Avzal Simons is facing only one of the 11 ‘Station Strangler’ charges. Justin Pearce reports
IT will take a lot to keep Lorraine Solomon away from the Cape Supreme Court in the next few weeks. Likewise Kathleen Samaai. Likewise Mary and Louise van Rooyen. Likewise most of the 40 or so other people who this week crammed the public gallery of the Cape Supreme Court for the trial of Avzal Simons.
Most of the people in the crowd never knew Elroy van Rooyen, the nine-year-old boy who is the only victim named on the charge-sheet in the case of State v Simons. Mary van Rooyen was Elroy’s mother, Louise his grandmother. But for the others, Elroy had never been more than a name — the last in the long list of boys who were found strangled on the Cape Flats over a period of seven years. The boys included Lorraine Solomon’s grandson Marcelino Cupido, and Kathleen Samaai’s son Neville.
Simons is currently on trial on charges of kidnapping, sodomy and murder, arising from Elroy’s death in March last year. Late last year, police were investigating charges against Simons in connection with the other 10 murders that were attributed to the Station Strangler during 1993 and 1994.
Now, almost a year after Simons was arrested, the state has decided to proceed with charges relating to the Van Rooyen case in the absence of sufficient evidence relating to the other charges.
But for the people in the gallery, the notion of the Strangler lives on. And with no charges having been laid in connection with the other 20 ”Strangler” deaths, justice for the death of someone else’s son is almost as good as justice for the death of one’s own
By now they are past the obvious signs of grief. One of Elroy’s relatives broke down in tears as the charges were read, but for the rest of the trial so far they have responded stoically to allegations of appalling physical abuse, and descriptions of a body half eaten away by maggots.
Several of them — including Elroy’s grandmother — cannot read or write. Yet for three days in court they leant forward in their seats so as not to let a word of legal argument go by unheeded. They are frustrated by the process. They resent the fact that someone whom they have already convicted in their own minds should be allowed to consort with agents of the law.
”Where does he go at lunchtime?” wondered one woman during the recess.
”He goes to eat with the advocate,” her friend replied. ”That’s why he’s so fat.”
Simons’ apparent serenity during the trial only added to their suspicions. He stood in the dock with a religious paperback in his hand, the occasional puzzled frown his only sign of discomposure. The former convert to Islam has now reverted to Christianity — and he attributes his calmness to his ”faith in the Lord”.
But to the people in the gallery, he is an alien. Fouzia Hercules, the witness who claimed she had seen Simons with Elroy on the day the boy disappeared, said she remembered his face because he was a stranger, and ”we all know each other in the Strand”.
His face, Hercules had recalled earlier, ”was like the face of a Bantu”.
Simons’ dark complexion may engender racist contempt as a ”Bantu”. But his middle-class accent, his chic suits and ties and his reputation as a scholar provoke mistrust of a different kind — in the eyes of the crowd, he is affecting a status which he does not really deserve.
”Look at how he sits there taking notes like a businessman,” remarked one woman. They believe too that Simons, a schoolteacher, abused his status to lure children to their death.
But just as an outsider is an easy scapegoat for the murders, so it was a sense of trust in scattered extended families and in the children’s good behaviour that allowed the murders to go unchecked for so long.
Outside the court, Dora Kannemeyer recalled how long it had taken her family to realise something was amiss when her nephew, Jeremy Benjamin, disappeared from home.
Like most of the ”Strangler” victims, Jeremy lived in Mitchells Plain. His family had first gone to his friends in Macassar, then to his father in Stellenbosch, and then to his grandmother in Eersterivier — without the benefit of home telephones, it was days before they realised that Jeremy was not in safe company. It was six weeks before he was found
Such circumstances do not make for easy investigation. Elroy was the last of the victims of the alleged Strangler, and by the time of his disappearance the public was checking up on suspicious behaviour in a manner that bordered on fanatical.
Yet so far Hercules has been the only witness who has positively linked Simons to Elroy’s disappearance, and much of the evidence led by the state so far has been
Defence counsel Koos Louw has rigorously cross- questioned Hercules and other state witnesses, challenging the reliability of information remembered from a year ago. The coming week is to see a trial- within-a-trial which will contest the admissibility of statements made by Simons to magistrates and police shortly after his arrest. During cross-examination on Wednesday, Louw bluntly accused Sergeant Andre Oliver, investigating officer in the Van Rooyen murder, of arresting Simons ”without a grain of evidence” and of knowing that ”if no further evidence came to light there would be serious problems”.
Simons’ arrest came at a time when anti-Strangler vigilante gangs had almost brought anarchy to Mitchells Plain. The impending trial-within-a-trial suggests that the eagerness by the police to secure a conviction could end up playing into the hands of the defence.
But the women in the gallery, whose sense of justice the police were so keen to satisfy, have their own way of dealing with such a scenario: ”He may escape here, but not with God.”