November 14th, 2019
Headsman
South Africa conducted its last execution on this date in 1989: that of Solomon Ngobeni, for robbing and murdering a taxi driver.
Apartheid South Africa had long been one of the world’s most prolific users of capital punishment. According to Wikipedia it had logged nearly 3,000 executions over the 30 years previous, including a one-year count of 164 as recently as 1987.
But the policy was about to see a sudden reversal — along with the policy of apartheid itself.
Earlier that same year, the South African presidency had been assumed by F.W. de Klerk. Much to everyone’s surprise, the copper-bottomed Nationalist Party conservative set about dismantling the entire white-rule infrastructure. Once he’d secured his term de Klerk moved with alacrity, immediately permitting some anti-apartheid marches that his security services wanted to shut down and proceeding apace to more dramatic reforms that within a few years saw off apartheid altogether.
Shuttering the Pretoria Central Prison gallows was one early gesture in this same campaign, considering the many martyrs that platform had made of regime opponents down the years. In 1990, de Klerk pronounced a formal moratorium on executions and he never lifted it; in 1995, the first politically weighty ruling of the post-apartheid Constitutional Court abolished capital punishment.
However, Ngobeni has no assurance of maintaining his milestone distinction in perpetuity. In present-day South Africa, blighted by a great deal of violent crime, reinstatement of capital punishment enjoys the support of several political parties and a sizable majority of the public.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Hanged,History,Milestones,Murder,South Africa
Tags: 1980s, 1989, apartheid, f.w. de klerk, november 14, pretoria central prison, solomon ngobeni
February 10th, 2017
Meaghan
(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
On this date in 1956, Zulu witch doctor Elifasi Msomi was executed in at Pretoria Central Prison in South Africa for the murders of fifteen people.
The devil made him do it, he said. Or, rather, Tokoloshe, an evil spirit in Zulu folklore.
Msomi had not been successful in earning a living at witch-doctoring, so he consulted an experienced colleague for advice. According to Msomi, the man introduced him to Tokoloshe and said, “Get me the blood of 15 people.”
Over the next year and a half, Msomi stalked KwaZulu Natal, slaughtering victims as the demon pointed them out, and collecting their blood in bottles. He would attack them with a knife, hatchet or knobkierie after luring them to an isolated area.
The first victim was a young girl. To prove to the demon just how dedicated and obedient he was, Msomi hacked his victim to death in front of his girlfriend. Tokoloshe was delighted, but the girlfriend was horrified. She went straight to the cops and had Msomi arrested. Then he escaped from custody … with Tokoloshe’s help, he said.
Msomi followed up on his first act by slaying five children. In April 1955, he was linked to multiple murders and arrested again, but again he escaped and picked up where he’d left off.
In his book Murder By Numbers: The 100 Most Deadly Serial Killers From Around The World, Robert Keller says,
Serial killers seldom stop killing of their own accord, but that is exactly what happened with Elifasi Msomi. Having collected the blood of his fifteenth young victim, he said that Tokoloshe thanked him for his service, then bathed with him in the river before they parted company.
Without Tokoloshe to help him anymore, Msomi soon came to police attention again when he was arrested for petty theft. In custody once more, he freely confessed to the murders and led authorities to some bodies, but he said he wasn’t responsible for his actions and was only following Tokoloshe’s orders.
There was, however, the problematic fact that he had raped some of his victims and robbed others; Tokoloshe hadn’t requested THAT. At the trial, two psychologists testified that Msomi was very intelligent and got sexual pleasure by causing pain to other people.
Writing of this case in Real Vampires, Night Stalkers and Creatures from the Darkside, Brad Steiger says,
Such was the reputation of the witch doctor’s power of channeling the Tokoloshe that prison officials granted permission to a deputation of tribal chiefs and elders to view Msomi after he had been hanged on February 10, 1956. These men were thus able to return to their respective tribes and proclaim that the witch doctor was really dead and that Tokoloshe had left him to seek out another host body.
On this day..
