August 18, 2025 • 56 mins
This week on Wicked Words on Exactly Right: in 1999, a woman named Betty Ketani went missing in Johannesburg, South Africa. She just vanished from the restaurant where she was working. Then a letter found 13 years later changed everything. Author Alex Eliseev tells me about his book Cold Case Confession—a real Agatha Christie story.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
So he's quite careful with this package. Starts to pull
it apart in a first letter that they come across,
and literally starts with the words, if you're reading this,
then I'm dead.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:50):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. This week on Wicked Words
on Exactly Right, in nineteen ninety nine, a woman named
(01:10):
Betty Katani went missing in Johannesburg, South Africa. She just
vanished from the restaurant where she was working. Then a
letter found thirteen years later changed everything. Author Alex Elisa
tells me about his book Cold Case confession a real
Agatha Christie story. So when we talk about the things
(01:34):
that are important about this story without ruining it for
all the listeners, because it's a really interesting story, what
do you say, what are the big things that you
want people to kind of learn a little bit when
they read this book.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
I think that there are many many themes in this book,
but I think the one that catches your attention that
first is just how amazing lot of the stars lined
up to actually bring this story to life. This genuinely
is one of those one in a million, maybe one
in a billion stories. It's definitely the most fascinating story
that I've ever worked on as a journalist in over
(02:07):
twenty years. It really stood after me because of how
unlikely this entire story is and how kind of it
could really belong in a film, in a Hollywood film,
because it's just that unrealistic. And whenever I signed books,
I kind of rise inside them saying that the truth
wing is so much stranger than any kind of fiction
that you can come up with. And of course, this
(02:29):
particular story begins with a bunch of letters, A bundle
of letters if you liked, that had been hidden under
a carpet for many, many years. And then a routine,
a kind of a very regular renovation at that house
in Johannesburg. On an average day that folks were lifting
up the carpets found this bundle of confession letters. And
(02:50):
suddenly this mystery that had been lying dormant, slumbering away
for ten eleven twelve years, first to live and the
opening words of that confess I'm not making this up,
but genuinely, the first words of that first confession letter
that is found all those years ago. It goes along
the lines of if you're reading this, then I'm dead
(03:11):
and here's what happened. And so those were the first lines,
and I guess goosebumps kind of thinking about it still
all these years later, and then you start to go
down the kind of the main main avenues of well,
what if that letter had never been hidden, what if
it had never been found, what if it had just
been thrown in a dust, And would we still have
(03:31):
this story, would we have the spot, would we have
most importantly justice for a family that had been waiting
for it for so so many years. And we'll talk about,
of course, the characters and so on, but really this
is a story of a case that was lying underground,
if you like, and suddenly came to life through this
(03:51):
very very strange act and this kind of very strange circumstance.
So it's fascinating and it begins and it goes through
and for me, because I covered it as the trial
was going I wrote the book as the trial was
going on for four years, it has a very kind
of a natural narrative to it. I didn't have to
work hard to make this thrilling because I didn't know
(04:13):
how the story would end. And so as I investigated,
as I sat through the cause, as the surprise is
kept springing up on us. All of that is in
the book, and I think that's partly why it's had
the success that it has.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Are you a true crime author by trade or was
this your first true crime book?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
So I am not an author by trade. I'm an
author by accident. I started ass as a journalist, and
so this is now going back to Johannesburg. I was
a community newspaper journalist. I started writing in those little
kind of community stories and then built myself up going
to mainstream journalism. I was working on kind of daily newspapers,
(04:56):
weekly newspapers and really kind of just an all found it.
I would report on Bryan the one day, the economy
the next day, how anything really that came along. I
had a really and still do have a big interest
in science reporting. But then kind of I carried on
that journey and obviously told more and more stories to
my journalism and eventually came across this particular story. I
(05:20):
was working for a news state by the time in
Johannesburg called The Star. It's kind of, you know, one
of those beautiful broad seats that are as old as
the city and I still get nostalgic thinking about its
offices in central Johannesburg. But anyway, so I was kind
of doing all kinds of different stories, and one of
the things that I was investigating was the drug trade,
(05:40):
so the kind of the dark underbelly of the city.
And I was put into contact with some special agents
who were working undercover at the time. They were called
the Scorpions, which is a great name if you're going
to be an undercover agent. So there were a law
enforcement agency and I was doing a little bit of time.
I was on the seats with them, just seeing how
the drug trade operators that were taking us around, and
(06:02):
so we made some really good connections in that world.
And a couple of years later, I got a call
from one of those agents and he put me onto
this particular story and said, you're not going to believe this,
And then of course he gave me that line about
the fact that this confession had been found under a
carpet and now they've been arrest and all of this
(06:23):
kind of mystery was starting to unravel. And so I
had moved over into reporting for radio by then and
jumped on the story and broke it on air. As
it became a story that I started to report on
as a radio journalist. But at the same time, my
kind of real passion was always writing, and so I
(06:43):
kept writing it, and very kind of quickly after the
trial began, I teamed up with PANDEC Millen Publishers, and
they said, you know, this is going to be a
great book, and I said, I could not agree more
with you, because it is. It's just an incredible story.
And I always came to being an author, and so
this was a great opportunity, and so that's how it happened.
(07:05):
I have contributed it to other books throughout my career.
But this is the kind of the big one that
I wrote myself, So no, I wouldn't call myself. And
also by trade, but I've been a writer all my life.
I've been a journst all my life, and so telling
real stories, I guess is a trade that I have had.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
It definitely is a trade. Well, let's go back to
nineteen ninety nine and just tell me you know about
the wherever you want to start. Actually, if you want
to set the scene for Johannesburg in that time period,
then and move forward with our main people.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Of course, So Johannaespurg is called the city of gold
in South Africa because it is where all of the
economic opportunity lies. So a lot of people from around
South Africa almost migrats into Johannaston to work because that's
where the money is, that's where the politics is, that's
kind of the working hard. We've got another city called
cap Tan, which is the beautiful part of it and
(07:59):
nah is the kind of gritty best where you can
go and earn money. So a lot of people would
move to Johannesburg. And of course, if you consider the
country's past, was a party eight there are a lot
of families that were moving into Johannesburg but having to
leave their own families behind in more rural settings. There
aren't other provinces, and that's just because of the way
(08:22):
that the country was divided up and segregated in the past,
that there were many different provinces, and one of them
it was called Eastern Cape. It was a kind of
a rural setting. If you can imagine the most magnificent
mountains and rolling hills. It's the home of Nelson Mandela,
for example. So in that space there was a woman
(08:42):
who was called Betty Katsani and she was born in
nearby George, but kind of grew up in the Eastern Cape.
And she was one of many children. I think there
were ten of them, and she grew up there and
eventually had children of their own. She had three children
of her own, and she came to Jhannersburg much like
(09:03):
many other people did, to work. She left quite a
big part of her family behind. Think Shooney had her
youngest child with her. He was only I don't think
the child was even a year old at the time.
So she was kind of earning the money sending it
back to the Eastern Cape. And the job that she
got in Johannesburg was as a cook and a really
(09:24):
interesting and famous restaurant called Cranks and Cranks was this
kind of mad house restaurant run by a really really
eccentric owner. There were kind of body dolls in the
ceilings and weird sculptures and they're welcome to the fabulous
Las Vegas signs, and it was really interesting. It was
quite kind of one of those institutions in Johannisburg where
(09:46):
people would come and eat party for the food, but
mostly for the experience, and so Bessie could finally was
I suppose an invisible cook at the back of that restaurant.
