Pretoria - While the former Siyabuswa traffic chief calmly stretched his arms behind his back seconds after receiving three life sentences for killing his common-law wife and two children, family members in the packed public gallery gasped.
The family of Joseph Selala was shocked by what they deemed to be a harsh sentence, while the family of Vicky Masemola, who was shot dead in her bed, couldn’t believe that Selala appeared so calm.
Wearing sunglasses, Selala glanced across the public gallery, before slowly making his way down to the holding cells at the high court in Pretoria.
It still remained a mystery what happened on the evening of December 6, 2013,and in the early hours of the next morning, when Vicky and the couple’s children Khomotso, 12, and Lethaba Masemola, 8, were killed execution-style in their beds.
Selala chose to remain mum during the entire trial, other than to say he was not the killer. Judge Bam said he elected not to divulge what drove him to the triple killings. “I infer that he was evil minded when he killed the three victims,” the judge said.
The Masemola family afterwards said they, too, were still in the dark and dumbstruck as to what drove Selala to kill his own children and their mother.
Vicky’s older brother, George Masemola, told the Pretoria News that Selala was abusive towards her and that she often complained to him about this. “But we never expected this. Now we will never know what happened that night.”
Other family members speculated that he was jealous of her because, as an accountant at KPMG, she often travelled around and met a lot of people.
The couple did not live together and Vicky and the children stayed with her mother. Selala had another home in the same area. He came to fetch the children a few hours before they were killed, as he wanted them to stay overnight with him.
He told a family member that he first shot his children before he went to his wife’s home to kill her. The two siblings each had a bullet wound to the head. The killer left the empty cartridges on the bed with their lifeless bodies. Vicky suffered several bullet wounds and, in this case, the killer also left the empty cartridges on the bed.
A suicide note written by Selala was found in his bedroom, in which he referred to Vicky as “a bitch”.
His advocate denied that he was the author of the letter, or that he was the person who phoned a family member after the killings to tell her he was the killer.
Adding to the findings that he is the one who killed his family, is the fact that Selala’s 9mm pistol mysteriously disappeared after the killings. He claimed he had lost it when he forgot it in a taxi. He also departed for Limpopo on the morning when the bodies were discovered, but his advocate explained it was because he had to take part in certain spiritual rituals.
Judge Bam found that Selala carefully planned the three killings. “It was a horrific and terrible crime. The children were killed execution-style while sleeping and they had no chance to escape their fate.”
Pretoria News