Accused guilty of killing teenager
GASPS of relief could be heard from the public gallery in the Western Cape High Court yesterday after Bradley Noble was found guilty of the rape and murder of Hanover Park teenager Michaela Adriaanse.
Acting Judge Yolanda Renqe said 36-year-old Noble had not been a credible and honest witness, and that his version of events of March 19 last year had been “full of discrepancies and inconsistencies”.
Michaela, who was 16, had gone to the Wynberg public pool on that day with several school friends, but they were refused entry as it was a school day.
They then headed off to Kalk Bay beach, where they smoked dagga and drank whisky. There they met Noble, who introduced himself as a drug merchant from Retreat. Later in the day, Michaela had a fight with a school friend over a pair of sunglasses and stormed off to join a group of men from Manenberg.
But she then returned to her friends, and got her bag to leave.
During the trial, her friends testified that Noble had said he would bring Adriaanse back and that he followed her.
That was the last time they saw her alive.
The friends spent the next few hours searching for her, enlisting the help of two other men to try to get a cellphone number for Noble.
At about 8pm that night, they caught the last train home. They went to Michaela’s Hanover Park home and told her parents she was missing. The family reported the case to Muizenberg police station and went to Noble’s home, but he was not there.
They returned with police for a second time after midnight, and this time found him sleeping. He denied being at the beach, until he saw one of the schoolgirls he had been with that day. He also denied knowing where Michaela was, and even helped police search for her.
Three days later, her body was found in a bushy area in Kalk Bay. The court found that the cause of death was bluntforce trauma caused by a large object, most likely a rock that was dropped on her face.
Judge Renqe said evidence showed she was unconscious when she received the fatal blow, and that there were signs of strangulation, which could have been caused using the cords from her dress.
Noble maintained his innocence throughout the trial, and claimed he had consensual sex with the teenager.
He pinned the blame for the murder on State witness Trevor Benn. He said Benn had arrived at the scene and wanted to have sex with the teenager, but when she refused he killed her.
But the acting judge dismissed this version: “Trevor was never at the crime scene as alleged by (the) accused.”
She said Noble was “not averse to being economical with the truth”, and that he had “crumbled miserably under cross-examination”.
Wearing pink T-shirts adorned with photographs of the pretty teenager, and bearing the words “Justice for Michaela”, her friends and family described the teenager, the youngest of four daughters, as an extrovert with a bubbly personality.