Johannesburg - John La Cote would arrive for work in a Ferrari and sometimes he would bring along his English butler.
“You were aware of there being money behind him,” recalls former film director Cedric Sundström.
It was 20 years ago, and Sundström and La Cote were working on a police reality TV show called Duty Calls.
Long days and nights were spent in police stations waiting for the police to be called out on a crime. What the police and the rest of the film crew didn’t know then was that they were working with a killer, and John La Cote was not his real name.
His real name was Jean Claude La Cote and together with his ex-wife Hilde van Acker they had killed
British businessman Marcu John Mitchell, execution style.
This week the two, nicknamed the Devil Couple, flew into Belgium from the Ivory Coast after they were
extradited from the West African country. They are facing jail time after they were convicted in 2011, in absentia.
This 24 years after they shot
Mitchell twice in the head and neck, in the coastal Belgium town of De Haan.
In those two decades, the couple had successfully evaded an international manhunt and escaped police custody twice.
This, while enjoying a high-flying lifestyle of mansions and luxury cars.
It is believed Mitchell was murdered after he confronted La Cote about money that went missing. He had gone into business with La Cote in a deal where he would front money to buy aviation parts. After he was shot dead, Mitchell’s body was hidden in the sand dunes and later discovered by playing children.
On the day of the murder, the couple fled to the UK by ferry. Later that same year they were arrested in
Belgium but later released by police as they
continued their investigation.
The pair took the chance and fled to Brazil before arriving in South Africa in 1999.
“He came out and he made an agreement with the police,” says Sundström.
La Cote came across as the moneyed TV producer who got the police to agree to them filming them while they went about their duties.
“It was at times harrowing stuff,” says Sundström.
A lot of their filming was in Hillbrow, they also hung out at the old Brixton murder and robbery offices. The series would be called Duty Calls.
La Cote at first took up residences in Lonehill estates, before moving to a multi-million rand mansion in Observatory.
At one stage the police nearly did catch La Cote. He was red-flagged when he arrived at the Wonderboom Airport in Pretoria. The red flag notice alerted officials that Interpol was looking for him and Van Acker.
But there was confusion over his status and police, according to a report in The Saturday Star at the time, were asked to simply keep “an eye on him”.
“At the time, we were unaware of all this, and from our dealings with him, we thought it was a case of mistaken identity,” remembers Sundström.
Duty Calls turned out to be a great success.
In 2003, La Cote conned a wealthy Irish businessman out of 2 million in a scheme to buy aeroplanes.
The money was wired to a South African bank account and there it disappeared. There were five other fraud cases that La Cote was charged with.
And while both La Cote and Van Acker were being sought by Interpol, they didn’t appear to take too many precautions in hiding their identities. On the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission website, there is evidence that the pair each registered companies, using their own names and birth dates.
In 2007, the SAPS finally caught up with La Cote when he was arrested and placed in a Joburg jail. He wasn’t there for long. Van Acker sprung him from jail in a brazen escape.
She and others posed as police officers and convinced officials to release him so they could interview him as part of an investigation. It took police a week to notice he was gone.
The couple slipped the country and are believed to have headed back to Brazil, but Belgian authorities didn’t give up in their hunt. In 2016, they were placed on Europol’s most wanted list. A year later, Van Acker was featured in the agency’s Crime has no Gender Campaign.
Then in November 2019, the pair were arrested in the Ivory Coast.
The couple, it is believed, will ask for a retrial.