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- Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Murder has always fascinated us, and when women are the masterminds, the intrigue grows exponentially. Not only are female murderers much rarer than male killers, but their crimes usually also involve a more sophisticated type of plotting. In Blood on her hands, award-winning journalist Tanya Farber investigates the lives, minds and motivations of some of South Africa's most notorious female murderers, from the poisonous nurse Daisy de Melker, to the privileged but deeply disturbed Najwa Petersen, to the mysterious Joey Harhoff who died before revealing where the bodies of her victims (including her own niece) were. Farber sets each case against the backdrop of the different eras and regions of 20th and early 21st century South Africa the women operated in. Her writing style is lighter than the subject matter might suggest and Blood on Her Hands will keep you reading until late at night – probably with your light on. The women featured also include: Dina Rodrigues, Phoenix Racing Cloud Theron, Marlene Lehnberg, Chane van Heerden and Celiwe Mbokazi.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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BLOOD
ON HER HANDS
SOUTH AFRICA’S MOST NOTORIOUS FEMALE KILLERS
TANYA FARBER
Jonathan Ball Publishers
Johannesburg & Cape Town
This book is dedicated to my late parents, who understood and nurtured my love of writing, and to Jeremy, Sophia and Naomi, who have gently held my hand during the writing.
INTRODUCTION
Meet Daisy de Melker, who ‘lovingly’ prepared a flask of strychnine-laced coffee for her son. She is very different from Najwa Petersen, who carefully planned a ‘house robbery’ to eliminate her musician husband. Chané van Heerden placed her victim’s facial skin in the freezer for preservation, yet Phoenix Racing Cloud Theron wished to dispose of her mother’s body before it was even cold. And Dina Rodrigues? She ‘wouldn’t harm a fly’ – but then went and organised a hit on a baby.
Women are not paragons of virtue who cannot commit murder. Nor are they always insane when they do deliberately cause death. And the women with ‘blood on their hands’ are not homogeneous.
Ironically, the idea for this book came to life during the trial of a male murderer. For months, I had reported on the Henri van Breda trial in the High Court in Cape Town. The young man’s parents and brother had been brutally axed to death in January 2015 at their luxury home outside Stellenbosch. His badly injured sister survived the ordeal but had no recollection of the attack.
There was a bottomless curiosity among readers about the trial, and obvious questions began to well up in my mind as to why this could be. Was it the family’s wealth? The brutality of the attacks? The familial nature of it? Basically, what makes one murder trial more fascinating than another? Out of these questions came some uncomfortable answers. Whether we admit it or not, there’s an insatiable hunger for tales of murder that sit outside the norm, and that’s where female murderers come in.
Statistically, female murderers are major outliers, making up only five per cent of all killers. Also, they seldom match the more common masculine narratives of impulsive violence. With the careful planning that often goes into murders committed by women, we’re drawn to their interior world in a way that we are not with their male counterparts. We find ourselves trying to fathom what they were thinking.
The result is that archetypes have proliferated over the centuries – black widows, femmes fatales, sexy assassins, creepy nurses, baby-faced butchers, to mention but a few. These archetypes dictate how we think or write about such women but leave little room for the minutiae of an individual’s life, psyche and act of murder.
In the pages of this book I have, I hope, let each story speak for itself. Before going into the hard facts of each case, I’ve begun it with an up-close-and-personal imagining of the interior world of the murderer and what a day in her life and mind might have looked like; this has required a measure of poetic licence on my part.
The final chapter gathers insights from local and international experts, analysis, data and other stories from across the globe that resonate with those from our own shores.
There are also many other South African women who are labelled ‘murderers’ but whom I’ve deliberately left out of this book. They include the woman who takes the law into her hands after years of savage abuse by her partner; or the single mother living in abject poverty in a shack who leaves her newborn baby at the bottom of a bin because she sees no way out of her situation; or the mother who kills her tik-addicted son because he is destroying everything in his path …
The women in this book could not, in my opinion, blame their circumstances for what they did.
Tanya Farber
Cape Town
May 2019
CHAPTER 1
DAISY DE MELKER
Germiston, 1932
One morning in late February, a middle-aged woman with a downturned mouth and deep blue eyes pulled back the covers of her bed with more vigour than usual.
