#TheHerald180 | Stories that grabbed the headlines

It was a decade of huge breaking news that was transforming the future trajectory of SA, events and conflicts that were changing the face of the world, and even in Nelson Mandela Bay and the region further afield, a series of stories that would rock the city and beyond. All would be covered extensively by The Herald.

The year 1990 would signal in the massive, seismic shift for a violence-torn, isolated SA in turmoil and witnessing rising civil unrest that had already reached boiling point.

It was a precarious moment that would precipitate the release of Nelson Mandela, the unbanning of the ANC and other organisations and the task of slowly repairing a broken, bloodied and divided nation.

It would culminate in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, to be followed by the opening and exposing of historical and sometimes unbearable wounds and atrocities by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and then the start of the arduous task of rebuilding, restoring, reforming and, most crucially, reconciling.

But in Nelson Mandela Bay, a series of stories, crimes and tragedies would also leave their mark.

From the horrific and vicious rape attack on Alison Botha to the darkly mysterious and still unsolved execution-style murder of two close friends in a suburban home, the frenzied fatal stabbing of a young teenage sports star by her older sister, and the corporate fun family weekend away on a river tubing adventure which would end in a nightmare and the loss of 13 lives.

These local and national events are what former news editor of The Herald, Pat Sydie, remembers most about his time on the newsdesk.

“The job of news editor is a difficult one because you’re stuck in the middle — between the news reporters and the senior editors and responsible to both,” Sydie says, in his trademark, good-natured style.

Sydie recalled some of the local stories that made big news during this period in SA when the country was undergoing a huge transformation.

* In 1990, while SA was focused on the release of Nelson Mandela and the beginning of lengthy post-apartheid negotiations, Stewart “Boetie Boer” Wilken began a killing spree in then Port Elizabeth, with a modus operandi that criminologists would describe as being highly unusual as he targeted very different victims from sex workers to young boys across races.

The Herald’s coverage was featured in a TV documentary on Wilken’s crimes broadcast by Showmax in 2023 entitled Boetie Boer: Inside the Mind of a Monster.

* In May 1994, an execution-style double murder in Walmer rocked the city and remains unsolved to this day.

Close friends Felix Coetzee and Scott Ayton were found brutally murdered by domestic worker Elsie Mati who was confronted by a gruesome scene when she arrived for work at the Ayton family’s Alcock Road home.

Coetzee was bound, gagged, blindfolded and sitting upright on a chair in the lounge. He had been shot in the back of the head.

Ayton was in a bedroom, where he had been slain in a similar fashion. No arrests were ever made in the puzzling case which left police baffled. 

* The abduction and appalling attack on Alison Botha — during which her throat was slit from ear to ear and she was disembowelled — was a story that rocked the country and beyond.

It happened a week before Christmas on December 18 1994, when satanists Frans du Toit and Theuns Kruger snatched their victim from outside her apartment and drove her into deep bushes off Marine Drive near Noordhoek where they carried out their vicious attack and left Botha, then 27, for dead.

She granted The Herald an exclusive interview from her hospital bed just days afterwards and described in harrowing detail the intended fatal wounds inflicted on her from which she miraculously survived.

Despite receiving several life sentences, Du Toit and Kruger were released from prison in 2023 and Botha had a second close brush with death in September last year when she suffered a massive brain aneurysm from which she is still recovering.

There was at least some good news and an expression of public relief earlier this year when correctional services minister Dr Pieter Groenewald cancelled the perpetrators’ parole and they were reincarcerated.

* Another crime which shocked the city was that of 16-year-old Amanda du Toit who stabbed her 13-year-old sister, Ciska, to death in a jealous rage over a pair of Doc Martens shoes on October 19 1994.

The younger sibling had been stabbed numerous times with a 20cm knife, once right through her body.

The older sister told police she fought off a male intruder wearing a balaclava who she had found stabbing her sister, but six days after her sister was buried, she was arrested for the murder.

A mysterious note thrown into her coffin at her funeral by Amanda raised suspicion and ultimately led to the teen’s arrest. 

The subsequent trial proved a challenge for The Herald because the accused could not be identified as she was under 18, even though her identity was widely known.

After receiving an effective 10-year jail sentence, Amanda was released from prison in 2002.

However, she was killed in October 2009, 15 years after the murder, when she crashed her car into a tree in Heugh Road.

* In a family crime which seemed to mirror that of the Du Toit sisters in the way in which the perpetrator laid blame on a non-existent killer or killers and ultimately met a deadly fate after release from prison, policeman Uyslen Nel shot his wife Natasja, 25, and their sons — leukaemia sufferer Marius, 4, and Robin, 2 — on a deserted road on the outskirts of Uitenhage in February 1996, following an argument with his spouse.

He had told colleagues he believed they had been murdered by unknown assailants after he went to get assistance after their vehicle broke down.

In an interview with a psychiatrist before his trial, however, Nel said Robin’s cries had sounded like “the screeching of chalk on a blackboard” and he had had to shut him up.

But in 2015, Nel died when he was electrocuted while working in the ceiling of a house in Westering after being on parole for just more than a year after serving 19 years of the three life sentences he received for the callous murders.

* Prominent Port Elizabeth attorney Merwe Swart was shot dead in the driveway of his Walmer home in 1996 by one of the thugs Kirkwood farmer Fanie de Lange had hired to assault him.

De Lange was released in October 2002 after serving three years and five months of a seven-year sentence for his role in the conspiracy to murder Swart.

* Another headline-making story covered extensively by The Herald was the blackwater tubing disaster in Tsitsikamma in March 2000, when 13 lawyers and their business associates died in the Storms River rafting tragedy as a result of heavy rains in the catchment area of the Storms and Witteklip rivers, which resulted in a build-up of debris that burst and triggered rapid and overwhelming floods.

The victims included family members of the invited clients, including a young teenager.

The Herald