De Villiers Residence, Pretoria
38
Smit’s case was of no use to me in attempting to understand why Leon Labuschagne had killed seven men at the reservoir. I put the file away and went to look for my sister. Annelise was in the kitchen preparing dinner. The innocence of the scene reminded me of the cases where the men whose death warrants I had seen had crept into a house to kill the woman inside. I offered to open a bottle of wine. After the dishes had been cleared from the table, Annelise left to supervise her children’s homework. Pierre and I retreated to his lapa. He carried a bottle of very old French cognac.
We sat down and I accepted a cognac from him. I sniffed at the rim of the bulbous glass. ‘What’s the difference between brandy and cognac?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘If you have to ask you won’t understand.’
We sat staring into the night. Although the sky was clear you could not see the stars; the city lights created a haze. I pondered a conundrum that has intrigued me from the time I first moved to the city: why do I feel unsafe in the city at night when I never feel unsafe in the dark nights in the bush?
‘Listen, Pierre,’ I said, ‘I really need to talk some more about killing.’
‘What exactly is it that you want to know?’
‘I want to know if it is possible to kill someone in cold blood because you are angry with him or hate him.’
He sighed and shook his head and asked, ‘Is this a rhetorical question?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it isn’t. Let me rephrase the question. What I want to know is this: could you kill seven people in cold blood because you are angry with them, or because you hate them for their race?’
‘Yes, you can,’ he said, nodding. ‘But what I can’t understand is how such a man could think that he is a Christian.’
The conversation was going in the wrong direction for me, although he had partly answered my question. ‘Christians have killed a lot of people in the name of the faith,’ I reminded him. ‘But that is not what I have trouble understanding. What I am trying to grasp is how a man feels while he is killing. What does he think? How does he feel? How does the killer’s body react to the thing he is doing – killing?’
‘God knows,’ Pierre said very softly, ‘I know about that.’
‘Are you willing to tell me?’ I suggested gently. ‘I cannot get through to Labuschagne and I am trying desperately to understand what was going on in his mind.’
‘Not now,’ was all he said.
Knowing well that he wouldn’t be moved, I was on the point of giving up. But then he said, ‘Maybe later, after I have put the children to bed.’
I realised that he meant after I have had a few more cognacs and I assisted him in getting greased up quickly. By the time he started opening up my head was spinning.
‘I think we have a physical aversion to killing, which has nothing to do with religion or morality,’ he said. ‘It’s incredibly difficult to kill someone. I found it difficult even when they were shooting at me and it was him or me.’
‘How do you mean, it was physically difficult?’ I asked.
‘I mean that you go to custard. You shake, you stiffen up, there is a roar of blood or whatever in your ears, and all your training goes out the window. Worst of all, time stands still. And in that void all your senses become hyper sharp and all your sensations are magnified tenfold. So you feel dangers greater than they really are, threats more serious, while at the same time your capacity to think is compromised and your reactions are slowed down.’
‘So what happens then?’
‘You make mistakes, and plenty of them. Big ones, too.’
He sipped at the cognac. I had given up trying to match him drink for drink. I had to go to court the next day with a clear head.
‘And you relive those mistakes every day after that; you experience the whole event exactly as it happened, with all the physical sensations you experienced at the time. You go back there but you can’t turn the clock back. When you wake up the consequences are still there for you to deal with.’
I brought the discussion back to the point. ‘But how do you force yourself to do it, even in those cases where you have to kill, I mean when your whole being resists, as you’ve explained?’
He stood up abruptly and went into the house without looking back. I thought he had gone to sleep, when I heard a toilet flush. He returned to the dark of the lapa.
‘I know exactly how they felt,’ he said as he sat down.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘he doesn’t talk about it and on this topic I have so far had to beat every word out of him.’
‘I am not talking about Labuschagne,’ Pierre said gruffly. ‘I am talking about the thirty-two men they hanged.’
This threw me somewhat off balance. I played with the glass in my hand, swirling the cognac higher and higher towards the rim. How could he know what those men felt? He was so unlike them. He answered without hearing the question.
‘I read all those cases, remember,’ he said. ‘I know what every one of them went through. You become someone else in the pack. Your own identity and values are absent somehow, they get submerged in a morass of other personalities and value systems. For a time each killing is easier than the previous one, and then they start getting more difficult than the prior ones. Eventually you have this thing inside you that you can’t talk about and you can’t bear thinking about. And you end up where it is easier to be awake than to be asleep. You pick up a momentum.’
We sat staring at our glasses for a while. I thought of Wierda’s words. They hunt in packs.
‘Yes, it is a momentum. You start slowly and pick up speed until you feel comfortable. Then you pick up more speed until you reach the extreme limits of your self-control, the point just before you know you are going to lose it.’
He did not say what it was. I assumed he was referring to his self-control or his sanity, perhaps both.
