Daphne McLachlan recalls the night when light went out of her life when her teenage daughter was brutally murdered.
|||“We walk gently around the days in April,” says Adrienne Murray, looking over at her sister Daphne McLachlan, “and my sister always goes into a deep depression about this time of year.”
On the night of April 8 nine years ago, Daphne came home late from her nursing shift, went into her daughter Vicky’s room and put the light on for when she returned.
Vicky was 19 at the time. She had matriculated from Bergvliet High School a few months previously and had just begun the second term of a secretarial course at a business college.
Not far from the family home - where Vicky and her younger sister Melanie, then 16, were living with their aunt Adrienne and their mom - Vicky was serving tables at the Tavern ‘n Ale in Diep River to earn some money.
“I came home from work that night and wanted to see her as I hadn’t seen her at all that day,” recalls Daphne, not able to hold back tears.
“I was getting home late from work at the time, and stayed up for a while. For some peculiar reason I put her light on so that she didn’t have to fumble around in the dark when she came in, and I went to bed.”
At 2.30am, Daphne woke up and saw the light was still on. She went into the room and found that Vicky hadn’t come home.
“I tried to phone her,” she says, “and I couldn’t help feeling that something had gone wrong.”
She called several times, but nobody answered. She waited until 6am, and then began searching for her.
She went to the tavern owner’s house and got him out of bed. He knew nothing beyond the fact that she had reported for work, then left as usual at 11.30pm when her shift ended.
Daphne also went to Vicky’s best friend’s house. But she hadn’t seen her.
By then, though her mom didn’t know it, Vicky’s phone was lying somewhere on a mound of mud, and her abandoned car - doused in petrol and badly burned - was in a deserted spot in Seawinds near Lavender Hill, just 5km from their home.
Melanie, now 25, was extremely close to her older sister, and describes the following nine days during which the search for Vicky was in full swing.
Too traumatised by what was happening, she only joined the search parties twice. For the rest of the time, it was a nightmarish waiting game.
“Every day felt like forever,” she says. “An hour felt like a whole year, and yet you’d never get to the end of the day. It would be eight in the morning. It would be forever. And then it would only be 8.30am and I was already so tense and so tired, and nothing was happening.”
Nine years later, the three women have not been able to process the knowledge of what happened to Vicky that night. In a trial that would last more than five years, as one delaying tactic after another interrupted the course of justice, one of the four perpetrators, Rashaad Square, had turned State witness and, before a packed courtroom, described the events that unfolded.
When Vicky finished her shift, a fellow waiter asked her for a lift to a house in Retreat. The house, it turned out, was a drug den. And, hiding behind a church wall not far from where Vicky did a U-turn after dropping him off, were Johannes Petersen, Jonathan Fortune and Square.
Waiting in the road ready to begin the attack was Mogammat Gaffoor.
Coming down from a high and wanting more drugs, the four men had hatched a plan to hijack a car and steal money, or rob a client who had just “scored” at the drug den.
Gaffoor jumped in front of the car and ordered her to stop. He ripped a gold chain from her neck and then got into the driver’s seat, The other three climbed in, pushing Vicky down to the floor. Begging them to release her, she offered them everything she had if they would only let her get out of the car.
For reasons which never became clear, other than the fact that Gaffoor as the ringleader had decided it would be this way, Vicky was driven to a remote farm in Philippi.
Dragged by her hair from the car at the entrance to the farm, she was then, at gunpoint, made to perform oral sex on three of the four men while Petersen stood at the gate to act as a sentry.
Gaffoor then dragged her to a manure compost heap three metres away, ordered her to strip down, and raped her. Square and Fortune followed suit. The gang rape continued until Gaffoor said that she should be murdered because she would be able to identify them.
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Fortune and I said no,” Square later told the judge, “but Gaffoor became aggressive and said we must because she had seen our faces.”
Square said Gaffoor then fetched Petersen from the car and ordered him to kill Vicky.
With a single shot to the head, Vicky’s naked body was left on the manure heap.
Thus began one of the city’s biggest manhunts, involving 140 volunteers from the police, the SANDF and the community, while Daphne and other family members also took out newspaper adverts and distributed pamphlets.
Vicky’s car was found two days later, and, Melanie recalls, they “were told by a counsellor to expect the worst”.
“She said that it was almost inevitable that Vicky would be found dead, and that we must prepare ourselves for that. And in my heart I knew she was gone, but I didn’t want to accept the idea of her not being here anymore.”
A week after Vicky’s car was found, Daphne was out with a search party when someone got out of a vehicle that had been combing a different area.
“They stopped us on the road,” she says, “and the one man got into the car and wasn’t supposed to tell us, but he said: ‘We found the body.’ We returned to the police station as the police were supposed to tell us, but we already knew.”
Square, it turned out, had confided in a friend that he had seen the “missing woman” pamphlets, and was overcome with guilt. The friend encouraged him to confess, and he finally led the police to the farm in Philippi.
“I wanted to see the body but they were adamant that I must not,” says Daphne, “because it was in such a bad state.”
Adrienne adds: “That was also part of the delay in identifying the body, and then there were the dental records, but she had perfect teeth so there were very few points of recognition.
Eventually, through the fingerprints of her driver’s licence and orthodontists’ reports sent from Joburg where Daphne and the girls had been living, they were able to make a positive identification.”
When the trial began, Daphne was at first not allowed to attend because she was a witness. Later, Adrienne advised her not to go because of the effect it would have on her.
Adrienne went instead, barely missing a day of the trial, but was extremely traumatised by Square’s testimony of what had happened to her niece that night.
For Melanie, it is the nightmares that have stayed with her.
“All the time I dream that she is alive.
“I dream about her disappearing and then coming back, and then me not being able to find her,” she says, “but it was only a year ago that I was able to have a proper dream about that night – a dream that took me through all the brutal motions of what happened. I was able to face up to it.”
Today Vicky’s room is barely changed, but her mother sleeps there now.
Her white cat, which Adrienne says used to walk to the end of the road to greet Vicky every day on her return, wanders around the house and curls up on Vicky’s bed.
Memories are everywhere; faded photograph albums of Vicky as a three-year-old holding her newborn sister on her lap like a doll, splashing around in the pool at their home in Joburg as a toddler, or giving a naughty smile to the camera as a teenager.
On Monday, it will be exactly nine years since Vicky’s funeral, and since her ashes were scattered in the waterfall at Cecilia Forest.
Thoughts of that April night visit Daphne, Adrienne and Melanie every day, but they try find their way through the darkness by reminiscing about the past.
“Two years before she died, we went to Silverhurst and we wanted to get some waterblommetjies out of the pond,” says Daphne, smiling, “but nobody could reach so she took all her clothes off and jumped into the water. Just then some other people came walking along and she was still naked in the water. We all couldn’t help laughing.”
Melanie says her sister was a bubbly person who lit up any room she walked into.
“There are so many things from our childhood that I remember,” she says, “like playing tennis in the road and riding our bikes all over. We were tomboys and were always getting into trouble.”
Her mother remembers Vicky “mothering” her little sister and dressing her up, stealing roses from other people’s gardens, and later, getting provincial colours in tennis and swimming.
But perhaps her real calling was to be a chef.
“That was her dream,” her mother says. “She loved cooking and she cooked most of the time for us. She loved watching all the cooking channel programmes and she would talk about the house we were going to build, and the stoves and barbecues we would have.”
She looks at the pile of albums, which include a baby book in which she lovingly inscribed every detail of Vicky as a baby - her birth weight, her milestones, her first birthday party, her first words.
“I would give my life for her,” she says, as her eyes fill with tears again. - Saturday Argus