Jan Lotz can’t remember a single event in which his talented daughter Inge participated which he did not attend.
Just one of his beautiful memories of his murdered daughter include an occasion when, aged nine, he travelled to Vienna in Austria to be there to congratulate her for winning a medal in an international choir competition.
Lotz was speaking this week after, unable to come to terms with Inge’s unsolved murder on March 16, 2005, he posted a R1 million reward for information leading to the conviction of her killer. He also announced this week that he had hired legendary crime investigator Piet Byleveld, who has solved various serial killings and other high-profile murder cases, to probe his daughter’s murder.
Inge was 22 years old and studying for a master’s degree in mathematical statistics when she was murdered in her apartment in Stellenbosch.
In a cruel and vicious attack, her body was found with 50 different wounds.
Her boyfriend, Fred van der Vyver, was arrested three months after the murder, but acquitted after a year-long trial in 2007.
He successfully sued the State for wrongful arrest in the Western Cape High Court in August last year, but police are appealing the decision.
Speaking this week from his office at the Tygerberg campus of the University of Stellenbosch, Lotz recalled his joy at accompanying Inge on a trip to Europe with the Tygerberg children’s choir.
“We still have a beautiful picture of Inge and the medal she received.
From age of five, Inge had travelled overseas extensively with her parents.
“She went overseas on her father’s shoulders,” Inge’s mother Juanita says.
At 13, the three visited the US, and Lotz recalls a smiling Inge walking past fields of cherry trees in bloom with their pink and white blossoms lighting up the landscape during a visit to Washington DC.
They also visited the White House and the UN.
“The United Nations had a session in progress. She was fascinated.”
Lotz, a professor and the academic head of Tygerberg Hospital’s radiology unit, teaches newly qualified doctors how to do brain and spinal imaging, and produce three-dimensional images of the brain.
His daughter scored an average of 104 percent in matric at the DF Malan High School in Bellville, and achieved the fourth highest place in the Western Cape.
She completed her honours degree in statistical mathematics cum laude.
“One thing about her is that she really had a knack for mathematics. It was something unusual,” he said.
She had loved to read and he once gave her War and Peace, the epic historic novel by Russian author Leo Tolstoy to read, which she enjoyed.
While at university, “she never stayed on campus for a single weekend”.
Inge completed her Unisa Grade 8 final piano examinations with the highest honours. “She was very versatile on piano,” he remembers.
Their weekends together would “almost always” end with with a braai on Sunday afternoon.
Since Inge’s murder, Lotz has found it hard to find joy in life: “One moment I had everything, the next moment I had nothing.”
People close to the Lotz family have spoken with great concern about Lotz’s deteriorating state of mind since Inge’s murder. While his wife kept contact with her close circle of friends, he increasingly cut himself off from the world.
“I’m a bit of a loner. I have become extremely isolated.”
This Easter Weekend, he and his wife will be back at Witsand, where Inge spent every Christmas with close friends.
“We do go back there, but it’s a difficult situation. That’s where Inge effectively grew up,” he said.
Of the renewed investigation and the reward, he said: “When you wake up or go to sleep, it’s always there. We need closure.” - Saturday Star