I asked him about Mrs Webber’s killers. There were three of them and they could so easily have overpowered her and taken what they wanted. Why did they have to stab her, and beat her, and strangle her with a wire tied around her neck? Why?
‘They were in a panic. You can only kill if you go into a state of panic. You can’t do it otherwise,’ Pierre said. It was not a complete explanation.
We drank some more and talked about what had happened to him in Angola deep into the night. I got the impression that I was the first one to hear it from him and that not even my sister knew.
‘Let me tell you something else,’ he said, changing the topic. He was slurring his words. ‘When someone you know well dies, the awfulness of the death is offset by the weight of the memories you have of that person’s life, and of your shared experiences. But when you kill a stranger all you have are the act of killing and the process of dying. Together, the killing and the dying constitute your sole memory of that person, and your shared encounter. It is a memory of their agony and your hand in it.
‘The only thing worse than killing a stranger would have to be to kill someone you know well, with whom you have shared memories and shared experiences. Because then the memory of the act of killing and the process of dying would make nonsense of all those prior memories and shared experiences; it would mock them and piss on them.’
Pierre was not given to swearing, and when I looked up sharply I saw he was oblivious of my presence.
‘We killed strangers, and that was difficult enough,’ he said as we staggered from the lapa, long after midnight. ‘I just can’t see how you can kill someone you know.’
The way he said it gave me an idea. ‘When you shot at those people, did you think of them as people, you know, like you and me? Or how did you see them?’ The question wasn’t very coherent. We were at the gate and I was ready to drive back to the hotel.
‘No, no,’ said Pierre. ‘You don’t shoot at people. You shoot at uniforms. All you see is the uniform.’
‘What about the ones who don’t wear a uniform?’
>
‘If they don’t wear your uniform, whatever they’re wearing, that is the enemy’s uniform,’ he said.
The war in Angola was not very clearly defined in my mind. We saw very little on television. I had no picture of the enemy’s uniform. What we were allowed to know was that there were Russians and Cubans assisting the local forces.
‘So you shoot at uniforms. Does that help you not to think of them as people?’ I asked.
‘We have our uniforms and they have theirs. I told you, soldiers don’t shoot at people; you shoot at uniforms. You don’t think of them as people while the fighting is going on.’
There was a qualification in Pierre’s response, unintended perhaps, but it was enough of an opening to allow another question.
‘Do you think of them as people after the fighting has stopped?’
It was a question too many. Pierre turned on his heel and walked back to the house, his reaction an answer more eloquent than words.
I drove back to the hotel carefully. I should not have been driving, but the streets were deserted. I thought of the events in the gallows chamber and at the reservoir. Maybe there was something in Pierre’s reaction to my last question. Men in uniform see the enemy as a human being only when he is dead. And their job, of course, is to kill them.
But I was more interested in the warders and prisoners in Maximum, where warder and prisoner alike were dressed in prison green.
DAY FOUR
Defence: 7 October 1988
Execution: 9 December 1987
V3625 William Harris
V3626 Brian Meiring
V3627 Christoffel Michaels
V3628 Herold Japhta
V3629 Jan Swartbooi
V3630 Pieter Botha
V3631 Anthony Morgan
Maximum Security Prison
39
The warders stood waiting in the passage. The Sheriff was late and the new arrivals could not be taken to their allocated cells before the Sheriff had taken their fingerprints and compared them with the prints on the death warrants.
The initial briefing by the Warrant Officer had been completed. The five prisoners stood in front of the Warrant Officer. They were dressed in the prison uniforms of the men who had been hanged less than a week earlier, the drab garb giving no hint of the agony of the desperate last moments of those who had last worn them, or of the many before them.
But first, the new prisoners had to be taught the rules of Maximum Security Prison.
‘Obey orders at all times. Understand?’
Smack, smack.
‘Say, yes sir, when a warder speaks to you.’
Smack, smack.
‘Don’t look at me! Look at the floor. Keep your eyes on the floor at all times.’
Smack, smack.
‘Didn’t I tell you to say yes sir?’
Smack, smack.
‘Don’t ever talk, not to another prisoner, and not to a warder unless it is to say, yes sir. Understand?’
‘Yes, boss.’
Smack, smack.
‘Don’t call me boss. I told you to say, yes sir, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, sir.’
By the time the Sheriff came in, the prisoners knew their place in the system. They were quickly fingerprinted and placed in their cells. They were brutal men, but they had never seen such brutality before.
Palace of Justice
40
It was going to be a very long day; the make-or-break day for the defence. I went to court early and entered as soon as they opened the doors to the public. I counted the steps as I walked up; there were thirteen. I wasn’t superstitious, but I had been up and down those steps four or five times a day for two weeks; why had I not noticed it before? I hoped it was not an omen for the day.
