Philip Tucker's two teenage daughters from his marriage to former Miss World Anneline Kriel are taking their father's sudden death "very badly".
Dressed in his pyjamas and socks, 59-year-old Tucker was found floating face down in the pool of his luxury double-storey townhouse in Sandhurst.
Meat and marinade found on the scene suggested he had been preparing a braai for himself in the hours before he died.
While the exact circumstances of Tucker's death remain unknown, paramedics suspect he fell from the roof while trying to fix a faulty TV aerial. His body was only discovered hours later, when his domestic worker arrived at his home.
"It was obviously a huge shock," said Tucker's friend and divorce attorney Billy Gundelfinger, one of the first people on the scene of the former show jumper's death, "no one expects this".
Gundelfinger on Monday described Tucker's famously acrimonious relationship with Kriel, which formed the basis of several ugly custody disputes over their daughters Tayla, 17, and Whitney, 15, as "resolved" and "completely in the past".
Cape Town-based Kriel - who is married to businessman Peter Bacon - and her daughters will fly up to Johannesburg for Tucker's funeral on Thursday.
Tucker's Joburg-based brother and sister, who is travelling from the US, will also attend the service.
After receiving an early morning phone call about the accident, it was Gundelfinger who then called the Hatzolah Emergency Services for help. Netcare 911 arrived shortly afterwards.
According to Netcare 911 spokesperson Mark Stokoe, Hatzolah staff tried in vain to resuscitate Tucker, who had apparently been dead for several hours.
"There was nothing anybody could have done."
Tucker, then a millionaire show jumper and horse-breeder, married Miss World 1974 Kriel in the 1980s. Their tempestuous union ended a decade later, after Kriel filed for divorce in 1994.
The couple's increasingly bitter custody disputes reached their peak when Tucker went to court to stop his daughters from moving to Cape Town with Kriel and Bacon. But, siding with Kriel's argument that Tucker could use the family wine farm when he visited Tayla and Whitney, Judge Willie van der Merwe dismissed Tucker's case.