Mom’s agony: son’s killers may get parole

PR Handout

Brett Goldin

KEVIN RITCHIE

DENISE Goldin is a tortured woman. Tonight the first part of a 13-instalment M-Net series on South African crimes will be flighted. It re-enacts the murder of her son Brett and his friend Richard Bloom.

Today, the accomplices to the murders were due to come before a parole board asking to be released after serving less than half their sentence.

Goldin can’t be there.

She’s in mourning for a mandatory seven days in terms of Jewish rite, after her 97-year-old father died on Thursday.

She has no doubt though that it was the news that his grandson’s perpetrators were about to be paroled that sent him into terminal decline, when she told him a fortnight ago that she was off to Cape Town.

Richard Bloom

INLSA

Goldin had intended to be at the hearing at Drakenstein Prison to oppose Jade Wyngaard and Nurshad Davids’s attempt to be released on early parole after serving only six years of their 12-year sentences.

Her father won’t be the first person to die because of the stress of the case. Her husband Peter died at the age of 64 shortly after Brett was murdered. Goldin believes his heart had been broken.

Brett, an acclaimed actor, and Bloom were killed in Cape Town in April 2006.

They were hijacked, kidnapped, shoved in the boot and driven from Camps Bay to the cable car parking area, where they were forced to strip to their socks and made to lie face-down. Then they were driven to the murder site at the traffic interchange and executed with two shots to the head.

Goldin and her daughter Samantha, who have fought to keep Wyngaard and Davids in jail to serve their sentences, thought they had won a reprieve until the end of 2013 when the parole board turned down the applications last November and January this year respectively.

But the law changed on March 1 this year, allowing convicts to apply after half their service and not four-fifths as had been the case.

Then, on Freedom Day, both criminals got a further six-month discount thanks to President Jacob Zuma’s special announcement to all serving prisoners.

“What makes me really angry and disillusioned,” Goldin said, “is the message that is sent out about the worth of life in this country. I, and so many others, were under the impression that hardened and violent criminals wouldn’t benefit from the president’s gesture, but obviously they are benefiting.

“If prisons are being emptied to solve overcrowding, why aren’t they being made to work off their debt to society by being put to build more jails and schools – and learn a trade in the process?” she asked.

Goldin has had all her documents couriered down at her own expense to the Drakenstein parole board’s hearing today, but she’s under no illusion that this time the pair might well win their freedom.

“Are they prepared to re-enter society?” she asked. “They were high on tik when they killed Brett and Richard. Do they have the life skills to avoid drugs now? Will society be safe from them going on a hijacking/killing spree again?”

Goldin said the amendment to the parole legislation had made justice a joke.