Donovan Moodley, who kidnapped, then murdered 21-year-old Leigh Matthews, “leaves me cold”, former Brigadier Piet Byleveld told the Tribune in an interview.
It was terrible to see the toll on Leigh’s family as Moodley appeals against his life sentence, said Byleveld, adding that an examination of his bank statements indicated he had kidnapped before and the victim’s family had chosen to keep quiet after paying a ransom.
Leigh had just celebrated coming of age with her parents and sister when, on July 9, 2004, Moodley kidnapped her in a parking lot at Bond University in Sandton.
He made her strip naked before he snuffed out her life with four gunshots.
She was already dead when Leigh’s father, Rob, dropped off a R50 000 ransom that night on an isolated stretch of highway.
Moodley never had any intention of reuniting her with her family, said Byleveld.
“Moodley had demanded a ransom of R300 000, which Leigh’s father withdrew from two bank accounts. He was persuaded by the police to hand over only R50 000.
“If Leigh had been alive when Moodley realised the amount was much lower than he’d asked for, he would have demanded the remainder, using her as a bargaining chip. Because he didn’t, I think he could not provide the family with proof of life at that point,” said Byleveld.
Leigh’s kidnap became a national obsession, with 24-hour call lines inundated by people who claimed to have seen the pretty blonde student.
On July 21, her parents received the news they’d prayed would not come. A grass cutter had found their daughter’s body in open veld in Walkerville. She would not be coming home for the special theme party they had planned for her birthday.
When Moodley was arrested, Byleveld said he found further proof of his callousness and greed – Leigh’s tanzanite ring, given to her by her parents on the day before her death.
After the murder, Moodley had burned Leigh’s clothes and dumped the residue. When he read reports that she had been wearing a valuable ring, he returned to scratch through the ashes until he found it.
Taking Byleveld to his room in his parents’ home, he opened a CD case and produced his sick trophy.
The sleuth said that while he hoped the first gunshot had ended Leigh’s life and prevented further suffering, the autopsy could not confirm that.
He said although he had kept in contact with the Matthews family since her death, experience had taught him to slough off the memory of evil.
“While I am working to catch a killer, the case occupies me every minute I am awake. When justice has been done, I put the criminal and his deeds out of my mind,” he said.
“Leigh’s father and mother, Sharon, don’t have that option. They lost a child in the most terrible circumstances, and now they have to deal with Moodley making a mockery of the judiciary.
“It makes their wounds bleed all over again. You just have to look at the pictures taken of them in court this week to see how they suffer.”
A photograph printed in a national newspaper showed a virtually unrecognisable Rob and Sharon Matthews.
Agony
Leigh’s father had aged dramatically and his features were gaunt. Her mother’s face was a mask of agony.
Byleveld, who is still working on several unsolved murders around the country, despite having retired from the police force, is also frequently asked to assist the families of victims from other parts of the world in tracking the killers of their loved ones and putting them behind bars.
He said Moodley was the worst kind of criminal.
“I have dealt with many of his kind, and I know he is without conscience,” he said. “I am not a medical professional, but I would characterise him as a psychopath.
“He has shown not a shred of genuine remorse; it is all about him. He thrives on attention and feels clever when he is playing with the law and grabbing headlines.”
Byleveld rubbished Moodley’s claims, made in a Joburg court this week, that he had been coerced into the plot to kidnap Leigh by three Nigerian drug lords.
“Don’t tell me that armed drug dealers would kill a woman and let Moodley walk away with the proceeds of the crime,” he said.
“He has already given three versions of what happened. This is his fourth pack of lies and no one is buying it.”
While Byleveld was not the original investigating officer in Leigh’s kidnap and murder, he gained worldwide attention when he solved the case in just two weeks.
“I never rely on anything that has been done before I start an investigation,” he said. “I go back and start out from scratch. Nothing is a given until I have proved it for myself.”
In the recently published biography Byleveld, Dossier of a Serial Sleuth, journalist Hanlie Retief documents his spectacular record in tracking down some of the country’s most serious offenders.
He is responsible for putting serial killers Bongani Mfeka, Lazarus Mazingane (aka the Nasrec killer), Cedric Maake (the Wemmer Pan killer) and Sipho Dube (the Mine Dump Killer) behind bars for consecutive life sentences.
Byleveld reiterated what he has said in the past, that in the few instances where he has not been able to solve a case, he would never concede defeat.
“Moodley is behind bars, but someone helped him to conceal Leigh Matthews’s body between the time she died and the discovery of her remains 12 days later.
“The post mortem showed that her body had been refrigerated. That points to an accomplice,” he said.
“I am convinced Moodley committed the killing by himself, but someone else conspired to hide the body.”
Byleveld’s investigation turned up a friend of the killer who had owned a mortuary.
“It was abandoned by the time we searched it, and unfortunately no trace evidence was found to link the facility to Leigh, but I will get to the bottom of the matter,” he vowed.
Byleveld said he firmly believed an inexplicably large deposit into Moodley’s bank account the year before Leigh’s murder was proof that he had kidnapped before.
“(The sum of) R92 000 is a heck of a lot of money for a student,” he said. “I believe his previous victim’s family did not go to the police out of fear, and that they got the victim back.”
He said there was little doubt that Moodley would have committed another crime, and even killed again, had he not been apprehended.
“Moodley had a taste for luxury, and he did not care what he had to do to feed it,” he said.
The different stories Donovan Moodley has told:
Version 1:
Moodley confessed to kidnapping and murdering Leigh Matthews. He said he approached her on the Bond University campus on Friday July 9, 2004, and asked her for a lift. He kidnapped her and informed her parents that he had her, and demanded a ransom. Later that night he took R50 000 from her father, Rob, and then returned to a deserted spot in Eikenhof where he shot her dead.
The next morning, near his home in Lenasia, he made a fire and burnt her clothes in a secluded patch of veld.
On July 25, 2005, he pleaded guilty, handing in a signed plea and admissions.
Version 2:
In May 2010 the Supreme Court of Appeal dismissed his application for leave to appeal against his sentence. He filed the appeal just before Christmas in 2009 after his application for an appeal in the Johannesburg High Court was refused by Judge Joop Labuschagne.
In his application, Moodley added to his case by saying Judge Labuschagne had “committed a material irregularity in the proceedings during the conviction” in relation to the guilty plea by failing to clear up discrepancies in his confession.
In papers, he expanded on the reasons he laid out in his original appeal – telling of an unnamed aunt who, on several occasions, offered to fund his case and then disappeared.
He claimed that while he had planned the kidnapping, the murder had not been premeditated. It was only when he was at the point of releasing Leigh that he realised she would be able to identify him and that he would be caught. He therefore had “no option” but to shoot her.
Latest version
Moodley says a retrial would allow him to “expose a web of lies, perjury and corruption” that were perpetuated by investigating officer Piet Byleveld to ensure that he was locked up for life.
Moodley claims he was forced into the kidnapping by three drug dealers, named Frank, Jemba and Allie, who threatened his family if he did not get involved.
The three, he said, were after a wealthy French student named Gasper, but when this plan did not materialise, they changed their plan to take someone else: Matthews.
He now claims Jemba shot Matthews from behind and then pulled her into the bushes and fired three more shots.
Moodley claims it is incomprehensible how he could tie up and kidnap a student from a parking lot full of security guards.
He also questioned Rob Matthews’s initial statement in which he indicated that a black man had picked up the money.
He also trashes Byleveld, saying he had ignored the “truth” about the three men involved, failed to read him his rights and forced him into confessing to the crime. - Sunday Tribune