By Janine Lazarus
The last time I saw Kobus Geldenhuys was through the bars of a dingy cell minutes after a judge had given him to five death sentences for the murders of five women.
That was 12 years ago. The other day I saw him again - in a photograph illustrating an article about death row prisoners waiting to be resentenced to jail terms by order of the Constitutional Court.
Would Kobus Geldenhuys walk free again one day? Maybe in the next few years? I doubt it... and I pray not.
For two years this 25-year-old police officer, dubbed the Norwood Serial Killer, had held my suburb in a stranglehold of terror, raping another three women apart from the five he had murdered.
The picture jolted me back to those years when the police had used my flat to keep a watch on the police barracks, and the night I had acted as a decoy in the hope we could lure the killer into a trap.
As I faced him through the bars in his cell under the Rand Supreme Court, as it was known then, he looked nothing like the monster I knew he was.
The long-lashed dark-brown eyes were inappropriately soft, his bowed frame strangely small. He pleaded for forgiveness and cried, and despite myself, I wept with him.
He hung his dark head and listened quietly as I told him of the fear I had lived in, terrified that I would be the next woman he would rape and silence with a bullet between the eyes.
I asked if he would have pistol-whipped, raped and shot me had it been my first-floor bedroom window on Grant Avenue that he had climbed through, cat burglar-like, in the middle of those hot summer nights in 1991.
No, he said.
I still cannot explain my tears for this man I had hated and who had brought so much terror and grief to all those women and their families. And I cannot explain how I even let him reach through the bars and wipe away those tears with a piece of tissue.
I asked if he had seen the newspaper articles I had written about him from the brutal beginning of his killing spree to its bloody end. He said he had, and told me that he was frightened because he didn't know how to stop.
He was hungry, so we shared a mince sandwich made for him by a female warder.
He claimed he had been up since before 3am that morning trying to make peace with himself and his God.
Two years before there had been two small newspaper reports about rapes in Norwood. After the second early in November 1991, police confirmed my suspicions that the two rapes that had taken place in next door apartment blocks had been committed by the same man.
After further investigation police told me they believed he was using the roof of the Norwood Police Station's single barracks as his vantage point 30 floors above ground level.
The next month the rapist turned killer. He shot dead a 27-year-old woman, Julia Hitge, who lived in a commune in Shipston Lane. Shortly after the execution-style killing, a detective told me that the killer had probably used a silencer to muffle the sound of the gunfire.
A few days later, the naked body of a 27-year-old pharmacy consultant, Jennifer Matfield, was discovered by her flatmate, sitting upright in an empty bathtub.
Single women began moving out of the trendy suburb, while those who stayed joined private security companies, barricading their flats with burglar bars.
Razor wire, a sight so unfamiliar in the friendly streets, suddenly appeared, snaking its way across the tops of garden walls. The coffee bars dotted up and down Grant Avenue, once alive with the sounds of late-night laughter and music, became unnaturally quiet.
The hunt for the former railway police officer had become a very personal one. I had lived in the epicentre of his hunting ground in a first-floor corner flat just like those of his other victims. And like them, I was also single, brunette and in my late twenties.
I used to teach weekly aerobics classes at a health club located in Iris Road, and both of his pretty murder victims in Norwood would regularly attend my sessions.
Three weeks after the first murder, I was told off-the-record by detectives that the man they were looking for was, almost without doubt, a police officer. They suspected that he lived in the drab building behind my apartment block, housing the Norwood Police Station's single barracks.
The detectives asked if they could conduct part of their investigations from my home and for close on three weeks they did - with their weapons on my couch an eyesore and their cackling two-way radios a rude and insistent noise.
And then one night I acted as a decoy. I walked slowly down a deserted Iris Road past the Norwood Police Station, with the detectives perched on the roof of my building.
The night was warm, but as I walked through the darkness, a chill like nothing I had ever felt before enveloped me. I chided myself for being silly when I knew I had four armed policemen watching over me, but the fear remained.
This fear ended only with Geldenhuys's arrest and conviction.
Should he be let out soon, or even in a few years?
At the time, criminologists and other experts on violence sounded warnings that he would strike again.
Likening him to Screwdriver Rapist Willem Frederick van der Merwe who first struck in 1971, they said that the Norwood Killer would keep on coming back for more, with very little concern for the consequences of his actions.
At the height of Van der Merwe's reign of fear, he was being hunted in Johannesburg, Vereeniging, Pretoria and the East Rand in connection with at least 10 attacks on women and a 13-year-old girl.
He was finally convicted in the Rand Supreme Court on five counts of rape and other charges. This killer whose method of murder was to gag most of his victims with a sock, before tying them to their beds with stockings and raping them, was like Geldenhuys, sentenced to death.
But a petition started for him by his brother and sister, ultimately led to him being reprieved and jailed for 20 years. Fear was rekindled when his sentence was reduced in 1987 and the Screwdriver Rapist finally walked free in April that year.
In January 1989, he raped two women hitchhikers in the Cape - killing one of them. But this time, the last of his terrified victims managed to survive by shooting him dead with his own pistol.
At hearings in mitigation of Geldenhuys's sentence in 1993, renowned criminologist Dr Irma Labuschagne said that she believed the killer would probably commit similar crimes if he ever was to be released, adding that society needed protection from him for a very, very long time.
I can't recall what words Geldenhuys mumbled when he was sentenced five times to death, but what I can still vividly remember were the mixed emotions churning inside me.
Now his case will be reviewed by a judge and his five death sentences commuted to a jail sentence.
Geldenhuys has been behind bars for 12 years now. How much more time should he serve?
I remember that meeting in the court cells.
I remember his victims.
I remember he told me he couldn't stop.
And I remember Irma Labuschagne's words that he would kill and rape again.
God help us if Kobus Geldenhuys ever becomes eligible for parole.