A mysterious third person may have been involved in the Sizzlers massacre that left nine people dead in January last year, the Cape Town High Court heard on Wednesday.
Defence counsel Nehemiah Ballem, representing taxi operator Trevor Basil Theys, said his client was afraid of this third person.
”He fears someone, and is afraid to talk. I have explained the implications to him, and he accepted it,” he said by way of explaining Theys’s refusal to testify in his own defence.
Theys and restaurant manager Adam Roy Woest have pleaded not guilty to nine charges of murder, one of attempted murder and armed robbery. Ten men’s throats were slit and they were shot in the back of the head, but one — Quinton Taylor — lived to tell the tale in court this week.
Ballem closed Theys’s case, telling the court he had been convinced up to the end of his consultation with Theys at 3.30pm on Tuesday that the taxi operator would testify.
On Wednesday, however, Theys had said there was no way he would step into the box.
”He told me emphatically he would not.”
Judge Nathan Erasmus responded: ”Once you have made your bed, you must sleep in it, nightmares and all.”
Asked by assessor Martin Groenewald why the Sizzlers killings had taken three hours, Ballem replied: ”We have not got their versions before the court. My own feelings are there were more people involved, and that’s why Woest made so many cellphone calls from Sizzlers during the incident.
”There is something more than what we know, that’s why I wanted Theys to testify. We do not know the full truth.”
The judge said it was known from Theys’s statement to a magistrate that Theys’s girlfriend had left him, apparently for a lesbian relationship before to the massacre.
The judge said it was also known that the dead were involved in same-sex sexual activities.
The judge asked: ”Did Theys perhaps act from homophobic motives?”
Ballem said his instructions were that this was a typographical error in the statement to the magistrate, and that Theys did not tell the magistrate that his woman had left him for another woman.
Earlier, counsel Mornay Calitz, for Woest, contended there had been no common purpose or plan to murder.
Although hard-pressed by the judge and Groenewald, Calitz was unable to explain why the two had taken gloves and petrol to the crime scene, if not to destroy evidence.
Nor could Calitz explain why Woest and Theys had passed the Sizzlers security wearing balaclavas if their plan had not been to avoid identification.
Judgement is to be delivered at 2pm on Thursday.
The two also face charges of the theft of two firearms and the illegal possession of firearms and ammunition. — Sapa