Amy’Leigh’s family on kidnap ordeal
Wynand and Angeline pour their hearts out to YOU’s Jacques Myburgh about their daughter’s kidnap ordeal and how Amy’Leigh is coping now
THE sound of a little girl’s laughter fills the air. It’s the cheerful chortle of a carefree child. Seconds later the source of the sound comes charging towards us on a blue bicycle. Amy’Leigh de Jager doesn’t seem bothered that her back tyre is flat. Her dad, Wynand, tried to fix it but he didn’t have the right glue so she’s making do with the broken bike.
Amy’Leigh (6) may look as if she doesn’t have a care in the world but she’s haunted by nightmares thanks to her ordeal that made headlines around the world.
By now the fact that she was kidnapped and held on a plot outside Vanderbijlpark for 19 hours is well known. What hasn’t been known up to now is how the family have been coping since her return.
The first thing she did when she got back to the family home in the early hours of the morning, was crawl into her
sleeping little brother’s bed, her parents, Wynand (28) and Angeline (26), tell YOU in an exclusive interview.
Amy’Leigh and Jayden (5) are very close and when Jayden opened his eyes and saw his sister, he gave her a big hug, before he fell asleep with his sister in his arms.
Jayden is also still trying to get over seeing his sister being grabbed outside Laerskool Kollegepark in Vanderbijlpark and shoved into a white Fortuner. The vehicle sped off with her, while his mom, Angeline, ran after it.
Wynand and Angeline are exhausted. They try to put on a brave face but it’s as if the past week’s strain is getting more difficult to hide.
Wynand lies down on the couch next to the huge pink teddy bear someone brought Amy’Leigh after her safe return. The bear is now their daughter’s favourite sleeping friend, Angeline says.
Since the kidnapping, Amy’Leigh has been having nightmares, and wakes up at night because she sees her kidnappers’ faces in her dreams.
Angeline lowers her head between her knees where she sits on the couch.
The news that Jayden’s Grade RR teacher, Tharina Human (27), may have been behind it all came as a huge shock. And Angeline struggles to accept that Tharina, once her best friend, is a suspect in the terrible crime.
There are rumours Tharina was involved in drugs and needed money to pay her debts. That could explain why the kidnappers demanded a R2-million ransom from the De Jagers.
But even harder to take in is that people are saying Angeline had something to do with it and that she was having an affair.
YES, Angeline says, Tharina was a friend – before they became estranged.
“I’m angry and disappointed. She used to come for braais at our house. At one point, we spent a lot of time together,”
Angeline says. “We weren’t friends over the past few months but I still trusted her. I’d never have expected something like this from her. “They broke my child.” Amy’Leigh and Jayden are playing with clay at the dinner table, blissfully unaware of what the grownups are discussing. In a soft voice, Amy’Leigh starts singing, “This is amazing grace, this is unfailing love . . .”
It’s the same song she was singing in her mom’s car the morning of the kidnapping. The song Amazing Grace from her favourite movie, Breakthrough, that she’d watched with her family the night before for the umpteenth time.
Angeline looks at her children in wonder. “Amy’Leigh is a miracle,” she says.
Here she and Wynand share with YOU how the events unfolded.
THE KIDNAPPING
Wynand, a teacher at Carl de Wet Technical High School and an F1 powerboat racer, is always up first in the De Jager household.
He runs a bath for Angeline, a homemaker, and gets the children’s breakfast porridge ready – it’s the first thing Amy’Leigh wants when she wakes up in the morning.
Then it’s the usual chaos of any suburban household on a school morning: getting dressed, brushing teeth, rushing off.
Wynand usually gets a lift to work, while Angeline drops off the kids. But on
the morning of the kidnapping, Wynand had forgotten to make the necessary arrangements the day before and had to drive himself to work early. “Amy’Leigh was busy putting her homework book in her schoolbag,” Angeline recalls. “We’re always late for school and I chose the closest parking spot to the gate I could get.”
Earlier that morning, Amy’Leigh had rummaged through her mom’s jewellery and put on one of Angeline’s watches. But as they arrived at school, she took it off and put it under a jacket on the seat.
