With his immaculate High School Musical blow-dry, Christoff Becker doesn't look like a mean son of a gun.
But this week the pampered son of a Pretoria principal was the country's most hated man.
He's a killer - a racist killer - and he should have faced his fate of a 12-year sentence months ago.
Instead, the 23-year-old haughtily delayed his arrival at the capital' s New Lock prison, taking the final flight out of Cape Town close to midnight on Monday, just as his partners-in-crime would have laid down in their jail bunks.
To the world outside, he pretended he could present as his alter ego: a studious drama student and photographic model.
The world outside was disgusted with his posturing.
Becker is the only one of the so-called Waterkloof Four who, it seems, can honestly afford to behave with such chilling petulance, insisting he is innocent, insisting he didn't receive a fair trial and insisting that soon the Constitutional Court will see it his way.
For the families of the other three - Frikkie du Preez, Gert van Schalkwyk and Reinach Tiedt - it seems the five-year fight to keep their sons out of jail may have devastated them financially, considering their legal team was led by Jaap Celliers, one of the country's most high-profile advocates.
Celliers is expensive, but he can certainly handle the acute controversy cast around the men he tends to take on.
His previous clients include Wouter Basson, euphemistically described as a chemical warfare expert, and one of apartheid South Africa's most psychotic assassins - the late Gideon Niewoudt.
More recently, Celliers has represented National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi who is to stand trial on charges of corruption and defeating the ends of justice in the Johannesburg High Court next year.
Becker's family could manage to pay up, but it might be suggested that, in some ways, it has been their son's dismissive refusals to part with the truth that have held up the process, adding to the costs.
His links to more violence after that night in December 2001 when the four killed one black man and attacked another set conversation about his penchant for violence at a breakneck pace.
In July 2004, he was said to have been present during a mass assault on two brothers aged 16 and 19 at a nightclub on the notorious Hatfield strip.
Broken jaws and trauma were reported after a miserable battle, a sordid tale of a crowd of young men punching and kicking each other on a pavement outside a pub.
Becker, Van Schalkwyk and Du Preez, who were all linked to the mayhem, were traced 10 days later - to a nightclub in Lynnwood.
The incident did not go further.
Becker's former lawyer, Oeloff de Meyer, later dismissed Becker's involvement in another undignified bar brawl in 2005 as "nonsense", saying there had been a fight, but " was knocked lights-out" by a middle-aged man who attacked him for no reason.
"I advised him to lay a charge," De Meyer said at the time. But Becker never did.
Becker had already been held by Tshwane metro police, in Hatfield again, earlier that year for alleged drunken driving.
He complained bitterly his arm had been hurt when blood was drawn from him before he was released on R1 000 bail, but soon he faced his fate - 100 hours of community service in an old age home.
At that time, Becker was considered a first offender, subject to a customary diversion programme. At that time, his murderous side was not yet proven.
The facade of white suburban grace which Becker, his mother Mariette and his father Christo tried to preserve, has been entirely ripped away.
Beeld reported last week Becker and Tiedt recently exchanged blows in Du Preez's presence after a series of furious cellphone messages had bulleted back and forth between them.
The account had it that Tiedt was allegedly offended by Becker's apparent reference to him as "white trash".
It is rumoured that Tiedt's family battled to keep up with costs, with estimations that the four would have had to stump up at least a million, maybe more, in their failed five-year defence.
Van Schalkwyk cultivated his own, peculiarly white South African glamour as a player for the Pumas rugby team in Mpumalanga, causing significant consternation in parliament where MPs called for the club to bar him - or face the consequences.
The South African Rugby Union said it could not abide having a convicted murderer in the team, even as Mpumalanga Rugby Union president Hein Mentz defended the Pumas' decision to field Van Schalkwyk.
The player, Mentz asserted, confident in his disingenuousness, was presumed to be innocent until he had exhausted all legal avenues in his bid to have the conviction set aside.
Parliament's sports committee chairperson Butana Komphela bristled, bold in his subtext.
He said steps would be taken against Mentz himself if it was found that he had misled MPs.
"If you are a right-wing person and you come and display it here, we will deal with you."
Yet, even Van Schalkwyk's perverse celebrity within the reactionary rugby-loving firmament could not exceed the attention foisted on Becker.
Eerily handsome, he has been the grotesque cheerleader for the Four since they were first, reluctantly, arrested in 2003, grinding to a halt their high school careers with murder and assault charges hanging over their heads.
When everyone else around them was celebrating the mystical transition from children to the next stage of life at matric balls and on the last day of exams, Becker, Du Preez, Van Schalkwyk and Tiedt shared a horror for which their parents, and their upbringing, must surely take some responsibility.
Former classmates and teenage drinking buddies, the men were all 18, matriculants and still at school in 2003 when they first faced charges and pleaded not guilty to murdering a man in Moreleta Park and beating another man in Constantia Park on the same quiet night around Christmas in 2001.
At the time of the crimes, they were a mere 15 and 16 years old, but they were as one, the state contending they acted with common purpose.
Becker arrogantly separated his legal action just days ago from the three others. He agrees something happened on the night in question, but that he never killed a man.
So the announcement from his new lawyer, Harry Pretorius, that he intends to apply for freedom to the Constitutional Court, has only attracted more public fury.
Suddenly, where all are as guilty as each other, Becker's hubris has destroyed any vestige of righteousness which he may have been able to extract before.
Becker, said state witness Heinrich von Landsberg at his trial, was driving his headmaster father's BMW on the night of the boys' furious bloodletting.
He claimed there was a set of carving knives in the boot of the car.
"I asked him why," Von Landsberg told the court in 2004. "Christoff said it was in case there was trouble." Becker denied this.
The witness said that he saw Becker and Van Schalkwyk standing in the park where the man died.
The boot was open. Becker lifted his arms high and made a rapid stabbing motion towards the man's back. The killers, again, denied this. As the man fell, said Von Landsberg, Becker was one among them who repeatedly kicked him in the park's deep shadows.
Later, they returned to the scene because Becker, he claimed, had apparently discarded the knives.
The testimony went that Becker offered Von Landsberg's younger brother R250 for every knife he found the following day.
The boy couldn't find any, but he said he saw a man he thought was dead. The unmistakeable smell of blood lingered in the air.
So when the muscle-bound trio of Du Preez, Van Schalkwyk and Tiedt were behind bars, Becker's pretty fiancee was at his side at the airport, weeping.
He says he'll take prison like a man - until he succeeds in liberating himself. Becker, says his mother, is God's child.
And God, she insists, knows he is a good boy.