'I am so sorry'
2005-07-26 06:09
Johannesburg - "Don't touch him!" screamed Sharon Matthews on Monday when the convicted murderer of her daughter Leigh, 21, took his weeping father's hand.
"I am so sorry... I am so sorry," a deeply emotional Donovan Moodley, 25, muttered over the jam-packed court to Mrs Matthews before he choked on a desperate "Please... please!" before his head fell into his arms.
But the shattered Mrs Matthews snubbed him with just one word: "Bastard!"
Earlier she had shaken her head and clasped her hands over her mouth when Moodley said via his legal representative in the Johannesburg High Court that before his arrest he had wanted to send Leigh's ring, a gift from her family on her 21st birthday, and an anonymous letter to her parents to explain "what the circumstances were that led to her death".
Shortly before that, in a hoarse voice and with his head bowed, he had pleaded guilty to charges of murder, abduction and blackmail.
In an affidavit he admitted he had merely kidnapped Leigh for a ransom, but ultimately decided to murder her because "he did not know what to do with her or how to let her go without being caught".
"...After I received the R50 000 from Mr Matthews, I drove around with the deceased, who was still tied up (in the boot of my car). After driving for quite a while, I (still) did not know what to do with her...
"I was scared there would be roadblocks and drove back to an out-of-the-way place where (Leigh and) I had been earlier that day.
"When we came to Walkerville, I realised I had no other choice but to kill her."
The 150 or so people in the packed 2A courtroom gasped and Mrs Matthews began sobbing out loud when Moodley told how he had told Leigh to undress and as she turned around to put a blanket around her shoulders, he had shot the naked girl in the back of her head.
"After I shot her in the head, I pulled her body into the bushes where I shot her three more times to make sure she was dead." One of these shots hit her in the neck and the other two in the chest, said Moodley.
"I did not shoot her on the spur of the moment, but decided (beforehand) and planned to murder her."
In his affidavit Moodley admitted he had not known Leigh before the abduction, but decided to abduct her on 6 July last year from the Bond University "because there were (at that moment) no other people nearby".
He had begun toying with the idea of kidnapping one of the students for a big ransom before July 2004 because he was "under the impression that most of the students at the university came from wealthy families".
But when Leigh told him after her abduction "her parents were not that wealthy", he agreed to reduce the ransom from R300 000 to R50 000 because Mr Matthews could only gather this amount.
Karen Matthews, Leigh's older sister, who sat between her parents, began shaking with sobs when Judge Joop Labushagne found Moodley guilty of all three charges against him.
Soon after that Moodley's father, Stephen Moodley, also began weeping and whispered to his son: "We love you, son, we love you."