Nobody would have known her. She worked with many other
people there. One day she went to work. This was
now kind of going back in time. She went to work.
I think this was ninety nine, and she never returned.
(10:09):
She just disappeared. She just vanished and she was never
seen again. And it's hard to believe that she would
have gone somewhere because her children were still there. Her
youngest was being looked after, so I think she was
only about a couple of months old, and so she
just vanished and nobody heard again from Besi Katani for many,
(10:29):
many years until in fact, the confessional letter was found
in twenty twelve. So we're talking about a period of
thirteen years where her family had no answers. They just
they simply did not know she banished or base of
the planet. And of course her family went to the police.
They opened the case. But you know, if you consider
(10:50):
the kind of socio economics of the country, she was
living in a very poor area. The police station that
this was reported at was in a poor area run
by all kinds of other different crimes and so on,
and so the case was never really investigated, if you
like it, it was just one of those cases, one
of many others. There were no answers for anybody involved.
(11:14):
Her children obviously grew up not knowing what happened today mother,
and it was torment, and especially for one of her brothers,
who's called Mankinki. I think she was really really devastated
by it. He kind of carried the torch of trying
to get some answers. He was an older brother and
they got nowhere, and that was kind of just this.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
It's hard for me to imagine a situation where there
was a woman I know she was an adult and
she could run off and do things if she wanted to.
But usually, you know, I'm used to stories at least
that on an American base, where the police say, is
she likely to be someone to leave her one year
old behind or to leave you know, a family behind.
(11:59):
And so when you said they didn't really get anywhere,
the police didn't seem to make an effort because they
have other things that they need to do. I wonder
if you put that into perspective. And I know that
Johannesburg was underprivileged, but what does that mean she doesn't
live this high risk quote unquote high risk lifestyle, and
so why didn't they get attention?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
I think for many, many different reasons. So I think
that there was definitely, you know, there wasn't much to
go on. I think, so there wasn't a huge amount
of evidence. But be that as it may, I think
if you had to start digging deeper into it, there
wasn't enough effort made at that time, and there are
lots of very complicated ingredients obviously playing there. But I'd
(12:42):
imagine that it's the combination of the fact that this
was happening in a high crime area, so you know,
kind of overrun by many other cases where the detectives
are overworked and overloaded. And so if you're a detective
carrying fifty forty fifty doctors, you can't give attention to
each one as you should. If you're in a wealthier
(13:02):
environment and was less crime, you know, you'd get one
or two doctors and you could really pull your arts
and solve into solving that particular crime. You know, South
Africa has and had various high crime rates as it is,
and so you know, this was not the only murder
or the only disappearance that was happening. There would have
been many many other things at place. So talking about
(13:24):
an overloaded system and obviously a system that still had
that applyed a prejudice working against it. She was, let's
say it, you know, outlast, she was a black, poor
woman who had come from another province to work in Johannesburg.
She disappeared into this kind of system, this bustling city
full of immigrants, and she vanished. And so you know,
(13:46):
unfortunately this wasn't some high profile case where all of
the best detectives got deployed and all of the resources
were poured into it. This landed up on the desk
of some overworked detective in a very poor area, was
a high crime rate, couldn't really know whether she had
been missing or not. Often it's difficult to track down witnesses.
(14:07):
Often even the families themselves kind of bought to make
the trip to town to testify and to give statements
and so on. So the wheels tend to fall off
very very quickly. And you know, I guess for all
of those reasons, it was not a very high profile case.
She wasn't young, and so that if she was a child,
maybe they would have paid her, but more attention to
(14:28):
a missing person docker at that fine. But yeah, I
guess you just kind of piled into that dad in
the system that was really struggling from that part era,
and you know, then fed in by whatever was happening
in a contemporary setting around that police station.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Did man can key her brother and the rest of
the family in eastern Kpe, did they have a gut feeling?
Did they look at the father of the children. What
was the situation there?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yes, there was, there were There were many kind of
theories and ideas. The family was quite broad. Many of
them were still in the Eastern Cape. So basically Tini
had essentially I mean, she had three children, So Tulani
was her oldest. Then there was Bullelwa and Lusunder. Lusunder
was really really young at the time. She was a
baby when this was all happening, and basically tiny you know,
(15:18):
did not lead a stable life. She you know, she
wasn't married to one man. She had various partners. She
enjoyed partying, you know. So I guess no real kind
of stable home for anybody to just go into and
start to investigate. And so, you know, I think there
were some people who thought that maybe she had run
off somewhere. But I think her family from the extensive
(15:41):
interviewing that I did and the research and I mean
I traveled to the Eastern Cape and met the family,
and we actually, I mean when the book was being published,
we had taken a decision to help and support the
family through the sales of the book. And to all
of that, I think that the people who were closest
to her, the siblings who were older or her age,
(16:02):
never really believed that year just run off somewhere. I
think they knew that something had happened to her. But
the trouble is, you know, again, when you are from
a poor family from another province, it isn't easy to
come and knock on doors and raise complaints, and so
you kind of you do what you can. But unfortunately
(16:24):
they didn't get any justice in all of those years,
and I think they never would have. You know, as
I said right at the beginning, if the stars just
had into lined.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Was anybody the family or the police. Did anyone manage
to get any kind of insight from the people who
were working at the restaurant that night before she disappeared.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Not really. I think that there were a couple of
interviews that were obviously done, a couple of statements taken,
but nothing really points to do anything specific. And I
think that this definitely isn't the kind of case where
somebody kept assets just kind of slugging away for years
and years. This was a case where they did what
had to be done. In the beginning, there was nothing
(17:07):
shook out from the tree, and so they kind of
forgot about it and offered wentz. Then of course the
police officers detectives moving on to other things fairly quickly.
The kind of sense I got was that there was
a little bit of engineering done, a little bit of
prellminary work, but nothing major, nothing serious. I think there
(17:27):
were many threads there that they could have time of death,
that they could have pulled, but that just simply weren't.
And also, you know, bear in mind that's the owner
of the restaurants. His name is Eric. He fled Currentry
soon after all of the kind of the story unfolded.
But he wasn't an incredibly interesting and kind of mysterious
(17:48):
character himself. You know, he went on television under different names,
and he was kind of also this enigma wrapped in
the mystery, as they say, right, So he was he
was a really really just in characters, and so he
would have antioacity spun different tales and possibly even confuious
any investigators that have come at knocking you on those
(18:09):
doors in the early days. And his role in this,
although it's kind of detailed quite a bit in the book,
is one of these puzzle pieces that just never balance
your place. Because of course he played the country has
never been seen again. So you know, I think that
the detectives would have painted quite a difficult task trying
(18:29):
to make sense of what was going on in that
restaurant at the basic Et sign he disappeared.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
You know, I don't do modern cases, but when people
do modern cases, like maybe the Gabby Patito case or
you know, the college students who were murdered in Idaho.
A gift to someone who's a storyteller is being able
to access the victim's thoughts, their fears and all of that.
And that's where social media is really helpful. It's not
(18:56):
helpful in a lot of cases in life, but I
think it is helpful there. You know, you're to access
so much. Were you able to get any kind of
insight about Betty, like from her own words? Do they
have letters? Do they have any video? Is there anything
that let you, you know, as a reader, would let
you connect to her.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I think that I connected to her in a great way.
