Rumours swirl after fire horror.
A Wellington teacher and her husband have died in a blaze that razed their home amid rumours about an extramarital affair
IT HAD been a chaotic day and it was late in the evening before she had the chance to contact her best friend, who’d been begging her to go for a drink because she needed to confide in someone. “Hi, Soens. Sorry, I was busy all day. I’ll call you tomorrow,” Anelma le Roux wrote in a WhatsApp message to Sunita van Dyk at 10.06 pm on Tuesday 9 May. But for Sunita there’d be no tomorrow. In the early hours of 10 May the 31-yearold primary school teacher, her husband, farm manager Jacques (30), and their dog, Skollie, burnt to death in their home on Oakdene Farm outside Wellington in the Western Cape.
And Anelma (31) would never find out what Sunita had wanted to tell her.
“Something was bothering her,” says the businesswoman, who owns a décor company in Wellington.
Anelma heard of the tragedy when her ex-husband called her in the middle of the night, saying the Van Dyks’ farmhouse had burnt to the ground.
When she couldn’t get hold of Jacques or Sunita she jumped in her car, still in her pyjamas, and drove to the house.
The life the young couple had been building in the five years since their wedding had gone up in flames – and Anelma was devastated when she was told the charred bodies found in the bathroom were those of the people she’d been friends with since school.
At first it seemed like a horrific accident – but the rubble of the farmhouse was practically still smouldering when the rumour mill kicked into overdrive.
Days before the couple’s joint funeral allegations of an affair between Sunita and Danie le Roux, headmaster of the prestigious Laerskool Paarl Gimnasium where she was a teacher, were leaked to the media.
“I’m so upset,” Anelma says. “Everyone is talking about the alleged affair but there are so many things about the fire itself that don’t make sense.
“Nobody’s asking the right questions. If the police investigation finds it was an accident then I’ll resign myself to that – all I want to know is what exactly happened to my friends.”
IN PAARL, Wellington’s neighbouring town, dried flowers still lie at the entrance to the primary school. A popular teacher has been laid to rest – but rumours of the relationship she supposedly had with the school’s headmaster, a married father of two, hang in the hallways.
“Mr Le Roux isn’t available,” a receptionist tells us before directing us to the security gate at the school’s entrance.
Danie’s wife, Eloise, refuses to believe the gossip.
“We’re devout Christians; we walk the straight and narrow,” she tells us in front of her mother’s home in a leafy suburb on the slopes of Paarl Mountain.
“The Lord and I know the truth – the stories are all lies.”
The previous day an article in local newspaper Paarl Post alleged that Eloise had arrived at the Van Dyks’ burnt-out home the day after the fire and taken some of Sunita’s personal belongings from the house and from Sunita’s car boot.
“I was trying to help Sunita’s family,” says Eloise, who runs a clinic for babies with her mom. “She was a close friend of mine and I returned the rings and everything to her mother in front of witnesses.”
Eloise dismisses all suggestion of an affair between her husband and Sunita. “Everything written [about it] is false and it’s destroying peoples’ lives.”
Manus Marais (28), Sunita’s younger
brother, says the family hadn’t known about an affair between Sunita and Danie but his sister’s closest friends had told him about it after her death.
He confirms Eloise was only trying to support the Marais family when she fetched Sunita’s belongings from the house.
Cellphone messages in which Sunita confessed details about an affair to a friend had been leaked to the media.
“Am very angry at Danie because I realise he used me . . .” reads a WhatsApp message she apparently sent in February. “But don’t blame him; was my choice to be used. Jac wants to go and see someone; both of us crying a lot.”
SUNITA never read the message in which Anelma promised to phone her the next day. The last time Jacques was on WhatsApp was at 8.27 pm; Sunita last checked the messaging service at 8.43 pm.
One of the questions Anelma’s struggling with is, “If the house caught alight at 2.30 the next morning from coals in the fireplace, how could the coals have continued to burn if Sunita and Jacques had gone to bed at 9 pm?”
She jumps up, demonstrating how small the couple’s fireplace was. “You could barely fit six small logs in there,” she adds.
“I need to understand why Jacques would have had the time and wherewithal to run a bath, wet the towels and sit on them if there was a window right next to them? The chest of drawers was small – he could just have moved it and they’d have been able to jump out the window.
“Sunita’s nightstand and Bible didn’t even catch fire – why were they in the bathroom if the fire wasn’t so bad in their bedroom? And how come Skollie was calmly with them in the bathroom? A dog’s natural instinct is to flee from fire.”
Anelma doesn’t want to say much about the possibility of an affair between her friend and the local principal. All she knows is Jacques and Sunita were working on their marriage and that they seemed happy before they died.
“You don’t find guys like Jacques. She chose him. He was an amazing man; they were a really good match.”
In his sunny office in the Wellington police station, all station commander Lieutenant-Colonel Johan Barkhuizen will say about the matter is that the police investigate crime, not extramarital affairs.
He refers us to the provincial spokesperson, Lieutenant-Colonel André Traut.
“The investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Van Dyks’ deaths has yet to be concluded,” Traut says.
Anelma has alleged the scene wasn’t properly cordoned off and that unauthorised people had gained access to it but Traut says an official complaint can be lodged if anyone has a problem with an investigation.
Neil Ennis, owner of Oakdene Farm, says the insurance company has indicated the cause of the blaze was the fireplace. “No foul play is suspected,” he says.
There are many unanswered questions about his brother’s death, but the Van Dyk family won’t be commenting until the probe into the fire has been concluded, says Jacques’ elder brother, Reghard (32).
Anelma says the questions haunt her. “I’m struggling with this – there are so many things that don’t make sense.”
She knows if she’d been the one who’d died and her long-time friend had been left behind with a lot of unanswered questions she’d also have kept digging until she’d discovered what was going on.
“Sunita would’ve done the same for me.”
‘Sunita’s nightstand and Bible didn’t even catch fire – why were Jacques and Sunita in the bathroom if the fire wasn’t so bad in their bedroom?