Nigel Fairhead spoke out this week for the first time about the dastardly murder of his wife and young daughter
Lin Sampson
The early part of this year was marked by a spate of unusual fires that crackled ominously across the Constantia Valley and left a deposit of ash on everything like a veil of mist. It bound the Cape Peninsula in a warp of sinister action, rumour and unpleasant consequence, and it made the air look like the inside of a smoker’s throat.
It was within this dark ring of foreboding that the memorial service for Brenda Fairhead (50) and her daughter Kia (11) was held in her lovingly cultivated indigenous garden in Constantia. And although the occasion marked a deed more dastardly than many of us even knew at the time, the garden seemed to put on a special show of beauty with a blush of oleander and pom pom trees and clumps of orange strelitzia nicoli.
The service had been arranged in three days by a few friends who in an action of love researched and remembered and addressed every little memory that would please Brenda. At the bottom of the lawn there was a table strewn with rose petals. Candles and votive vases filled with frangipanis guarded a smiling Buddha on each side of which was a framed picture of Kia and Brenda.
Sitting in the front row with his arms round his daughter Vashti (27), from his first marriage, was Nigel Fairhead. He sat up very straight and only at one point through the three-hour ceremony, when they played a song by Dylata Rawat (the daughter of his guru), did his shoulders begin to shake.
A teacher at the Waldorf School in Constantia, Gale Pullen, known as Teach, was the first to speak about Kia. With her thin brown arms and sun hat tied under her chin with two ribbons she was refreshingly energetic and unsentimental. She described the strange lopsided grin Kia got on her face when she was embarrassed.
She described how Brenda had a special way of calling Kia. “She would sort of pump her hands over her mouth and shout ‘co-ee’ and then from far away you’d hear an answering ‘co-ee’.” As a teacher Pullen was in no doubt that if her daughter was ever in danger Brenda would fight like a cornered dragon.
But it was Brenda’s great friend Debi Shortall, a psychologist who like Brenda had started her working life as a nurse, who sliced into Brenda’s character, bringing forth so many small diamonds of descriptive brilliance that even the people who did not know Brenda well felt when they left that she had been an intimate friend.
“She was,” said Shortall, “an enormously powerful woman, a force to be reckoned with. She was also hugely glamorous and she loved all the orange and red colours of autumn. I remember on our last camping trip to Nature’s Valley how she would stride out of the tent in the morning her mouth bright with lipstick. But the thing nobody knew about her was that she hated getting her hair wet. That’s why she used to swim with her head above the water.
“On millennium night we all sat round the fire and said a few lines about ourselves. The Sunday before she died we were all at Nature’s Valley and we walked along the Sout river. She suddenly stopped and said, ‘When I die I want my ashes thrown here.’ Then she stopped and laughed and said, ‘I don’t know why I’m saying that because I’ll be burying all of you.'”
For a minute Shortall’s strong voice falters: “If we hadn’t come home we would have been there.”
It was many months later that I went to interview Nigel Fairhead.
He lives in a house which is one of those Seventies architectural experiments that belongs to that vogue of bringing the outside in, rather like a large greenhouse where huge shrubs with glossy waxy, leathery leaves beat up against the plate-glass windows and cast a green light into the interior.
We sit and have tea and biscuits near the desk where Brenda used to work. “See that hole in the hedge, she cut it specially so she could look at birds and she would always keep a pair of binoculars on her desk,” he tells me.
Nigel is a slight man – he looked much thinner than when I had last seen him – with a crisp grey crewcut. He is very easy to talk to, open without being too confiding. He is one of those people who is unafraid to show weakness and it is this quality that invites confidences and understanding. He talks in a quiet modulated voice and it is in his voice and not his words that I hear his sadness.
His pain seems to lie in small acts of composure, a terrible quietness of being that sometimes engulfs him, and make him seem so utterly controlled. “It is my first experience of losing someone I really loved,” he says. “It is very painful, my heart is completely shattered.”
Nigel Fairhead came to South Africa when he was two-and-a-half. His family settled in East London and he went to school in Grahamstown.
“Once I left school I didn’t go home much although I like the Eastern Cape. My mother died of multiple sclerosis when I was five. I can hardly remember her.”
He and Brenda met in 1976 when he had just started his company Fairheads. Brenda was an Australian nurse in South Africa en route to Kenya but when she met Nigel she put aside those plans.