- 1945: Giovanni Cerbai, partisan - 2020
- 1726: Margaret Millar, infanticide - 2019
- 1938: Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, Winter Palace stormer - 2018
- 1854: John Tapner, the last hanged on Guernsey - 2016
- 1945: Anacleto Diaz, Philippines Supreme Court Justice - 2015
- 1973: Tom Masaba, Sebastino Namirundu, and 10 other Uganda Fronsana rebels - 2014
- 1892: Four anarchists in Jerez - 2013
- 1794: Jacques Roux, the Red Priest, cheats the guillotine - 2012
- 2011: Rashid al Rashidi, Mousa mosque murderer - 2011
- 1952: Liu Qingshan and Zhang Zishan, the first corruption executions in Red China - 2010
- 1956: Wilbert Coffin - 2009
- 1905: Samuel McCue, mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Guest Writers,Hanged,Murder,Other Voices,Rape,Serial Killers,South Africa,The Supernatural
Tags: 1950s, 1956, elifasi msomi, february 10, pretoria, pretoria central prison, tokoloshe
November 6th, 2014
Headsman
On this date in 1964, anti-apartheid fighters Vuyisile Mini, Zinakile Mkaba and Wilson Khayingo went to the gallows of Pretoria Central Prison — the first three members of the African National Congress’s military arm to be executed by apartheid South Africa.
In 1960, on the 21st of March — a date still kept as South Africa’s Human Rights Day, and worldwide as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination — white police gunned down 69 black civilians protesting the color line.
After the Sharpeville Massacre the struggle over racial apartheid in South Africa escalated to a much more violent plane.
Confrontations throughout South Africa following Sharpeville led the white government to declare a state of emergency and begin rounding up thousands of regime opponents. Pretoria also immediately outlaws the leading black resistance organizations, the Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress.
Driven underground, both PAC and ANC spun off military wings in 1961 to meet force with force.
We have already visited the “Langa Six”, members of the PAC’s Poqo.
Shortly thereafter, on December 16, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation” in Zulu, but better known simply as “MK”) announced its advent with placards in city streets.
The time comes in the life of any people when there remain two choices: to submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We will not submit but will fight back with all means at our disposal in defence of our rights, our people and our freedom.
MK conducted its first dynamite attacks that very evening in Port Elizabeth; over the ensuing 18 months, it carried out more than 200 bombings and other acts of sabotage against the facilities of the apartheid state: train tracks, power stations, telephone wires, offices.
A security crackdown naturally ensued.* By 1963, the white government had managed to expose and arrest three-quarters of MK’s regional Eastern Cape High Command. Vuyisile Mini, Wilson Khayingo, and Zinakile Mkaba were all swiftly condemned on multiple counts of sabotage plus one of murdering a police informant. International appeals for clemency fell on deaf ears; one fellow-traveler later remembered the men taking leave of their fellow-prisoners in a haunting song.**
“The last evening was devastatingly sad as the heroic occupants of the death cells communicated to the prison in gentle melancholy song that their end was near … It was late at night when the singing ceased, and the prison fell into uneasy silence. I was already awake when the singing began again in the early morning. Once again the excruciatingly beautiful music floated through the barred windows, echoing round the brick exercise yard, losing itself in the vast prison yards. And then, unexpectedly, the voice of Vuyisile Mini came roaring down the hushed passages. Evidently standing on a stool, with his face reaching up to a barred vent in his cell, his unmistakable bass voice was enunciating his final message in Xhosa to the world he was leaving. In a voice charged with emotion but stubbornly defiant he spoke of the struggle waged by the African National Congress and of his absolute conviction of the victory to come. And then it was Khayinga’s turn, followed by Mkaba, as they too defied all prison rules to shout out their valedictions. Soon after, I heard the door of their cell being opened. Murmuring voices reached my straining ears, and then the three martyrs broke into a final poignant melody which seemed to fill the whole prison with sound and then gradually faded away into the distant depths of the condemned section.
* It was during this crackdown that future president Nelson Mandela was rolled up. Mandela had helped to found MK.
** According to The Road to Democracy in South Africa, 1960-1970, the song was Mini’s own composition titled “Pasop — nants’in-dod’inyama, Verwoerd” (“Watch out, here is the African man, Verwoerd!”). If it is available online, I have not been able to find it.