Just to the left of her wardrobe was a chocolate-brown dress that she’d laid out on an armchair; placed neatly on top of it was a hat – almost brown but leaning more towards the colour of cream of mushroom soup. At 46, the woman had ceased to imagine herself in the glamorous slimline dresses drawn in fine detail on the sewing patterns sold in the shop down the road. For starters, they were tailored at the waist to such an extent that, on the rare occasions she had ventured to wear such a style, she felt as if she was in prison. That’s not to say the brown summer dress and hat weren’t some version of that style. They were just more – she paused to think of the word in her head – practical. The ideal outfit for the day that lay ahead.
Before putting on the dress, she made herself a strong cup of coffee and opened the window as wide as it would go. She remembered Robert, her late husband, always complaining that she liked to keep the house cool. If the roof could open, you would pull it back too, he used to tell her. Poor Robert. His glasses still sat on a small bookcase nearby. But the book he’d been reading, a detective novel, was just the perfect thickness to prop up the one side of the bed to even things out a little. She’d slipped it under one corner of the base and was delighted at how, for the first time since she’d witnessed violent convulsions on the mattress, the bed didn’t feel as if it were tilting towards the South Pole. Come to think of it, it had always felt lopsided to her, even before the convulsions, even back in the day when the person on the other side was not Robert but her first husband, William – the one who’d bought the house in the first place and whose plumbing tools still sat in a metal box in the shed. Poor William.
She looked in the mirrored panel of her wardrobe, pulled the mushroom-soup hat over her head, and picked up her handbag. Walking down the narrow passage in a house that felt smaller every day, she glanced into the kitchen. She thought of how she’d rinsed her son Rhodes’s blue coffee flask and stacked it on the drying rack the night before. There it still stood, next to the butter dish Robert had bought her at the department store. Or was it William who’d bought it? She couldn’t recall.
She also glanced into her son’s bedroom, off to the left, and felt her anger rise. After all she’d done for him! How she’d squandered her money on motorbikes for him and that trip to Europe! And now this: the unmade bed, the plate that hadn’t been taken to the kitchen, the perky cat sitting on the sill with no clue what a slovenly … She stopped herself just short of swearing out loud. He was, after all, her flesh and blood. As had been the little twins. And her two other children. The dearly departed.
Leaving the house, she adjusted the collar on her dress. Not quite the picture on the sewing pattern, she told herself, but glamorous enough nonetheless. Hollywood will add the glitz later, she told herself, waving to someone’s gardener as if she were a movie star on the red carpet and he an adoring fan. This added a bounce to her step, and as she made her way down the street, she thought of her son and the plan in her mind. The prospect made her walk with even more determination than before.
After a while, however, she could feel blisters developing on her feet. She was wearing a pair of velvet shoes, not quite the right size, that she’d bought just after William’s untimely death.
Now she put her mind to the plan. Unusually, she had some distance to cover. Also unusually, she had no shopping list folded in her handbag; she would pass the butcher, the dairy and the greengrocer without so much as a sideways glance. Today, there was just one item she was after, and for that purpose she need only visit the chemist.
As she walked, she could feel the sun reddening her skin, but got some reprieve as soon as she boarded the first of two trams as she made her way into Johannesburg. It was a warm day, typical of February, with the temperature hovering around 25 °C. A few clouds were gathering for a possible afternoon thunderstorm that could burst just as quickly as it would end.
Daisy imagined herself taking a broad brush dipped in pale blue paint to the skyline, easily covering all that displeased her with one flick of the wrist. How hard could it be to remove all the things one detested from this world, she asked herself.
Earlier, on her way out of Germiston, she had noticed that even more factories had sprung up in the industrial area on the outskirts of the town, pumping out grey smoke. The factories weren’t visible from her house; she could pretend to be living anywhere. But seeing them today had seemed to trap her inside the confines of a life too ordinary.
Later, after she got to Johannesburg and boarded another tram for the last leg of the journey, the conversations of fellow passengers automatically drew her in, but what she really craved was silence – the same thing she craved every day when her son returned from work, trampling heavily across the kitchen floor, with the large satchel on his back sometimes dragging a mug or two off the counter.
After catching one more tram, she finally arrived in Turffontein, not far from the racecourse, near her old home. Eager as she was to get to her destination, she first allowed herself the small indulgence of a 15-minute detour to visit the house at 22 Tully Street, which she had once called home. With a quickened step, she almost trotted down the road, the brown material of the dress now clinging to her legs as she moved. She turned the corner, and there it was – the double-storey, gabled house she had occupied with William.
The house, with its large bay windows, sunny voorkamer (front room), pressed-steel ceilings and wooden floors, had been built in 1903, by which time Turffontein was an established suburb thanks to its renowned racecourse, a Johannesburg landmark built in 1887. The racecourse had brought glamour, style and well-heeled crowds to the area, making Daisy feel cosmopolitan in a way her own mother could never have dreamed. The suburb was also the perfect place to bring up children.