“I was a Hatha yoga teacher at the time and she walked into the class. It was love at first sight. I have never known anyone who has had such a powerful feeling of relationship as we had. She was tall, long- legged, such an incredible person. I was just writing a letter to her sister and I was saying – and I am not just saying it because I was married to her – that I had never known another person with such a capacity to embrace life.”
For years he and Brenda ran Fairheads together. “Brenda ran the shops and I did the manufacturing.” Although Nigel had started out as a hippie sandal-maker, Fairheads proved a huge financial success, the Fairhead boot and sandal playing a prominent part in the iconography of the Sixties and Seventies.
“Brenda was an amazing business woman. She also worked hard at keeping up a family life and planning wonderful holidays. We went to Okavango and Malawi, holidays I would never have planned myself. There were definitely some hard times – we were together for 24 years – but she could always look on the positive side.
“Kia, yes, Kia,” he muses, “Such a little, little girl.
“She was quite a proud little girl. She would mix with all the other kids but she had an adult quality about her. I watched her quite recently walking into school and she reminded me of Brenda, the way she held her head high and the little flick of the hair. People who knew Brenda called her a warrior and I think Kia was starting to have those Brenda qualities. But she was quite a wise little girl, an old soul.”
Nigel says he tries not to go over the past but he cannot help sometimes rejigging the pieces of the plot. “They went off late in the afternoon. It’s a good time to fish and it was peak summer so it doesn’t get dark until late. Also it wasn’t really an isolated place. We had been there heaps of times before.”
“We had been to a wedding and I was tired. Strangely, just as they were leaving I decided I would go with them and I called down, but they had already left.”
Brenda and Kia never came back from that fishing trip on January 16. Their bodies were found 24 hours later in a deep ravine in the Keiskamma Pass. The hijacked vehicle, a blue Pajero, was found in the Frankfort area. Three youths, Zolani and Bongani Tom (21 and 22 respectively) and a 17-year-old co- accused were charged with murder, robbery, abduction, rape and indecent assault.
Nigel had told me that he would probably not attend the case, but when I ring him on his cellphone during the first part of the hearing he is at his niece’s holiday house in Kleinemond in the Eastern Cape. “The prosecutor persuaded me to take the stand. I think it is for the best.”
Medical evidence heard by the court suggested the attackers first used their hands to strangle Brenda, then strangled her with a scarf and finally fatally stabbed her in the chest. District surgeon Dave Kalev said: “I really think she put up quite a serious fight, which is why so many injuries were found on her head, neck and upper chest.”
Her attackers had first tried to incapacitate her by delivering blows to her head. When this did not work they had tried manual strangulation and the force had been so powerful that it had fractured her hyoid bone, which is situated just below the tongue. But her desire to live had been so great that even this did not work and they had tried to strangle her again and when she again showed signs of life they had finally stabbed her.
Kalev said vaginal smears for semen in both Brenda and Kia had been negative, but in the case of the mother the absence did not exclude sexual penetration. In Kia’s case, however, he excluded the possibility of intercourse as her hymen had been intact.
Nigel sounds emotional but strong. “It must have been terrible in those last few hours. What sort of people are these? They showed no remorse. Kia begged them to leave them alive and take the Pajero but in the end they put the noose around her neck.
“It is so beautiful here. I do love Africa and I intend to stay no matter what. Brenda and I had thought of settling in Australia and we went there but Brenda always said, ‘Oh, it’s so boring.’
“However, when we had asked Kia what she wanted to do when she left school she said she wanted to go to Australia. She said, ‘There are not so many bad people here.'”
Shortall had said that it was important that Nigel attend the trial. “It is vital for all of us to bear witness to what Brenda suffered. We were not able to be with her then but we must be there now.”
To many of the people watching the trial it was the composure of Nigel Fairhead that struck a fierce chord of sympathy throughout the local community.
In an immensely touching scene on the last day of the trial the mother of the 17-year-old youth apologised to him on her son’s behalf. She was crying and he showed immense compassion and had tears in his eyes.
“Yes,” Nigel continues on the phone, “It feels right. Life has to go on. I know there is a lesson to be learned.”
As the phone crackles and cuts, he says: “Hang on, let me move and see if that helps.” I hear the words come strangulated and faint across the airways. “I’m just not sure what the lesson is.”
n On Wednesday the Port Alfred Circuit Court handed down life sentences to the three accused.