The axe killing that left no one terrified
‘Children carried on playing in the streets and riding their bikes around. We carried on going for walks and nobody changed their lifestyle’
THE day after three members of the Van Breda family were hacked to death, police hinted to residents of the posh golf estate on which the family lived that surviving son Henri was their only suspect. But it took another 502 days to arrest him.
In the aftermath of Henri’s court appearance this week for the murders of his mother, father and brother, it has emerged that members of the De Zalze Winelands Golf Estate community had been told within hours of the murders that his wounds were self-inflicted.
Eben Potgieter, head of the homeowners’ association at the time, told the Sunday Times this week that the day after the murders the investigating officer told him: “We are not looking for a fugitive.”
Potgieter said: “That confirmed it: they were circling in on Henri.”
On the morning of the murders, Potgieter said he had been called to the scene, where he saw Henri.
“The medic said to me: ‘Those wounds on his body are selfinflicted.’ I knew that by 8am.”
But it took 18 months for an arrest to be made and for details of these wounds to be made official in the indictment filed at the Stellenbosch Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday by the National Prosecuting Authority.
“Everything pointed to the boy, so we wondered if police had contaminated the scene,” said Potgieter. “We only allowed Henri back on the estate under escort with attorneys.”
Estate manager Boet Grobler said “the forensic guys spent about a month” coming and going from the house at 12 Goske Street where Henri’s mother, Teresa, father, Martin and elder brother, Rudi were axed to death in January 2015. Younger sister Marli sustained severe head and neck injuries. But the estate did not go into lockdown. “Because we were convinced right from the beginning it was Henri, life at the estate carried on,” said Potgieter.
“Children carried on playing in the streets and riding their bikes around. We carried on going for walks and nobody changed their lifestyle.”
One thing they could not escape was the image of a bloody axe murder in their tightknit community.
“An axe is a very personal way to kill someone,” said Dr Giada del Fabbro, a forensic psychologist at the University of the Witwatersrand.
In a case like this the first of two possible scenarios was that the murders were something the perpetrator had “fantasised about” with “real intent”.
It was reported at the time that Henri had done internet research on his phone into the case of Christopher Porco, a man in Pennsylvania who killed his father and badly disfigured his mother with a fireman’s axe.
The second possible scenario involved a “psychotic episode” and “intense rage”, said Del Fabbro. In this case, “the axe just happened to be at hand” and “no rules would have applied”.
The Sunday Times confirmed previously that Henri was sent for a brain scan when the family lived in Australia in 2014 and was later a patient at a private rehabilitation centre in Bellville, Cape Town. Del Fabbro said that if Henri had antisocial personality disorder, and tik was also in the mix, as alleged by some, the combination could have proved highly dangerous.
“What you are looking at here, even before tik comes into the picture, is possibly a psychiatric disorder,” she said.
If someone was on medication for a psychiatric illness and used tik, a psychotic episode could ensue.
People with antisocial personality disorder had little to no conscience, took what they wanted, and had violent outbursts during adolescence.
They were impulsive, lacked empathy, and responded more to fear of punishment than an internal sense of right and wrong. Only at around 21, or sometimes 18, could antisocial personality disorder be diagnosed, and the results of attempts to treat it were generally “poor”.
Del Fabbro said that in family murders it was not useful to “idealise the victims” and “demonise the perpetrator”. Families were complex structures.
Potgieter said: “I remember him looking very dazed and almost far away. He seemed so noncaring. We had to ask: ‘Why is a boy who has just experienced losing his brother and parents, and his sister is seriously injured, not hysterical, not shaken, just emotionless?’ ”
A picture of Henri as a rolling stone has also emerged. Last year, his friend Alex Boshoff said he had dropped out of a university in Melbourne, Australia. He was due to leave for a three-month diving course at Sodwana Lodge the day after the murders. In April, he enrolled at a culinary school in Woodstock in Cape Town.
An axe is a very personal way to kill someone