We Are Not Such Things (25 page)

Back in 1993, Amy’s murder bloomed into an international incident, unfurling onto newspaper pages across the world. Always, they used the same shots of Amy—here with a pudgy black baby in her arms, here grinning widely, here surrounded by African women with baskets on their heads.

The trial was the first to be fast-tracked under a new act aimed at combating political violence and unrest. Other similarly political cases involving violence in the townships had been left to idle, but the local government swiftly applied the act to Amy’s case. Accordingly, for the better part of the year, the accused were denied bail and the state prosecution was urged to prioritize the case.

The defendants were kept at Pollsmoor Prison, just outside Cape Town.

“The prison is beautiful outside,” Easy recalled. “Nice gardens, nice flowers, very shiny. When you go inside, is cold showers, dirty beds, breakfast is porridge with one sugar, gangsters fighting and they cut your head.”

When they were finally given bail of 250 rand (equivalent at the time to about $70), their families had to raise funds. Vusumzi eventually returned to prison, which transported him to the court because he couldn’t afford the daily train fare to attend the trial.

The trial played against the backdrop of the Cape Town High Court, a pale gray building supported by pillars, its doors of carved, polished mahogany. The whole hullabaloo seemed a testament to colonialism. The proceedings took place in a resplendent, monochromatic room accented with wooden benches, wooden tables, and wooden paneling. The advocates wore long black robes, high white frilly collars, and powdered wigs, à la Great Britain, and everyone reverently referred to Judge Gerald Friedman as “M’Lord.” Once, the local Gugulethu cop Leon Rhodes, who was accustomed to testifying in lower-level magistrates’ courts, addressed Friedman as “Your Honor” instead of “M’Lord” and was roundly taken to task for disrespect as he sat there on the stand—an embarrassment he never forgot.

Set against such European-style formality, the trial became a macabre circus, especially because the PAC was experiencing trouble cobbling together a cohesive message. Some PAC leaders had sent a letter to the U.S. ambassador, expressing “regret” for Amy’s murder. Meanwhile, other PAC leaders had herded some radicalized township kids into taxis and sent them to stand on the courthouse steps, kick the walls, point imaginary guns, and chant, “Settler, settler, war, war.” The prosecutors snuck in and out of the back entrance to avoid them, and eventually the police erected a barbed wire barricade on the sidewalk. Pinky, Easy’s girlfriend at the time, smacked a reporter with her shoe.

Ntobeko was among the crowd. Small and thin, his image was caught by the camera that time he lifted one of the men in the freed APLA trio on his shoulders. He and his other student PAC compadres from the townships stood on the steps, crowds of kids as young as ten, hamming it up for the aghast spectators, talking a good game when the microphones dangled before them, cheering each other on, repeating the PAC rhetoric—“our land,” “war, war, war,” “settler, settler”—and then surreptitiously eyeing the cameras to check that they were being filmed. If no one watched, they stopped dancing around, deflated, but if they had an audience, they grew ever more energetic. Invisible children, they now had the world watching them.

For a couple of days in January 1994, Linda and Amy’s younger sister, Molly, pushed through the protesters as they entered the court. Peter and the other two siblings had stayed in America. The South African government had assigned the women bodyguards, a pair of poofy-haired Afrikaners whom they had nicknamed Hans and Frans. Linda, normally a zaftig woman, was thin and drawn in her various shifts, but made a point of walking with her chin angled skyward. Molly was more visibly unsettled. Hans and Frans stood guard. Later, Linda and Molly would see their bodyguards on TV, protectively flanking de Klerk, the former president who became deputy president to Mandela after the transition to democracy.

Months earlier, the PAC kids had sat in the gallery and laughed when Maletsatsi, Amy’s friend who had been in the car on August 25, sat at the witness stand and spoke of Amy’s last moment: how she could not speak, how she could only moan. A court clerk began to cry quietly, but the PAC kids let out whoops and giggles. Maletsatsi’s friend Sindiswa, the other female passenger, broke down before her testimony.