On this day..
- 1837: Luis Candelas, urban bandit - 2020
- 1941: Shura Chekalin, Hero of the Soviet Union - 2019
- 1938: Kasym Tynystanov, Kyrgyz intellectual - 2018
- 1717: Three spared en route to Tyburn, thanks to Jack Ketch's debts - 2017
- 1922: Ali Kemal - 2016
- 1863: James Murphy, after a reunion - 2015
- 1918: Roman Malinovsky, tinker, tailor, soldier, spy - 2013
- 1944: Boy Ecury, Aruban Dutch Resistance hero - 2012
- 1600: Ishida Mitsunari, Konishi Yukinaga and Ankokuji Ekei for the Tokugawa Shogunate - 2011
- 1793: Philippe Egalite, hoisted on his own petard - 2010
- 2003: Four for the oil of Chad - 2009
- 1730: Hans Hermann von Katte, Frederick the Great's lover - 2008
- 1914: Carl Hans Lody - 2007
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Activists,Capital Punishment,Cycle of Violence,Death Penalty,Execution,Hanged,History,Martyrs,Milestones,Murder,Revolutionaries,South Africa,Terrorists
Tags: 1960s, 1964, african national congress, apartheid, november 6, pretoria, pretoria central prison, racism, umkhonto we sizwe, viyusile mini, wilson khayingo, zinakile mkaba
November 14th, 2011
Headsman
On this date in 1960, South Africa conducted a mass execution of 15 miscellaneous criminals (14 black, one white) in Pretoria Prison.
The headline attraction was one of the 14 blacks: Phineas Tshitaundzi, the “panga man” or any number of related headline-worthy nicknames — the panga slasher, the panga maniac. (“Panga man” can also just be any old fellow with a panga, like an agricultural worker.)
A panga is a machete, and Phineas Tshitaundzi wielded this intimidating instrument during a 1950s spree terrorizing white lovers’ lanes around Johannesburg. “He would assault the men and rape the women — to whom, it was said, he then gave bus fare home,” wrote Jean and John Comaroff in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony.* “There could hardly have been a more intense figuration of the dark, erotically charged menace that stalked the cities in the white imagination.”
The assaults were non-fatal — panga man was the only one of the 14 blacks hanged this day not on the hook for murder — but the many survivors whose affairs were on the illicit side had injuries to cope with beyond those inflicted by the blade.
Tshitaundzi was finally caught as a result of fencing some of the proceeds of his crimes, whereupon it transpired that the terrifying perpetrator had been so difficult to capture because he’d been working as a mild-mannered 40-year-old “tea boy” at police headquarters itself, a position that allowed him to stay wise to various attempts to ensnare him.
The terrible “panga man” was installed in a kitschy exhibit in the police museum opened by his employes turned captors.
* The full chapter from this anthology can be read in pdf form here.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,Hanged,History,Mass Executions,Murder,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,Rape,Serial Killers,South Africa,Theft
Tags: 1960, 1960s, names, november 14, panga, panga man, phineas tshitaundzi, pretoria, pretoria central prison
October 18th, 2011
Headsman
On this date in 1985, poet Benjamin Moloise was hanged in Pretoria for murdering a (black) policeman in apartheid South Africa.
Moloise’s controversial execution occurred in the context of violent resistance to apartheid in South Africa’s black townships and an ultimately fatal crisis for the apartheid state.
The black majority, long treated as second-class citizens by the white powers-that-be, turned to increasingly confrontational tactics aiming to break official power at the township level. Attacks on black officials and police officers who administered state authority at that level were part and parcel.
Moloise was convicted in a plot to kill such an officer in 1983. (The African National Congress claimed responsibility for the killing, and said that Moloise wasn’t involved.)
His hanging approached as the township rising grew into a mass movement that the hardline government of P.W. Botha answered mostly with force* — so, little surprise that Botha spurned both American and Soviet entreaties not to hang Moloise and little surprise that the execution further escalated racial violence.
Furious black protesters rioted in downtown Johannesburg itself, which (like much of white South Africa) had theretofore remained mostly immune to the violence gripping the townships. Here’s a French news report on Moloise’s execution and its aftermath.
