Beach search for paedophile’s victims

POLICE searching today for the remains of victims of convicted paedophile Gert Van Rooyen, brought in two new excavators to Blythedale Beach, near Ballito, north of Durban.

Van Rooyen and his girlfriend, Joey Haarhoff, were accused of kidnapping six young girls more than 30 years ago, but some of their bodies were never found. The site currently being excavated is where Van Rooyen is thought to have buried some of his victims after spending a weekend there.

A police forensics team had located a storm water pipe they had been searching for. Today they are expected to focus on the pipe and its immediate surroundings in the hope of finding the remains.

The family of one of the missing girls is at the site.

In 1990, Van Rooyen shot Haarhoff and committed suicide at his home in Pretoria, as police closed in on the couple.

Today’s search is the result of a 15-month investigation by the television programme Fokus led by executive producer Alet Wright, who said information about the search would be revealed on the programme’s broadcast on Sunday night.

A team of forensic specialists from Pretoria arrived in the area and marked off a number of sites to be dug up.

The beach has been closed to bathers to facilitate the search.

It is not the first time the police have zeroed in on a North Coast beach looking for the remains of Van Rooyen’s victims.

In April 2007, massive storms that lashed the North Coast uncovered skeletal remains at eMdloti Beach. However, tests revealed the bones to be less than 10 years old and police concluded that they could not have been those of the missing girls. Van Rooyen’s victims: Tracy-Lee Scott-Crossley, 14, disappeared on her way to Cresta shopping mall in Randburg, on August 1, 1988.

Four months later, Fiona Harvey, 12, of Pietermaritzburg, disappeared on December 22, 1988.

On June 7, 1989, Joan Horn, 12, of Pretoria, disappeared.

Sixteen-year-old Durban girl Janet Delport escaped the couple’s clutches after she was abducted from a mall in July 1989.

On September 22, 1989, Kempton Park girls Odette Boucher, 11, and Anne-Mari Wapenaar, 12, went missing. – Daily News Reporter