For me many years, this was a story that never
leaves you. So you know, you will be showering and
it will come into your mind, you will be going
on a vacation somewhere and it will be there and
two a day it's still very much deep inside me.
I remember I had a photograph of basic Aciey that's
(19:36):
established in the book, and it was a photograph of
her kind of being back against this very old calm
in a city. You know. So that postograph I think
was the beginning of my journey to try and understand her.
I puened it up in my office and kind of
just looked at it whenever I could, whenever I was
investigating it. But her life had to be reconstructed through
(19:57):
talking to her brothers, to her children, through going to
the Eastern Cape and walking the streets and kind of
trying to understand where she had come from in Queenstown.
It was through interviewing the people that she worked with
at Crimes restaurants. It was through interviewing people who were
(20:19):
in that in that orbit, I guess at the time.
And so yes, the picture definitely did emerge.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
It wasn't a need series of tweets and Instagram photographs
and so on, But I really got a sense of
her life, the parties that she attended in a suburb
called Hillbrow in Johannesburg, the work ethic that she had
become a kind of a mother figure to some of
the other women that were working in that particular restaurant,
The fact that she was feisty and fiery, and you know,
(20:47):
she didn't. She kind of stood up to Eric, who
was the owner of the restaurant, and even though she
was quite intimidating and even scary to many people, she
kind of really stood up to him and that rose
up and challenged him, and I think there was some
respect there too. And so yes, I definitely got a
sense of a person who wouldn't just back down and
(21:10):
fold away, of a person who would stand up, and
that I guess fed into all of the mystery around
why she disappeared. But it was interesting and I definitely
did get it feel like I kind of I met her.
And I'm almost glad that it wasn't just a string
of social media, because you know, I don't know how
realistic that is. I think the work that I did
(21:31):
was was far deeper. Was it was really going back
through the family into the person.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
One more thing about nineteen ninety nine before we moved
forward in time. So who reported her missing? How did
her family even know? Did she have like a weekly
phone call and they and she missed it? Or was
it somebody at work?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
No, the sounder was a baby, and so she had
being looked after by I think it was relatives or
friends or whatever. The case, and be and and and
when Vessy didn't come home, obviously there was an alarm
that went off. She had another brother who did the
initial kind of police reports and things like that. When
King she only came up later because you know, he
was living in another province. So whoever she could gather up,
(22:16):
I guess in Johannesburg would have been the family that
initially sounded the alarm. But again it was you know,
it was a week, it was a weak bell, and
it didn't ring particularly loud or particularly long before the
doctor just began gathering dust.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Did you speak to the three children, I can't remember
if you said that or not.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
I dealt with them all the way through Rise Up
until you know, the conclusion of the of the entire
trial and the entire case, when keeps her brother was
definitely a crucial kind of link to the family. But yes,
and and you know, we tell snippets of the children's
lives to the book as well, because you know, I
(22:56):
don't know what it must be like to just live
with that agon yield, having absolutely no idea what happened
to your mother. And of course, remember in South African
some of the cultures and so on. It's really really
important to be able to put spurs to rest, because
otherwise the ancestors remain restless. And so there's a huge
(23:16):
component to getting closure, and it's sending people to become
kind of ancestors and so on. So there's a real
spiritual angle to that. And of course, yeah, there was
none of that because there was no body, There was
no conclusion, there was no evidence, and so I think
that was an added layer of agony for her family.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
My first book, which was set in nineteen fifty two,
during the London smog, I interviewed she's now our grandmother,
but you know, she was thirteen at the time. Her
father walked home through the smog and he had bronchitis,
and eventually he dies a few days later. She tried
to save his life, and you know, they weren't from
a family that talked to each other very much. She
(23:57):
failed most of her you know exams, and you know,
this was a crucial time for her and it changed
the trajectory of her whole life. She had wanted to
do one thing and then she ended up because she
didn't do well on these exams and she just couldn't
pull herself out of that because of her father's death,
because of one person. It's just incredible how much, you know,
(24:18):
certainly a parent, but even a sibling, anybody dying around you,
how much it can really affect you and the path
that you go on. So did you get a sense
for what this did to the kids, aside from of
course being sad and mourning their mom and the uncertainty.
Did this affect them in a way where it just went, boy,
this would have never happened had their mom not died.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
It's interesting, as you said that, I got an image
of a kind of a glass or a mirror, and
there's an initial break and then the cracks just begin
to kind of blow out, And I think that really
is what happens here. I think those acts began to
run the minute that she vanished. I obviously can't kind
of sit down and sort of you exactly what And
otherwise I suppose a family that was already struggling. You know,
(25:03):
there was very little money to go around. If you
imagine one person in a family earning many, many, kind
of hundreds of comets away as a cook at a restaurant,
sending whatever she could back to the family. So there
was a really kind of a poverty that was a
great disadvantage for the family. There was the distance, so
growing up away from your mother was obviously something that
(25:26):
was also really difficult. But definitely for her youngest is
under you know, I think the cracks would have been
particularly deep and particularly painful. And I think definitely, you know,
her life was affected by to a great extent. She
was at school when some of the trial was playing
out and so on, and so that kept kind of,
(25:47):
I suppose, interfering with her world. So the short answer
to your question is, without adult it impacted that family
dramatically and radically. Did they already face hardship and struggle. Yes,
I mean this would have been a tsunami that kind
of just washed over them, and everything else is obviously behind.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Well, let's move forward. This is an interesting discussion because
normally when we have these stories, there's a lot of investigation,
and then when you get to thirteen years later, it's
not as robust because it's sort of like, here's the answer,
and here's kind of what they say happen. But because
the investigation in this case was so inefficient, I think
(26:28):
the most of the information is going to start now
with the discovery of this letter. So we know, over
these thirteen years, the family gets no answers. She has
simply vanished. They have no idea of you know, she's
taken a boat to America or what's happened. So tell me,
like set the scene for where are we when this
this stack of letters is discovered under a carpet.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah, so we're I mean we're in Johanna Stakes Solt
but a way away from where the restaurant is so
deepen kind of the suburbs, and there's a very regular
house and there's renovation that's under way. There's a family
that's basically trying to get a new tenants in because
the old tenant wrecked the place. So there's a last
minute scramble to try and clean the place up before
(27:10):
the next tenants arrives. The previous tenant kind of had
this really annoying little dog that had feed everywhere, and
so the house was mainly and the carpets were disgusting,
and so this family is frantically trying to get this
all together. And one of the things that they're doing
this is the weekend, and so one of the things
they're doing is they're ripping up carpets to get rid
of the smell. And you know, one of the people
(27:33):
involved in us is that the youngster, his name was Jeffrey,
and he pulls up the carpet, finds these letters and
everything just pauses for a second, because why is there
a stack of blesses lying under the carpets. And Jeffrey
is a young man, but he kind of works at
a workshop, and so he's mechanically driven, and he knows
you don't just kind of start unscrewing gearboxes and things
(27:55):
because springs will fly out and so on. So he's
quite careful with his package, starts to pull it apart,
and as I mentioned earlier, the first letter that they
come across literally starts with the words if you're reading this,
then I'm dead, and that obviously grabs their attention, and
they start to read to the rest of the letters,
and they're still trying to piece together what this lays do,
(28:17):
whether it's real, whether it's prank. They just simply have
no idea until they make a connection to another one
of their tenants who have moved out a little while ago,
a man named Conway Brown. And once that connection is
made everything kind of starts to piece together, and Conway
Brown is a really fascinating part of the story. But
(28:40):
he used to rent the house where these letters were found,
but he has moved on from there already. But once
that leak is made, there's a sense that this is
a real letter, that it could be something. Of course,
the people who find it had no idea who anybody
in the story is. They have no idea what Benzicatani is.