As she stood there, she remembered Rhodes as a toddler, climbing up onto the window seat and staring out, with the ear of his fluffy bunny in his mouth. For a moment she felt a wave of tenderness, as if the intervening years had never happened and her life as a wife and mother still lay undiscovered in front of her …
The sharp bark of a dog brought her back to reality, and she turned in her velvet shoes and headed for the chemist.
Walking through its familiar ornate wooden doors, she felt almost dizzy with excitement. The smell of antiseptic and soap, the shelves stacked with plasters and painkillers, drugs to loosen the bowels or tighten them up, toxins, tonics, scissors, you name it … Almost aroused just by being there, she straightened her hat and walked towards the counter. There stood the pharmacist, Abraham Spilkin. As polite as ever, he told her how elegant she looked, and she beamed.
His tone made her feel like a lady who’d grown up in the dappled shade of an apricot tree on an expansive lawn with a governess at her side. Such thoughts brought stability to her mind, erasing the memories of being one of 11 children in a small town on the platteland. It was also a time when any opportunity ‘up north’ could suddenly lure parents and older siblings away.
‘What can I get you today, madam?’ Mr Spilkin asked.
Daisy quickly dropped the corners of her mouth, and said in a small, sad voice, ‘I have a very sick cat in my care, I’m afraid. The poor thing can hardly move for wincing in pain.’
The chemist suggested she visit the vet to see what could be done for the poor creature, but Daisy clarified that the kindest thing she could do right now for an animal in a living hell was to put an end to its misery. The kindly Mr Spilkin offered to do the deed for her, in case the prospect was too traumatic for her.
‘Thank you kindly for the most generous offer,’ Daisy said, ‘but I feel that the distance would be too far for the sickly animal to travel. Besides which, as a trained nurse, I’m more than capable of doing it myself, however much it’s going to break my heart, and I know just the right dose to give.’
Mr Spilkin carefully prepared the package, then took from behind the counter the poisons register – a compulsory record of the sales and purchases of dangerous substances. Arsenic, after all, wasn’t something to be trifled with. In England, the odourless, tasteless and colourless substance had gained notoriety as the poisoner’s tool of choice: the so-called inheritor’s powder had shown up in 237 cases in English courts between 1750 and 1914.
But this was clearly just about a sickly cat, and so Mr Spilkin passed Daisy the register. With a steady hand, she wrote, ‘Mrs DL Sproat, 22 Tully Street, Turffontein’. This wasn’t her legal name (by then she was Mrs De Melker), but she knew better than to betray herself in the register. Before Mr Spilkin could extend the conversation any further, she slipped her purchase into her handbag, thanked him, and quickly left.
The first thing she did when she arrived home was pull off the velvet shoes and soak her feet in a basin of warm, soapy water. The relief. The feeling instantly took her back to her nursing days in her early twenties. She had worked so diligently in a hospital in Johannesburg that she would forget about the tight-fitting shoes on her feet until her shift was over. Once home, just like now, she would let out a long but barely audible sigh of relief. It came back to her now – how she had decided one night, while staring at her toes in the murky water, that she would one day be married and leave the hard work of nursing behind her.
The cat, looking as spritely as ever, jumped off the windowsill and slunk past her. She could have sworn it knew what she was up to. After drying her feet with a fluffy cream-coloured towel, she climbed onto a chair in the kitchen with the package of arsenic held tightly in her hand. On the top shelf, just out of sight even as she stood on the chair, was an empty biscuit tin, the slightly rusted one with the navy-blue flowers along the lip. She felt for it, carefully slid it forward, and placed the tiny package directly behind it. There it would sit until five days later, when she prepared a flask of coffee for her son to take to work.
That trip to the chemist in her old stamping ground, where Mr Spilkin had served her at the varnished teak counter, would later seal Daisy’s fate at the end of a hangman’s noose.
The name Daisy de Melker would become synonymous with the cold-blooded modus operandi of a female serial killer. There have been few such women recorded across the globe, either before or after Daisy, which is strange when you consider the size of the world’s population.
Would the telltale signs of such a personality have shown up in the early years of a child’s life? Perhaps – unless they were buried under the noise and mayhem of a house teeming with children. How likely would it be that odd behaviour would attract the attention of parents trying to feed, raise and educate 11 children, as was the case in the household in which Daisy grew up?
