Gruesome. The crimes and criminals that shook South Africa by De Wet Potgieter

Gruesome. The crimes and criminals that shook South Africa by De Wet Potgieter. Penguin Random House South Africa. Imprint: Zebra Press. Cape Town, South Africa 2015. ISBN 9781770229082 / ISBN 978-1-77-022908-2

Gruesome. The crimes and criminals that shook South Africa, by De Wet Potgieter. Early in January 2012, South Africans were shocked by the events that instantly landed the tranquil village of Modimolle, formerly known as Nylstroom, on newspaper front pages.

On 3 January 2012, Johan Kotze and three black men, whom he had hired, lay in wait for his estranged wife, Ina Bonnette, and her son, Conrad, at Kotze's Modimolle home. He had wilfully lured them there. Kotze then ordered the three men to repeatedly rape Ina. For two and a half hours she was tortured and brutally assaulted. Her breasts were also mutilated. Ina had to listen how Conrad unavailingly pleaded for his life before being shot dead by Kotze. The media promptly dubbed Johan Kotze the Modimolle Monster, and the name stuck - to the dismay of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who appealed to the media to stop calling Kotze a monster: "He may indeed be guilty of inhuman, ghastly and monstrous deeds, but he is not a monster. We are actually letting him off lightly by calling him a monster, because monsters have no moral sense of right and wrong - and therefore cannot be held morally culpable," Tutu wrote to The Star. He added that Kotze remained "a child of God with the capacity to become a saint". A full-scale debate erupted around Tutu's letter. It was this debate that reminded me of the countless times my path as a journalist had crossed with those of violent people. Each of them had been driven by a different force that compelled them to commit their horrendous deeds. Would it be fair to call them monsters, even though some of their acts were downright gruesome and inhumane? I dusted off and reopened the files to have another look at what these people had done. It was interesting to see who had shown remorse and who had not, and I was once again confronted by the question, Who are we to judge? Did Jesus not say that the one who is without sin should be the first to cast a stone? And that is how Gruesome came about. The book recounts how I became involved in 10 cases that kept people speculating for a long time. In some of these cases the culprits were never brought to book. In others they were caught and put in jail. What was the result? Was there remorse? And what good is this remorse? Join me as I retrace the paths that these offenders have walked and revisit each of their cases. Just as Johan Kotze and his gruesome deeds appalled South Africans, the acts of the main characters in each of these recounts, with the exception of Andre Stander, had everyone asking in horror, How could they? How can one human being do this to another. In each of the stories, you will be surprised by facts that have never appeared in print before.

This is an excerpt from Gruesome. The crimes and criminals that shook South Africa by De Wet Potgieter.

Title: Gruesome
Subtitle: The crimes and criminals that shook South Africa
Author: De Wet Potgieter
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Zebra Press
Cape Town, South Africa 2015
ISBN 9781770229082 / ISBN 978-1-77-022908-2
Softcover, 15 x 23 cm, 240 pages, several b/w and colour photographs