Van Breda killer weapon revealed
THIS is the axe that killed Henri van Breda’s mother, father, brother and almost took the life of his sister, Marli. It’s the first time the murder weapon has been photographed.
Coming out of the SAPS evidence bag, exhibit No 1 in the triple-murder trial currently being heard in the Western Cape High Court looks innocuous, like a garden axe from a hardware store.
Or as Judge Siraj Desai remarked when the murder weapon was handed up to the bench in week one of the trial: “It looks like an axe you’d chop wood with.”
It’s been cleaned since it was recovered by police from the stairs where it landed after Henri van Breda allegedly hurled it at the fleeing killer moments after fighting and disarming him.
The one in the crime scene photo album is bloodied after a killing spree that shocked investigators and paramedics.
According to sickening crime scene photographs, the 0.9kg Lasher hickory-handled axe inflicted at least 15 skull-splitting wounds between 6cm and 8cm long, killing Martin, Theresa and Rudi van Breda.
Marli was struck the most, including once across her jugular vein area.
The mindless violence of the album distracts from other evidence in its pages which provide a hint of what’s still to come in this trial.
This includes the photos of what the captions call “presumable blood” on the basin, shower door handle and towel in one of the bathrooms of the Goske Street murder house.
The photos show cloths and a mop head on the line and later bagged. Presumably, these images refer to count five of the indictment, which accuses van Breda of tampering with the crime scene.
Hardly noticeable are the photos of blue-black shoe prints that were enhanced with amido black.
Amido black is an amino acid staining dye that can be used to detect bloody footprints cleaned off a tile floor.
Perhaps the most left-field photo is one of a toilet bowl with faeces floating in the water. Seemingly, this is where Van Breda claims in his plea statement: “I had to move my bowls.”
This was until the typo was corrected by Judge Desai, when he dryly noted in a moment of dramatic relief during a tension-filled reading of Van Breda’s first account of the attack: “That’s bowels with an ‘e’.”