That not idea many of the names that I mentioned
(29:01):
in it. And so this is one of those kind
of bivotal moments that I think could have gone either way.
They could have taken the letters and said this is rubbish,
thrown it in the bin, and carried on with their renovations,
and they didn't. They kind of passed them along to
a friend who had another friend because one of those
kind of passed the letter around. And so Let's found
(29:23):
its way into the hands of a really interesting pair
of detectives. One of them was all Doc. That was
the one was called JB. And if you kind of
picture a I don't know, like a biker's bar or pub,
you kind of get the scene of who these characters
are they're private investigators. They run around searching for adventure
(29:45):
and cass and they get hold of this and start
to kind of shake the tree. I think, probably motivated
by an adventure just a thrilling story. They want to
try and see where it leads them, and so they
start to kind of poke around and see what this
is all about. They get some local police officers on board.
This is not a very different part of town, and
(30:07):
so things start to move a little bit. But at
this stage they still have no idea whether this is real,
whether it's just a prank. The less it talks about
a shallow grave, they dig up the shadow grave and
it's a thing there. So they kind of go through
this back and forth. Is this reel or is it fake?
Is it real? Is it fake? And eventually they get
(30:28):
their way through to Conway, who is one of these
really interesting characters. And I know this because I spent
many many hoursts seeing and interviewing him in jail, and
he is one of these really kind of interesting characters
who kind of just it almost feels like his entire
life has been a stream that swept him along and
(30:49):
kind of bancing around from one thing to the next,
and he kind of gets discovered and just confex us
kind of amazing. He just starts to talk once he's cornered,
and you know, it's interesting because he kind of talks
about these black claus and his memories. Then he talks
about wanting to get one of these things off his chase.
(31:11):
But he's kind of the real first piece that comes
together for these detectives, and so they get him into
a room. Let's take his confession, and you know what,
it turns out that the lester is talking about a
real case. Conway starts to help them put some of
the pieces together. He talks about who wrote the letter
(31:35):
and the fact that they are not dead, even though
they say, if you're really mister and I'm there, we'll
get to all of that just now. He tells them
art the fact that two police officers were involved in
the crime. He talks about his other friends, and crucially,
he talks about what happened to Bensicittani. He describes in
(31:56):
a very dramatic way how first she was in essentially
brought to this very dark kind of spot outside of
the main city and then stabbed. He talks about how
she survived that attack and was discovered in the hospital
a little while later recovering, and then this brazen operation
(32:17):
with the assistance of the police officers to go and
kidnap her a second time from hospital to if you like,
finish the job. He talked about how she had then
been left to die inside this bus on a farm
kind of a host there outside of the city again
and eventually buried in a shallow grave. And a shallow
grave that keeps getting mentioned, of course, is at the
(32:39):
very house where the letter was discovered. It's behind the garage,
so behind where you would park a car. The side
of the shallow grave is right there, and he kind
of really helps the police piece all of this together
and the domino starts to fall.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
So Eric, the private investigators, and Betty are at the restaurant.
Is there anybody else any other restaurant workers there?
Speaker 2 (33:04):
So it's impossible to tell. We don't know exactly what
transpired there. What we do know is that, according to
to Conway Brown, is that Bessie Kattani was interrogated, then stabbed,
then kidnapped again from hospital and left to die eventually.
So there's kind of a lot that happens around it.
(33:26):
But you know, there isn't this one moment, There isn't
this one evening where this all unfold. The real story, actually,
the story that I try and tell in the book,
is actually of how the investigation managed to bring together
the circumstantial evidence that we do have, because there was
never a smoking gun. You know, nobody burst into the courtroom.
(33:49):
It was rather this amazing case where you had all
of the circumstantial evidence coming together, and then the course
trying to make sense of all of that back it
up a little bit. Let me just say that once
Conway Brown was detained, arrested and questioned and confessed, there
were essentially six men who then were arrested for this crime.
(34:14):
So the first and the most important, I would argue,
is probably a man called Carrington laws He was a
private investigator who, at least according to the trial and
the evidence that emerged, was accused of being the kind
of masterminded at all. He was also the author of
the confessional letter which was proved to the trial itself.
(34:36):
There was also Conway Brown, who was somebody who get
befriended and who worked for Carrington Lawson. They were the
two brothers, both police officers called the Ranger brothers. That
was their surname. And then two out of figures, one
named Dirk and one named four. So essentially there were
(34:56):
six men who were eventually arrested for this crime on
a letter that came out under the carpet. They immediately
went to war against each other, and so Conway Brown
turned state witness. So did them do? So three of
them immediately rolled over and said we're going to cooperate
(35:17):
with the prosecutors. Caringson Lawson and the two police officers,
the Ranger brothers stood firm and did not compare to
anything and decided to stand trial for that particular case, accused,
of course of kidnapping and murdering DESICATII. Something else happened
at the same time, which is that the station level
(35:40):
police officers escalated the case up to a higher level
of the police and the prosecutors, if you like. In
South Africa, so if you imagine, there are detectives that
work at police station level, and then there are always
that work at the provincial level or the national level,
and so this case got bumped up the ranks, if
you like, again because of some connections between the investigators
(36:03):
and some more senior investigators, and so very quickly you
were in a situation where a provincial protective took over
the case, a man named Harold Van Bate, who was
a really seasoned detective who had investigated some really big
crimes in the years that he'd been busy on it.
(36:25):
And the prosecution was very quickly taken on by a
man named Helman Brewdray, who was a senior council. I
don't know what the American equivalence is, but here in
the UK it would be a sault somebody who's kind
of at the top of the legal ladder, if you like.
And so very quickly this case started to become more
(36:46):
high profile, more interesting. I was reporting on the radio,
so it started to the snowballs started to are supposed
to go in terms of how it was being investigated.
When I started reporting on this, the arrested a really
made and that escalation to the senior prosecutors that happened,
and so there was a now for the first time,
(37:07):
a real investigation bolding. So this wasn't now just kind
of routine little interviews and so on. This was a
proper effort to try and get to what actually happened.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Thirteen years later, exactly right.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
And the really interesting part also is that havent Bordering.
I mean, if he passed away sadly during the COVID years,
but if you imagine a giant, a man he was
in africaner and white South African who had worked in
the prosecution service for a really long time and had
also been involved in prosecuting a Party era crimes. So
(37:43):
in other words, he would have been somebody who was
sending he was sending people to the gallows who were
posing a party. If you can imagine that he'd come
from a family of police officers and so on, and
so here he was trying to get justice for this
black woman who had come from the provinces and they
had been murdered by these white men, and so it
was this kind of really interesting dynamic. But he was
(38:05):
the lead prosecutor, kind of was the lead detective now,
and things still moving, and they were trying to find
ways to basically build the case so that they could
take it to trial because they had these six men.