“I’m hiding it in case someone wants to steal it,” she told her mom.
Angeline has a rule that her kids have to exit their car using one door. She was focused on them and didn’t see the white Fortuner with no licence plates that parked behind them, she says.
“I don’t really know what happened in those few seconds. I just heard my child scream and when I turned around, I saw the man’s back as he jumped into the passenger seat and the car sped off.”
Angeline tried holding onto the Fortuner’s back door. She was dragged along but lost her grip, falling onto the tar.
“That’s when it hit me that my child’s been stolen.”
THE MORNING AFTER
Angeline got up off the tar, bruised and with bloody scrape marks. She’d torn a ligament in her shoulder.
But she ignored the pain, scooping up Jayden, yelling for someone to call the police. Once the little boy was inside the school, the desperate mom dashed back to her car to chase after the Fortuner.
“I drove in the direction they’d gone. I just drove and drove. I have no idea where to.”
She called Wynand, who didn’t answer. She called again.
“Angeline calls me every morning to say the kids are okay and at school. That morning, I missed her call,” Wynand says.
“I missed three calls from her before I saw she’d sent me a WhatsApp. Just as I was opening the message, she called again.
“I’ll never forget that phone call for as long as I live. The terror and anxiety in my wife’s voice as she screamed, ‘Our child’s been stolen’.”
He immediately got in his car and sped to the primary school. Angeline also returned and the pair clung to each other in disbelief.
“I just kept telling her we’ll find her. She can’t be gone, not our child,” Wynand recalls.
‘I don’t really know what happened in those few seconds. I just heard my child scream’
(From previous page) Wynand started driving the streets looking for the white Fortuner. Meanwhile, his wife and others started to pray for Amy’Leigh’s safe return.
Tania Greeff*, the mother of one of Amy’Leigh’s classmates, says she sped back to school when she got the message that a child had been taken.
As she arrived, Grade RR teacher Tharina Human was standing next to Angeline outside the school. “I heard the teacher saying, ‘Jayden’s okay, Angeline. Don’t worry’.”
Then help came streaming in from all over. Parents and members of the local community policing forum (CPF) and the police started a massive search.
“We sent people out on all the main routes from the city to look for the white Fortuner,” says Willem Muller, chair of the local CPF. Two helicopters joined the search.
When Wynand got back to the school, a detective accompanied him and Angeline home.
Then the first calls started coming in to Wynand’s phone: a voice, sounding like that of a man, demanding a ransom of R2 million.
Wynand eventually called his aunt to come and pick Jayden up to try to shield him from the drama. He and Angeline then went to the local police station to wait for news.
“Those 19 hours [at the station] felt like 19 years,” Angeline says.
THE TERRIFYING WAIT
Detectives and hostage negotiators asked the couple questions but mostly they spent a lot of time waiting.
Each time a police officer entered the office or one of them looked at their phones, the parents were filled with hope.
“But we started getting scared,” Angeline says. “It was getting dark and she’s afraid of the dark. I started feeling my child’s fear. What was going through her mind? Had she been given something to eat? Was she warm enough?
“I prayed and hoped my child was surrounded by angels.”
And then the terrifying thought: what if that had been the last time they saw their daughter?
Wynand shakes his head. “I started thinking back to that morning before school. The previous night, Amy’Leigh had built a toy gun out of Lego. She held it and told me, ‘Daddy, I’m shooting you – you must fall.’ And all I said was, ‘I’m already dressed for school. I can’t play now. I have to get to work.’ “Then you start thinking, what if those were my last words to my child?” That evening, an emergency meeting was held in Laerskool Kollegepark’s assembly hall. Tharina was there too, listening to the traumatised teachers speak about the kidnapped child and the parents pouring out their fears.
THE RETURN: EARLY MORNING HOURS, TUESDAY 3 SEPTEMBER
At about 2am, Hendrik Brandt (25) and his girlfriend, Savannah Kriel (22), were on their way home from a pub when they spotted a child in the dark in Heroult Street, Vanderbijlpark.
