This week the man dubbed the Station Strangler – a serial killer who murdered at least 22 young boys – will walk free on parole after 28 years in jail. Norman Simons was convicted of just one of the murders, and Gasant Abarder writes in this new #SliceOfGasant column that the release throws up questions about one of South Africa’s most infamous cases.
Abarder, who recently launched his book, Hack with a Grenade, is among the country’s most influential media voices. Catch his weekly column here.
Picture: African News Agency / Leon Muller
He was the bogeyman of my generation. Yet, the threat of being caught by this serial killer didn’t stop my friends and me from riding our generic brand BMX-style bikes on the dunes they called ‘Die Heuwels’ at the back of Lentegeur in Mitchells Plain.
This was just one of the areas with vast expanses of alien Port Jackson bush that somehow grew in arid loose sand that was the killing grounds for the Station Strangler. Despite our parents’ warnings in those days, circa the late 1980s, we kept going because our innocent minds couldn’t comprehend such evil.
This week, the man convicted of one murder using the same modus operandi as the Station Strangler but branded the killer of 22 little boys will be released on parole after 28 years in prison.
Norman Afzal Simons was a teacher in Mitchells Plain at the time of his arrest. His capture came just in time for the National Party to claim a success and use it as a campaign card ahead of the 1994 elections.
Back then, a young Afrikaans attorney Koos Louw was Norman’s lawyer. Koos believed with his heart that Norman wasn’t the Station Strangler. Norman was only found guilty of the murder of Elroy van Rooyen, whose body was found in an area called Melton Rose in Eersterivier – some way from Mitchells Plain.
The distance to the other scenes was just one of the anomalies that puzzled Koos. A big loose end, Koos would later tell me as I was now a journalist, were the two boys who escaped a man who wanted to bundle them into a car in the parking area of a shopping centre during the hunt for the killer.
Koos could never locate these two boys whose description of the man didn’t fit that of Norman. He drove a similar vehicle to the killer that other witnesses had reported. Well into the 2000s, other questions remained for Koos. There was a court inquest later that brought more pain but no answers for the families who never knew if Simons was the man who killed their little boys.
For this reason, Koos never cut his hair since the day Norman was sent to jail. Now an accomplished criminal lawyer, he would be known for his trademark ponytail and the famous reason his greying locks were so long. He vowed only to cut his hair the day Norman was exonerated as the Station Strangler.
Koos was a top lawyer who relied on facts, and it wasn’t the romance or the whims of representing his first major client that drove him to clear Norman’s name.
Some of the facts included: the two witnesses in Mitchells Plain who got away as little boys and who are now adult men; the DNA found at the scenes of the scores of murders attributed to the Station Strangler that was different to the DNA found at the Elroy van Rooyen murder scene; and the hunting ground of the killer inexplicably spreading to at least a 30km radius over time.
There were many, many more things that just didn’t tally. But chillingly, the murders of little children didn’t stop after Norman was jailed.
In 2005, I joined a new Cape Town tabloid called the Daily Voice. While it is infamous for its racy content, I was determined to bring investigative journalism to the paper. I started following a pattern of missing children later found murdered. The bodies were found in the Port Jackson bushes we would later call the Bush of Evil. They were found in shallow graves not dissimilar to the victims of the Station Strangler – raped before being strangled.
I asked Koos about it – by then older and wiser but still determined the police had the wrong guy. All he wanted was for the case to be re-opened and the DNA samples stashed in Pretoria to be re-examined using new technology that wasn’t available when Norman was convicted.
I will never know whether Norman was the Station Strangler, if there was a copycat killer, or why the killings continued after the police had their man. Neither will Koos. He passed away a few years ago and won’t see his former client being freed this week.
Also read:
If they play against an Israeli football club I’m done supporting Orlando Pirates
Picture: African News Agency / Leon Muller