Pastor and devil blamed by accused in murder trials
AN obsession with religion ended in a bloody crime spree for two men who are now facing murder and attempted murder charges in Cape Town.
Rodney Colbie, 45, says he killed his lover at her home in Brooklyn to save her soul from the devil.
Just two months earlier, 21year-old Lefuma Liphapang, who lives only 17km away in Du Noon, stabbed his eight-monthold daughter because, he claimed, a pastor had encouraged him to do so.
Both cases were heard this week in the Cape Town Regional Court, where a state forensic psychologist declared the men to be mentally fit for trial.
District surgeon Paul Theron said Colbie had “combined his Christian culture and belief system with an inadequate personal psychology” and had “al- lowed himself to be executioner” believing that he was “being God’s servant”.
Colbie is on trial for attempting to kill his former wife, 43year-old Liza Colbie, and his stepson, Zhane Esbach, 21. He also faces charges of violating a protection order for which Liza Colbie had applied, and killing Audrey Jameson — the woman he called his “partner in Christ” — on July 13 last year.
Colbie told authorities that he stabbed Jameson with a knife and a panga “to prevent her from committing suicide” because if he had not, the devil would have done it.
Theron described him in his report as a “self-confessed religious fanatic”.
Liza Colbie, speaking to the Sunday Times, said he was once a caring man who had invited the poor into their home on Christmas Day. Although their marriage crumbled, she still keeps a photograph of him in her Bible.
But Jameson, in a hand-written letter penned a day before she died, described him as a jealous man who refused to leave when she asked him to move out.
Meanwhile, the young father who allegedly stabbed his daughter after having “visions” at the Universal Church, where he worked as a security guard, made his 24th appearance in the same court this week.
Theron described him as “a very nice and soft-spoken young man” who was fit to stand trial.
The Universal Church has distanced itself from the case.