Charlize. Chris Karsten
Читать онлайн книгу.
the previous day had upset his stomach. He hoped the Underberg would help. Danie bought a bottle of vodka.
Back at Elsa’s place, the family sat around the kitchen table: Danie and his wife, Engela, and Elsa and the kids. Elsa’s husband, Jacques, was away on a business trip. Everyone was in high spirits. The boys, especially, liked to listen to Charles’s stories. He liked to regale them with tales about hunting and animals. That evening the kids were entranced as he demonstrated how little birds are fed by their mothers. In the early evening, amid all the chatter, Elsa and Engela made coffee and sandwiches. Danie poured vodka for himself and for Charles. Charles also drank the Underberg for his stomach.
That was how Elsa described the scene around her kitchen table during the first part of that evening, which would end so tragically. This scene of everyday domesticity differs drastically from the speculation by journalist and author Lin Sampson, in an essay in her book Now You’ve Gone and Killed Me. The Therons consider it just another attempt to portray them as a clan of unsophisticated plot dwellers, whom Charlize and Gerda were lucky to escape from; plot dwellers with a pickup in the driveway, eating Vienna sausages and biltong for supper.
“The drink lent an air of drama and bravado to a night in which past hurts fluttered like wounded birds,” Sampson wrote. “Perhaps they remembered that Gerda had once threatened – as Engela later testified – to shoot Danie and Charles and spread their brains on the walls. Perhaps they were aware that Engela felt Charles was married to a ‘possessive woman’ who had him ‘under her thumb’, as she also told the hearing. They might have talked, too, of all the times Charles had been locked out of his own house.”
According to Elsa, the family decided to let it be, not to persist in trying to give their side of the story to counter all the untruths being sent into the world. It would just bring them further hurt.
She tells how Gerda and Charlize stopped in front of the house after the photo session at about half past nine that Friday evening. Gerda stood in the kitchen door and asked Charles for their house key. He invited her in, asked her to wait five minutes, and they could drive home together. But Gerda didn’t want to sit down, and said that she and Charlize were leaving. She walked out with the key.
When Charlize came out of the toilet, having followed her mother inside, Charles asked her why she hadn’t greeted anybody on her way in. He had taught her good manners, she was supposed to greet people when she entered a room, especially her own family. But Charlize followed her mother outside.
The atmosphere in the kitchen was suddenly tense. Charles was upset, the jovial mood had been spoilt. He went to the telephone on the kitchen wall and phoned home. He talked to Charlize. Elsa and the rest of the fami-ly could hear that Charles was upset. He slammed the phone down. If she locked him out again, he threatened, he was going to shoot the lock to pieces. He had a small .22 pistol with him that he had borrowed from a friend because he was considering buying it from him.
Elsa told him not to be stupid, and advised him to sleep in the caravan if he needed to. She remembers that he put a comforting hand on her shoulder and asked his brother Danie to take him home in his new pickup. To reach his house, just four street blocks away, they had to drive up Cloverdene Road and make a right turn into Seventh Road. Number 56 was a few hundred metres along, on the left side of the street, hidden behind a high wall and trees.
As they walked out, Charles asked Elsa whether he could sleep at her house if Gerda had locked him out. The caravan was too cold, he said.
She laughed and assured him that she would always have room for him.
Charles walked out, wearing his leather jacket against the cold. Danie went along reluctantly, for he and Gerda avoided each other.
Elsa says her two brothers had barely been gone ten minutes when an alarmed worker came to call them, speaking about a shooting at Charles’s house. Elsa and Engela hurried to Seventh Road and found Gerda in the kitchen. She was leaning against the stove, clad in her winter pyjamas. Elsa smelt gunpowder and asked Gerda: “What happened? Where’s Charles?”
Gerda answered: “In the bedroom . . .”
When Elsa reached the main bedroom, Charles was lying on his stomach between the bed and the wardrobe with its yellow doors, at the entrance to the en-suite bathroom. She saw blood on the back of his leather jacket. She knelt and turned his head to look at his face. She called out his name. Under her hand his face was still warm. His glasses were broken.
Shortly afterwards the police and a doctor arrived. Charlize was sitting in the lounge, covered with a blanket, weeping and shocked. She was in her pyjamas too.
Charles died just after ten that evening. He was forty-three years old.
Detective Sergeant Hendrik Delport of the Putfontein detective branch took charge of the investigation. Blood samples were taken from Charles, sketches made at the scene, and a police photographer photographed Charles’s body. I later saw the photos in the police docket. The doctor had turned him around during a futile resuscitation attempt, so that Charles was now lying on his back.
At a quarter to midnight that evening the police removed his body.
On Saturday, Charles’s mother, Bettie, came from Kuruman to Elsa’s house and on Sunday she was taken to her son’s house. She wanted to form her own opinion of what had happened there and questioned Gerda and Charlize about the tragic events of the Friday evening.
The police registered a case of culpable homicide and on Monday, 24 June 1991, the police began to take sworn statements from all those involved. Bettie also gave a statement, concerning her conversations with Gerda and Charlize.
Charlize signed each page of her handwritten statement. Both she and Gerda declared that Charles had been drunk and had wanted to shoot them with a shotgun.
The following statements are a truthful translation of the statements as they were taken down and made available to me from the police docket.
Charlize’s statement read:
I, Miss Charlize Theron, a white female of fifteen years old, living at Plot 56, 7th Road, Cloverdene, tel [omitted], High School Die Kruin, Johannesburg, std 8, declare:
On Friday 1991–06–21 at about 21:30 my mother and I arrived at our home. We looked for the house key. We have a special place where we hide it, but we could not find the key.
We then went to Mrs Malan at the corner of Cloverdene Road and Third Road. When we arrived there, my father (the deceased) and his brother, Mr Danie Theron, were there.
They were sitting in the kitchen and they were drinking liquor. I am not certain exactly what kind of liquor they were drinking.
My mother asked my father for the key. I could hear that my father was aggressive towards my mother, but she got the key of the house, and went back to our vehicle alone.
Then I heard my father’s brother, Danie Theron, say to my father: “Why do you take her shit?”
They spoke some more, but I couldn’t hear exactly what was being said. I left the house and returned home with my mother. After we had arrived home, my mother locked all the doors carefully.
We put on our pyjamas and then the telephone rang. My mother said that we should not answer it. We let the phone ring. After a very long time the phone stopped ringing. Immediately afterwards it began to ring again. I picked up the phone then.
It was my father. He began to argue with me again and asked why I had not greeted the people. I wanted to explain to him that I hadn’t seen the other people. But he kept raising his voice. Then he asked where my mother was. He said: “Where’s that bloody bitch?”
I asked him to stop talking like that, please. He said: “Fuck you all!” He said it quite a few times and then he threw down the phone.
I told my mother that I was afraid. She tried to keep me calm. At that point someone hammered on the kitchen door. I told my mother that it was my father and that I was afraid of him.
I