Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

36

I’m dragging my feet over my story, lingering over the murder of Baby Marnewick because it was my professional coming-of-age, my zenith, my fifteen minutes of fame.

But also because it was the final chapter in the history of Zatopek van Heerden the Innocent, the Just, the Good. After this I’ll have to begin the prologue to damnation and I hesitate because the mere thought fills me with repugnance – not fear, no longer fear.

So let me close – but without the suspenseful denouement of a second-rate thriller. The truth was far duller.

The trail of Victor Reinhardt Simmel reached a dead end in 1980 and I found the reason eventually at Intercontinental Mining Support (or IMS, as it’s known). IMS took over Deutsche Maschine in 1987 but had kept none of the lapsed personnel records. It was an ex-colleague of Simmel’s, at IMS headquarters in Germiston, who supplied me with the information: the Masking Tape Murderer had emigrated to Australia in early 1981.

“He said it was due to the political situation here.”

I asked the ex-colleague what he could remember about Simmel. “Not very much. He talked a great deal and he was a liar.”

I knew it wasn’t the political situation that had made Simmel flee. It was the heat of the murder inquiries. Somewhere in their investigations of the last two or three murders, the police probably came too close. And so I went to Australia, with the permission of the prof and the University of South Africa picking up the tab. We – Superintendent Charley Edwards of Sydney’s Criminal Investigation Bureau and I – went to arrest Victor Reinhardt Simmel in Alice Springs, in the dry, dusty Northern Territory, an unsensational event, an anticlimax. We knocked on the door of his house, asked the short, ugly little man with the powerful shoulders to accompany us, and he came along without demur.

In an unbearably hot interrogation room, Simmel denied everything. But eventually, after days of fending off and lying, using the distancing mechanism of most serial killers, he said that “the other Victor Reinhardt Simmel, the evil one,” had done terrible things – and told us about his murder trail, which ran through South Africa, Australia, and even Hong Kong.

I wanted to know about Baby Marnewick and he, the “evil Victor,” could barely remember her. I had to show him the photographs in the yellowing dossier. I had to describe her and remind him how he had followed her from the shopping center, watched her for two days, humiliated and murdered her.

I looked for absolution in his insanity – and eventually found it. I had to dig for it because ostensibly he was no monster, merely a self-important, unattractive, damaged product of a casual sexual encounter between a slut of a mother who didn’t want him and an unknown father and a lifetime of derision about his background, his height, his acne, and his social status.

Thirty-seven women. Thirty-seven victims who had to pay the price of his rage. Had to pay the social debt of a community that finds it easier to reject than to accept, that prefers to remain uninvolved.

You, I, every one of us has a share in those thirty-seven murders. Because we’re bad by omission.

My absolution had a price.

And a reward. I was a hero in Australia. ACADEMIC SLEUTH CORNERS SERIAL KILLER was the front-page headline in the Sydney Morning Herald, the first of a storm of newspaper reports, television programs, and radio interviews. And back in South Africa I was the darling of journalists for two long weeks. (But how soon they forget. Only eight years later, with the Wilna van As case, not a single journalist made the connection – not until the end.)

I cannot deny that I enjoyed every moment of the attention. Suddenly I was someone, I was successful, I was good. Good.

And if all that still doesn’t jog your memory: Victor Reinhardt Simmel committed suicide before he could be extradited. In a cell in Sydney, he cut his wrists to ribbons with a sharpened table knife. Not with the neat transverse cuts of fiction and the movies but with the demonic lengthwise slashes of reality.

My life carried on. My life changed. The last great turning point, the prologue to my own downfall, happened two weeks after I had handed in my doctoral thesis. I was in Cape Town to hold a seminar on the profiling of serial killers for Murder and Robbery in those drab headquarters in Bellville South. And Colonel Willie Theal, then the officer in command, came to me after the proceedings.

“Come home,” he said. “Come and work for me.”