Teen hides as mom, gran killed

2008-07-08 08:32

Sonja van Buul

Meyerton - As a 14-year-old girl locked herself into her home on Monday afternoon, her stepfather murdered her grandmother and then her mother with a butcher's knife.

Marthinus van Vuuren, 52, is believed to have waited for his mother-in-law, Linda Kruger, 57, to return to the smallholding near Meyerton where she lived with her daughter and granddaughter.

He allegedly cut her throat with a butcher's knife and hid her body in the garage while he waited for his estranged wife to arrive.

The 14-year-old girl may have called her mother, Hazel van Vuuren, 38, to warn her, as Hazel stopped at the fire department on her way home to get help.

Police are also considering the possibility that she left the smallholding to get help after her mother's gruesome murder.

Stabbed four times

But when she arrived at the smallholding with a colleague and a traffic officer right behind her, Van Vuuren attacked her nevertheless. The enraged man stabbed her four times in the chest and she died of her injures in the driveway.

It is not clear if her colleague and the traffic officer witnessed the murder or if they arrived moments later.

The traffic officer arrested Van Vuuren at the scene.

According to police spokesperson Captain Shadow Mashabane, the Van Vuurens had been estranged since last year and a divorce was pending.

Mashabane said police did not know what had driven Van Vuuren to kill his wife and mother-in-law.

Badly traumatised

Netcare 911 paramedics took the badly traumatised girl, who wasn't injured, to a Vereeniging hospital to be treated for shock.

"A Netcare 911 trauma counsellor assisted her at the hospital," said Mark Stokoe, Netcare spokesperson.

She has since been taken to her biological father.

Van Vuuren is being held at Meyerton police station and will appear in Meyerton Magistrate's Court on Wednesday on charges of murder.

- Beeld