Siam Lee’s charred body was found in a sugar cane field defaced and with no teeth because her killer had bludgeoned her with a hammer.
This assault had happened as Lee, 20, lay handcuffed to a balustrade in an Assagay home, her head covered in a blanket.
Private investigator Brad Nathanson recalls being told these details in January last year while he and police questioned the alleged killer,
30-year-old Philani Ntuli.
He has escaped facing trial because of his recent death from skin cancer.
Ntuli also had Aids, which he wanted to spread, Nathanson believes.
Among the string of charges Ntuli would have faced in the Durban High Court from July 19 were counts of murder, rape, fraud and abducting Lee from the Durban North brothel where she and her mother, Nan, worked in the adult entertainment industry.
“He said he had decided he would have to kill her (after raping her repeatedly at the balustrade) because she had said, no matter what, she would go to the police,” Nathanson told the Independent on Saturday this week.
“He tried to strangle her but that was not successful.”
During that process her legs had gone into a spasm and he could not stand seeing that, Nathanson said.
“So he said he went to the garage and fetched a hammer, placed a blanket over her head and hit her repeatedly.”
Nathanson said he found the reason Ntuli gave for striking her with a hammer particularly disturbing.
“He said he wanted to put her out of suffering these spasms, that he felt sorry for her.”
The private investigator said the way Ntuli recounted the story about Lee was “matter of fact”.
“No emotion, no crying. Usually confessions are full of tears.”
Nathanson believed Ntuli then panicked and went to a garage at Shongweni to buy 25 litres of petrol.
“He was there in one hour that the cameras were down but a petrol attendant recognised him. He knew Philani as a regular customer.”
Then, Ntuli went to Cato Ridge, intending to dispose of his victim, the private investigator continued.
“But there were people hanging around.”
So, he proceeded to New Hanover where a farmer taking his grandson fishing stumbled on Lee’s corpse in a sugar cane field, a week after she had been reported missing.
Nathanson is not sure where she died - in Ntuli’s Assagay home, at Cato Ridge or at New Hanover.
“A policeman called me from there to tell me she had been burnt. He was crying. I started crying. I had never met her but I had never cared so much about a case. I dropped to my knees and asked God to help me be the person to find this animal (Ntuli).”
Nathanson said Ntuli even described
how and why he had abducted Lee.
“He said he had met Siam some
months before the murder and lent her
R50 000 ‘to get on with something’.
She had promised to pay it back but
did not.
“On the day (of the abduction) he
said he had lost his patience with Siam
and went to her room with handcuffs
and a gun and demanded the money.
He said Siam said she did not have it
and he became further annoyed.
“He said he thought perhaps if ‘I
take her, somebody else will come up
with the money. Maybe her mother’.”
It came up during Ntuli’s bail application that his car had been involved
in an accident not far from the Margaret Maytom Avenue house where Lee
was last seen alive.
Nathanson said that when he
followed up leads with an insurance
company, it pointed to the same house
a rape victim had suspected she had
been taken to two years before, after
being abducted.
“They showed me a Google image
of the house. I sat bolt upright in the
boardroom. The penny dropped. I felt
like I had won the Lotto.”
The rape victim became a complainant in Ntuli’s case, having picked
him out at an identity parade.
Nathanson said once he was at
the address – 2 Controversy Lane in
Assagay – he spotted the suspect’s car,
a black Mercedes Viano, in the garage.
“He deliberately didn’t insure the
vehicle and it was not in his name.
There was also no tracking device.
“He didn’t realise that a Viano has
its own tracking system installed by
Mercedes, which put him right at the
scene at Margaret Maytom Drive, the
accident nearby and New Hanover.”
Ntuli’s defence advocate, Martin
Krog, submitted during his bail hearing that Nathanson and his assistant,
Shane Brits, had performed an unlawful arrest.
Nathanson insisted that before the
incident “every cop was there”, but
after 4pm it was only himself and Brits
as well as Nathanson’s wife, Esme.
However, investigating officer
Gordon Pillay had left temporarily
to attend to a household chore, having told Nathanson to “grab him”,
Nathanson said.
“I was told to do it by a policeman.”
Nathanson and Brits pounced
when they saw Ntuli looking confused
to see his Viano missing from the
garage, the police having taken it away
on a flatbed, Nathanson said.
Inside the house, every drawer –
even in the kitchen – had sex enhancing products such as Viagra and ginseng.
“But there were no condoms and
no antiretrovirals.”
Nathanson said he received a flood
of correspondence from people who
had been scammed by Ntuli’s offers
to invest in fictitious companies and
wanted their money back, and women
going for job interviews that turned
into his attempts to seduce them.
“I believe he was deliberately
infecting people, living by the sword
and dying by the sword.”