IMPORTANT TO ESTABLISH GARDEE MOTIVE
THE team established by the police to probe Hillary Gardee’s brutal murder should not just crack the case, but also establish the motive for the crime.
This is important because of the manner in which the IT graduate and businesswoman was killed, and the profiles of the three suspects arrested since Friday last week.
Hillary, the daughter of former EFF secretary-general Godrich Gardee, was abducted at a local retail shop in Mbombela on April 29 while shopping with her 3-year-old daughter. The daughter was dumped in the street next to her home at Kamagugu Township.
After an extensive search by the police and private investigators hired by the EFF, Hillary was found dead in a plantation area outside Mbombela, about 60km from where she was abducted. She was found with a bullet wound to the head, suggesting she was killed execution-style. Her family said more than R1 300 had been withdrawn from her account.
Hillary was buried at a high profile funeral in her home town of Kamagugu in Mbombela on Saturday. It was attended by prominent politicians, including EFF president Julius Malema and Police Minister Bheki Cele.
It is common cause that Hillary’s father is a prominent politician and a lawyer who has taken up serious and sensitive cases in recent months. The three suspects include a 39-yearold man described as a former Wits SRC president. The man is apparently the owner of student properties in Mbombela. An employee of the ANC caucus in the Mpumalanga Legislature, the man is said to hold the position of director. He apparently owns a string of luxury cars.
The suspects do not fit the profile of ordinary criminals, as Cele and Malema said at the funeral. Given that the money taken from Hillary is peanuts compared with the suspects’ lifestyles and positions in society, it casts doubt on pure criminality being the sole motive.
It is almost impossible.
The next possibility is that politics and the economy, or a combination of the three, could be the motive. In a country where gender-based violence and femicide and politically motivated killings are rife, it would help the family, in particular, and the country in general to uncover the real motive for the cold-blooded murder. That would help the family find closure.