The answer is ‘not very’, and if you were to scour Daisy’s premarital life for any signs of psychiatric illness, the evidence plotted on a spectrum would only get as far as ‘restlessness’ and nowhere near ‘psychopathy’. For the latter, she would have had to display signs such as cruelty to animals, fearlessness when breaking rules, violent outbursts, manipulating others, and lying and stealing just for the fun of it. Daisy’s early life revealed no record of such traits. And yet, from the very day earmarked for her fairytale wedding, at the age of 21, the red flags of psychopathy begin to stand out.
Born to William and Fanny Hancorn-Smith in 1886 – the year Johannesburg itself was born – Daisy Louisa Hancorn-Smith spent her early life in the village of Seven Fountains, near Grahamstown, in today’s Eastern Cape province. The village had been established in the 1700s as a resting place for ox-wagons making their way across this vast landscape. The Dutch had called the area the Zuurveld. In 1820, farms that had been abandoned by them were allocated to poor British settlers who had been recruited by their government to strengthen the English population on the frontier of the Cape Colony. The name ‘Seven Fountains’ came from the profusion of natural springs in the vicinity.
Though Daisy’s family was not particularly poor, Seven Fountains never grew beyond its roots, and by the time Daisy was born, it was still a minuscule and undeveloped village surrounded by sparsely situated farmsteads. As is the case today, most of the local inhabitants were farmers.
In Daisy’s time, the Methodist church was the heart of the Seven Fountains community. There are no records of whether Daisy’s family sat in that church on the slow Sundays that linked one parochial week to the next, but what the records do show is that when Daisy was aged around eight, her father and two older brothers packed up and headed off to Bulawayo (in what was then Rhodesia), where land was being given to Britons for next to nothing. This journey, as well as the journey made by many others to Johannesburg on the hunt for gold, was commonly referred to as ‘going north’.
Two years later, several other families from Seven Fountains made the same trip to Rhodesia, and Daisy was sent along with them on the seven-day journey to be delivered to her father and brothers. It is not known why she left her mother at such a tender age, but one record1 speculates that this may have been for her safety. Tensions were brewing between the British and the Boer republics, and there was talk of war. Another record states that Daisy’s mother had left the family by then and had married a man in Port Elizabeth, passing away shortly thereafter.2 This would have been a major trauma for the young girl, and would also have necessitated her travelling ‘up north’ to join her father. Whatever the truth may be, her mother disappears from the record at this point.
In Bulawayo, she attended a farm school, and over the next two years two of her older married sisters also arrived in Rhodesia. Then, when she turned 13, she packed her bags once again, this time being sent off to board at the Good Hope Seminary in Cape Town, where she would wake up early each morning and get dressed in a prim black-and-white uniform and panama hat.
This notion of being shipped off for schooling elsewhere was not uncommon in those days. Many children left the homestead to attend school in more developed areas such as Cape Town. For Daisy, this was simply a part of life, and she remained at the Good Hope Seminary until she was 17. She had thus spent the better part of her teenage years in the company of fellow boarders rather than her own family.
In 1903, she returned to Rhodesia for a short spell, and then headed back to South Africa, this time to Durban, to enrol as a trainee nurse at the Berea Nursing Home. It was here that Daisy learned about medication, disease and the effects of different substances on the human body.
During her studies, she regularly travelled home to Rhodesia for holidays, and it was on one of these trips that Daisy met a young man named Bert Fuller, who worked in the native affairs department in the mining town of Broken Hill, in what was then Northern Rhodesia (today Kabwe in Zambia). Around the time of their whirlwind romance, Broken Hill was starting to flourish. In 1902, the discovery of lead and zinc deposits here had spurred the establishment of a fast-growing settlement. By 1906, the centrally located town was connected to the colony’s fast-expanding railway system.
Bert and Daisy were likely among the many young people on the lookout for entertainment in a town that was on the brink of a major growth spurt. Any outing after dark meant calling on a mlonda (watchman), who would hold a paraffin lamp in one hand and an assegai in the other, in case a wild animal decided to pounce. The mlonda would wait until the social event ended before walking the partygoers back home.
Another part of life here was the Anopheles mosquito, and it was the bite of a mosquito that would change the fate of the besotted young couple. Daisy and Bert were to be married in late October 1907, but by the time the big day arrived, instead of donning his wedding suit and saying his ‘I do’s’, poor Bert was prostrate in bed, overcome with a rapid pulse, high fever and extreme chills. The first day of their ‘happily ever after’ turned into a spectacle of death as Bert’s life came to an excruciating end, with Daisy by his bedside.