All of which dovetailed with a dramatic fall in South Africa’s international position, vividly symbolized by the months-long collapse of the rand — which bled about three-quarters of its value in 1985. International outrage at the blood shed to enforce South Africa’s color line subjected it to a cascade of diplomatic and economic sanctions in the mid-1980s.
Apartheid went out with the Cold War at the end of the decade — vindicating Moloise’s poetic final message, subsequently a staple message at anti-apartheid rallies.
I am proud to be what I am …
The storm of oppression will be followed
By the rain of my blood
I am proud to give my life
My one solitary life.
* It had implemented a state of emergency that very summer. At the same time, Botha pursued tweaks around the edges of apartheid to preserve it: weeding out “petty apartheid” provocations like whites-only/coloreds-only facilities, and implementing a new constitution with a tricameral, race-based parliament.
Part of the Themed Set: Illegitimate Power.
On this day..
- Feast Day of Saint Justus - 2020
- 1769: Six at Tyburn, "most of them, sir, have never thought at all" - 2019
- 2016: Prince Turki bin Saud al-Kadir - 2018
- 1942: The Jews of Trunovskoye - 2017
- 1769: Six felons at Tyburn, keeping away thoughts of death - 2016
- 1862: Ten Confederate hostages in the Palmyra Massacre - 2015
- 1943: Antoni Areny, the last executed in Andorra - 2014
- 1940: Hans Vollenweider, the last guillotined in Switzerland - 2013
- 1749: Bosavern Penlez, whorehouse expropriator - 2012
- Themed Set: Illegitimate Power - 2011
- 1470: John Tiptoft, Butcher of England - 2010
- 1672: Thomas Rood, the only incest execution in America - 2009
- 31: Sejanus, captain of the Praetorian Guard - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Artists,Arts and Literature,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,Famous,Famous Last Words,Hanged,History,Martyrs,Murder,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,Revolutionaries,South Africa,Terrorists
Tags: 1980s, 1985, african national congress, apartheid, benjamin moloise, october 18, poet, pretoria, pretoria central prison, racism
April 1st, 2010
Headsman
On this date in 1965, John Harris hanged in Pretoria Central Prison for an anti-apartheid bombing: the first and only white person put to death for political crimes in apartheid South Africa.
An idealistic young teacher, Harris planted a bomb in a whites-only section of Johannesburg’s Park Station, intending to demonstrate that whites, too, opposed racial segregation. But the bomb threat he phoned in was not acted upon, and the symbolic device killed a 77-year-old woman and badly burned many others.
5.30 am was the time set for the execution. We were all awake, thinking of John. Not long afterwards the phone rang. Ad Hain answered. The voice said: “Your John is dead.” She recognised the voice as one of the Special Branch men’s.
-John Harris’s widow’s testimony to the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission
His death (reportedly with “We Shall Overcome” on his lips) earned affecting tribute and flattering comparisons from his black countrymen.
Mr. Harris, a teacher and a member of the Liberal Party since 1960, is one of those few courageous White men in South Africa who believed passionately in racial equality, identified himself with the oppressed people and suffered persecution. His passport was seized in 1963. He was served with banning orders in February 1964 preventing him from continuing his work with the Liberal Party and the Non-racial Olympic Committee.
Like many others, he became convinced that there was no way left to influence the situation except by clandestine activity. When most of his colleagues in the underground organization, the African Resistance Movement, were jailed or fled the country, he tried to plan a spectacular demonstration. He placed a bomb in the Johannesburg station and telephoned the police so that the area would be cleared. The police did not act promptly and an elderly lady lost her life as a result of the explosion.
Under the prevailing circumstances in South Africa, the means of struggle are for the liberation movement to decide in the light of the conditions in the country.
The responsibility for the consequences lies very much on the rulers of Pretoria who, in defiance of the world and all sense of decency, created a situation which left no other alternative to decent people than to engage in violence.
In mourning the execution of Mr. Frederick John Harris, let me say that it will not be forgotten that in the struggle of the South African people this man, a member of the privileged group, gave his life because of his passionate belief in racial equality. This will serve to strengthen the faith of all those who fight against the danger of a “race war” and retain their faith that all human beings can live together in dignity irrespective of the colour of their skin.