Three of them had confessed that you would never build
a case like that because well, people who fall out
tend to lie about each other. So you need more,
you need more than that. And so they started to
(38:28):
tackle this investigation from different directions. One of the ways
that they were trying to solve it is through the
handwriting analysis, because the letter was hyped, but there was
enough on it in terms of side notes and signature
that could give them a handwriting match.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
There was a signature on this letter correct because he
thought he was going to be dead. I guess correct.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
If you go along with what the courts found, then
this is somebody who's a seasoned investigator used to taking
and making statements. So it almost had the feel of
an affidavit of a police statement. If you like this
confession letter that began with if you're reading this, then
I am dead. And so they started to try and
match their handwriting, but there was a very small sample
(39:14):
and it wasn't quite conclusive enough. And there was this
moment in an investigation where the main detective had this
wonderful idea to go into the prisons and essentially request
all of the letters that parents and Lawton had been
writing in jail, to request very random things like an
eye player or whatever for to listen to some music
(39:35):
or to complain about something. And so they were then
able to do a proper handwriting analysis.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Was he denying that he wrote this letter?
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Oh, right from the beginning, So he was basically he
was basically saying that he was being framed, particularly by
Eric and also by kind of everybody else. But he
was basically and all the way through this case always
maintained that he was the big of somebody who was
trying to bring them and it was, you know, his
line in court was, you know, I remember I was
(40:07):
in the court room the one day and we were
talking and I kind of asked, you know, well, what's
the strategy and carrying some laws and just simply said,
you know, our strategy is simple, prove it. It was almost
a challenge to the prosecutors to say, well, you know,
push this past that level where circumstantial evidence is heavy
enough to actually secure a conviction. And I don't think
(40:28):
that carry Sym Lawson and his team ever imagined that
that could happen. But so the handwriting was really really crucial,
and they brought in some handwriting analysis and that was
part of the case, but it still wasn't enough. A
major major part of this investigation was, well, if you
say that basically Katina was killed, where's her body? Yeah,
(40:52):
you can't have a murder case without a body, because
what happens is between the two years time basic Katania
arrived boats that she had taken to America like you said,
and goes bye, sorry about that, I'm back. So they
needed to prove that she had actually been killed, and
that was really really difficult because they went to the
shallow grave the letter. It was like a pirate matter.
(41:13):
There was an x markster spot, but there was nothing
buried there. And it's interesting because they kept digging it out.
So there were several attempts at it and each time
there was just nothing. And eventually, once the police investigation
kind of escalated high enough, there were a couple of
forensic investigators that were brought in and they were really
(41:34):
well connected and so they were able to reach out
a little bit further and bring in a very specialized
unit that investigates a pritt Era crimes across South Africa.
So if you imagine anti apartheids campaigners or activists who
were taken outs and killed by the state police and
then disappeared, this unit went around and found their bodies
(41:57):
and tried to bring closer to the family. You remember,
we had the kind of the truth and reconciliation process
in South Africa after a parties and so this unit
was really specialized in excavating graves, and so they came
in and I think this was the third or fourth
time they were digging up to spray desperately hoping to
find some evidence, and on this one final attempt they
(42:20):
brought in this very specialized units. They set up kind
of a sifting process to go through everything, and if
you can believe us, six tiny little bones washed up.
So there was nobody There was no skeleton, but there
were six tiny little feet bones that were discovered very quickly,
backed for evidence and captured by the police. But there
(42:44):
was another problem, right because well, what if it was
a bone that belonged to somebody else, what if it
was an animal bone? What it? You know, there were
so many what ifs. The forensic labs in South Africa
had to go tign to all DNA from these little bones.
But the tuble is they'd been in the ground for
over a decade and they were tiny, and they weren't
(43:06):
kind of the kind of bones that were really easy
to work with. So the South African forensic services weren't
able to get DNA from them, which seemed like a
really big setback. But again I keep talking about the
stars aligning. But through some connections and some previous work
that South Africa had done, they were able to reach
out to a forensic laboratory in Bosnia. And the reason
(43:31):
that's interesting is because Bosnia of course had gone through
its own Balkan walls, and so the experts there were
incredibly skilled at pulling DNA from incredibly decomposed and damaged
tiny pieces of bone. And so they went to the
International Commission for Missing Persons and managed to find some
(43:52):
experts there who said, well, give us a crack, and
so these bones were then shipped off to Bosnia and
there they managed to get a hit and match the
DNA to Bensicatanese family. And I know that it's difficult
for a global audience to understand this, but for South
Africa to do that level of investigation, it's almost unheard of.
(44:13):
I mean, it's a really huge effort to unbirth the truth,
to bring in forensic experts, to find international partners to
DHL samples across and then to invite those experts to
come and testify in a country. And it was incredible
because Carryings and Lawson and the two brothers put up
(44:35):
as legal defense. Carrington was represented by one of the
country's top lawyers, top criminal lawyers, who was really well
known around the country. So they had an incredibly powerful
defense team. And they were grilling the handwriting and analysts.
They were grilling the people who turned against each other,
(44:58):
and they were grilling DNA experts who blew over from Bosnia.
But there was an incredibly solid witness who blew over
I think the same was Thomas Parsons, and he was
kind of this incredibly seasoned investigations that he had done
a million different court cases. I think he was. He'd
been involved in a lot of the kind of international
(45:20):
genocide cases and so on. And as he was being grilled,
there was this line, I'll never forget it. He said,
you know, to me, it doesn't really matter what happened
to this bone. It could have been picked up by
a blackbird and dropped on my desk. She was trying
to defend the kind of the chain of custody, said,
it doesn't really matter because the kind of test that
(45:40):
you do to call DNA out of these bones, you know,
they simply don't lie. You can't plant DNA inside the bone.
And so that DNA evidence really really stuck, and it
gave the prosecution a body, It gave them handwriting analysis,
it gave them the testimony of those who had turned
state witness, and suddenly it's impossible. If you imagine a
(46:03):
kitchen with all of these ingredients scattered everywhere, Suddenly it
all came together into this one case. And in that
case took four years to work its way through the
legal system in South Africa. Wow, but work its way
through the legal system it did. The lead investigator, which
I told you about how Van Bake I think he
was on the stand for about eight days and had
(46:23):
a breakdown while he was testifying, got hostitialized, came back
and finished the job. You know. The prosecutors that what
they could to present all of their evidence, and it
was an incredible, incredible case to follow.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
What do you think was the message that was being
telegraphed out to South Africa to have all of these
top prosecutors to have this investigation the DNA analysis. Why
do this for you know, a woman, particularly a black
woman from not a very you know, a nice area.
(46:58):
I mean, what really was the whole point was this political?
What were they doing?
Speaker 2 (47:03):
I don't think it was political.
Speaker 3 (47:05):
I think that I mean, I genuinely believe that the
people who were involved in this case, kind of right
down from the station level all the way up to
the very top levels of prosecutors and police offers, I think.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
That they wanted to solve the case. I think they
were genuinely drawn in by the mystery. I think it
was one of those cases that does not come around Austin.
I think it's a once in a career case for
many of these police officers and prosecutors and so on.
