Pretoria Girls High has been dragged into the sleazy underworld of crime and drugs Thuli Nhlapo and Thebe Mabanga Just a few months ago, Tanya Oosthuizen was one of South Africa’s luckiest teenagers – a bright, young and attractive brunette, head girl of one of Gauteng’s leading schools with a range of lucrative professional careers possible in her future. But next week she is scheduled to appear in the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court for allegedly having used her charms to persuade four boys to embark on a robbery and car-hijacking spree. The extraordinary case has dragged Pretoria Girls High – which consistently produces outstanding matric results – into the sleazy underworld of crime and drugs. “If I never met her, I would not be here today,” said William Petrus Prinsloo, the chief culprit in the operation, minutes before he was sentenced to 24 years in prison by magistrate Adriaan Bekker, who described him as “a reasonably intelligent person and not a rag doll”. The sentence follows Prinsloo’s conviction on six charges of robbery with aggravating circumstances and an attempted robbery committed between March 19 and April 3 this year. In one callous instance, Prinsloo and an accomplice – Mark Flascas (18) – used a telephone wire to tie up a 60-year-old woman and robbed her of jewellery valued at R29 000. Flascas was handed a six-year sentence.
Prinsloo’s nightmare began when he and three of his schoolmates at Capital College, a private school in Pretoria, were recruited by Oosthuizen to help carry out instructions from her boyfriend, Andre Venter (23). Venter was convicted last year on charges of robbery. He picked his victims through various classified advertisements by posing as a prospective buyer of their goods. Oosthuizen is alleged to have smuggled a knife that Venter then used in a failed escape bid last August. Psychologist Antoinette Human believes that Oosthuizen used sex to manipulate Prinsloo. She also diagnosed Prinsloo as emotionally unstable. He is a product of a broken family: his parents divorced when he was five. His mother has since moved to San Francisco, leaving him with a contract worker father who travels extensively. At the time of meeting Oosthuizen, he was living with his sister in a Sunnyside flat. Although Prinsloo confessed in court to using LSD and ecstasy to calm down before committing the offences, he said he was nevertheless extremely nervous and had to carry a gun. Oosthuizen and Adriaan van Zyl (18) are expected to apply for bail next Wednesday. A fourth suspect, Manuel da Silva (19), was not granted bail.