I stood aside as the usher unlocked Court C. I took my seat at the defence table and started going through my notes. There was only one topic of substance left. After three days of wrangling and manoeuvring we had finally got to the point where Labuschagne was going to have to explain what had happened at the reservoir. Nothing else really mattered, neither the brutality of the execution process nor the unfairness of making these young men participate in it. It didn’t matter whether one was for or against the death penalty. The only thing that mattered was this: what was the explanation for what had happened at the reservoir? No one else could give that explanation; it had to come from Leon Labuschagne. His fate would be determined by what happened on this day of the trial. He would have to talk, and he would be cross-examined.
When the cell sergeant came in I asked him to bring Labuschagne up early. He said that he could not leave him unattended in the dock and that he had other work to do, so I was obliged to go down to Cell 6 again. The sergeant locked me in and left. Labuschagne sat with his eyes downcast as I spoke. He looked tired.
‘The rules of ethics don’t allow me to talk to you about the evidence you have already given,’ I said, ‘but you know where we are heading. We are going to have to cover the events of that last day, from beginning to end.’
He nodded without looking up. There was reluctance in the slump of his shoulders. I thought I saw a slight shake of his head.
‘We have no choice. You and I have been there before. You told me and you are going to have to tell the Court. We get only one opportunity to tell your story and this is it. It will be you and me, just the two of us. But you are going to have to do the important talking.’
Labuschagne fiddled with his tie. His facial expression was impenetrable. I could not see whether he was afraid or tired, whether he had given up hope or was, like me, hanging in there at the very limits of his emotional reach.
‘I will be there with you every step of the way. I will talk you through every part of your story. But I need to know that you will do your best, that you won’t give up and that you will help me too. I can’t do it on my own.’
He did not react, so I asked him directly, ‘Will you help me?’
Labuschagne took his time before he looked up and nodded.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now please take the notes Wierda has prepared for you and run through them one last time before we start.’
He nodded again. Fatigue and resignation were apparent in his eyes. I was also tired, but I wasn’t ready to give up.
I spent the next half hour watching as he went through the events as summarised in Wierda’s briefing notes. I turned page by page with him, keeping an eye on him to ensure that he did not skip pages.
When the cell sergeant came for us, I went up into the dock behind Labuschagne and sat down on the bench in the dock next to him. The sergeant kept watch from his table behind the witness box.
James Murray came in, followed by Sanet Niemand. ‘How long are you going to be?’ Murray wanted to know. He was referring to the examination-in-chief.
‘Maybe an hour,’ I said. There was no reason to keep them guessing any longer.
‘Are we going to finish by the end of next week, Johann?’ he asked. ‘I have another difficult case starting in Johannesburg the week after that.’
I was a little surprised at the implication that he regarded the case as a difficult one.
‘I sincerely hope so,’ I replied, making a joke of it. ‘I like your city, but it’s time to go home.’
Studiously avoiding Labuschagne’s gaze, he joined in the small talk. ‘Yes, I can understand that.’
The court filled up quickly. I recognised a few lawyers among the spectators. They must have come for the cross-examination.
We bowed as usual when Judge van Zyl and his Assessors came in. When everyone had settled down and Labuschagne had taken his place in the witness box, I started with an open question. There would be more specific questions later, many of them.
‘What happened on the eighth of December?’
The answer was given without any hint of emotion. ‘We hanged seven.’
I looked at the list I had. In alphabetical order: Busakwe, Hansen, Kodisang, Leve, Marotholi, Pr
ins, Smit.
‘What happened on the ninth?’
‘We hanged another seven.’
Botha, Harris, Japhta, Meiring, Michaels, Morgan, Swartbooi.
‘And on the tenth?’
‘We hanged the last seven.’
Gcaba, Gcabashe, Maarman, Mbambani, Mjuza, Mkumbeni, Njele.
It was time to get more specific. ‘Did anything unusual happen on the eighth?’
He thought for a while. ‘Not as far as I can remember.’
‘And on the ninth?’
‘That was the day of the teargas,’ he said, and then added, ‘I think.’
‘You think?’ I asked.
‘Yes, it was a Tuesday.’
I corrected him. ‘No, the ninth was a Wednesday.’
‘It must have been the eighth then.’
Judge van Zyl intervened. ‘How certain are you of the day? Or the date?’ he added.
Labuschagne looked towards me, but I could not help him. Indeed, I did not want to help him either. His uncertainty was good for his case even if he did not realise it.
‘I can’t remember, sir,’ he said.
‘Try to think back,’ suggested the Judge. ‘Cast your mind back to that week and tell me on which day was the teargas incident.’
Labuschagne shook his head before he answered. ‘I think it was the Tuesday.’
‘How sure are you it was that week and not another week?’ asked the Judge.
Labuschagne did not answer.
Eventually the Judge looked at me and said, ‘See if you can get an answer.’
I waited for Labuschagne to make eye contact before I asked, ‘Are you able to answer His Lordship’s question?’
He took a deep breath before he answered. ‘I am sure it was that week, but I don’t know what day.’
I glanced at the Judge and when he nodded, I continued. ‘Let’s deal with the tenth. Did anything unusual happen that morning during the executions?’
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