Africa-Press – South-Africa. The last people who saw little Tazne van Wyk alive offered her and the man she was hitchhiking with on the N1 near Worcester a place to stay for the night because it was cold and dark.
During the judgment of the man accused of kidnapping Tazne on 7 February 2020 and then raping and murdering her, Judge Alan Maher recapped events presented to him as evidence.
At around 21:00 that night, a Worcester woman was driving back from a work social with her landlord when she saw a man and a little girl dressed in shorts and no jersey hitchhiking along the N1.
They stopped and asked them where they were going, and the man said he had to get the child to her mother in Beaufort West.
The woman asked her landlord to drive them to Beaufort West, but he didn’t want to go that far.
They went through a roadblock and asked the traffic officials for advice on getting the child and the man to Beaufort West. The traffic officer suggested asking truck drivers who had parked their vehicles at a truck stop for a lift.
They drove to the truck stop, and the woman went and asked the truck drivers if they could give the two a lift.
The truckers said they were not allowed to and had cameras in their cabs so they couldn’t help. In the meantime, the accused tried to sell a memory stick to the landlord for R20.
The woman said Tazne was very chatty, as though they had always known each other. She felt sorry for the little girl, who seemed to be cold. She offered them a place to stay for the night, but the accused said no.
Eventually, they drove the two back to the N1 because he said he did not want to go to a “bright” garage because he “hated cameras”. They waited a while and left. On Sunday, she saw a Pink Ladies Facebook post of the two of them, and after speaking to her friends, called the Worcester police to tell them what she had seen.
Maher noted that at the time, she had joked that he was “sexy” and “clearly a nice man who looked after himself”. That was the last time Tazne was seen alive.
The man on trial has denied harming Tazne in any way. He testified that they were held against their will by a group of people speaking a language he did not know, whose taxi they got into to get help with directions. He said he was eventually booted out of their vehicle on the N1 near Bloemfontein.
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Word was getting around that Tazne was missing, and so was the accused. The accused’s twin sister called him on Sunday night, 9 February, and asked if he had taken the child. He said the last time he had seen her was at a shop. There were other sightings of Tazne on the afternoon she disappeared.
One was while a man and his niece were sharing a gatsby; another was by a man who sat opposite them on a taxi to Parow station, and another by a person who saw the accused and the little girl walk under a subway towards Shoprite in Parow.
Maher also went through the difficult post-mortem and DNA evidence. He said that according to forensic analysis, DNA found under Tazne’s fingernails was a match for the parolee arrested for her murder.
He faces 27 charges. In addition to the murder of Tazne, he also faces charges of raping his daughter and granddaughter, absconding from parole, and severely beating some of the children in his large blended family.
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