I have recently received a message sent by him from his death cell in Pretoria Central Prison in January. He wrote:
“The support and warm sympathy of friends has been and is among my basic reinforcements. I daily appreciate the accuracy of the observation that when one really has to endure one relies ultimately on Reason and Courage. I’ve been fortunate in that the first has stood up — my ideals and beliefs have never faltered. As for the second, well, I’m not ashamed — I know I’ve shown at least a modicum of the second. ”
When I think of John Harris, the first White martyr in the cause of equality in South Africa, I am reminded powerfully of a great White American, a man who gave his life over a century ago — on December 2, 1859, to be exact — because of his passionate hatred of slavery: I mean John Brown.
People said then that John Brown was eccentric, that he was unwise in attacking the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and that his act would only strengthen the slave lords.
History has made a very different judgement. Whether the particular act of John Brown was right or wrong, wise or unwise, his cause was right and invincible.
-1965 statement on this date’s hanging by Achkar Marof
Harris’s conviction was secured with the states-evidence turn of one of his compatriots in the white anti-apartheid African Resistance Movement. For this betrayal, John Lloyd earned his freedom and had already moved to England by the time Harris was executed.
Lloyd built a public service life of his own in the UK. However, his bid for parliament on the Labour ticket in the 1990s was scotched when public exposure of his past (as (a) a leftist terrorist; and (b) a betrayer of his fellow-leftists) brought him more baggage than one man can tote in a general election.
Harris’s rough treatment under arrest also continues to haunt his former interrogators in South Africa.
On this day..
- 1918: Paul von Rennenkampf, tsarist general - 2020
- 889: Qin Zongquan, late Tang warlord - 2019
- 1592: The Uglich Bell - 2018
- 1464: Johann Breyde, via Schandbild - 2017
- 1698: Katharina Sommermeyer, Beierstedt witch - 2016
- 1307: Murcod Ballagh, beheaded - 2015
- 2013: A day in the death penalty around the Persian Gulf - 2014
- 1916: Gabrielle Petit, Belgian spy - 2013
- 1872: William Frederick Horry, Marwood's first - 2012
- 1942: Not Hersh Smolar, saved by Genesis - 2011
- 1691: Jack Withrington, highwayman - 2009
- Themed Set: Selections from the Newgate Calendar - 2009
- 325: Licinius, Constantine's last obstacle - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Activists,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,Hanged,History,Martyrs,Milestones,Murder,South Africa,Terrorists
Tags: 1960s, 1965, african resistance movement, apartheid, april 1, elections, john harris, john lloyd, politics, pretori, pretoria central prison, racism
September 9th, 2009
Headsman
On this date in 1986, African National Congress cadre Andrew Sibusiso Zondo was hanged in Pretoria nine months after bombing a shopping center near Durban, with five white fatalities.
Zondo claimed he had intended to non-fatally target the South African Airways office at Amanzimtoti’s Sanlam Centre, but couldn’t find a functioning, available telephone in time to phone in his attempted bomb warning. Did we mention that he was 19?
Zondo, it turned out, had been radicalized by South African security forces’ indiscriminate violence against claimed ANC “strongholds” — and specifically by a still-infamous attack, the “Matola raids,” on neighboring Mozambique.
The apartheid regime wasn’t out to win hearts and minds. And it didn’t.
[T]here have never been any ANC bases or camps in Mozambique. There are residences … and if the qualification to make a home a base is only that the people in it can use a gun, then let us be told now: because every white man in South Africa can use a gun and there are weapons in every white household. Are these bases too? (ANC Acting President Oliver Tambo)
The bomb (actually a mine) was planted three days after a South African raid on Lesotho. One of Zondo’s accomplices later turned state’s evidence in exchange for immunity.
Both the ANC, which had an official policy of avoiding civilian casualties, and Zondo himself portrayed the affair as a regrettable rogue operation carried out unofficially by an understandably frustrated cadre.
