Western Cape -
A Western Cape High Court judge yesterday sentenced a 31-year-old handyman to life imprisonment for murdering his employer, describing accused Moegamat Armien Salie’s crime as “a despicable and cowardly violation”.
Acting Judge Diane Davis jailed him for an additional 15 years for robbery with aggravating circumstances.
The judge told Salie he had inflicted a life sentence of anguish and grief on Anzunette du Plessis’s family, and that it was “only fitting” that he be sentenced to life imprisonment.
However, she advised him to use his time in prison positively and to honour Du Plessis’s memory by changing his life for the better.
“You still have life and, while you have life, you have choices,” she said, adding that while he could do nothing to undo his actions, he could remember the effect the murder had on the family, and how they were “trapped in a prison of grief and anguish”.
In October, Salie of Mitchells Plain, butchered Du Plessis in her Buchanan Street, Claremont home, where he had worked months before.
According to the evidence of a pathologist, Du Plessis was stabbed 10 times in the back. The knife was also drawn across her throat three times during the attack.
After the murder, he filled a wheelie bin with stolen goods, leaving the premises with the intention of selling them.
He met two men pushing a trolley in Lansdowne Road and loaded the items into it.
Police patrolling the area thought this was odd, and stopped him.
Earlier this month, Judge Davis convicted Salie of murder and robbery with aggravating circumstances.
In passing sentence yesterday, the judge said the offences were “undoubtedly ranked among the most serious crimes”, and that crime scene photographs revealed “an act of appalling brutality”.
She added that Salie abused his position as a workman, and was “driven by greed and not need”.
A victim impact report before the court showed the effects that Du Plessis’s murder had on her family and included that fact that her fiancé, Claude Kruger, suffered from insomnia and struggled as a single parent to their three-year-old daughter while carrying the weight of his grief.
Turning to Salie’s personal circumstances, the judge said he had had an unhappy childhood, which included difficult financial circumstances and fighting parents, and had started using tik to escape from his problems.
He told the court he felt terrible about what he had done, and wished he could make it up to the family.
However, Judge Davis said that while the court had no doubt Salie regretted what he had done and the predicament it had got him into, his remorse was not genuine but rather self-pity.
“One cannot help but wonder if it was not a desperate attempt to secure a more lenient sentence in circumstances where he was caught red-handed,” she said, adding that he had not made a full and frank disclosure to the court.
She added that there was nothing remarkable in Salie’s personal circumstances which served to diminish his moral culpability.
There were no substantial and compelling circumstances to justify a departure from the prescribed minimum sentences of life imprisonment for murder, and 15 years for robbery with aggravating circumstances. Salie was also declared unfit to possess a firearm. - Saturday Argus