They realised it had to be Amy’Leigh, because they’d been following the news of her kidnapping, the couple told Rapport newspaper.
She started running away from them but they managed to catch up with her.
“She said they [her kidnappers] had dropped her off in the street. They’d been in a white car with black stripes that’s the size of her mom’s car on the inside.
“She told us the men had told her to walk to a blue car in the street – her mommy was waiting for her there. But she didn’t see a blue car and the kidnappers just sped off,” Hendrik and Savannah told the newspaper.
Amy’Leigh told them “a white man and a black man with stick hair (dreadlocks)”
had held her captive and when she complained of thirst they told her to “shut up”.
Hendrik gave his jacket to her to keep her warm and they walked about 4km, taking turns to piggy-back Amy’Leigh, to the nearest police station.
By that time, Wynand had been pacing the hallways for hours and “smoked six packets of cigarettes”.
He went outside to light another cigarette.
“I bent my head to light it. When I looked up, I was looking at my little girl’s face.”
Her eyes were puffy from crying, her hair was messy and the clothes she’d dressed in the previous morning were dirty. There were dirty tear tracks down her cheeks.
“I took her into my arms and held her tightly. The first thing she said to me was, ‘Daddy, I’m hungry – I want a hamburger’.”
Inside the police station, Angeline was still waiting.
“I lay against a table with a blanket around me. One of our friends rushed in, saying she’d been found,” Angeline says.
She rushed down the hallway, straight to her little girl.
“And the only thing she said in a nearly inaudible voice was, ‘Mommy’.”
Amy’Leigh was so thirsty by then she started drinking water as if she could never get enough, her parents say.
“Half the water ran down her chin and neck,” Wynand recalls.
“We taught our children never to accept food or gifts from strangers. She said the people had offered her food and drink but she’d refused to take it.”
“We were all in tears,” says Willem Muller of the CPF about the moment Amy’Leigh was returned.
While Hendrik and Savannah were questioned to rule out involvement, Amy’Leigh was examined at the local hospital.
“We were very happy to hear they (the kidnappers) hadn’t hurt her,” Wynand says.
Finally, at 6am on the morning following the abduction, Wynand and Angeline walked into their home with their daughter. The ransom, they say, remained unpaid.
THE ARRESTS
Tharina was arrested on 4 September on the smallholding near Vanderbijlpark where she lives.
Soon after, Laetitia Nel (40), a nail technician, and her friend, Pieter van Zyl (50), were also arrested in connection with Amy’Leigh’s kidnapping.
On Monday 9 September the three of them appeared in the local magistrate’s court charged with kidnapping.
Soon rumours about Angeline’s involvement started swirling and people accused her of being romantically involved with a friend, Shawn Delport, whom she called shortly after Amy’ Leigh’s kidnapping.
Wynand is seething over this. “They started saying the most horrible things about my wife; that she’s an alcoholic, a drug user and that she’s having an affair,” he says.
“People want sensation,” Angeline adds. “And they’re hurting people.”
She doesn’t want to say more as she feels the legal process must now take its course.
Rage wells up in Wynand each time he thinks of Tharina and the other suspects. Before the incident, his daughter would wake up every day with a smile on her face, he says.
“On the Sunday evening and the Monday morning we still saw that smile. But that smile hasn’t returned since. I can see the sadness in her little face. The laugh that used to come from her belly is gone. As a family, we’ve been robbed of a beautiful outgoing child who’s suddenly become shy.”
Jayden is traumatised too, Wynand says. “Yesterday, a car came driving up the street. He and I were outside and he immediately ran over to me and held onto my leg.”
Both children are getting counselling and Angeline says they’ll also go to counselling as a family.
She looks at her daughter, who’s still playing with her clay. “Amy’Leigh has told us she’s forgiven those people.
“Yesterday morning when she got up, her first words were, ‘Daddy, Mommy, I’ve awakened the world. I’m not angry at them anymore. I forgive them.”
The case has been postponed to 19 September for formal bail applications. The state has indicated it would oppose these applications. The police investigation continues.
* Not her real name