Johannesburg - Portia Nyamakari had to wipe her eyes when she saw her daughter’s body lying in a pool of blood.
“I thought I was seeing things,” she recalled on Tuesday about the horrific discovery of her daughter Winette, who was decapitated.
The alleged murder weapon? A grinder.
It has been just over a month and Nyamakari believes her daughter was killed by her partner, Alex Thomas, 40, who is still missing. Police are looking for him for questioning.
The last time Nyamakari saw Winette, 29, alive was on Tuesday, June 24. Thomas had come to their workplace and asked Nyamakari to give Winette the day off because he wanted them to go somewhere.
“That Wednesday he called to ask me to fetch their son from creche, but they didn’t come to pick him up later,” she said.
Thomas’s neighbours in Turffontein told Nyamakari the last time they saw her daughter was on that Tuesday, when she was seen putting up the washing outside.
By June 28, Nyamakari had still heard nothing from Winette and Thomas. She then went with her husband to the couple’s house to check again, before going to the police station to report a missing person.
“The door was open and the house was messy, with papers and clothes everywhere. Their TV was on and I thought they had been robbed.
“When I looked down, there were droplets of blood so I followed the trail,” she said.
When she reached the bedroom, she was met with a pool of blood and her daughter’s lifeless body covered in a blanket.
“When I removed the blanket, she was naked from the waist down and her head was hanging on the edge of the bed,” she said.
Nyamakari then rushed out of the house and called her husband Felix to come and see. “I couldn’t look for the second time because it was terrible.”
Felix said since the murder the family had found it hard to cope. “We don’t feel safe anywhere we go. He can come and kill us too. We want the man to be arrested,” he said.
Thomas and Winette’s two toddler children have been moved to a relative’s home until the Nyamakaris move out of their Kenilworth, Joburg, home.
Felix described the couple as loving and affectionate, always holding hands in public. But Nyamakari said Thomas was also possessive.
“He was a jealous man. Sometimes he would just come and sit at our tuckshop and wait for her to finish,” she said.
Since the killing, the Nyamakaris have heard from neighbours that Thomas was spotted on the night of the murder at Park Station and in Turffontein, wearing a black coat and hat with a bandaged hand.
“Why doesn’t he just turn himself in? We know it is him,” said Nyamakari.
A murder case was opened at the Booysens police station.
Warrant Officer Lorraine van Emmerik said the police were trying to get Thomas in for questioning.
The Star