'Amateurs' behind Chanelle hit
2011-11-21 12:18
Pretoria - A guilty conscience led to Chanelle Hennings killers, a “bunch of amateurs”, being picked up one by one last week.
The only player the police don’t have behind bars is the mastermind of the plot.
Those already arrested will meet in a Pretoria court on Tuesday.
Sources close to the investigation said on Sunday that the mastermind’s big mistake was to use amateurs, some of them drug addicts.
Mistakes
“These were a bunch of amateurs who tried to do something and in the process made a lot of mistakes,” said a source.
“They got two drug addicts to do the job. And they aren’t stable.
“When Doepie’s [Constable Gerhardus du Plessis’s] conscience began to trouble him, everything went wrong.”
Even before Henning was murdered outside her son Benjamin’s pre-school in Faerie Glen, Pretoria, Du Plessis wanted out.
He was allegedly warned that if he didn’t go through with the plan his wife, children and dog would be killed.
So, on the fateful Tuesday, he took a stolen gun and accompanied Willem “Pike” Pieterse on his motorbike to the pre-school.
Police said that seconds after Henning dropped off her son, Pieterse drove past her car and Du Plessis, by his own confession, pulled the trigger.
A week later, “Doepie couldn’t take it anymore”, a source said.
He called a colleague at the Hercules police station, where he had been a detective, and spilled the beans.
Confessed
That colleague called the Hawks Tactical team last Monday. Du Plessis confessed to his part in the murder and the police started to pick up the plotters one by one.
By Tuesday afternoon, Ambrose Monye, 37, a former Nigerian Olympic athlete, Preshan Singh, 24, and Deon Schoeman, 20, were behind bars.
Schoeman allegedly stole the firearm that later ended up with Singh, who allegedly supplied it to the plotters.
Monye allegedly hired Du Plessis and Pieterse, both addicted to drugs, to carry out the murder.
Pieterse was arrested in a bar in Despatch in the Eastern Cape on Wednesday evening.
Andre Gouws, a good friend of Henning’s estranged husband Nico Henning, was arrested on Wednesday morning at a farm stall in Machadodorp, Mpumalanga.
Gouws, allegedly the link between Monye and the mastermind, was apparently “the only professional among the lot”, said a source. It is understood that police are investigating Gouws’s alleged involvement in other hits that went wrong.
“These were not professional guys,” another source said. “After the murder, the guys they got developed a conscience they couldn’t live with.”
Gauteng police spokesperson Brigadier Neville Malila said police are still investigating.
