Personal grief in the public eye

How does one cope with a terrible private trauma that has become a public spectacle?

In the past 13 months the question has repeatedly confronted Denise Goldin, the mother of Brett Goldin, the actor murdered with his fashion designer friend, Richard Bloom, in Cape Town last year.

She has had to navigate two landscapes: one created by the media, the public’s fascination with the case and the judicial process, and the other of personal grief.

On Monday, the trial of accused Shavaan Marlie (25) and Clinton Davids (23) began in the Cape High Court.

Television crews, photographers and reporters settled in alongside family members, supporters and curious onlookers for what promised to be a long courtroom drama.

But the hearing ended as quickly as it had begun, with the judge’s announcement of a plea bargain. Each accused was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Denise Goldin, who travelled from Johannesburg to attend the trial, appeared on the news, visibly stricken, to say she was ‘relieved that it’s over and we don’t have to go through the trauma of a court case. Hopefully there’ll be a chance for all of us to start reconstructing our lives now.”

But as public debates raged about the outcome of the case, South Africa’s culture of violence and the death penalty, Denise was reliving her bereavement. In the flurry of the morning’s events, she had mislaid Brett’s umbrella. With other personal effects, this was all she retains of his daily life.

She has been staying in his former flat in Oranjezicht, and visiting his favourite coffee shop down the road. She keeps him ‘alive” through the words of former friends, colleagues and neighbours who sing his praises.

She has followed the exact route followed by the killers from the site of his abduction in Camps Bay to the murder scene. There, she lay down in the precise spot where the fatal shots were fired.

The day after the judgement, Denise Goldin started mothering other people’s children.

She headed for Manenberg Secondary School on the Cape Flats, her car laden with ingredients for chicken soup. The plan was to show a small group of youngsters from the Proudly Manenberg campaign how to make it.

Denise took an interest in the school when Western Cape education minister Cameron Dugmore told her about the campaign, which aims to combat Manenberg’s gangs, drugs and violence She was particularly touched by a young girl who told her that ‘every day she doesn’t know if she’ll make it home from school alive”.

The contact has helped her to come to grips with her reflex thought that young men fitting the profile of her son’s killers could have pulled the trigger.

Travelling to Manenberg with Wynberg public prosecutor and her friend Janene Rheeder, Denise keeps her eyes shut along De Waal Drive. She cannot bear this stretch of road, part of the route followed by the killers before they executed Goldin and Bloom, face down and naked, in a field next to the M5.

A source close to the case told the Mail & Guardian that the courtroom version of events had been sanitised. While the accused claimed they shot the two friends because one had screamed after being ordered not to, the source said, there was no evidence of panic. After the murder, the killers had returned to Camps Bay to find Goldin’s car and give it to one of their number, Marlie, as a birthday present.

Denise Goldin still struggles with the details, the hard evidence of the murderers’ inexplicable callousness.

She has also had to live with the public images of her son’s body, wearing only socks and with his hands tied behind his back, with a gunshot wound to the head. The photos she carries in her handbag — taken just days before he was to leave for a Shakespeare festival in Stratford-on-Avon to take a part in Hamlet — are of a good-looking young man with striking eyes.

The public first intruded on the private domain when she travelled with her daughter and husband — who died within a year of Brett’s death — to Cape Town to bring home Brett’s body. On the plane, they were surrounded by passengers ogling the murder scene on the front pages of the tabloids.

Others followed suit, until the family won a court order banning further publication of the image. But the picture reappeared this week as a small inset on the front page of the same newspapers.

And she has to contend with repeated rumours and allegations — including a throwaway line in the Mail & Guardian‘s Christmas edition — that the murdered men were under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time of the killing.

M&G ombud Franz Krüger summed up Denise Goldin’s dual ordeal earlier this year when the paper apologised to the families: ‘Too often, the media forget that there are two kinds of readers: those who are outsiders to the event being written about, and the insiders who often know in much more detail what happened and may be profoundly affected by our writing.”