Devastated mom faces teen’s killers

Published Nov 9, 2013

Share

Johannesbrug - Sylvia Theologo took a deep breath. Then another. Haggard and worn, she approached the dock, holding tightly on to the reams of paper she had scribbled on furiously. She was here to read it to her daughter’s killers.

Nervously, she straightened the tiny waistcoat drooping over her painfully thin shoulders. Keep it brief, her lawyer had advised her. No, this was her time. There was too much to say about her beloved daughter, Kirsty. She had waited two years as the case against her murderers dragged on.

If she could have, Theologo would have told the High Court, sitting here in Palm Ridge, near Alberton, on Friday how she had always made sure her seven children were safe and loved.

Yes, Kirsty was a rebel. They fought a lot. Like her mother, the teenager was born tough. “She gave it as good as she got. I kicked her out a couple of times. But believe me had I known (her fate), I never imagined I would spend every single day since her death feeling heart wrenched at the wasted times and all the bad things we went through. I feel so sad because I can never make amends.”

Theologo wanted to tell the court how she has learnt to cry quietly, “so as not to upset the kids”, and how proud she was that God “allowed me his angel” for 18 years. “I’m just sorry she’s gone. That my baby died in such a gruesome and painful way.”

But Judge Geraldine Borchers stopped Theologo. It was not an occasion for speeches. Instead, she implored the fragile mother to focus on why she was here: to give evidence in the pre-sentencing proceedings of Lindon Wagner and Robin Harwood, the two teenagers who were found guilty on Thursday of Kirsty Theologo’s murder and the attempted murder of her best friend, Bronywn Grammer, then 14.

It was on October 21, 2011, that they and four other friends enticed both girls to a koppie behind a popular swimming club in Linmeyer, south of Joburg. There, they bound Kirsty Theologo, smashed her head with a rock, doused her with petrol and set her alight as a sacrificial offering to the devil.

“If I had known this would have happened, I would have traded my own life,” Theologo told the court, weeping. “She was a good girl. Nobody deserves ever to have gone through what she did.

“She fought back and I’m so proud of her. They wanted her to die on that koppie but I believe that by God’s grace, through God’s hand, he gave her some sort of adrenalin. She managed to carry her friend Bronwen on her back all the way home.”

Home was 2km away where Kirsty’s worried younger brother, Alex Noble, discovered his beaten sister, who had collapsed in their kitchen.

“You’re very emotional about what’s happened. Am I right?” Judge Borchers asked Theologo.

“Yes, this has changed every one of us,” she replied. “We’re not the same people any more. My children were always close, always together. They’re aggressive now… How do I take away their heartache and yearning for their sister?

“I feel that to a certain extent, my children blame me for what happened because I’m the mother, I should have protected her. How was I to know? I mean, these were her friends.

“She trusted them. These boys, they came to us as good Christians. They were always praying, preaching and carrying on about God. But boy, was I misled.”

After her daughter’s death, she crumbled. “I’m very embarrassed to say I did turn to drugs. I left my children with my sister. But in that time while I was away, I got help and did a lot of healing.”

“Do you think that’s helped you?” asked Borchers. “Yes, it has,” Theologo responded.

“But what’s been very hard is coming to court. I get better, then I come to court and it’s all over again.

“My life is so ruined,” she sobbed. “I get sick, I get ulcers. Look, I have 22 different bald spots. My nerves are finished. My doctors say I’m strong but my body is shutting down.

“When I saw the photos of Kirsty without the bandages, how could you do that to my poor child,” she said, turning to Wagner and Harwood. “She must have been in so much pain, and so frightened. They could have stopped at any time. They didn’t. They left her there like a piece of nothing.”

Her son, Alex, was now rebelling against her. “He was the one who went looking for his sister. He couldn’t find her and went home only to find Kirsty later that night, beaten. They had such a bond.”

In court, Alex told his sister’s killers he forgave them. “I’m angry with myself for not being able to help her. I have nightmares. Although I have broad shoulders it doesn’t help if my sister is not here for me to lift up any more.”

Grammer, a scarf hiding her burnt neck, told the court she no longer trusted easily and searched for Theologo’s personality in her other friends. “I will forgive you,” she told the pair, “but I will never forget.”

Before proceedings got under way, Theologo and Vanessa Arendse, Lindon’s mother, briefly embraced. Both she and Deidre Moses, Harwood’s mother, implored the Theologo family to forgive their sons.

But Theologo cannot give any more.

“As far as forgiveness is concerned, you won’t be getting that from me,” she addressed the two men. “You speak to your maker, okay?”

She didn’t get to tell them what she had written: “You’re heartless murdering rubbish. You can say and call what you did Satanism, the truth is you killed my Kirsty and you ran away like cowards.”

The case was postponed to February for sentencing. For Theologo, this was news she could not bear.

“No, I’m finished,” she wailed. “I can’t do this any more. I want it to end. I need to look forward, to carry on with my life.”

Saturday Star

Related Topics: