We Are Not Such Things (23 page)

By 1990, the country was facing a stalemate. The apartheid government was unable to govern; the liberation movements were unable to seize power. President F. W. de Klerk, part of a new generation of Afrikaner, recognized the impossibility of maintaining white rule in a country with a declining white population and a rising black population—mired in a recession, hindered by sanctions and military expenditures, weighed down by a bloated bureaucracy meant to keep apartheid afloat. Mandela and the ANC recognized that they faced logistical and financial issues as the Soviet Union collapsed, denying them their main support network. Both parties would benefit from a peaceful handover of power.

So in 1990 de Klerk unbanned the ANC and PAC and released Mandela from prison. Over the following year the majority of political prisoners were released, the State of Emergency was lifted, and many apartheid laws were repealed. The ANC, in turn, suspended the armed struggle. The PAC did not. An era of political negotiations began.

Nonetheless, violence snowballed as the country navigated the rocky road from minority rule to inclusive democracy. Between 1989 and 1994, 17,426 people died in political clashes. Amy Biehl was just one of these victims, killed by a mob of young black men. The vast majority of victims, however, were black, and were killed by soldiers, police, security forces, and warring black organizations.

This was the environment in which Pikker worked, though he refused to comment on whether he tortured or killed anyone. He claimed that back when he joined the force, he was “dumb when it came to politics,” but he was committed to the job. In his years on the force, Pikker had gathered information about underground groups, most specifically the ANC. He traveled hours every day to interrogate political prisoners stashed in various prisons along the peninsula. He tapped phones and gathered intelligence.

He saw burned bodies and burned children. He drove away as a grenade landed by his colleague, and turned to see a street covered in blood. One of his co-workers was attacked in Khayelitsha and dragged onto a rubbish heap, his dead body shot repeatedly. Pikker himself, after testifying against a black defendant in court, escaped being assassinated by a hit man brought in from the Eastern Cape.

“So what you do is you go buy a couple bottles of brandy, sit under the trees, and talk about it at night with other cops.”

By the 1990s, Pikker was a member of the Riot and Violent Crimes Investigation Unit, working out of the “office in the bush,” investigating crimes suspected to be of a political nature: murders and arsons, taxi wars, any crime that involved an Eastern Bloc weapon (the theory being that communist Russia was supplying the communist ANC opposition movement with guns).

“Whether I thought it was right or wrong is neither here or there,” Pikker said softly. “They were trying to remove the government of the day with a government of their own by violent means. This was the overthrow of the current status quo by an underground group who wanted to take over the running of the country on the communist basis.” He paused and lit a cigarette. “Like the soldier, you do what you’re told.”

On August 25, 1993, Pikker was on standby, finishing dinner with his wife and three boys at home. His pager was on 24/7 and he was hardly ever around—sleeping off a night of boozing on Christmas morning as the boys opened their gifts; off chasing cases during a birthday party; investigating political foes during his kids’ sports games. His wife picked up the slack. He balefully dubbed himself a “stay-away dad.”

“I always said I had an affair with the police all my life. I couldn’t wait to go back in every day. I was addicted. My wife sacrificed, and the kids sacrificed.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Ja,” Pikker said, nodding. “Ja.”

At around 7:30
P
.
M
., Pikker’s phone rang. A white woman had been killed during a political protest in Gugulethu. The victim was American. Pikker jumped in his car and zipped over to the Gugulethu police station. He drove through the crowd outside the station gates and headed to the back, where a few of his colleagues and a bunch of local cops were milling about on the pavement. He saw Amy lying beneath a blanket. He bent down and lifted it up. She had a gash on her head, and blood on her face. Her eyes were slightly open, but she was clearly dead. Without thinking much about it, Pikker claimed his role as lead detective on the case.

“I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ Words I’d come to regret.”