And then I think as it went further and further along,
as it got to the High Court, as it was
(47:41):
kind of challenged in the Supreme Court, as it was
appealed in the Constitutional Court, it kind of brought a
different message, and that is this equality before the law. Right,
It's this idea that you don't have to be rich,
or white or powerful to get justice. It's an idea
that ratically at least you know, a justice system should
(48:02):
be blind, is to treat everybody the same. And so
I think it definitely kind of carried that message. And
I'm looking at a copy of the book now and
as a quote on it at the back by a
lady called tulimadon Sella who was the nation's public protector.
She led an oversight units that was basically trying to
keep anigh on the government and what it was spending.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
We would say in America, a watchdog.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
A watchdog, and she is an incredibly respected woman, Tulia
modon Sella, and her quote is a relentless search for
truth and justice. Cold case compassion is a story that
inspires confidence in the system and the firms that indeed
we are all equal before the law. And I think
that was an interesting aspect. And you asked me right
(48:48):
at the beginning about some of the major themes, and
that that was definitely one of them. I remember being
asked to write for a global policy magazine about what
is said about the South African justice system to the
outside world. African justice system all often seems kind of
like a wild wild West, so like a jungle and
corrupt and unfair and so on. But then at the
(49:09):
same time that this was happening, we had all these
other big cases. You probably wouldn't remember, but there was
the case of a man who had been extradited from
the UK to Central for killing his wife. This was
the divine case there was to ask for the stories,
case that blew into town and also kind of showed
the power of our That was another case that I
reported on too, so the Pastorias case and so on,
(49:32):
and so I think at that particular time, the South
African justice system was being looked at by the world,
and this was a story that told a very different tale,
a tale that if you get the right people together,
if you put in the effort, if you overlook some
of the kind of the differences of the past and
so on, if you don't just assume that cases and
poor neighborhoods don't need to be investigated, you can altogether
(49:55):
these most incredible investigations and you can give closure to families.
And you know, I was there that on the day
that it all came together and there was a guilty
verdict and character lawson was sentenced to thirty years in jail.
The Ranger brothers were sent to jail, and I was
there with when the family got that news. I was
(50:16):
there when they made a trip up to Johannesburg from
the Eastern Cape. So essentially it's quite difficult to explain,
but it was a spiritual ceremony to try and bring
Betty Posiini spurred back home to the Eastern Cape. So
they went to the grave site. Now with the bones
having been discovered there they could put some of that
earth into a coffin and bring her home. They went
(50:38):
to the bus where she was left to die and
perform some ceremonies. If I paused for a second, I
can kind of stop feel them in my rib cage.
And then they took her coffin back home to the
Eastern Cape. They were able to bury her and essentially
to make peace with the ancestors. And that's that's a
hugely important thing. And I think that the story in
(51:01):
many ways for that sale too, along with this incredible
kind of a nice investigation and who had done it
and so on.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
So the folks, so I guess that was the Ranger
brothers and Conway Brown. Those are the folks who took
plea deals. Is that what they did?
Speaker 2 (51:19):
No, it's so confusing because there are so many characters.
We have to actually publish a couple of pages to
guide people through all the characters. Initially, so Conway Brown
was the kind of the first Domino that fell. Without him,
nothing would have gone any further. If he had just
clammed up and kind of said, I'm not talking to you,
there's a good chance that this would never have been solved.
(51:40):
But he spoilt everything else. And then Paul and Dirk
were also then the characters who took the plea bargains.
Charents in Lawton, who was the author of the confession,
and the Ranger brothers stood firm and they didn't take
any plea bargains and they rolled the diets and said
we can see this and we believe that we're going
(52:01):
to get acquitted. But in the end, ultimately just to
me that remained to get sent to jail. They were
convicted for it. Conway Bryan also spent time in jail,
by the way, which is where him and I had
many many interviews. And the Ranger brothers too had spent
time in jail. I think they'd been released. Paul and
(52:21):
Dirk some deals, and so you kind of had different
characters turning on each other, but the author and the
two police brothers were the ones that wanted to see
the trial through.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
Wow and Carrington never ever kind of after the conviction
or appeals. He never caught to writing that letter that
ruined so many people, Thank goodness.
Speaker 2 (52:43):
No, So I mean I had made a huge punts
of efforts to try and hear more of his story,
to interview him, to present it. I was fortunate in
the fact that he spent many days on the witness
stamp too, and so I am able to represent his
side of the story to a huge extent because it
was running through the course. But the reality on it
(53:06):
is that you know, there are so many questions left
an answered here, and you know this is a story
that spreads out than just Bosnia. It's actually I talk
about it in the book, but it's it's a case
and a story that takes place across five different countries.
So you have South Africa where it kind of all
plays out. Then you have Bosnia that helped with the
(53:29):
actual DNA investigation. You have somebody who's in New Zealand
who the lesson was actually addressed to, who's never come
forward and was never tracked down. There were a couple
of people in Australia that played its new role, including
the daughter of the restaurant who was never extradited. Although
there was a lot of talk about that, and there
(53:51):
was even a UK link was one of carrying some
DX wives who also played a kind of a role
in the story but never came through. And the story
kind of went across the globe. And there are many
many pieces still missing there. And one of the ones
that I'm most fascinated by is, well, why did Conway
not take that letter after hiding it? How could somebody
(54:14):
forget a letter that's important and then just move out
of the rented home and leave it lying under the carpets.
I think I got close to some of the answers
through the interviews with him. I also feel like I
got pretty close to why the letter would have been
written to begin with, because if you look at all
(54:34):
of the inviting that was going on, I think probably
some more of an insurance policy in case something happened.
So if you can picture the scene, you feel like
somebody like Eric or somebody else would be out to
get you. You are probably a little worried about it,
so you would write this letter, give it to a
friend who hide never imagine your friend would then just
(54:56):
forget it under a carpet, and then the rest of
course this ste but you know all of that is explored. Obviously,
it much creates a detail, and I know that you know,
talking about it now, it kind of feels a little
bit like a strobe light onto a really interesting story.
But hopefully that gives you the thread. And as I said,
the beauty of that of the book is that it
was written very naturally along the process of the trial,
(55:19):
and so it kind of lays it out very chronologically
and gives you that lovely merriage of building up of
course to the end, will those who who are responsible
for essentially get justice.
Speaker 1 (55:41):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, All About the
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and
Don't forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(56:02):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Amerosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer.
Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff,
and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook
(56:24):
at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more.