The doctors said he’d died from blackwater fever, a complication of malaria that rapidly destroys the body’s red blood cells, causes intense jaundice, and turns the urine a dark reddish-black colour (hence the name). Interestingly, the disease is thought to spring from an autoimmune reaction in some people when malaria and quinine come together in the body. In those days, quinine was given as a preventive against malaria, and civil servants like Bert were regularly given doses free of charge by the colonial government.
Given Daisy’s unfolding history from that day onwards, it has been suggested – most interestingly by her own defence lawyer long after her trial – that it was she, and not the dreaded blackwater fever, that was the real cause of Bert’s death. After all, many of the symptoms of the disease are not unlike those of poisoning: both arsenic and blackwater fever destroy red blood cells, cause havoc in the kidneys, and send chills through the body and blood into the urine. But, with little available evidence to back up this theory, it must remain confined to a dark corner of history.
What is certain, however, is that following Bert’s death, Daisy got her first delicious taste of passive income. Not more than a couple of days before his end, Bert had signed a will bequeathing £100 (equivalent to about R100 000 today, at a time when the average salary was around £4 a week) to his wife-to-be, and after she had grieved at his bedside, the money promptly became hers.
She spent the next few months as a single woman, but then, at age 22, in Johannesburg, she happened upon one William Alfred (Alf) Cowle, a man 14 years her senior. A plumber, he plied his trade in a city that was developing so fast off the back of its booming mining industry that he was never short of work. Eighteen months after the death of her beloved fiancé, Daisy tied the knot with Alf and the blackwater tragedy was all but forgotten.
What happened over the next few years could be seen in two different ways, and therein lies the mystery of everything we think we know about Daisy de Melker. On the one hand, Daisy and Alf were an average couple living in Turffontein, enjoying the buzz of a growing city, making a good living from its need for services, and, eventually, bearing five children to share their lives in the gabled double-storey house on Tully Street.
On the other hand, all but one of those children succumbed to illness, and though death in childhood was far more common in those days than it is today, the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Daisy’s children are chilling, as is the fact that they raised no suspicions. First, there were the twins. Born prematurely, as twins often are, they came out of their mother’s womb slight and fragile. Entrusted to the care of a very young woman who clearly had mental-health issues, perhaps the little ones never had a fighting chance. But whether Daisy murdered them or they died from neglect, or they were simply too delicate for this world, is impossible to say. They both died in infancy, and the lack of historical data makes it impossible to know.
Child number three was ambitiously named Rhodes Cecil, after the British imperialist, businessman, mining magnate and politician who had died about a decade earlier. Born in 1911, Rhodes Cecil was a robust child, requiring far less attention than the twins had, and he soon became his mother’s favourite. As much as she resented him when he got older, she doted on him as a young boy, and his childhood, as far as we know, was normal and stable, and probably not very different from those of his peers in the neighbourhood.
Then came Lester, born in 1913. There was nothing to suggest that the boy was unhealthy or frail, but at some point before his fifth birthday he was laid to rest under a hot sun, with Daisy standing by the grave in a broad-brimmed black hat. How tragic it had been, Daisy told her acquaintances and friends, that the little boy had developed an abscess on his liver for which there was no cure.
And then came the fifth and last child, who was named Alfred Eric. Perhaps because he was not as adored as his older brother Rhodes, or perhaps through the sheer coincidence of where diseases and mysterious ailments choose to strike, he too met an untimely death not long after his first birthday. When he was 15 months old, he was suddenly overcome with violent convulsions and taken upstairs to a room in the Tully Street house. There he writhed around on the bed for just a few minutes before all movement ceased.
The deaths of four out of five of Daisy’s children did not attract much attention: no concerns were ever raised in the halls of gossip in her community, nor down at the police station. Daisy, instead, was viewed as a strong survivor who had endured the deaths of one fiancé and four children.
There is little documentation about family life in the Cowle home in the years that followed, but what is known is that they moved to a single-storey house in Germiston, where Alf worked as a plumber. Rhodes, having lost four siblings at a young age, might have been somewhat indulged by his parents. Daisy was utterly devoted to him and to her role as his mother. And life simply carried on – until 1923, when tragedy struck again.
One morning in January of that year, Daisy prepared some Epsom salts for her husband. There was nothing unusual about this – he had regular aches and pains, for which Epsom salts, a natural remedy, were just the ticket. But on 11 January, something strange unfolded: after taking the salts, Alf complained to Daisy that he felt even worse than before.
