Growing list of murders that police may never solve
● Pensioner Lorraine Roberts was stabbed to death in her home, which was so modest that all there was to steal was a length of copper pipe. Three years later, police are no closer to bringing her killer to justice.
Lynette Hichens, her niece, happened upon the 84year-old’s body in a spare room beneath a heap of dirty laundry, dumped there as she bled to death.
“I think about her all the time and it hurts to know that whoever killed her is still walking around like nothing happened, all for a piece of piping,” she said.
“It is a memory I have put in a box and pushed to the back of my mind. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night that box opens, even though I wish it wouldn’t.”
The case is one of thousands of murders which increase every year and will likely never be solved.
The police ministry this week revealed that 21,022 people were murdered in SA between April last year and March this year — equating to about one person slain every 30 minutes.
Experts and crime analysts say that because of the parlous police detection rate, which feeds into even lower rates of conviction, thousands of cases go cold.
Institute for Security Studies researcher Gareth Newham said police had a 22% detection rate, meaning less than one in four murder cases that are opened are ever handed to a prosecutor.
“This means that more than three out of every four murder cases are not solved. What is also concerning is that the detection rate has also been on the decline, telling us that the police are solving fewer and fewer murders,” he told the Sunday Times.
Newham said the detection rate had declined from 29.5% in 2014 to 22% this year.
“This is a deterioration of the detective service and that is because you have police commissioners who have no understanding of policing and who don’t understand crime,” he said.
“We need more detectives, not more police. We don’t need to police all 58-million people within the borders. We need a competent intelligence service and good detectives.”
Hichens said: “The truth is I was never really surprised that no-one was arrested. So many people are killed and no-one is ever held accountable.”
Like Hichens, Sonwabo Dywili is consumed by the murder of his brother, Nceba, an ANC councillor gunned down in Port Elizabeth in 2016.
“My brother’s killers roam the streets of Walmer and are known to the community but it’s now three years on and no-one was ever arrested. Maybe if we were from a well-known or wealthy family our case would have been solved.”
David Bruce, of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, said the dearth of skilled police officers contributed to the swathe of unsolved murders. “Police are a component of government that is heavily resourced, but it is the focus on skills that needs to be at the fore,” he said.
“The police have a legacy of bad human resource policies and beyond that we get into the intricacies of investigating homicides and the complexities of doing that in a developing nation. It’s little wonder that so few people are convicted.”
For the families of cold-case murder victims, justice and closure remain out of reach. Fourteen years after Stellenbosch student Inge Lotz was bludgeoned to death in her flat, her mother Juanita said she was still lost for words when she thought of her.
“I don’t even know what to say any more. We haven’t had any closure and I don’t think we will. After everything that has happened, we are trying to piece together our lives as best we can,” she said.
“There is nothing to say, none of it will help Inge.”