Understanding a murderer's motive

Submitted by Pete Farlam

I read three reports on murders recently, which made for disturbing but also compelling reading. It’s a bit like not being able to take your eyes off a car wreck: I know I shouldn’t really look and that it will haunt me, but I’m also intrigued as to the extent of the horror.

The first one was a transatlantic murder by a “seemingly ordinary” 27-year-old Englishman and the other two were all-too-familiar robbery-related killings in South Africa.

Writing in the London Review of Books (August 14 2008), author Jonathan Raban provides a fascinatingly detailed account of the virtual life of Neil Entwistle, a “seemingly ordinary [read working-class] 27-year-old Englishman with an honours degree from the University of York” who married up, ran into lots of debt and then took an extreme way out of his predicament. Entwistle, who had been living in Massachusetts in the US for barely four months, killed his wife, Rachel, and baby daughter, Lillian, with his father-in-law’s Colt .22 revolver while they lay sleeping in their new double bed before fleeing back across the Atlantic to his parents in Worksop. In June this year a Massachusetts court sentenced him to two concurrent life sentences without parole.

Raban provides a brilliant account of the banal, largely internet-based life of the killer. Neil Entwistle was an internet scam artist and sleaze merchant but not a violent murderer (at least before the killings). So why did he do it? The judge commented that his crimes “defy comprehension”, an opinion shared by the lead prosecutor. Shortly after the verdict, the lead prosecutor was quoted as saying: “Sometimes you just don’t know why … No ‘why’ would really explain this. There is no why.”

I imagine that Raban took this up as a challenge, to understand the why of Neil Entwistle’s actions. He puts the pieces together in a way that recalls (for me at any rate) the careful attention to detail of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. If I had the time and the resources, I would be interested to try to understand the whys of two local murders, both of which received brief mentions in a local newspaper.

The Cape Times reported on the arrest of two suspects in the Van der Westhuizen murders in Kleinmond. Last Sunday the small seaside town was shocked by the fatal stabbing of Schalk (78) and Marie van der Westhuizen (73), a couple who were known for their generosity and charitable work and who had just celebrated Marie’s birthday with family and friends. Two men, aged 22 and 23, who used to do casual labour for the couple, were arrested in the Overhills informal settlement and the police recovered items taken from the couple’s house.

The Cape Times also reported the murder of well-known businessman and business publisher Robin McGregor (79), founder of the Who Owns Whom publication, who was found stabbed to death in his house in Tulbagh on Tuesday. The Tulbagh police found McGregor’s body after their Bellville counterparts stopped and arrested three suspects, aged 28, 29 and 30, who were driving McGregor’s grey Mercedez Benz Kompressor in Neethling Street in Bellville South.

While short on details, these two stories suggest a similar pattern. In both incidents the victims were elderly whites who lived in small rural towns in the Western Cape, the suspects are male and almost certainly coloured or black, and the primary motive for the killings appears to be robbery. Reading these short news items, I had many unanswered questions. Immediately I thought of drugs, gangs, poverty and a culture of violence, as well as racial inequality. I wondered about the effects of the fuel-price hikes and the global (and local) recession on already-struggling, long-term unemployed youths.

It would be heartening to read what someone like Jonny Steinberg, whose award-winning writing on crime includes Midlands and The Number, would make of these two brutal murders. Steinberg has a way of weaving multiple elements together in a way that illustrates broader problems through attention to a single narrative. Just as Jonathan Raban helps to dispel stereotypes that Entwistle — the son of a coal miner who was trying to live beyond his class — was therefore somehow suspicious and bound to come to no good, Steinberg enables us to see beyond the stereotypes to the complexity of South African criminology.

It’s not only the Najwa Petersens (or the Neil Entwistles) of this world that deserve detailed coverage. But in a country which has roughly 18 000 murders a year, what are the chances of getting to the bottom of the latest tragic killings?

Pete Farlam is a psychologist and freelance writer in Cape Town