She immediately called a doctor, who came over to see what help could be administered. At that stage, Alf’s symptoms were mild enough for the doctor to shrug them off, and he prescribed a bromide mixture. This prescription suggests that Alf was already showing signs of convulsions and muscle spasms; bromides, and particularly potassium bromide, were commonly used as a sedative and anticonvulsant in the early 20th century.
It was after the departure of the first doctor, however, that things really took a turn for the worse. Soon, the plumber was in agony, and Daisy, saying she was unable to cope on her own, called the neighbours to be with her. They decided that the opinion of a second doctor was in order, and rather urgently.
By the time the next doctor walked through the doors of the small white house, Alf had turned a decided shade of purple. Foam oozed from his mouth, his muscles were convulsing uncontrollably, and as the doctor tried to examine him, he recoiled in pain. Before the doctor could do anything, Alf died right there on the bed, his face contorted in agony.
If Daisy had fooled the first doctor, she had no such luck with the second, who had seen the symptoms in full force. He refused to sign the death certificate, as he suspected poisoning. All the signs pointed to strychnine. After ingesting strychnine, a person does not immediately start flailing around and turning purple. The symptoms come on more slowly, and at any rate, Daisy might very well first have given her husband a low dose. The symptoms of a low dose are consistent with what the first doctor had witnessed: agitation, fear, restlessness, muscle spasms and a tight jaw. With a higher dose, such as the one possibly administered by Daisy between the two visits from the physicians, the symptoms are far more extreme and present much more quickly. There are major convulsions, which injure the kidneys and liver. The arms and legs go rigid, and the back and neck arch. Finally, and quickly, the person can no longer breathe. Robbed of oxygen, they turn a shade of bluish-purple. Alf Cowle’s symptoms certainly fitted the description.
At this stage, Daisy might have been in a bit of a panic. Would her plot be exposed? Would the doctor report his suspicions to the police, and would she hear an unwelcome knock at the door sometime soon? No. None of this came to pass. An autopsy was carried out on the badly damaged body of William Alfred Cowle, and the death certificate recorded the cause of death as ‘chronic nephritis and cerebral haemorrhage’. The former is a disease of the kidneys and is characterised by nausea, vomiting, twitchy muscles and shortness of breath. Alf had experienced these symptoms, and the use of the word ‘chronic’ implied that the loss of his healthy kidney functioning had taken place over time. As for the cerebral haemorrhage, this simply meant he had bleeding inside the brain. The wording of the death certificate quickly put paid to any risk that foul play would be suspected on Daisy’s part. It suggested a fatal episode resulting from a dread disease.
Daisy had watched her late husband’s body being taken out on a stretcher. She’d seen the death certificate, which explained to the world how he’d died. All that remained in this three-act play was the cashing of a cheque to the tune of £1 795 (comparable to around R2 million today), which she’d inherited from the dearly departed.
For the next three years Daisy and Rhodes Cecil – who was no longer the sweet child she’d adored and was instead, as he entered his teens, becoming increasingly difficult – lived alone in the house she’d inherited. Then Daisy met Robert Sproat, another plumber, who at age 50 was ten years her senior.
Sproat, who had accrued considerable wealth through clever investments and financial planning, asked for Daisy’s hand in marriage within months of meeting her. Strangely, the date they chose for the nuptials was the anniversary of Alf’s death.
Daisy and Robert were married for almost two years, but by all accounts the household was not a happy one. The problem lay not with the married couple, but rather with the tension that quickly arose between Rhodes Cecil and his stepfather. It is alleged that Robert found his stepson to be spoilt, petulant and quick to anger, while Rhodes Cecil, for his part, was likely possessive of his mother. Having outlived all siblings and his father, he had had Daisy all to himself for several years, and now, in his teenage years, he did not take kindly to Robert’s arrival.
Three months shy of Daisy and Robert’s second anniversary, her second husband presented with symptoms uncannily similar to those of her first. Robert began vomiting and convulsing, and complained of severe pain. It was during this bout of illness that his brother, William, travelled from Pretoria to see him. While the sick man lay in his bed, Daisy convinced William over a cup of tea to get his brother to sign a new will that would leave everything to her. As it turned out, Robert survived the ordeal, during which his wife had acted as nurse. When he recovered, life as everyone knew it carried on for another month. All that had really changed was his will.
A few weeks later, on a Sunday in November 1927, Daisy prepared a tray of beer and brought it to her husband, who sat relaxing on the stoep on his one day off. Rhodes sat with his mother and stepfather, who sipped the refreshing drink. A few minutes later, Robert grabbed his abdomen in agony, stood up, and collapsed. The symptoms were similar to the attack of the previous month, but worse. Daisy once again summoned the neighbours and the doctor, flawlessly playing the role of the panic-stricken wife. She wedged herself firmly into a chair next to the bed of her dying husband – a bed to which he had now been strapped because of the violent convulsions washing over him.