“The witness is overcome,” the judge announced, and court was adjourned.

LAUGHTER IN MURDER COURT CHILLS S AFRICA,
London’s
Sunday Times
announced, before bemoaning the country’s “depravity”: “Good was fighting evil in supreme court number one, and it looked as if this country’s tide of thuggery and intimidation would triumph.”

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, soon to leave South Africa for a more welcoming post in California, attended the trial in her capacity as an anthropologist. She approached the accused’s attorney, Nona Goso, and asked why the spectators had laughed.

“The laughter was not acceptable to me, nor to anyone else, but it did not shock me,” Goso told Nancy. “I live in a township and I know the extent to which apartheid has murdered human feelings….Their own people have been killed so often that it has the effect of reducing killing to nothing.”

As Linda and Molly passed the students on their way to the trial, flanked by Hans and Frans, the same students started to jeer.

“Kill Americans!” they yelled from the pavement.

“One settler, one bullet!”

Linda didn’t wince, and Molly tried to follow suit.

“I’ve been to more intimidating Raiders football games,” Linda later told me.

Linda and Molly attended a “trial within the trial,” an extensive offshoot of the initial trial that centered on whether the defendants had been forced to confess through intimidation and beatings. Easy’s father, Wowo, also sat in on the proceedings every day, “a small man in a blue knit cap,” as Linda remembered. “He almost looked like he wanted to speak to me.” On one of the days during which the Biehls sat in court, the entire line of questioning concerned whether Easy had been forced to smoke a stub of a cigarette found on the interrogation room floor.

Linda was privately anguished by this element of the trial: her daughter had been killed, and here they were, watching people debate the provenance of a cigarette butt. Worse, Mongezi Manqina—the handsome man accused of stabbing Amy, who chewed on a toothpick throughout the trial—turned directly to Molly and flashed her a broad smile.

“Was he smiling at me or laughing at me?” she wondered aloud nervously. “I feel sorry for him.”

Later, when I tracked him down, Mongezi, who still had the toothpick in his mouth, claimed that chewing on it simply calmed his nerves. And he had only smiled at Molly because, well, she was Amy’s spitting image; it was as if the woman he’d stabbed to death was standing before him, a pretty walking ghost. Why that made him grin widely, he could not explain.

After two days, the Biehls decided enough was enough, and let the trial go on its way without them. They went to the Camps Bay beach—the ritziest strip of sand and saltwater in Cape Town—followed by the faithful Hans and Frans, each wearing swimming trunks that revealed lily-white legs. They were driven out to Paarl, the hot, rural farming and vineyard town an hour outside of Cape Town, where the first Poqo members had marched in 1962, murdering two white citizens and wrecking property. There, the Biehls met Mandela. Linda shook his hand; he even knew her name. Her skirt kept blowing up in the wind and the ladies beside her kept pulling it down. Then Linda and Molly watched as Mandela commanded a throbbing, worshipful crowd at the Paarl soccer stadium, and their hair stood on end. It was history in the making. Mandela was not yet president and the country was not yet free; but he would be, and it would be, within months.

While Linda and Molly Biehl met Mandela in the Winelands, the Cape’s senior prosecutor, Nollie Niehaus, was still trying to build a case, despite the fact that the senior defense attorney, the aptly named Justice Poswa, was stalling endlessly with the trial-within-a-trial tactics, spending months trying to get the defendants’ confessions thrown out. More troubling was the fact that the prosecution still had very little evidence conclusively tying the accused to the murder.

Nollie Niehaus was the law to Ilmar Pikker’s order and had been easy to find since he was still working for the state as a senior prosecutor. He picked up his phone on the first ring, and the next day he greeted me at the National Prosecuting Authority office downtown. Niehaus was a sprightly, salt-and-pepper-haired Afrikaner gentleman who had clearly dedicated a good portion of his life to trimming and caring for his mustache. Like most prosecutors, he was a ham and a showboater, with a healthy dose of self-confidence and a sharp mind. He was as upbeat as he was hardened; I sensed he would have no qualms about flashing you a smile before asking the judge to hang you. Through the ebb and flow of the various political tides, Niehaus had ridden the waves, putting away rapists and murderers and organized crime bosses with aplomb. He had seen a bunch of major cases in his time—including the one he’d recently wrapped up, Goldin and Bloom, about which he was eager to reminisce.

