- Judgment of the man accused of murdering Tazne van Wyk, and abusing some of his relatives, will move into its third day on Wednesday.
- Judge Alan Maher has been summarising the evidence ahead of announcing his decision on whether the accused is guilty or not.
- He will have to decide whether Tazne's last night was due to a night from hell at the hands of mystery foreigners, or if the accused was the culprit.
The second day of judgment of the man accused of raping and murdering eight-year-old Cape Town girl Tazne van Wyk ended on page 90, with the judge reaching the arrest of the man suspected of abducting her.
Judge Alan Maher has spent the past two days reading through the witness evidence and forensic findings presented to him, including having to go over the results of the postmortem on her little body all over again.
When Tazne was murdered, and the accused was arrested, he ended up facing 27 charges after his family members broke their silence over alleged rapes and severe physical abuse.
Tazne's parents were in court again on Tuesday, and this time her mother brought a cuddly teddy. One of the accused's relatives was spotted, but kept a low profile.
Tazne disappeared on Friday, 7 February 2020, and her body was found almost two weeks later in a stormwater drain next to the N1 near Worcester.
Her body was so decomposed that her pubic area was covered in maggots, so a biological anthropologist had to be called in to testify whether she had been raped.
Her left hand was missing and still is.
DNA was found under her little fingernails and was compared with a sample taken from the accused. It was a match.
The accused says that Tazne scratched him when he desperately tried to hold on to her as a group of people speaking a foreign language held them against their will and wrenched her away from him somewhere in the Karoo.
He had asked them to let her go, but, he claimed, it was all in vain.
He said when she was taken, he was tied up with a scarf and could do nothing, but he said he heard water. One of the mystery people (none has been located) returned with Tazne's limp body and they drove out of the bushes, and left her somewhere on the side of the N1.
He described a hellish afternoon which started with these mystery people stopping in a Siyaya taxi with pink on the side to ask for directions as he left Elsie's River in Cape Town.
He said Tazne appeared out of nowhere and got into the taxi when they offered money for the directions. They were held in this taxi, which went to Worcester via a drug deal in Malawi Camp, and a stop in Paarl for fish takeaways. They were finally dropped off in Worcester along the N1.
He turned down the offer of accommodation for the two of them for the night, telling two good Samaritans he needed to get "the child" to her mother in Beaufort West.
However, these mysterious people came back in a different car while they were trying to hitchhike. It was a Toyota bakkie, and they pushed the two of them in the car, stopped in some bushes, took Tazne to the water, brought her limp body back, and put her next to the N1.
He said they booted him out of the car near a roadblock on the outskirts of Bloemfontein much later.
He claimed that he slept on the highway that night and headed back to Laingsburg.
He did not go to the police once at Laingsburg, but he did go to a shop to charge his cellphone. He sat in the bushes that afternoon.
"He never told anyone what happened as there was something wrong with his head," said Maher in his summary of what the accused testified. "Everybody would blame him. He started blaming himself. He did not know what to tell people."
The accused has testified that one of the mystery people smoked from a packet of drugs they collected in Malawi Camp right next to him in the back of the bakkie, and it made him feel high.
He was arrested in Cradock on 17 February and did not tell the police about his and Tazne's ordeal. He did not like the way the police were treating him.
"How can I speak to such people?" quoted Maher from the accused's testimony.
The accused denies all 27 charges put to him, including absconding from parole. On that charge he said he went to tell the parole officer he was leaving town, but the office was closed.
Judgment is expected to be handed down on Wednesday.