Horror family slayings in Germiston
The partner of a man shot and killed by his father in a triple killing pours her heart out about her night of horror
THE house looks creepy. Even though it’s daylight the curtains are drawn – as if trying to shield the world from the terrors that took place inside.
Behind the high palisade fence two dogs yap in the deserted yard. Jack Russell Spike and dachshund Troy are desperate for their owners to come back but Vanecia Becker hasn’t felt strong enough yet to set foot in the house in Germiston on the East Rand – so for the moment friends are popping in occasionally to feed the two animals.
You can understand why Vanecia (29) is reluctant to return. It’s here that the man who was to become her father-inlaw, Johan Brody (64), shot and killed her fiancé, David (38), along with his two other children, Tanya (37) and Anna-Marie (33), before turning his .22-pistol on himself. Vanecia believes it’s a miracle she and her nine-year-old son, Kian, escaped death that night. But she’s given up trying to fathom what it was that made Johan decide to spare her and his grandchild.
“He was a monster,” the stay-at-home mom tells us in the chilly lounge of her aunt’s home in Randburg, Johannesburg, where she’s now staying with Kian and Ava, a puppy David rescued from the street. This is where she now faces the task of explaining to her only child why he’ll never see his dad again.
BEFORE the shooting David was concerned about his father’s state of mind. Something was wrong, and he knew it. “Lord, please hold my hand tightly tonight,” Johan wrote on Facebook late in the afternoon before the shootings, seemingly depressed again. Vanecia didn’t think anything of it and told David before going to bed, “Your dad is at it again.”
At 2.30am Johan phoned his son in the cottage on the property where he and Vanecia lived.
When David walked into the house,
Johan was standing in the passage with a pistol in his hand. Just get yourself and your fiancée and child away from here, he ordered his son.
Soon after David ran into the cottage to warn Vanecia and his son to leave, a shot rang out. It ended Tanya’s life. Anna-Marie had already been shot in the forehead through a pillow as she lay in bed.
Desperate to see what was going on, David ran back into the house and his father mowed him down in the passage.
Johan then stumbled into the cottage, telling Vanecia to grab Kian and get away from there. He told her he’d shot and killed all three his kids.
“Not David! Not David!” Vanecia screamed at him.
As a weeping Kian sat with his dad’s puppy on his lap, his granddad left the cottage and went back to the house.
There, in the main bedroom, he ended his own life.
WHEN Vanecia and family friends think back now they can see the warning signs had been there for a long time. They say the cracks first started to show almost two years ago after Johan’s wife, Lettie (54), died of heart failure.
“Lettie led a good life close to God, but when she died everything changed,” a neighbour tells us. “Maybe she was the pillar everything rested on, and once she was gone nothing was right anymore. I think it’s then that Johan started to build a thick wall around himself.”
David and Vanecia were together for nearly 12 years and lived in a cottage on his parents’ property for eight of those years.
Vanecia says Johan was an unpleasant person, but after his wife’s death he became worse and started treating his daughters, especially Anna-Marie, badly.
“Anna-Marie was so soft-hearted. She was such a loving person. Always did what she could for others and all she ever asked for in return was acceptance, a bit of attention and love.”
Tanya, a teacher’s assistant, was “a darling” and “loved children a lot”. Vanecia describes her as a chatterbox who was always first to know any news.
The two sisters didn’t enjoy going out and didn’t have boyfriends. “Anna-Marie always joked that if she had to get married one day she’d marry her mom,” Vanecia says.
She says Anna-Marie was really fond of her mom and blamed her dad for Lettie’s death. In the week before her death he didn’t even visit her in hospital – apparently because he didn’t like hospitals.
“I think [their marriage] was a comfort zone for him. There was no love. When he called her he’d say, ‘Stupid, come here,’ or ‘Stupid, are you going to cook now?’ He never called her ‘my love’ or even just referred to her by her name, Aletta or Lettie, when he asked her for something.”
At devout Lettie’s funeral Johan tried to stop his kids reading a passage from the Bible – but in the end David stood up and read a verse from his mom’s copy.
After Lettie’s death Vanecia was keen to move out but David insisted on staying to look after his dad. She says Johan made her feel so uncomfortable that sometimes she’d lock herself in the cottage. “He’d stare at me as if he was looking straight through me.”
Anna-Marie and Tanya had to take care of the household chores: cleaning, seeing to meals and washing and ironing their dad’s clothes. He’d shout at them if he thought they weren’t doing a good job.
Tanya had moved into Anna-Marie’s room to protect her from her dad, Vanecia says. There on the double bed the two sisters were killed in their sleep.
About a month before the tragedy Johan lost his job as a driver when the company he worked for went into liquidation. But Vanecia insists it wasn’t because of money problems that he was so angry and depressed. She says that as a former Transnet employee he received a pension and his family also chipped in to help cover his expenses.
But in those final weeks he started drinking more and more and was abusive, especially towards Anna-Marie, who wore only men’s clothes and years ago penned a story about a girl who was molested when she was little.
When Johan downed handfuls of tablets two weeks before the shooting, David came to his rescue by sticking his finger down his throat to induce vomiting. They knew something was wrong – but never in their wildest dreams imagined Johan would do what he did next.
VANECIA later found out David had gone to his death holding a silver chain, a gift from her on their first Christmas together. David never took the chain off but removed it there in the passage shortly before his dad killed him.
The couple were planning to get married in June next year and David intended wearing jeans to the ceremony. With this in mind, Vanecia wore blue jeans to her fiancé’s memorial service, which was held at Trinity Methodist Church just kilometres from the murder scene.
In another poignant touch she made sure the church was filled with cream and red roses – the same flowers she’d wanted for their wedding day.
“I’ll no longer have roses at our wedding so I arranged the perfect funeral.”
One of her neighbours shakes his head sadly as he talks to us. For weeks he’s been trying to come to grips with what happened – but it’s just too much to take in.
“In one night the whole family was wiped out,” he says. “You hear about these things only in the movies. You never dream it could happen on your front stoep.”