Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

32

Among the heartbreaking reports of killings from virtually all over the country, I found the trail of the Masking Tape Murderer.

Not immediately, but slowly, with orderly hard work, lists and flow charts and notes and graphs and a total, overruling obsession.

The documents arrived one after another, from detectives in cities, from small towns in the country, all with precisely the same theme: a yearning to catch the sick soul, to trap the perpetrator of abhorrent crimes, the same mandate to empower, the same unconditional offer of assistance to solve and close the dormant, dust-gathering files.

In those weeks I discovered the soul of a policeman, the hunting instinct, the personal involvement of a hunter with his prey. Because each file spoke of dedication, of passion, every packet had a letter enclosed in which I was begged to use the new criminological knowledge, to share, so that they could still the pain of an unsolved murder, the gnawing realization that he was still out there, carrying out his deadly calling.

It was in those weeks that I discovered my true vocation, experienced my initiation into the brotherhood, alone in an office in the maze of the university’s corridors. In those weeks I lost Wendy and found myself: I truly smelled blood for the first time and could not resist the odor.

Of the unbelievable eighty-seven responses that I received from all over the country, only nine were indisputably applicable, with another four or five possibilities. The rest were the crimes of other serial killers who had plagued our country for the past twenty years.

Naturally there was the temptation to establish a sort of national register of mass murder (how far ahead of my time I would’ve been!) but my obsession was too overwhelming, my debt of honor to Baby Marnewick too heavy a yoke.

And when all the information had been processed onto a huge chart that covered one wall of my office, the murder route of Masking Tape had been mapped. It was a chronicle, a casebook study of the rise, apprenticeship, and eventual coming-of-age of a serial killer who had drawn his trail of bloody destruction across the South African landscape.

And he was a miner.

His journey started in 1974 in the Free State gold-mining town of Virginia, with the assault and rape of a fourteen-year-old black schoolgirl who survived the knife wounds in her breasts by sheer willpower after she had been found with her hands tied behind her back with masking tape in an open stretch of veld. His first initiatory deed? Or were there others before that – clumsy, unreported attempts? Or was that the first time he used masking tape? The dossier mentioned that the victim could give no description of the rapist. Didn’t want to?

In the same year, a fifteen-year-old white schoolgirl, again from Virginia, was found next to the road, hands bound with masking tape, seventeen knife wounds in her breasts, with one nipple cut off. The police combed the black township and the black mine-workers’ compound, interrogated any number of black suspects, the connection between the two victims clear. No arrests were made.

Blyvooruitzicht on the West Rand, 1975: A twenty-two-year-old secretary at a legal firm, slight and pretty, finished her work and went home. No one ever saw her alive again. The following afternoon at 12:22 they kicked in the door of her small flat because they were suspicious. They found her in the only bedroom, hands and feet bound with masking tape, multiple stab wounds in the breasts, both nipples clumsily removed, a teddy bear on her face. (That, said the Quantico model, was a sign that the murderer was ashamed of his deed, that he didn’t want to see her eyes.)

December 16, 1975: Carletonville. A black farmhand discovered the naked body of a twenty-one-year-old waitress at 6:30 in the morning at the side of the tarred road to Rysmierbult. Masking tape, stab wounds in the chest, nipples removed. Where had she been murdered? There were no signs of a struggle where she was found, no trail of blood. No arrests.

March 9, 1976: A thirty-four-year-old prostitute was found in her flat in Welkom. The amount of blood in the room was frightening – one of the knife wounds had sliced through her aorta, which spouted a fountain of blood against the walls, over the furniture and the floor, flushing out her life. She had struggled: there was skin under her nails and she had bruises on her face. She was probably dead before he could use the masking tape, but it was found where it had rolled under a coffee table. Nipples sliced, knife wounds, and, for the first time, horrifying postmortem mutilation of the vagina.

Rage.

No fingerprints on the roll of masking tape.

Then, in 1979, after three years of silence, the death of Baby Marnewick. For the first time a victim in the kneeling position; semen found for the first time.

Where had he been for three years? After the acceleration between ’75 and ’76, the increasing aggression, the periods between the murders becoming briefer? Serial killers didn’t simply disappear of their own free will. They never stopped, they were moths around the flame of self-destruction, closer and closer, crazier and crazier, until they were burned out, usually in the white flame of justice.

The answer, the FBI said, is very often a jail sentence. Because where there is the smoke of serial murder, there is a fire that sparks off other crimes – even minor acts of white-collar theft, arson occasionally, indecent assault and rape or attempted rape. All the studies indicated that a silence of months or years that disturbed a killer’s demonic tempo was, in 80 percent of the cases, due to a jail sentence for another crime.

Three murders in 1980: In March at Sishen, a twenty-three-year-old housewife, kneeling, multiple knife wounds, nipples removed, masking tape around the ankles and wrists.

June, in Durban: A thirty-one-year-old cosmetic sales rep in her hotel room. Exactly the same modus operandi.

August in Thabazimbi: A twenty-three-year-old unemployed single woman, possibly a prostitute or a call girl, found in her small home, five days after someone had used the whole terrifying ritual to humiliate and murder her.

And after that, nothing.

The bloody trail ended sharply and suddenly, as if Masking Tape had disappeared off the face of the earth. Dead? Jail sentence again? It made no sense.

For a week I stared at the monster on my wall. The flow chart was there, the map, the notes in the margin, the main suspects – not a single duplication. The list of similarities and differences was there, as well as the gaps.

The trail was there, sharp and clear, but there was no indication of identity. The murderer of Baby Marnewick had a trail now, a history. But, as yet, no name.

For a week I brooded and gazed and reread every one of the nine documents. And the one thing I couldn’t find was the murderer of Baby Marnewick. I would have to cast my net wider.