After the crowds by the gate had dispersed and Pikker had adequately questioned and intimidated the edgy local cops on duty—including a humiliated Leon Rhodes, the officer who had been first to the scene, found Amy, and driven her to the police station—he drove over to the Caltex station, where the crime had occurred. The township was still and quiet, not a soul on the sidewalks. Pikker inspected the white railings smeared with blood, a lock of dark yellow hair curled on the dry grass. He walked across the way and started knocking on doors, taking statements.

As usual, few people were willing to talk, but some whispered rumors. Pikker hit up some confidential informants; he heard some accusations whispered through the grapevine. Rhodes had given Pikker the paper he’d received, with the names of the suspects scrawled on it.

“I remember Ntobeko,” Pikker said. “He seemed illiterate, unschooled. And what was his name, that guy? Easy…Nofemela…he was a local, one of the first to be identified. I know exactly what he looks like.”

By dawn on August 26, less than twelve hours after Amy’s death, a riot squad pulled up at Easy’s house. They stormed the place and found one Mzikhona “Easy” Nofemela, age twenty-two, in his underwear, having been previously asleep next to his girlfriend Pinky in a back room. But you had to wonder, if Easy had spent the night before the killing hiding out in a safe house in Khayelitsha, why hadn’t he returned there? Surely that would have been more practical than going to his mom’s place.

The cops continued to sweep the township, gathering suspects all morning and afternoon. Over the next few days, more young men were dragged in, and then let go. You could arrest whoever fit your fancy, but after forty-eight hours in holding, you were required to release a suspect if there was not enough evidence to justify his continued incarceration. In fact, there was little physical evidence to back up Amy’s case: no DNA and no fingerprints. People were calling the anonymous crime line, but township eyewitnesses, the impimpis, were always in short supply.

Nonetheless, Pikker and his squad had enough to keep Easy incarcerated, along with a group of seven others who had been separately rounded up. Following the crime, police had swarmed the area, plucking up at least a few suspects they could justify keeping for longer than two days, the vast majority of them from a little rectangle of streets spanning from NY1 to NY111. They hunted down Mongezi Manqina as he ran out the back of his mother’s house. They snapped up Ntobeko Peni at a relative’s place. Easy, Mongezi, Ntobeko: the three names on the scrap of paper that had been handed to Rhodes. In September, on a tip, cops headed to Langa and cuffed Vusumzi Ntamo in the yard of his aunt’s house; he would be the fourth man convicted of Amy’s murder.

Pikker’s crew picked up a scrawny local teenager named Terry, who witnesses recalled had lifted items from Amy’s car. They also dragged three ropy, hardened men who had gone into hiding in a southwestern coastal town called Saldanha Bay. These men were named Mena, Mankeke, and Steyn, and they were all affiliated with APLA. I’ll call them the APLA trio.

On August 26 Pikker and a couple of other unwashed, bleary-eyed cops made their way west to the Salt River Mortuary, where Amy’s body was held. There, a medical examiner named Gideon Jacobus Knobel performed an autopsy. Amy was placed on a metal table and cleaned off so that Knobel could properly inspect her wounds. Her hair, now wet, was tangled and slicked back from her bare, freckled face. Her eyes were closed. Her clothing, soaked with blood, had been gathered as evidence, and her body lay naked beneath a blue terry-cloth towel.

Knobel examined every inch of Amy. Her arms and legs were tanned but her torso pale white. Her height, he noted, was 1.64 meters, or just shy of five-four. Her mass, he recorded, was 53 kilograms, just under 117 pounds. He categorized her physique as “small.”

“Little warrior,” her boyfriend, Scott, had called her.

“Little dynamo,” Peter and Linda called her.

Amy’s nutrition was “good,” Knobel wrote. He opened her mouth:
Full set of teeth.
He ran his hand over her skin.
Body cool to touch. Rigor mortis fully established and posterior lividity present.

