'Callous' killer gets life
2008-03-04 08:05
Pretoria - A KwaMhlanga man who strangled a single mother after she gave him a lift to town was a callous, heartless killer who remained a danger to society, a Pretoria High Court judge said on Monday.
Judge Eberhard Bertelsmann sentenced Lucky Kaiser, 27, to life imprisonment for the December 2005 murder and robbery of Leonie Chantler, 47, near her smallholding outside Boschkop, in the east of Pretoria.
Chantler, who lived on the smallholding alone with her two teenage children, was strangled and most probably indecently assaulted after agreeing to give her killer a lift to town and even waiting for over an hour until he arrived.
She never returned home. Her partly decomposed, half-naked body was found with a rope around her neck, with the other end tied to a tree, in the veld about 15km from where her bakkie was found abandoned next to the road two days earlier.
Bertelsmann said Kaiser had not shown a morsel of remorse about what he had done, choosing to tell lies about his horror deeds until the end of his trial.
"There is no indication that he feels he did anything wrong or that he has any remorse.
'The mental torture'
"... it took two agonising days before her body was found... One cannot even begin to imagine the mental torture her family must have gone through in those 48 hours.
"The distress that was caused by the way in which their mother was found was starkly evident when their daughter testified in court."
The lives of her children had been changed irrevocably.
They had to be taken in by other family members, but the emotional damage caused by the way in which they lost their mother would be with them for the rest of their lives, he said.
Bertelsmann said it was clear that Chantler was a resilient woman, who had farmed alone on her plot. She had struggled for her life. That's why deposits of her and Kaiser's blood were found in the cab of her bakkie.
The fact that Kaiser had been acquitted on a rape charge because of a lack of evidence would never remove the doubt in the minds of Chantler's family about how many horrors she had had to face before she finally died.
Callus denial of guilt
"You made your getaway in the truck in which she gave you a lift. When you ran the truck off the road, you removed the radio and tried to bluff your way out.
"... Fortunately, the dedicated and quick work of the investigating officers saw to it that you were not only apprehended within a few days, they also did a painstaking investigation and collected sometimes minute evidence, establishing a watertight case of circumstantial evidence," Bertelsmann said.
The callous fashion in which Kaiser had denied his guilt showed that he had a complete lack of respect for Chantler and her family, the judge said.
The attack was carefully planned and executed and life imprisonment was the only appropriate sentence, he added.
- SAPA