Once again, the cause of death was recorded by the doctor as cerebral haemorrhage, and once again Daisy’s bank account swelled. This time, she was left a whopping £4 000 (approximately R4.5 million today), plus a further £560 from Robert’s pension fund.
Robert was buried next to Alf at the recently established Brixton Cemetery in Johannesburg. Family plots were common at Brixton, and so it was that two strangers who had never met one another, but who were joined in death by a past with Daisy, came to lie side by side.
With Robert now safely in the ground, Daisy had enough money to indulge her unemployed son’s every material wish. This included setting off on a cruise to Europe together and even buying him a motorbike, which had to be shipped back to Johannesburg.
Some four years later, it was time to marry again. Seemingly with a penchant for plumbers, Daisy chose the widower Sidney Clarence de Melker, a plumber who had a daughter named Eileen, only two years younger than Rhodes Cecil. Loving and devoted, Sidney was everything Daisy had dreamed of: a kind stepfather, a man with a distinguished career as a Springbok rugby player and, like her two previous husbands, a reliable source of income. You might imagine that after marrying Daisy he too might not have been long for this world. But this is where a dramatic twist occurs: the next loved one marked for death was none other than Rhodes Cecil, by now aged 19, who had outlived four siblings, a father and a stepfather.
With the motive a little less clear, various theories have been advanced to explain the poisoning of Rhodes Cecil: one was that the lazy and pampered young man stood to inherit money of his own (willed to him by his father) on his 21st birthday – or at least he believed he did – and spoke of it often in Daisy’s presence. He had also, by then, become a menace in the house, frequently hurling abuse at both his mother and his stepsister. Another theory was that he had witnessed the symptoms of the previous poisoning events, and Daisy was worried that as he grew older, he would realise what had unfolded.3
On 2 March 1932, Rhodes headed off to the only job he’d been able to hold down: carrying out minor repairs on cars and trucks. Slung across his body was the leather satchel in which he carried some neatly cut sandwiches and a blue Thermos of coffee that his mother had prepared for him.
During the first coffee break of the day, he generously offered his friend at work, James Webster, a swig of the still-warm coffee. It was strong, and James had only a little. Rhodes, however, poured himself a large mug of it and finished it all before the shift recommenced.
Very suddenly, both men began to feel decidedly ill – but both recovered. James felt better within a day, and Rhodes even went off to play rugby after work. The experienced Daisy apparently hadn’t dosed the coffee with enough of the white powder purchased from Mr Spilkin. One theory is that Daisy was more familiar with the workings and dosages of strychnine than arsenic, or perhaps, on a subconscious level, she was wavering about whether to kill her only child. If the latter was the case, she soon recovered the courage of her convictions.
A few days later, Rhodes played his part in the by-now-familiar final act: the convulsing man in bed, the panic-stricken woman at his side, the neighbours and doctors called in to help, only to witness a patient foaming at the mouth, turning purple, and taking his last breath.
And, once again, the post mortem kept Daisy’s secret: Rhodes had died, it was reported, of cerebral malaria, contracted when he’d worked in Swaziland, and which had lain dormant until then. Daisy once again received a sum of money, although in this case it was only £100, paid to her because of an indemnity form that Rhodes, at her request, had filled in during that same contract job in Swaziland.
Rhodes was interred beside his father and stepfather at Brixton Cemetery. It seems strange that nobody – or almost nobody – suspected Daisy to have had a hand in the remarkably similar deaths of her loved ones. Was it because the unsophisticated medical diagnoses and post mortems of the time lacked the rigour and technology we have today? Or was Daisy’s skill in the performing arts so spectacular that nobody thought to question events, despite the glaring coincidences? It might have been a combination of both.
William Sproat, Daisy’s former brother-in-law, was the first to realise that something was amiss. His suspicions had been raised five years earlier, when he’d travelled from Pretoria to visit his ailing brother, and had been convinced by his sister-in-law to talk the very ill Robert into altering his will. And when his brother died suddenly just a month later, he’d taken it upon himself to keep an eye on what Daisy did next.
When Rhodes died, William Sproat wasted no time in taking his suspicions to the police, who, upon hearing the various stories from across so many years suddenly stitched together, knew they had grounds to investigate further.