The national media was particularly enamored of certain crimes, chief among them anything that involved wealthy white people—preferably attractive and educated, and especially if the violence was senseless and arbitrary, and played into widespread fears. In the case of Goldin and Bloom, a twenty-eight-year-old comedic actor named Brett Goldin and a twenty-seven-year-old fashion designer named Richard Bloom had left a dinner party in the upscale seaside neighborhood of Camps Bay at ten one night in April 2006. I regularly strolled there after dark, and my hundred-pound mother-in-law walked her obese, docile spaniel by the sea there after dinner every evening.

But on their way to the car, Goldin and Bloom were surrounded by a group of gang-identified colored men from the Cape Flats, sleep-deprived, twitching on
tik
and loaded on liquor. Tik, or, crystal meth, makes you emaciated and wild, as evidenced by the roving bands of young addicts strutting through the townships and colored areas, followed by strung-out old addicts, limping alone down the streets. It also makes your teeth rot away.

The men had been on the lookout for a car to steal, and they had their eye on Bloom’s shiny VW hatchback. In South Africa, Volkswagens are ubiquitous, and thus a draw for criminals. Many carjackers are merely working for an organized crime syndicate, which usually orders a particular make and model for a client. The carjacker targets the desired vehicle, which is immediately hustled away, its driver dead or injured or perhaps merely traumatized and standing by the side of the road. Its identifying marks are removed and it is sold to a buyer, often across the border or in a faraway city.

The men who wanted Bloom’s car were too disorganized and inebriated to be working for a crime boss, but they still knew to home in on a car that might blend in undetected and appeal to a potential buyer. Why they also took Goldin and Bloom, when they could easily have simply absconded with the car, has never been fully explained. Some say it was a gang initiation, but others think it was a dumb split-second decision that snowballed into unplanned violence. Hours after the robbery and kidnapping, Goldin’s and Bloom’s naked bodies were found by a highway off-ramp.

Niehaus strode over to his bookshelf and rifled around, before pulling out a large photocopy of a color picture and slapping it on the desk between us: two naked young men, facedown on dry grass and pine needles, dead from a couple of shots to the head.

“It looks quite personal,” I said.

“Noooo,” Niehaus drawled. “They were queer though. Don’t know if that had anything to do with it. Both good actors, though.” Actually, only Bloom was a performer; Goldin was a fashion designer. Niehaus pointed to a close-up of a blood spatter on one man’s arm. “See, that was caused by spilling from the head wound to the arm. Horrific, hey?”

He replaced the photo, sat down, and spun his chair around. Did I mind if he smoked?

I didn’t mind, I said, but was that allowed?

Niehaus closed his door, cracked a window, slipped a Camel from his jacket pocket, lit it, and smiled wide. “Who guards the guardian?” he asked. Then he leaned back in his chair and focused on my questions. “Amy Biehl,” he muttered.

In 1993, Niehaus’s hair was chestnut brown and his neck was a little thicker, but his mustache was as full and lustrous as ever. He was working across the street in the old days. You could see his previous office from here, the building by the courthouse with the air-conditioning units on top and the red trim. Back then, Niehaus was handed the Biehl case, which would swiftly consume his life. The case was a media circus, and he was expected to do what it took to win.

He charged the suspects with murder, and asked for them to be hanged. Between 1960 and 1990 in South Africa, 2,500 men were hanged. Ninety-five percent of them were black, sentenced by white judges. As apartheid headed toward its demise, the death penalty remained on the books but was utilized less frequently, and by 1993 it was merely symbolic. Everyone knew that if the political winds continued blowing as they were, a person sentenced to death would simply rot in jail. Indeed, by 1995, a year into his presidency, Mandela abolished the death penalty completely.