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Blood on Her Hands: South Africa’s most notorious female killers by Tanya Farber
Jonathan Ball Publishers
248 pages
R179
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Women who kill have vastly different motives from men’s. They are rarer than their male counterparts. At a global level, 95% of people who commit murder are men.
This violent crime is hardly out of an impulsive act of rage, but rather a long build up of frustration and anger which results in calculated and sophisticated plotting to fix what they deem as a stumbling block. And it can be a stumbling block in terms of love, money or power. Sometimes all three. Especially when they’re from upper or middle class families.
Award-winning journalist Tanya Farber, in Blood on Her Hands: South Africa’s most notorious female killers, exquisitely tells the stories of nine women who have grabbed headlines with their horrifying tales of murder.
Farber unpacks the lives, minds and motivations of some of South Africa’s most notorious murderers, from the poisonous nurse Daisy de Melker and the privileged but deeply disturbed Najwa Petersen to the mysterious Joey Haarhoff, who died before revealing the fate of her victims.
Also included in the book are the stories of Charmaine Phillips, Phoenix Racing Cloud Theron, Marlene Lehnberg and Celiwe Mbokazi.
I personally got sucked into some stories more than others. One of the more interesting and disturbing stories is that of serial killer De Melker, only the second woman to be hanged in 1932, for poisoning two husbands and a son – that’s besides the deaths of four of her other children who died prior to her conviction.
Haarhoff might have died in 1990 before being held accountable for her role in the abduction and murder of girls in the 1980s, but today she is still being talked about because the families of her victims didn’t get closure when her partner and accomplice Gert van Rooyen decided to blow their brains out.
And who can forget Najwa, wife of music icon Taliep Petersen who is serving 28 years behind bars for the murder of her husband in 2006. Petersen carefully planned a house robbery to eliminate her husband. She had already stabbed him in the neck just before that.
Chané van Heerden did something bizarre and incredibly cruel. She put her victim’s facial skin in the freezer for preservation. She had an unusual obsession with skinning humans.
And then there’s the very angry and jealous Dina Rodrigues. Many thought that she wouldn’t harm a fly, but she organised a hit on the baby of her boyfriend.
In most of the murder cases, these women personally knew their victims.
Despite the brutality and shock factor of the book, Blood on Her Hands is written in a style lighter than the subject matter suggests and makes it impossible for you to put the book down.
Farber takes you through each case, against the backdrop of the different eras and regions of the 20th and early 21st centuries the women operated in and incredibly captures her audience from one chapter to the next.
She toys with your emotions and makes you feel as if you’re following ghosts to relive their darkest moments – as if you’re a witness to these crimes. Farber delves into their lives, their relationships, their histories and their final acts – murder.
I’m personally fascinated by the minds of murderers, and in this case where women are the masterminds, the intrigue is even greater.
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