The only forensic evidence left to test William Sproat’s hypothesis was buried in the family plot at Brixton Cemetery, and the only way to revisit this was to exhume the corpses of the three men. And so the digging began: if William Alfred Cowle, Robert Sproat and Rhodes Cecil Cowle had all been lowered into the ground under the teary eyes of Daisy de Melker, history was being reversed. Neat mounds of soil slowly formed at the gravesides as, one by one, the authorities dug deep and hauled out the three large, dark coffins.
First to go under the microscope was the relatively fresh corpse of young Rhodes. Just six weeks dead, the body was in a fine state, all things considered. This was perhaps not surprising: the powers of preservation of arsenic were well established. As far back as 1838 (almost fifty years before Daisy was even born), a letter to the editor of the medical journal The Lancet had noted that while it was very convenient to preserve bodies for dissection with arsenic, it presented a fatal risk to the dissector, who could possibly inhale some of the powder in the course of his work. The letter was written by John Snow, an esteemed English physician who became known as ‘the father of epidemiology’ and who was a pioneer in the use of anaesthesia.4
‘Arsenic poisoning’, the examiners pencilled in, followed by a question mark, in their preliminary report. The state forensic pathologist then examined the corpse more closely, and voilà! Arsenic was found in Rhodes’s spine, hair and viscera.
The bodies of William and Robert, who had lain in the ground for far longer, were badly decomposed. Unlike Rhodes, their bodies had not been preserved by arsenic. But, on close examination of their spines, what was found? Traces of strychnine – just as deadly if administered in the right amount, and just as readily available for Daisy to purchase. Additionally, their bones were tinged with pink – a clear sign of the presence of strychnine. Because strychnine is colourless and odourless, chemists would dye it pink (and, less frequently, green) to make it more visible to the human eye and thus prevent accidents, since its main use was in pest control in cities.
The fourth body to be put under a microscope was a living one – that of Rhodes’s colleague James Webster, with whom Rhodes had shared the laced coffee. Sure enough, cuttings of his fingernails and hair showed clear traces of arsenic poisoning, and when the police asked him to recall what he had consumed that day, he took no time to mention the blue flask from which Rhodes had poured him some coffee. The police went to the De Melker household, retrieved the blue flask, and tested it for traces of arsenic. The test came back positive.
With any doubt as to the validity of William Sproat’s suspicions of murder now removed, the police came knocking on the door of Daisy de Melker. She was arrested, charged with the three murders, and immediately transported to the Women’s Jail at the Fort prison complex (nowadays Constitution Hill) in Braamfontein.
When Daisy’s trial began on 17 October 1932, the then High Court of the Witwatersrand was transformed into a public spectacle. There was great demand for seats in court, and each day a queue snaked down the road outside the court, with some people selling their seats in the public gallery for a fine sum of money. Daisy de Melker had become a household name – an icon to some, a curiosity to others, and a macabre subject of morbid fascination to many. Catching a glimpse of her in person in the dock in a courtroom was a great thrill. This was, after all, the Union of South Africa’s first serial killer, and a female one at that.
Finally, when one local newspaper managed to procure a studio photograph of Daisy, it wasn’t so much the quenching of the public’s thirst for details that became important. It was, instead, the moment at which Abraham Spilkin, standing behind his teak counter at his chemist’s shop in Turffontein, opened his copy of The Star newspaper – and the penny dropped. The Daisy de Melker on trial for killing two husbands and a son was the same Mrs Sproat who’d come about her ailing cat, and who’d carefully signed the poisons register. He immediately folded the paper, asked an assistant to serve the customers in his absence, and headed down to the local police station.
The Crown (as the State was known until South Africa left the Commonwealth) called 60 witnesses to the stand as they built their case that Daisy was a cold-blooded murderer. The defence, for its part, called only a few witnesses. But, of all those who testified for either side, it was the testimony of Spilkin that had the spectators spellbound. As he described in detail how Daisy had spoken of her sickly cat before purchasing a small package of arsenic, any traces of reasonable doubt that Daisy had murdered her son began to fade.
In the cases of William and Robert, Daisy’s guilt was harder to prove. The traces of strychnine found in the bodies of the two men certainly provided forensic evidence that they had been murdered. But, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Daisy was behind the murders would require circumstantial evidence too. In the case of her son, the tell-tale signs in the blue flask, the purchase of arsenic at Spilkin’s pharmacy, and the illness of James Webster were enough to wipe out any reasonable doubt. With William and Robert, although it was relatively obvious that she was behind their murders, it could not be proven beyond reasonable doubt.
