Cops can't forget horror
2003-08-08 22:50
Marietie Louw and Borrie la Grange
Pretoria - She might still have lived after a shot to the head. There was mud between her fingers, and marks where she seemed to have reached for help.
This is the picture that will remain in the mind of an traumatised Pretoria policeman after the horror hijacking, rape and murder of a Pretoria mother, child and grandmother.
This member of the Pretoria West police last week found the body of Hester Rawstorne, 54, near Haakdoringboom smallholdings north of the city.
She was thrown out of a vehicle shortly after she was hijacked in Sunnyside along with her daughter-in-law to be, Janine Drennen, 24, and her one-year-old granddaughter, Kayla. She had a gunshot wound to her head.
Supt Sandra Behr, area chief of social services in Pretoria, said members of the police who were on the scene, were very shocked.
Porcelain doll
"The killing of a helpless baby deeply touched them. They are having nightmares, flashbacks and are overly aggressive."
Three days after the murder, investigators sat around a table and cried, a colleague said.
Members of the serious violent crime unit of the police station are undergoing trauma counselling.
Kayla was probably first shot in the in the head and then in the stomach, "Her body lay like a bloody porcelain doll among the winter grass," one of the investigators said.
Drennen was repeatedly raped and shot several times.
Their mutilated bodies were found in a desolated area in Stinkwater outside Hammanskraal.
In her mother's arms
Kayla was buried in her mother's arms on Friday. A tearful Linda Jordaan, Kayla's grandmother, put one of the baby's teddy bears next to a wreath of brightly coloured flowers on the coffin.
Clifford Rawstorne, 34, Kayla's father and Drennen's fiancé, cried inconsolably. His two sons from a former marriage, Michael, 12, and Shaun, 9, stood next to their father as the coffin was lowered into the grave.
Rawstorne's mother was buried in Pretoria West on Friday afternoon.