Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Was conviction of teacher as killer, kidnapper a miscarriage of justice?
TWO hours before 10-year-old Elroy van Rooyen was abducted in Strand, taken into the bushes and raped and murdered, the man later convicted as his killer was in a police station on the other side of the Cape Peninsula having his photograph taken.
Primary school teacher Norman Avzal Simons was not there as a suspect, but to apply for the police reserve.
The problem was the picture taken that day showed him with short hair and dressed in his Sunday best. Even more odd is that after his visit to the police station, according to Mike Stowe, the prosecutor in the Station Strangler trial, Simons was observed at about 2.30pm at the public library in Claremont.
Now, while it might have been possible to get from Claremont to the Strand by 4pm in order to lure Elroy to his doom, and, for that matter, to have changed out of his Sunday best, there remains the problem of the identikit.
This identikit, subsequently compiled by witnesses had the suspect wearing his hair in a woolly Afro, casually attired, and looking nothing like the subsequently convicted Simons.
The coincidence was never raised in evidence in the trial that saw Mitchells Plain teacher Simons convicted as Elroy’s murderer, and named as probably being the notorious Station Strangler.
It’s just one of many such forensic anomalies that escaped notice in the sensational 1995 trial that sought to lay to rest forever the ghosts of 22 brutally murdered and degraded children.
Taken together, however, the questions still haunting the case ask an appalling question: Was justice really done, or did it miscarry in a climate where it was deemed vital to secure a conviction and a closure?
At the time – as the 1994 democratic elections loomed – the National Party was seeking to reinvent itself as the party of the coloured constituency in the Cape, and placed huge pressure on police and prosecutors to “solve” the eight-year-old Strangler murder series.
These were some of the issues that we – including reporters Warda Meyer and Lavern de Vries – examined in a series of articles in late 2009 and early 2010.
At the end of it all, the evidence was so compelling that then Western Cape Safety and Security MEC Dan Plato officially called – in a letter to then national police commissioner Bheki Cele – for the investigation to be reopened.
A top level team was dispatched from Pretoria to review the evidence. Despite several attempts, nothing more was heard of the cold- case reinvestigation.
But the questions have not gone away.
This week, nearly 20 years after the Strangler conviction, former public prosecutor Mike Stowe broke ranks, phoning in to radio station Cape Talk 567 to second-guess the forensic foundations on which Simons was found guilty.
Stowe drew attention to the improbability of Simons being at the scene of the crime, given his presence in Claremont only 90 minutes earlier.
Most damagingly, however, Stowe, somewhat remorsefully, recalled a seemingly inexplicable omission on the part of his prosecution. In the absence of DNA or other hard scientific evidence linking Simons to the crime, the guilty finding had been handed down on the basis of two sets of testimony.
One was the less-than conclusive witness accounts. The other was a confession, which Simons had repudiated, and which is riddled with inconsistencies.
Incredibly – and highly irregularly – the confession was entered into the record as evidence, and formed the basis for the guilty finding, duly handed down by Justice WA van Deventer in 1995.
No regard was given to the anomalies and the seeming contradictions that continue to haunt what remains the West- ern Cape’s most sensational and traumatic serial killer mystery. Anomalies include:
● Fingerprints did not match Simons’s and at least two blood and semen samples were found on Strangler corpses; neither matched Simons’s blood profile.
● None of the handwritten “messages” found at the murder scenes could be linked graphologically to Simons.
● Inspector Don Engelbrecht, broke ranks before Stowe, testifying in 2008 that two Strangler “survivors” had come forward. Neither confirmed Simons as the attacker, instead saying their tormentor had been a black man of medium build.