Dangerous to know
A new book about SA’s most notorious female killers paints a detailed picture of these wicked women and their lurid crimes. This is an edited extract from Blood On Her Hands, by Tanya Farber
‘Speak up,” Marlene said, quickly clapping her hands. “I can’t hear you when you mumble.”
Marthinus cleared his throat. “I say, good morning.”
“Have you been here before?” she asked him. He shook his head. “Do you know how to write?”
“My name, yes,” he said.
“Okay, come and stand here by me at the desk and I’ll write the information for you,” she said, rifling through a set of stacked filing trays and pulling out a form. Picking up a pen, she asked without looking up, “Name and age?”
“Marthinus Choegoe, 33,” the man said, his eyes downcast. “Reason for visit?” He looked confused. “Why are you here?” Marlene said, an edge of impatience in her youthful voice.
“My leg,” he said, looking down again.
“Are you here to be measured for a new leg by the technician?” He nodded. “And what happened to your leg? “Car accident,” he said. “The doctor had to cut it off afterwards.”
The Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital is so vast that it looks more like a military compound than a place of tiny beds and fluffy toys. It was here that Marlene finally cast off the shackles of her puritanical upbringing and proudly took up her post as a receptionist in the hospital’s orthopaedic workshop …
At sweet 16, she should still have been doing her learning in a classroom. But the “education” that Marlene began within the grey walls of the children’s hospital was of a different nature altogether … It is not known who crossed the line, but the moment arrived when it was clear that the sexual instinct had overwhelmed the sense of right and wrong — and Marlene Lehnberg, at age 17, began an affair with Christiaan van der Linde, her 47-year-old boss.
Soon, sneaking off together became a regular occurrence during the working day or at night when the workshop closed …
With Christiaan as the object of her obsession, Marlene had begun to see [his wife] Susanna as a barrier to her own “forever after” … Choegoe, the onelegged accident survivor, became her pawn.
Marlene discovered that the unemployed and down-at-heel Marthinus was a regular at a shop called Solly’s Trading Store, not far from his house in Retreat, a working-class suburb on the Cape Flats for people classified as coloured. Using Solly’s as a delivery address, she wrote Marthinus a note, inviting him to contact her if he wanted to “earn good money”.
Within days, Marlene saw the figure of Marthinus silhouetted in the doorway. Sensing that her plan was coming to fruition, she drew a one rand note from her bag and gave it to him. “Meet me at the Rondebosch Town Hall at seven this evening,” she told him. It is not clear if this tiny sum of money (even for those days) was meant for transport or simply to create the impression that she had the “means” to get what she wanted.
But, either way, the two of them met at the allocated place and time as planned.
To sweeten the deal, Marlene brought along a bottle of gin in a brown paper bag. She got straight to the point and told Marthinus the job she had in mind for him. “I’d like you to murder someone for me,” she said. “A woman.”
Marthinus was, not surprisingly, appalled. “But I’ll be sent to the gallows, Miss Marlene,” he said. He had never injured another person before, though he had once been caught in possession of a dangerous weapon and had appeared in court. Marlene had
found this out and now used it to flatter him, saying he was just the sort of person she was looking for — “someone who can handle a dangerous weapon”.
Despite Marlene’s drawing him into her plan as an accomplice, he made his way to the Van der Linde home planning to warn Susanna that she was in peril. But when she opened the door, he lost his nerve and asked for money. She refused and Marthinus simply hobbled away.
Another week would pass before Marlene attempted, one more time, to lure the amputee into her plot. By this time, Susanna van der Linde had shifted in the prospective murderer’s mind from an anonymous victim whose death spelled money to a living, breathing woman.
Marlene had no such compunction, however. Desperate to get Marthinus to commit the act, she promised to expedite the production of his prosthetic leg, and threw in a small transistor radio for good measure.
And so Marthinus made his way to the house in Gladstone Street in Bellville once again. In Marlene’s mind, Susanna would soon be lying in a pool of blood and then in a coffin. But, instead, Marthinus arrived at the place fixed for the murder … and simply walked past.
Marlene wasn’t going to give up, however, and Marthinus was soon handed another sealed envelope at Solly’s Trading Store. “Use a knife if you have to, but make sure the job is done,” the note inside read. A short while later came an instruction for Marthinus to phone Marlene at the workshop.
He went to a nearby “tickey box” (public phone) and dropped a silver five-cent coin into the slot.
“Good afternoon, orthopaedic workshop, Marlene speaking, how may I help you?”
On hearing the muttering Marthinus on the other end of the line, Marlene’s heart began to race: another opportunity to coax him into the darkness of her plan. This time, she went all out and offered him a car — a grand prize she could never have afforded. Still he refused. Now she became desperate. “I’ll have sex with you — after you’ve killed her,” she said … There was a stunned silence, and she heard Marthinus swallow.
The next time Marlene Lehnberg ran her tongue along an envelope to seal it, it wasn’t Solly’s Trading Store she would write on the front.
