With her dying breath she uttered a name
Could the victim’s last words help police nail her killer?
On 2 February 2013, Anene Booysen was due home by 1am.
She was at a local pub just 10 minutes’ walk from her home in Bredasdorp, near Cape Town, South Africa, so her foster mother, Corlia Olivier, 40, had said she could stay out late.
The venue was a hotspot for local youngsters.
Yet Anene, 17, never made it home.
At 5am the next day, as a security guard arrived for work at a local building site, he found her, beaten and mutilated, her intestines spilling out.
She was conscious, but in agony. Near death.
The emergency services were called.
And when neighbours knocked to tell Corlia that a young woman had been found brutally injured, she raced to the scene.
The moment she saw the teenager’s trainers sticking out from underneath the sheet she’d been covered in, she knew it was Anene.
‘Help me!’
Corlia and her husband had taken Anene in after her mum died when she was little.
Loved her like their own. But the family struggled financially, so when Anene was 15, she started working.
She sometimes worked as a cleaner on construction sites, including the one where she was found.
As Anene was rushed to hospital, Corlia followed, shocked and horrified by her foster daughter’s injuries.
‘My child’s face was beaten up. Her intestines were lying in front of me on the bed where she was lying. I held her hand. She said she was tired and sore,’ Corlia said.
Anene was covered in blood and sand. She’d been raped and had cuts to her private parts.
The doctors said her injuries were the worst they’d ever seen.
‘My mother, my mother, help me,’ Anene cried when she saw Corlia.
When she said she was cold, Corlia lovingly covered her in a blanket.
Then, even as she lay dying, Anene appeared to utter the name of her attacker.
Zwai – the nickname of a close friend, Jonathan Davids.
And she told police that Zwai hadn’t acted alone.
She said she’d been gang-raped by five or six men, then left for dead.
Later that day, Anene told her mother she was
tired and going to sleep. Then she passed away. The case was now a murder investigation.
The next morning, Davids, 22, and his friend Johannes Kana, 21, were arrested. Both denied rape and murder.
Shocking and cruel
The case sparked national revulsion.
South African president Jacob Zuma described the attack as ‘shocking, cruel and most inhumane’.
‘The nation is outraged at this violation,’ he said.
Campaigners organised protests to raise awareness of the number of rapes and sexual assaults in South Africa – believed to be 175 per day.
Kana was sent for trial.
Yet, despite Anene’s dying allegations, all the charges against Davids were dropped due to insufficient evidence.
Analysis of blood and semen found on clothing and shoes didn’t link them to him.
He also claimed that, while he’d spoken to Anene in the pub, he’d left shortly after – and that he wasn’t the only man with the nickname Zwai.
And he blamed a fall for scratch marks on his arm and neck.
In autumn 2013, Kana pleaded guilty to raping Anene – but denied murder.
The prosecution rejected his plea, claiming he’d murdered Anene, had disembowelled the teenager. Witnesses testified that they’d seen Kana and Anene together at the pub in the early hours of 2 February. Some reported seeing them leave together. Kana’s cap was also found at the building site. Yet his defence said this didn’t prove he killed Anene.
No proof?
Lawyer Pieter Du Toit read out Kana’s version of events.
‘I was with my friends. She came to sit with me,’ he said.
He claimed they walked from the bar towards her home and stopped to kiss.
But when she pushed him away, he pulled down her pants.
She fell and hit her head. He then raped her, punching and kicking her.
‘After I raped her, I ran to my house,’ he said. ‘Anene was alive when I left her and had no open wounds.’
He apologised for his actions.
‘Although I was under the influence of alcohol, I knew what I was doing,’ he said.
He claimed no one else had been involved.
But was he covering for other attackers?
Prosecutors admitted that when Anene made her accusation about multiple attackers, she was in pain and heavily medicated, so may have been confused.
The defence urged the judge to consider Kana’s earlier admission and find him guilty of rape only.
They claimed there was no proof that Kana inflicted the fatal injuries.
Would Anene get the justice she deserved?
Johannes Kana, 22, was found guilty of the rape and murder of Anene Booysen.
As Judge Patricia Goliath handed down his sentence, Anene’s relatives sobbed.
Judge Goliath said the ‘barbaric attack gave the court an idea of the type of person Kana is’ and that he ‘did not show any remorse for the crimes he committed’.
Kana, who’d shown no emotion during the four-week trial, was sentenced to two life sentences without parole.
Just before his sentencing, Kana declared his innocence.
‘I know I’m not guilty of killing Anene,’ he said.
Jonathan Davids has never faced trial for offences against Anene and believes that she named him in the hospital because she had seen him at the pub that night and believed he could help nab her attackers.
Many attending the trial felt that justice had been served – Kana would die in jail.
Yet, some people in the community still felt Anene had been subjected to a great injustice. They questioned whether other men had been involved – as Anene herself had claimed in the hours before she died.
He didn’t show any remorse for his crimes