It was not the last word in the bloody tit-for-tat
Two other persons suspected of being involved in the Amanzimtoti blast, Mr Phumezo Nxiweni and Mr Stanley Sipho Bhila, were [extrajudicially] executed by Security Branch members after they were acquitted in court … At Andrew Zondo’s memorial service, his brother was so severely assaulted that he developed epilepsy, which subsequently killed him. Two mourners were shot dead leaving his parents’ home after the memorial service. Lembede, one of the security policemen involved in the killing of Zondo’s alleged accomplice, was himself later killed, allegedly by members of MK.
Hanged along with Zondo were two unrelated ANC cadres, plus three unrelated common criminals.
I have no information about the criminals, but the other revolutionaries to swing were Clarence Lucky Payi and Sipho Brigitte Xulu (or Sipho Bridget Xulu — but a guy, by either name).
Payi and Xulu assassinated another ANC agent, Benjamin Langa, the brother of present-day South African Chief Jutsice Pius Langa.
South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission has officially attributed the murder to a false flag operation conducted by Pretoria — whereby a mole in the ANC ordered the killing and, with its perpetrators’ subsequent execution, achieved for the white government “a triple murder … without firing a single shot themselves.”
A murky affair by any standard, and one that may not be entirely buried. There’s been some attempt (hotly disputed) to establish a sinister (if vague) alternate hypothesis linking current South African President Jacob Zuma himself to the Langa murder.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Assassins,Capital Punishment,Cycle of Violence,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,Hanged,History,Mass Executions,Murder,Revolutionaries,Ripped from the Headlines,South Africa,Terrorists
Tags: 1980s, 1986, african national congress, amanzimtoti, anc, andrew zondo, apartheid, ben langa, benjamin langa, clarence lucky payi, jacob zuma, maputo, matola raids, mk, oliver tambo, phumezo nxiweni, pius langa, pretoria, pretoria central prison, racism, september 9, sipho bridget xulu, sipho brigitte xulu, stanley sipho bhila, umkhonto we sizwe
June 20th, 2009
Headsman
On this date in 1962, Marthinus Rossouw was hanged in Pretoria after an unusual defense strategy failed to repel a headline-grabbing murder charge.
Rossouw shot dead Baron Dieterich Joachim Gunther von Schauroth, a rich farmer (dude was born in a castle) who had been forced into city living by a long run of drought and was known for the life expectancy-compromising habit of toting around large sums of cash.
Rossouw insisted at trial that the killing had been at Von Schauroth’s own instigation, so freighted with care was the victim’s life that he implored his younger friend to end it. The defendant hoped thereby to mitigate the sentence as a case of murder by consent.*
Whether telling the truth or not, Rossouw didn’t make a very credible witness; caught in several lies and omissions, and naturally lacking any corroborating witness to the alleged murder pact, the jury gave him no slack.
Neither did the noose.
* The proper legal handling of a case where the victim of a homicide has freely desired to die is a longstanding salami-slicing juridical problem — witness a whole chapter in an 1897 British primer on consent issues in the law.
On this day..
- 1679: Five Jesuits, for the Popish Plot - 2020
- 1483: Fernando II, Duke of Braganza - 2019
- 1890: Elizabeth and Josiah Potts, wife and husband - 2018
- 1684: Sir Thomas Armstrong, Whig plotter - 2017
- 1375: Niccolo di Toldo, in the arms of St. Catherine of Siena - 2016
- 1816: Peter Lung, uxoricide - 2015
- 1979: Bill Stewart, ABC News reporter - 2014
- 1944: Jakob Edelstein and family - 2013
- 1945: 8 American flyers at Fukuoka - 2012
- 1911: Sitarane and Fontaine, Reunion Island occultists - 2011
- 1940: Tirailleurs Senegalais, for France - 2010
- 1864: William Johnson, a bad example - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Hanged,Murder,Pelf,South Africa
Tags: 1960s, 1962, dietrich joachim gunther von schauroth, june 20, marthinus rossouw, murder by consent, pretoria, pretoria central prison
June 2nd, 2009
Richard Clark
(Thanks to Richard Clark of Capital Punishment U.K. for the guest post, a reprint of an article originally published on that site. The images accompanying this post are also provided by Mr. Clark. -ed.)