This letter, dated October 1974, was addressed to the hospital manager. “Notice of Resignation” read the subject line.
A few days later, driving her white Ford Anglia, she pulled up in front of Marthinus’s humble home in Retreat. It’s hard to imagine the conversation that unfolded in that car, in South Africa, in 1974, between a white teenage woman and a one-legged man of colour with a hammer in his possession. They talked about the house in Bellville where a killing would take place. Except, once again, it didn’t. Marlene stopped the car in front of the house in Gladstone Street, discharged Marthinus and the hammer, and quickly drove away. But Susanna, peeking through a window from behind a lace curtain, spotted a familiar figure. She’d seen the man loitering in the neighbourhood before — asking for money, hanging around, acting suspiciously.
She called the police, who wasted no time in rushing over. At that time in South Africa, a “nonEuropean” man in a white suburb would instantly be suspected of having ulterior motives if he was there without a legitimate reason, such as delivering a parcel or working in someone’s garden.
Marthinus was picked up just two blocks away and dragged off to the station, where his worst nightmare unfolded. The police did not hold back, and Marthinus was eventually sent back onto the streets with swollen eyes, bruises, other injuries and a clear warning never to return.
With not the slightest regard for Marthinus’s condition, Marlene now began to look elsewhere for an accomplice. This time, it was twentysomething engineering student Robert Newman, who lived in the same boarding house as her. She knew he owned a Llama pistol, and asked if she could borrow it — as one might a tape measure or stapler.
When he said no, she confronted him: would he carry out the murder for her, then?
Unlike the downtrodden Marthinus, who’d been dragged down to a place where choice and agency were nonexistent, the young engineering student knew a foul plan when he heard one. And his answer was as straightforward as could be. “No,” he said.
Some days later, he came home to find the pistol missing from his room. Prime suspect: Marlene Lehnberg. And no guessing what she hoped to do with it.
At 8.30am on 4 November, Marlene drove to Marthinus’s Retreat home with the lethal weapon concealed in her car. Under the pretext of going to Bellville to say a last goodbye to Christiaan — she was moving to Johannesburg for good, she told Marthinus — she persuaded him to accompany her. It was only once they were on the road that she handed him the gun and told him what was expected of him.
Around 9am, the Anglia pulled up once more in front of the house that had now been marked for several months as a place of murder. Inside, a single occupant was clearing away the breakfast dishes after the children had left for school, while her husband was (presumably) looking over at the empty reception desk in the orthopaedic workshop several kilometres away. She wouldn’t be alone for much longer, though.
Soon, the door would open and in would come her killer — the last person to see Susanna van der Linde gasp for air as the life left her body. Who exactly was the killer? Was it Christiaan’s lover herself, having finally realised that the only person she could rely on to remove the obstacle to her happiness was herself? Or was it the hapless one-legged man who didn’t really have it in him to kill but who, by this point, had been manipulated and coaxed into committing homicide? It depends whom you ask.
In Marlene’s version, she was the mastermind who hired an assassin and drove the getaway car. According to her, it was she who went up to the house and rang the doorbell — Marthinus had already been warned not to show his face in the neighbourhood again, so why tempt fate by forcing him to be the frontman? She claimed that as soon as the door opened, she jumped into her Anglia and sped off.
According to Marthinus, however, Marlene made no such dash back to the car after ringing the bell. Instead, she stayed on the scene as he too now appeared in the doorway. As soon as Susanna clapped eyes on him, she shouted that she was going to call the police. According to him, what followed was like a scene from a horror film: as Susanna tried to flee, Marlene violently tripped her, then pistol whipped her to the point of semiconsciousness.
Marlene ordered Marthinus to strangle Susanna, but in the heat of the moment, also looked wildly around the room for a weapon, soon spotting a pair of scissors on the sideboard. She passed them to Marthinus, who plunged the blades into Susanna’s chest several times — three, he said, though forensic pathologists later discerned six wounds to the chest area. Was it such a frenzy that he erased some of those moments from his memory, or was it Marlene herself who inflicted the additional three wounds, so intent was she on murdering Susanna that she matched Marthinus’s stabs until Susanna’s chest was a relief map of hatred and jealousy?
A neighbour, a Mrs Marais, would later testify that the white Anglia stood empty outside the house for several minutes. This corroborated Marthinus’s version that Marlene wasn’t simply the mastermind and driver of the getaway vehicle but was indeed inside the house when the gruesome scissors murder took place.
When Marthinus was driven back to his house after the murder, he was covered in green dye from a gas pistol that Marlene had grabbed inside the house and used on him. He was, quite literally, a marked man, and was dropped at home in a dishevelled state. Why did she do this? Like most things about Marlene, it’s difficult to say. But, it’s likely that it was her way of saying, “I’ve painted you as the criminal you are. If you go to the police now, they will pin this crime on you alone.”
‘I’d like you to murder someone for me,’ she said. ‘A woman’
‘I’ll have sex with you – after you’ve killed her’