Cape Town - While detectives were breaking the traumatic confirmation of Gill
Packham’s death to her heartbroken daughters at Diep River police station, their father Rob, 58, was partying with friends at his marital home a few kilometres away when police arrived to arrest him.
“It looked so normal,” said a source familiar with the events of that awful week who declined to be named.
“A stranger would never have guessed that this was the home
where Gill Packham had disappeared from a week earlier. People close to her were still hoping she would by some miracle be found alive, that the burnt body found in the boot of her car wasn’t hers.
“And there was Rob partying with friends. When the cops arrived he’d had a good couple of drinks already.
He wasn’t badly under the influence, but under the influence. There
were beer and wine bottles all over the place.”
Gill Packham went missing on February 22 last year.
Following a frantic family and community search her burnt-out BMW was discovered at Diep River railway station. In the boot was a charred body. Police suspected it was Gill but pathologists confirmed this only seven days later on March 1.
That triggered Rob Packham’s arrest later that Thursday evening for the murder of his wife.
To minimise the stress of witnessing their father’s arrest Diep River cops apparently decided to summon Packham’s daughters Kerry and Nicola to the station to first break the news that their mother had been positively identified.
“When they heard that their father was arrested while partying at home they were just as shocked as the some of the cops were,” said the source.
During that agonising week before the body in the boot was identified as Gill’s, one of her sisters told a friend she hoped Gill was “not answering desperate calls and frantic WhatsApps because she had jumped on a plane in a hurry to get away from her marriage problems”.
“If my wife went missing and was not yet confirmed dead I’d be hoping that the body was not hers,” said another source familiar with the events of that week.
“I’d be continuing the search. I would not be partying at home. I wouldn’t accept the finality of it until I got confirmation of it. There would always be that last straw of hope that she was just missing, that she was still alive.”
Meanwhile, in the wake of Packham’s failed High Court appeal to have his bail conditions reinstated it emerged that in the days following the discovery of Gill’s burnt corpse his phone was tracked in the vicinity of his now ex-mistress’s workplace.
Packham’s ongoing obsession with her has been front and centre of his bail drama leading up to his March 11 murder trial.
It climaxed on December 21, when a High Court judge cancelled Packham’s bail for repeated harassment of his ex-mistress, who is a state witness. That sent him to jail days before he was due to walk his daughter down the aisle.
Packham’s former lover of three years cannot be named according to an earlier court order.
In her December order Judge Elizabeth Baartman noted that Packham’s badgering could not be halted by warnings from his ex-lover’s attorney.
Not even increasing his bail to R75000 and placing him under house arrest could discipline him.
Despite all these measures, she said, Packham showed “a flagrant disregard for the orders of this court”.
In this week’s judgment, Baartman noted that Pakham’s bid to be freed from Pollsmoor on bail came without his admission that he had in fact harassed his ex-mistress.
“The applicant seeks to reduce this contravention of his bail conditions to insignificance, without admitting it... the applicant’s attitude towards the court orders defies logic.... It is not in the interest of justice to allow the applicant to persistently contravene his bail conditions.... There is no merit in this ground of appeal.”