Sandra Smith was the last woman to be hanged in South Africa (with her boyfriend Yassiem Harris).
Background.
Sandra Smith was a 22-year-old coloured woman (official South African designation during the apartheid era) who was married to a trawlerman called Philip and had two small children. Philip spent long periods at sea and sent money back for Sandra and the children. She began having an affair with Yassiem Harris, who was 3 years her junior, in the autumn of 1983 and soon they were deeply in love. Harris had been involved in crime since the age of 13 and had convictions for theft and fraud and was also a drug user. Philip found out about the affair from his neighbours and in March of 1986, he finally threw Sandra out. She and Harris now began living together in a rented apartment but soon the money that Philip used to give her ran out and their finances became tight.
The crime.
To make ends meet, they tried renting video recorders from shops and then selling them but this didn’t net them any real money. Harris, who was unemployed, also spent time hanging about outside a girl’s school and got to know some of the girls, including Jermaine Abrahams. He soon found out where she lived and from his conversations with Jermaine, he concluded that her family were quite wealthy.
They hatched a plan to break into the Abrahams’ family home and steal her mother’s jewelry and anything else of value. Harris had also found out that her parents left for work at 7.00 a.m. in the morning and she left for school about 7.40 a.m.
The victim, Jermaine Abrahams.
Smith and Harris arrived at the house about 7.30 a.m. on September the 1st, 1986, and Harris was let in by Jermaine on the pretext of him wanting to use the telephone. They tied Jermaine up but were disturbed by someone knocking at the door. She started to shout for help and struggle so they then tried to strangle her with a dish cloth. Harris now fetched a knife from the kitchen and repeatedly stabbed Jermaine in the neck. Amazingly, she didn’t die from her injuries and managed to get to her feet and stagger a few paces before collapsing. Harris carried Jermaine to her parents bedroom and made her show him where the jewelry and valuables were kept. He wrapped the poor girl in a duvet and then cut her throat, leaving her to bleed to death. He and Smith collected up what they wanted and then left the house.
Two weeks later, while Smith was being questioned by the police regarding the video scam, she surprised the interviewing officer by confessing to the killing of Jermaine. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with it,” she said. In her statement she told the police, “He pulled the scarf tight across her mouth and then cut her throat.”
On the 15th of September 1986, Sandra Smith was formally charged with the murder and 5 days later Harris was arrested and also charged with it.
Trial.
At their committal hearing at the Mitchell’s Plain Magistrates’ Court on the 23rd of September, they pleaded guilty to murder, alternatively to culpable homicide, and to stealing R2,000 worth of jewelry.
They were tried together at the Cape Town Supreme Court on December the 1st, 1986, before Mr. Justice Munnik, the Judge-President of the Cape Court, and two assessors. South Africa did not use the jury system, although its court proceedings were based upon British law, but instead a system of a judge and assessors. Both were represented by counsel and both attempted to shift the blame on to the other. Smith maintained that Harris had done the actual killing and Harris claimed to have been dominated by Smith, although they both admitted being present during the murder.
Sandra Smith was embarrassed by the revelations of her sex life with Harris in court and seemed at times more concerned with these than the fact that she was on trial for her life.
Having heard all the evidence, Mr. Justice Munnik gave a full reasoned judgement in which he described Harris as “an appalling witness.” He said it was clear that it was Harris who had stabbed the girl and slit her throat to prevent her identifying them. He also rejected Harris’ defence claim that he been dominated by Smith which had been refuted by the psychiatrist giving evidence for the prosecution. He accepted that Smith was demanding but not dominant, and there was no evidence to indicate that she forced Harris to kill Jermaine, nor that she had done anything to prevent the murder. He thus concluded that they were both equally responsible for the crime under the doctrine of “common purpose.” Thus on the 11th of December 1986, they were both formally convicted of the murder of Jermaine Abrahams and with robbery with aggravating circumstances and remanded for sentence.
Eleven days later they were brought back to the court and received the mandatory sentence for murder — that they be hanged by the neck until they were dead. Additionally, Harris received a 10-year prison sentence for robbery and Smith was given seven years for it. Sandra Smith became hysterical when she was sentenced to death and had to be taken struggling and screaming to the cells.
