Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

34

I found his name among hundreds of others.

I dug, prospected for weeks in the register of every sexual offender between 1976 and 1978 who had served a jail sentence. And found his name in the lists of comparisons that decorated my wall.

Victor Reinhardt Simmel.

It was a fleck of gold in the gray ore of information, but it didn’t show up immediately and brightly; it was almost invisible. I listed every one questioned in each of the murders. In the investigation into the death of the twenty-one-year-old waitress in Carletonville, there had been a Victor Reinhardt Simmel. Short notes, a group of regular guests in the restaurant where she worked were questioned. He was there on a few occasions and she served him, among others. He denied any knowledge, expressed his sympathy. There was nothing to lift him out of the mass of other suspects.

And eventually in the sentence register: On July 14, 1976, a Victor Reinhardt Simmel was jailed for three years in the Randfontein Magistrates Court on charges of indecent assault on a twenty-six-year-old librarian and possession of pornographic material. I traced the investigation and court files. Crime of opportunity: She walked home in the dusk of early evening, put her key into the lock, unlocked the door. Simmel was driving past, stopped at her garden gate, got out of the car, asked for directions in a friendly manner, suddenly grabbed her arm, and forced her into the house. She had yelled. He punched her in the face, threatened to kill her.

The neighbor opposite was defying water restrictions during the great drought of ’76 by watering her lawn. And she saw what was happening, called her two miner boarders. They burst into the librarian’s home. Victor Reinhardt Simmel was tearing off her blouse, his forearm against her throat, her nose broken and bleeding from the punch. They dragged him away, subdued and tied him. In the meantime the neighbor had called the police.

In his car they found pornography – Dutch magazines with explicit photographs of bondage.

Perhaps they also found a roll of masking tape in the car. Maybe they didn’t know it was connected to any case.

Victor Reinhardt Simmel.

Not a miner. A technician for Deutsche Maschine, a firm that made and maintained huge industrial water pumps for the mining industry.

There was a picture of him in the dossier of the case. Short and stocky with the innumerable scars of a war lost to acne.

The thread between Simmel and the Masking Tape murders was slender, so terribly slender – a single cameo role in one of the murders, but it was all I had, all I needed.

I took his photo and drove to Virginia, looking for Maria Masibuko, who would be a thirty-eight-year-old woman by now with scarred breasts and the face of a murderer stored in her memory. I didn’t find her there. They told me she had gone to Welkom. Another rumor had it that she was living in Bloemfontein. After another two weeks I traced her to a maternity clinic in Botshabelo, a nursing sister with delicate hands and the memory of pain and hate still showing in the movement of her shoulders.

She looked at the photo, briefly, before her mouth twisted…

“It’s him,” she said. And walked away to choke back the vomit rising in her throat.