Knobel shaved the crown of her head to examine the wounds. He peeled back the skin, opened the skull, and peered at the brain contained within. He took out a ruler and measured the stab wound to the left of her breast, the bruises on her hands and wrists, the blue blooming across her thigh. He snapped photographs of each relevant injury. He made notes on three sheets of paper that contained black-and-white sketches of the generic human body from various angles: right profile, face from the front, left profile, skull from the front, skull from above, brain, hands, palms. It was a crude map of the body, used by the examiner to keep a visual record of where each injury occurred.

Knobel marked each of Amy’s wounds on the sketches. Using a pen, he marked a spot on the bridge of the nose, and wrote “old scar 0.5 cm.” He marked the large, triangular wound made by a brick on her head, and drew an arrow to a more detailed rendering of the wound. He drew each cut and its corresponding measurement on the facial sketch: “0.7 cm abrasion” on her right shoulder; “3.0 cm upper edge, sharp angular edge in bone” above her right eye; “bone fragments” on the right front of the brain.

Later, Knobel sat down at his typewriter. He detailed his chief findings: the stab wound to the chest, blood that had gathered in the chest and heart, several major lacerations to the head, and two fractures of the skull. He concluded the cause of death:
Stab wound of the chest into the heart and head injuries with fractured skull and the consequences thereof.

“She probably didn’t feel much pain after the blow, even though she got out of the car and tried to speak to the mob, tried to calm them down, poor woman,” Knobel later said, referring to the brick that came through her shattered windshield and hit her in the head.

Pikker recalled that Knobel had indeed blamed the initial stoning, not the stab wound, for Amy’s swift and permanent demise. “He said the blow to the head could affect her gait and her speech, and it went right through the skull and damaged the brain. He was convinced that that was the cause of her death. Witnesses say she was mumbling, muttering, stumbling, reaching out in that incoherent way. Even if she had received immediate medical help for the stab wound to the chest, it wouldn’t have helped for her bleeding in the brain.”

Pikker left the morgue and got down to business. For the next eleven months, he worked the Amy Biehl case day and night as other files piled up on his desk, accumulating dust, and as other accused languished in jail cells. He worked twenty-hour days, transporting the remaining witnesses, making deals, seeking out evidence, searching for clues, filling out forms.

The attorney general was putting on the pressure as the story garnered attention around the world. The U.S. government was also keen on closing the case with satisfactory results. But still, testimony from township dwellers was not forthcoming. The windows of potential witnesses were broken. One witness found his dog writhing out front, its stomach split open. Soon enough, witnesses were recanting their testimony or refusing to appear in court, claiming threats and intimidation.

On October 6, 1993, seven men were indicted on charges of murder, public violence, and robbery. These included Easy, Mongezi, Vusumzi, the APLA trio, and Terry, the teenager who had nicked valuables from Amy’s car. Of these seven, however, only six were in custody. Terry had been released to his mother because he was too young to be held in jail, and he had promptly skipped town.

By November 22, the APLA trio, infamous in the township for taking no prisoners, were released for lack of evidence. Witnesses refused to testify against the men, who denied any involvement in the crime. Upon hearing of their liberation, the trio ran out of the courthouse gleefully, lifted on the shoulders of their friends, saluting the PAC. Ntobeko had been hauled into the police station in late August 1993, and had stood in a lineup, but nobody could—or would—identify him, and he was let go. In old video footage, he blends into the crowd of cheering young people and helps to hoist the trio members up in the air. After a witness stepped forward, Ntobeko was rearrested, tried, and sentenced in a separate trial in 1995.

“You see, Amy thought that being in Gugulethu every day, she was well known,” Pikker said. “She felt she was accepted. It often happened in the past, people who were stoned or petrol-bombed taking their domestic workers home. But Amy had this innocence. She didn’t expect something like this to happen. Fortunately for the investigation, she was a prominent person. She had a political status. The kids who killed her, they thought she was just a white woman. But she worked with the ANC. If it was a normal person, the story would be out just for one day, on page five.”