And if you know of a historical crime that could
use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked,
email us at info at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also
take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
So he's quite careful with this package. Starts to pull
it apart in a first letter that they come across,
and literally starts with the words, if you're reading this,
then I'm dead.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:50):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. This week on Wicked Words
on Exactly Right, in nineteen ninety nine, a woman named
(01:10):
Betty Katani went missing in Johannesburg, South Africa. She just
vanished from the restaurant where she was working. Then a
letter found thirteen years later changed everything. Author Alex Elisa
tells me about his book Cold Case confession a real
Agatha Christie story. So when we talk about the things
(01:34):
that are important about this story without ruining it for
all the listeners, because it's a really interesting story, what
do you say, what are the big things that you
want people to kind of learn a little bit when
they read this book.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
I think that there are many many themes in this book,
but I think the one that catches your attention that
first is just how amazing lot of the stars lined
up to actually bring this story to life. This genuinely
is one of those one in a million, maybe one
in a billion stories. It's definitely the most fascinating story
that I've ever worked on as a journalist in over
(02:07):
twenty years. It really stood after me because of how
unlikely this entire story is and how kind of it
could really belong in a film, in a Hollywood film,
because it's just that unrealistic. And whenever I signed books,
I kind of rise inside them saying that the truth
wing is so much stranger than any kind of fiction
that you can come up with. And of course, this
(02:29):
particular story begins with a bunch of letters, A bundle
of letters if you liked, that had been hidden under
a carpet for many, many years. And then a routine,
a kind of a very regular renovation at that house
in Johannesburg. On an average day that folks were lifting
up the carpets found this bundle of confession letters. And
(02:50):
suddenly this mystery that had been lying dormant, slumbering away
for ten eleven twelve years, first to live and the
opening words of that confess I'm not making this up,
but genuinely, the first words of that first confession letter
that is found all those years ago. It goes along
the lines of if you're reading this, then I'm dead
(03:11):
and here's what happened. And so those were the first lines,
and I guess goosebumps kind of thinking about it still
all these years later, and then you start to go
down the kind of the main main avenues of well,
what if that letter had never been hidden, what if
it had never been found, what if it had just
been thrown in a dust, And would we still have
(03:31):
this story, would we have the spot, would we have
most importantly justice for a family that had been waiting
for it for so so many years. And we'll talk about,
of course, the characters and so on, but really this
is a story of a case that was lying underground,
if you like, and suddenly came to life through this
(03:51):
very very strange act and this kind of very strange circumstance.
So it's fascinating and it begins and it goes through
and for me, because I covered it as the trial
was going I wrote the book as the trial was
going on for four years, it has a very kind
of a natural narrative to it. I didn't have to
work hard to make this thrilling because I didn't know
(04:13):
how the story would end. And so as I investigated,
as I sat through the cause, as the surprise is
kept springing up on us. All of that is in
the book, and I think that's partly why it's had
the success that it has.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Are you a true crime author by trade or was
this your first true crime book?
Speaker 2 (04:33):
So I am not an author by trade. I'm an
author by accident. I started ass as a journalist, and
so this is now going back to Johannesburg. I was
a community newspaper journalist. I started writing in those little
kind of community stories and then built myself up going
to mainstream journalism. I was working on kind of daily newspapers,
(04:56):
weekly newspapers and really kind of just an all found it.
I would report on Bryan the one day, the economy
the next day, how anything really that came along. I
had a really and still do have a big interest
in science reporting. But then kind of I carried on
that journey and obviously told more and more stories to
my journalism and eventually came across this particular story. I
(05:20):
was working for a news state by the time in
Johannesburg called The Star. It's kind of, you know, one
of those beautiful broad seats that are as old as
the city and I still get nostalgic thinking about its
offices in central Johannesburg. But anyway, so I was kind
of doing all kinds of different stories, and one of
the things that I was investigating was the drug trade,
(05:40):
so the kind of the dark underbelly of the city.
And I was put into contact with some special agents
who were working undercover at the time. They were called
the Scorpions, which is a great name if you're going
to be an undercover agent. So there were a law
enforcement agency and I was doing a little bit of time.
I was on the seats with them, just seeing how
the drug trade operators that were taking us around, and
(06:02):
so we made some really good connections in that world.
And a couple of years later, I got a call
from one of those agents and he put me onto
this particular story and said, you're not going to believe this,
And then of course he gave me that line about
the fact that this confession had been found under a
carpet and now they've been arrest and all of this
(06:23):
kind of mystery was starting to unravel. And so I
had moved over into reporting for radio by then and
jumped on the story and broke it on air. As
it became a story that I started to report on
as a radio journalist. But at the same time, my
kind of real passion was always writing, and so I
(06:43):
kept writing it, and very kind of quickly after the
trial began, I teamed up with PANDEC Millen Publishers, and
they said, you know, this is going to be a
great book, and I said, I could not agree more
with you, because it is. It's just an incredible story.
And I always came to being an author, and so
this was a great opportunity, and so that's how it happened.
(07:05):
I have contributed it to other books throughout my career.
But this is the kind of the big one that
I wrote myself, So no, I wouldn't call myself. And
also by trade, but I've been a writer all my life.
I've been a journst all my life, and so telling
real stories, I guess is a trade that I have had.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
It definitely is a trade. Well, let's go back to
nineteen ninety nine and just tell me you know about
the wherever you want to start. Actually, if you want
to set the scene for Johannesburg in that time period,
then and move forward with our main people.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Of course, So Johannaespurg is called the city of gold
in South Africa because it is where all of the
economic opportunity lies. So a lot of people from around
South Africa almost migrats into Johannaston to work because that's
where the money is, that's where the politics is, that's
kind of the working hard. We've got another city called
cap Tan, which is the beautiful part of it and
(07:59):
nah is the kind of gritty best where you can
go and earn money. So a lot of people would
move to Johannesburg. And of course, if you consider the
country's past, was a party eight there are a lot
of families that were moving into Johannesburg but having to
leave their own families behind in more rural settings. There
aren't other provinces, and that's just because of the way
(08:22):
that the country was divided up and segregated in the past,
that there were many different provinces, and one of them
it was called Eastern Cape. It was a kind of
a rural setting. If you can imagine the most magnificent
mountains and rolling hills. It's the home of Nelson Mandela,
for example. So in that space there was a woman
(08:42):
who was called Betty Katsani and she was born in
nearby George, but kind of grew up in the Eastern Cape.
And she was one of many children. I think there
were ten of them, and she grew up there and
eventually had children of their own. She had three children
of her own, and she came to Jhannersburg much like
(09:03):
many other people did, to work. She left quite a
big part of her family behind. Think Shooney had her
youngest child with her. He was only I don't think
the child was even a year old at the time.
So she was kind of earning the money sending it
back to the Eastern Cape. And the job that she
got in Johannesburg was as a cook and a really
(09:24):
interesting and famous restaurant called Cranks and Cranks was this
kind of mad house restaurant run by a really really
eccentric owner. There were kind of body dolls in the
ceilings and weird sculptures and they're welcome to the fabulous
Las Vegas signs, and it was really interesting. It was
quite kind of one of those institutions in Johannisburg where
(09:46):
people would come and eat party for the food, but
mostly for the experience, and so Bessie could finally was
I suppose an invisible cook at the back of that restaurant.
Nobody would have known her. She worked with many other
people there. One day she went to work. This was
now kind of going back in time. She went to work.
I think this was ninety nine, and she never returned.
(10:09):
She just disappeared. She just vanished and she was never
seen again. And it's hard to believe that she would
have gone somewhere because her children were still there. Her
youngest was being looked after, so I think she was
only about a couple of months old, and so she
just vanished and nobody heard again from Besi Katani for many,
(10:29):
many years until in fact, the confessional letter was found
in twenty twelve. So we're talking about a period of
thirteen years where her family had no answers. They just
they simply did not know she banished or base of
the planet. And of course her family went to the police.
They opened the case. But you know, if you consider
(10:50):
the kind of socio economics of the country, she was
living in a very poor area. The police station that
this was reported at was in a poor area run
by all kinds of other different crimes and so on,
and so the case was never really investigated, if you
like it, it was just one of those cases, one
of many others. There were no answers for anybody involved.
(11:14):
Her children obviously grew up not knowing what happened today mother,
and it was torment, and especially for one of her brothers,
who's called Mankinki. I think she was really really devastated
by it. He kind of carried the torch of trying
to get some answers. He was an older brother and
they got nowhere, and that was kind of just this.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
It's hard for me to imagine a situation where there
was a woman I know she was an adult and
she could run off and do things if she wanted to.
