Judge Shyam Gyanda found Mathew Naidoo and siblings Nicolette and Hardus Lotter guilty of the brutal murder of the Lotter parents on Tuesday
Nicolette 29, and Hardus, 23, murdered their parents, Magdalena (Riekie) and Johannes Lotter, by assaulting and strangling them on July 19, 2008, at their Westville home.
Naidoo planned and influenced the siblings carrying out the killing, the court found.
All three accused had pleaded not guilty to the double murder, but Naidoo later changed his plea to guilty.
In his judgment Gyanda labelled Naidoo a “pathological liar”.
“His entire evidence and the manner in which he went about trying to fleece Nicolette and Hardus is the work of a con artist.
“Although ordinary people will laugh at their predicament, clinical psychologist Lourens Schlebusch, in his evidence, referred to various other cons where thousands of people were duped and many lost their lives.”
Gyanda described Mathew as a glib character, who fancied himself as being cleverer than anybody else, including police.
Gyanda referred to a letter left at the Lotter house that police found: “You can see in the letter that Naidoo had a great opinion of himself and he thought that everyone else was stupid.
“However, on the stand when the wheels started to come off, he made an about turn and after consultation with an independent counsel, he wanted to plead guilty.”
Gyanda said this was another indication that Naidoo felt he was a person of so much intelligence and ability that he could mislead counsel and an independent counsel.
“Naidoo expected his plan would go through. Hardus was either going to plead insanity or kill himself and he (Naidoo) would be out of it.
“Our view of the entire killing is that it started with the fact that Naidoo did not like the manner in which Johan Lotter refused to accept him as companion of Nicolette.
“It became apparent in the defence of Hardus and Nicolette that they blame Naidoo.
“They were influenced by Naidoo to such an extent that they couldn’t exercise their own free will.
“If one regards the evidence of Hardus and Nicolette, there is ample corroboration that Naidoo portrayed himself as the third son of God.”
Validating these claims, Gyanda referred to the letters written by Naidoo in the prayer book where he refers to God as Dad and himself as the son of God.
Gyanda described Hardus and Nicolette as “fertile grounds” in which Naidoo could plant his ideas.
Naidoo set out to control the siblings to such an extent that he made them believe that the murders were a good thing, that their parents had to be destroyed because they were evil.
The fertile grounds referred to the ease with which the siblings could be manipulated.
Naidoo also preyed on hardus’s emotions by telling hardus he was victimised by apartheid and because of the bad treatment he received from his family.
This was to an extent why hardus became susceptable to Naidoo’s control.
“In spite of this Hardus was still sceptical of Naidoo and looked to his sister to affirm that Naidoo was genuine.”
Gyanda referred to the Jonestown massacre in his judgment.
In 1978 in South American Guyana, Californian preacher Jim Jones murdered 276 children and 638 adults – poisoning them en masse with cyanide-laced fruit-punch.
The tragedy became known as the Jonestown cult massacre.
Gyanda said that “brainwashing” had been used on a very large scale to realign religious beliefs to get them to do things that “you and I, looking at from the outside, could easily criticise”.
“When we on the outside,” Gyanda said, “looking at Hardus and Nicolette, we deliberate that there is no basis that they could be influenced by Naidoo, yet there are examples of it happening in the past.”
Gyanda referred to Naidoo’s prayer book which was handed in as evidence.
Gyanda said Naidoo referred to God as his father and described himself as the son of God. In his evidence Naidoo admitted that the handwriting in the book looked like his, but denied he had written it.
In her testimony Nicolette testified that it was her book, but that Naidoo took over possession when he lived in the house.
“The conclusion is irresistible that Naidoo was the author of the book,” Gyanda said.
The court adjourned for Gyanda to decide if they would continue with argument in mitigation and aggravation today.
The court had heard that Nicolette and Hardus lured their schoolteacher mother into the kitchen and attacked her with a Taser stun gun, in the hope of rendering her unconscious, and then injecting air bubbles into her veins.
The plan failed. The mother fought back and Hardus was forced to hold his mother down and silence her, while Nicolette went to fetch Naidoo from the Pavilion shopping centre.
When they returned Nicolette stabbed her mother about four times and she died within 15 minutes.
Multiple penetrative injuries to the left lung, deep skull bruising, extensive bruising around the eye, bruising on the left cheek extending to the jaw, a single penetrating injury to the thyroid gland, a single puncture wound to the arm, extensive bruising on the left arm, lacerations to the mouth and bruising to the chest wall were some of the injuries found on the mother during the post mortem examination.
Hardus, in his evidence, said Naidoo instructed him to kill his father.
Hardus told the court how he entered his father’s room while he was asleep, wrapped an electrical cord around his neck and wrestled for about 30 minutes before he “got the upper hand”. He said he sat on him for 20 minutes to make sure he was dead.
Before this final attempt the trio had tried twice before to kill off the father. First, by mixing sap from a poisonous plant into his whisky and failing that, to add 90 percent alcohol to his drink to induce alcohol poisoning. - The Mercury