Cape Town - Zara Hector’s body was treated like garbage, robbing her family of the chance to get closure, the Kuils River mother of two’s sister, Vivi-Anne Pretorius, told the Western Cape High Court on Tuesday.
Pretorius testified in aggravation of sentence for her sister’s convicted murderers, Renaldo van Rooyen and Tawfeeq Ebrahim.
In court she addressed Judge Lister Nuku on the impact the brutal murder of her sister had on her family’s life.
“The pain this has brought our family is indescribable and with that goes the trauma. What worsens the pain is the fact that although her remains were found, none of us as the family could view the remains,” she said.
Pretorius said the family was advised by a pathologist to cremate the body due to its state of decomposition.
Hector was murdered on March 15, 2016. She was bludgeoned to death with a hammer, at the garage in Van Rooyen’s home in Kuils River. Her body was found wrapped in canvas and dumped on a farm in Groot Drakenstein, 10 days after she went missing.
“They did not only brutally murder my sister, but dumped her like dirt, and that is the worst trauma that they brought on us. We couldn’t give her a proper burial because there was no coffin,” she said. Pretorius said Hector’s children, aged 18 and 5, were struggling to cope without their mother.
She said the family had no closure and wanted to hear from the convicted killers why they murdered her sister.
Neither Van Rooyen nor Ebrahim testified in mitigation.
Their lawyers submitted heads of arguments asking the court to deviate from a prescribed minimum sentence of life imprisonment for the murder charge and 15 years for robbery with aggravating circumstances.
Van Rooyen’s representative, advocate Pieter Burgers, said the convicted killer dreamt of being a preacher.
He had two children and no previous convictions.
“Drugs tik, played a prominent role in the sequence of events. They were smoking tik in the garage (where the murder took place) at the time,” he said. Advocate Wimpie Strauss, for Ebrahim, said at the time of Hector’s murder his client was experiencing family problems which led to his drug abuse: “He went through a torrid time.”
Sentencing will be heard on August 20.