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Authors: Vernon W. Baumann
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positively identified as belonging to Benny Boonzaayer. What made the find even more interesting, and enigmatic, was that various items belonging to the other Daddy Long Legs victims were also strewn about the shallow grave. In fact, the site yielded small items that could be traced to almost all of the victims. Amongst the items, there was the asthma inhaler, belonging to Barry Coetzee; a little Saint Christopher medallion belonging to Jason Reed; and a single sock bearing the name of Kiepie Gous. Investigators also found one sneaker belonging to Ryan Devlin. The strange dump site led to a string of new theories and conjectures. It did not, however, lead to the killer himself.
In the end, Daddy Long Legs cut a murky swathe across the hearts and minds of the people of Hope. It was a dark band of misery, loss and fear. A small town had lost its innocence. And would for evermore bear the scars of his psychopathy. An entire generation of children were forced to grow up before their time, becoming intimately acquainted with the dark spectre of twisted human sexuality.
The killer, dubbed Daddy Long Legs on that hot spring evening by a couple of pre-adolescent boys, had thankfully departed ... and would be no more.
That was until...
An Odd Event
Before we continue the story, we need to focus on an odd little footnote.
At around the same time that a group of traumatised boys found the remains of Daddy Long Legs’s last victims, something strange occurred one night at the Hope police station.
It was around 2am, on a Sunday morning. Although the Hope police force could boast a staff of around 80 people, including administrative and support staff, this particular morning there were only two police officers inside the police station. Two vans, with two policemen each, had responded to two separate calls of domestic disturbance in the township of Steynbrug. Although it was only a few hours before a new business week would begin, it was nothing strange for some members of the Steynbrug community to still be partying it up.
Neither of the two officers on duty that night could quite agree on the events of that evening. There was a great deal of contradiction and both officers revised their testimonies more than once. Only the following was ever established beyond a shadow of a doubt: around 2am, on the morning of the 4 th of February, 1990, some unknown person broke into the forensics room at the Hope police station. This was in the days before all the region’s forensics were centralised at the nearby city of Kimberley. Autopsies were still being conducted on site and all relevant records and samples were stored there too.
When the police officers had done a proper inspection, it was discovered that the autopsy reports for three of the Daddy Long Legs victims had been stolen as well as some biological samples. Since no copies of the autopsy reports existed elsewhere, the vital information contained in the reports were forever lost to history.
Fearing a media backlash, the theft was never reported to the press. The two policemen suffered a severe reprimand as well as extensive disciplinary measures. They were, however, not dismissed.
Following an investigation, it was discovered that at least one of the domestic disturbance call-outs had been a ‘false alarm’.
PART TWO
Detective Wayne Human
One
The thin and bespectacled man drove slowly down Schoeman Street, deep in thought. The Pretoria street was crowded with the usual lunchtime traffic. Buses and taxis. Motorbikes and sedans. Honking and hooting. Rude gestures. Pavements packed with hundreds of pedestrians. And dozens of informal traders.
It was Monday afternoon in the heart of South Africa’s administrative capitol. And Detective Wayne Human wished he was somewhere else.
Damn!
He yanked the wheel of the Toyota Corolla and braked hard to avoid a kombi taxi that had come to a sudden standstill. He cursed again. For a moment he considered
In the end, Daddy Long Legs cut a murky swathe across the hearts and minds of the people of Hope. It was a dark band of misery, loss and fear. A small town had lost its innocence. And would for evermore bear the scars of his psychopathy. An entire generation of children were forced to grow up before their time, becoming intimately acquainted with the dark spectre of twisted human sexuality.
The killer, dubbed Daddy Long Legs on that hot spring evening by a couple of pre-adolescent boys, had thankfully departed ... and would be no more.
That was until...
An Odd Event
Before we continue the story, we need to focus on an odd little footnote.
At around the same time that a group of traumatised boys found the remains of Daddy Long Legs’s last victims, something strange occurred one night at the Hope police station.
It was around 2am, on a Sunday morning. Although the Hope police force could boast a staff of around 80 people, including administrative and support staff, this particular morning there were only two police officers inside the police station. Two vans, with two policemen each, had responded to two separate calls of domestic disturbance in the township of Steynbrug. Although it was only a few hours before a new business week would begin, it was nothing strange for some members of the Steynbrug community to still be partying it up.
Neither of the two officers on duty that night could quite agree on the events of that evening. There was a great deal of contradiction and both officers revised their testimonies more than once. Only the following was ever established beyond a shadow of a doubt: around 2am, on the morning of the 4 th of February, 1990, some unknown person broke into the forensics room at the Hope police station. This was in the days before all the region’s forensics were centralised at the nearby city of Kimberley. Autopsies were still being conducted on site and all relevant records and samples were stored there too.
When the police officers had done a proper inspection, it was discovered that the autopsy reports for three of the Daddy Long Legs victims had been stolen as well as some biological samples. Since no copies of the autopsy reports existed elsewhere, the vital information contained in the reports were forever lost to history.
Fearing a media backlash, the theft was never reported to the press. The two policemen suffered a severe reprimand as well as extensive disciplinary measures. They were, however, not dismissed.
Following an investigation, it was discovered that at least one of the domestic disturbance call-outs had been a ‘false alarm’.
PART TWO
Detective Wayne Human
One
The thin and bespectacled man drove slowly down Schoeman Street, deep in thought. The Pretoria street was crowded with the usual lunchtime traffic. Buses and taxis. Motorbikes and sedans. Honking and hooting. Rude gestures. Pavements packed with hundreds of pedestrians. And dozens of informal traders.
It was Monday afternoon in the heart of South Africa’s administrative capitol. And Detective Wayne Human wished he was somewhere else.
Damn!
He yanked the wheel of the Toyota Corolla and braked hard to avoid a kombi taxi that had come to a sudden standstill. He cursed again. For a moment he considered
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