They were transferred to the country’s only death row, at Pretoria Central Prison, a modern facility on the outskirts of the capital where all South African executions were carried out. Their appeals were turned down and the review of the trial transcripts to determine whether to recommend that the state president grant clemency carried out by the Ministry of Justice failed to find any mitigating circumstances. As clemency was not forthcoming, their execution date was set for the 2nd of June 1989. Apparently, only around one in 50 people convicted of homicide were actually hanged at this time, the majority serving a prison sentence.
Execution.
At 6.50 a.m. on that morning, Smith was taken to meet Harris for the first time in over two and a half years. Together with two other men who had been convicted of murder, they were led the 52 steps to the pre-execution room next to the gallows. The death warrants were read to them and they were given the opportunity to say their last words. Their hands were handcuffed behind them and white hoods placed over their heads, these having a flap at the front which was left up until the last moment.
They were now led forward by warders into the large and brightly lit execution room. It was some 40 feet long with white painted walls. They would have seen the gallows beam running the length of the room and the 7 large metal eyes from which the four nooses dangled. (Seven prisoners could and often were hanged at once on this gallows.) The picture shows very much what Smith and Harris would have seen as they were led to the gallows. The chain hoist on the middle metal eye is used for raising the trapdoors after an execution.
They were positioned side by side, on painted footprints over the divide of the trap and held by warders while the hangman placed the nooses around their necks. He then turned down the hood flaps and when all was ready, pulled the lever plummeting them through the huge trapdoors.
They were left to hang for 15 minutes before being stripped and examined by a doctor in the room below. Once death had been certified, the bodies were washed off with a hose and the water allowed to drain into a large gully in the floor. A warder put a rope around each of their bodies and with a pulley lifted them to allow the rope to be taken off. They were then lowered onto a stretcher and placed directly into their coffins before taken to a public cemetery for burial.
Although executions in South Africa were held in private, the procedure was described in detail by the then hangman, Chris Barnard, in an interview before he died. He officiated at over 1,500 hangings there.
South Africa hanged 1,123 people at Pretoria Central prison between 1980 and 1989, Solomon Ngobeni being the last on November 14th, 1989. Surprisingly perhaps, almost all of these were for “ordinary” murders rather than politically motivated crimes and most attracted very little publicity.
According to the South African Department of Correctional Services, two other coloured women were hanged for murder in the years 1969 to 1989, Gertie Fourie, on the 20th of May 1969 and Roos de Vos, on the 12th of December 1986. A total of 14 women were executed between 1959 & 1989, out of a total of 2,949 hangings.
President De Klerk ordered a moratorium on executions in 1990 and capital punishment was abolished altogether by the incoming black government of Nelson Mandela on the 7th of June 1995.
Comment.
We cannot know why Smith and Harris went to the Abrahams’ home while they knew Jermaine would still be there or whether they had actually formed any intention to kill her. Neither of them had any record of violence prior to the murder. My guess is that they panicked when she started to call for help from the person who knocked on the door and they tried to silence her. However, it seems hard to believe that Harris really thought she wouldn’t identify him to the police as soon as they had left and he may well have decided to kill her for this reason. It is claimed that Smith wanted Jermaine dead as she was jealous of her having some sort of relationship with Harris. In any event, Jermaine suffered a horrible and agonising death at their hands.
We cannot know, either, which one of them did the actual killing or whether they both took equal part in it. But there was clear “common purpose” established under law, and there were no obvious mitigating circumstances to allow the state to reduce the sentence on either of them. South Africa had the highest rate of judicial execution in the world during the 80’s so they would surely have known the penalty for murder but like so many people, gave no thought to it until it was too late.
Sadly, it is so typical of the kind of brutal and senseless murder that happens all too frequently and one that led to cruel deaths for three young people.
On this day..
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,Hanged,Milestones,Murder,Pelf,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,South Africa,Theft,Women
Tags: 1980s, 1989, june 2, pretoria, pretoria central prison, sandra smith, yassiem harris
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