible for her brother to have done the deeds of which he’d been found guilty. He loved children, she said. “At home, the children were always around him,” she said, “and he was always around them.”
She couldn’t have hit the nail more squarely on the head.
Outside the court, an uncharacteristically thrilled Piet Byleveld told the media he was satisfied with the sentence. “Andrew Jordaan is not the kind of man who should be out on the street,” he said in the dry cop-speak so typical of Piet.
Now, three years later, he looks at me and smiles. A sad smile. Perhaps it’s just as well he never had children, he says. He would have gone out of his mind with worry every time they set foot out of doors.
Instead, he catches the murderers of other parents’ children.
With his retirement imminent, this may have been his last big case. And, ironically, the victims were innocent children.
Pastor Philip Kruger, minister to many in the Pretoria Central Prison, took Andrew Jordaan under his wing. Early in 2010 he told me that Jordaan was always alone during visiting hours. No one came to see him. When he did get a visitor, it was inevitably someone who had “befriended” him through the post. The person would arrive, take one look at Jordaan through the window and leave. Just to be able to boast: I saw Sheldean’s killer.
“What a pathetic human being,” Piet says, pushing aside Jordaan’s files and dockets. Case closed.
Later, in the early evening, as I’m driving back to Pretoria, Piet phones. Where are you now? Have you locked your doors? Phone me as soon as you arrive.
I forget. An hour later he phones again. The initial panic in his voice changes to annoyance.
He knows what can happen on the road, after all, what lies waiting round the bend, what lurks in manholes.
Those eyes have seen it all.
Piet Byleveld with Nelson Mandela.