Fritzl, Baby P, Shannon Matthews, Charlotte’s two – roll call of the damned

Late one Sunday evening in 1987, while still an articled clerk, I received a call from attorney Max Mosselson, who wanted to know if I knew the whereabouts of a client I had been representing for the better part of that week.

Mosselson was acting for a woman who was separated and had been trying desperately to obtain a court order interdicting her estranged husband from having any contact with her or their children. Advocate Gerrie van Tonder and I had blocked three applications before the late Judge Levy in the Witwatersrand Local Division of what was then known as the Supreme Court.

Our client was a Dutch (as in from Holland) man around 40 years of age, who appeared to counsel and me, as a victim of a woman intent on using the children as a bargaining chip in order to gain leverage for the divorce settlement. He was quietly spoken and appeared to be genuinely concerned about his wife and children. The judge shared our view and three times during the course of that week refused to grant the relief sought by this lady.

How desperately wrong we were all proved to be.

When I took the call late on Sunday I advised Mosselson that I don’t keep tabs on my client. He advised me that my client was with the children and calling his client from phone boxes and threatening to shoot them. I promised to try and get hold of my guy urgently. When Robyn (Mrs Traps) asked me what was going on I told her I had a very bad feeling about this. Lawyers don’t call late on a Sunday night after being refused three applications unless they are malcontents (which Max is not) or there is a genuine problem.

Where do you even start to look for your client on a Sunday evening, he wasn’t listed in the phone book and cellphones were something for the future? Within about half an hour I got the call. My client had killed his son and himself in the driveway of the house where his wife was staying – the ultimate act of spite and revenge.

My hatred and loathing for him has not left me even 21 years after the event.

The judge, advocate and I were absolutely devastated by the events of that Sunday evening and, despite all the murder cases, armed robberies and other violent crimes I would encounter over the years, that one will always linger.

Unfortunately too often our species displays the most disgusting conduct in “caring” for our young:

In the Cape High Court we are witnessing the trial of Marius Van Der Westhuizen who purportedly in an act of pure spite and manipulation killed his three children, in front of his wife Charlotte, the mother of two of them. Josef Fritzl kept his daughter locked in a cellar in Austria so that he could breed an entirely separate family locked in a cage.

Shannon Matthews was kidnapped and drugged by her mother Karen and an accomplice in order to claim a £50 000 reward. This animal went on television to make “heartfelt” pleas for the safe return of the child she had safely locked away about a mile from where she lived. She watched happily as thousands of police were employed in a frantic search for the “return of her child”.

Baby P was a toddler who was horrifically assaulted by its mother, her boyfriend and a house guest on an ongoing basis, eventually causing its death, in circumstances so disgusting that it has caused a row in the House of Commons and initiated an investigation into British social services.

Selfishness, spite, greed and hate, some of the wonderful gifts we give to our children; not to forget child slavery (including sex slaves), paedophiles, neglect, abandonment and so on and so forth.

Yet if you were to ask people to name the biggest challenges facing the world right now they would probably come back with climate change and the global financial crisis. Very few would even think of, or list, the terrible harm and neglect which we are visiting upon our greatest asset of all; our children.

And that is the biggest shame of all.