But usually, you know, I'm used to stories at least
that on an American base, where the police say, is
she likely to be someone to leave her one year
old behind or to leave you know, a family behind.
(11:59):
And so when you said they didn't really get anywhere,
the police didn't seem to make an effort because they
have other things that they need to do. I wonder
if you put that into perspective. And I know that
Johannesburg was underprivileged, but what does that mean she doesn't
live this high risk quote unquote high risk lifestyle, and
so why didn't they get attention?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
I think for many, many different reasons. So I think
that there was definitely, you know, there wasn't much to
go on. I think, so there wasn't a huge amount
of evidence. But be that as it may, I think
if you had to start digging deeper into it, there
wasn't enough effort made at that time, and there are
lots of very complicated ingredients obviously playing there. But I'd
(12:42):
imagine that it's the combination of the fact that this
was happening in a high crime area, so you know,
kind of overrun by many other cases where the detectives
are overworked and overloaded. And so if you're a detective
carrying fifty forty fifty doctors, you can't give attention to
each one as you should. If you're in a wealthier
(13:02):
environment and was less crime, you know, you'd get one
or two doctors and you could really pull your arts
and solve into solving that particular crime. You know, South
Africa has and had various high crime rates as it is,
and so you know, this was not the only murder
or the only disappearance that was happening. There would have
been many many other things at place. So talking about
(13:24):
an overloaded system and obviously a system that still had
that applyed a prejudice working against it. She was, let's
say it, you know, outlast, she was a black, poor
woman who had come from another province to work in Johannesburg.
She disappeared into this kind of system, this bustling city
full of immigrants, and she vanished. And so you know,
(13:46):
unfortunately this wasn't some high profile case where all of
the best detectives got deployed and all of the resources
were poured into it. This landed up on the desk
of some overworked detective in a very poor area, was
a high crime rate, couldn't really know whether she had
been missing or not. Often it's difficult to track down witnesses.
(14:07):
Often even the families themselves kind of bought to make
the trip to town to testify and to give statements
and so on. So the wheels tend to fall off
very very quickly. And you know, I guess for all
of those reasons, it was not a very high profile case.
She wasn't young, and so that if she was a child,
maybe they would have paid her, but more attention to
(14:28):
a missing person docker at that fine. But yeah, I
guess you just kind of piled into that dad in
the system that was really struggling from that part era,
and you know, then fed in by whatever was happening
in a contemporary setting around that police station.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Did man can key her brother and the rest of
the family in eastern Kpe, did they have a gut feeling?
Did they look at the father of the children. What
was the situation there?
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yes, there was, there were There were many kind of
theories and ideas. The family was quite broad. Many of
them were still in the Eastern Cape. So basically Tini
had essentially I mean, she had three children, So Tulani
was her oldest. Then there was Bullelwa and Lusunder. Lusunder
was really really young at the time. She was a
baby when this was all happening, and basically tiny you know,
(15:18):
did not lead a stable life. She you know, she
wasn't married to one man. She had various partners. She
enjoyed partying, you know. So I guess no real kind
of stable home for anybody to just go into and
start to investigate. And so, you know, I think there
were some people who thought that maybe she had run
off somewhere. But I think her family from the extensive
(15:41):
interviewing that I did and the research and I mean
I traveled to the Eastern Cape and met the family,
and we actually, I mean when the book was being published,
we had taken a decision to help and support the
family through the sales of the book. And to all
of that, I think that the people who were closest
to her, the siblings who were older or her age,
(16:02):
never really believed that year just run off somewhere. I
think they knew that something had happened to her. But
the trouble is, you know, again, when you are from
a poor family from another province, it isn't easy to
come and knock on doors and raise complaints, and so
you kind of you do what you can. But unfortunately
(16:24):
they didn't get any justice in all of those years,
and I think they never would have. You know, as
I said right at the beginning, if the stars just
had into lined.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Was anybody the family or the police. Did anyone manage
to get any kind of insight from the people who
were working at the restaurant that night before she disappeared.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Not really. I think that there were a couple of
interviews that were obviously done, a couple of statements taken,
but nothing really points to do anything specific. And I
think that this definitely isn't the kind of case where
somebody kept assets just kind of slugging away for years
and years. This was a case where they did what
had to be done. In the beginning, there was nothing
(17:07):
shook out from the tree, and so they kind of
forgot about it and offered wentz. Then of course the
police officers detectives moving on to other things fairly quickly.
The kind of sense I got was that there was
a little bit of engineering done, a little bit of
prellminary work, but nothing major, nothing serious. I think there
(17:27):
were many threads there that they could have time of death,
that they could have pulled, but that just simply weren't.
And also, you know, bear in mind that's the owner
of the restaurants. His name is Eric. He fled Currentry
soon after all of the kind of the story unfolded.
But he wasn't an incredibly interesting and kind of mysterious
(17:48):
character himself. You know, he went on television under different names,
and he was kind of also this enigma wrapped in
the mystery, as they say, right, So he was he
was a really really just in characters, and so he
would have antioacity spun different tales and possibly even confuious
any investigators that have come at knocking you on those
(18:09):
doors in the early days. And his role in this,
although it's kind of detailed quite a bit in the book,
is one of these puzzle pieces that just never balance
your place. Because of course he played the country has
never been seen again. So you know, I think that
the detectives would have painted quite a difficult task trying
(18:29):
to make sense of what was going on in that
restaurant at the basic Et sign he disappeared.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
You know, I don't do modern cases, but when people
do modern cases, like maybe the Gabby Patito case or
you know, the college students who were murdered in Idaho.
A gift to someone who's a storyteller is being able
to access the victim's thoughts, their fears and all of that.
And that's where social media is really helpful. It's not
(18:56):
helpful in a lot of cases in life, but I
think it is helpful there. You know, you're to access
so much. Were you able to get any kind of
insight about Betty, like from her own words? Do they
have letters? Do they have any video? Is there anything
that let you, you know, as a reader, would let
you connect to her.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
I think that I connected to her in a great way.
For me many years, this was a story that never
leaves you. So you know, you will be showering and
it will come into your mind, you will be going
on a vacation somewhere and it will be there and
two a day it's still very much deep inside me.
I remember I had a photograph of basic Aciey that's
(19:36):
established in the book, and it was a photograph of
her kind of being back against this very old calm
in a city. You know. So that postograph I think
was the beginning of my journey to try and understand her.
I puened it up in my office and kind of
just looked at it whenever I could, whenever I was
investigating it. But her life had to be reconstructed through
(19:57):
talking to her brothers, to her children, through going to
the Eastern Cape and walking the streets and kind of
trying to understand where she had come from in Queenstown.
It was through interviewing the people that she worked with
at Crimes restaurants. It was through interviewing people who were
(20:19):
in that in that orbit, I guess at the time.
And so yes, the picture definitely did emerge.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
It wasn't a need series of tweets and Instagram photographs
and so on, But I really got a sense of
her life, the parties that she attended in a suburb
called Hillbrow in Johannesburg, the work ethic that she had
become a kind of a mother figure to some of
the other women that were working in that particular restaurant,
The fact that she was feisty and fiery, and you know,
(20:47):
she didn't. She kind of stood up to Eric, who
was the owner of the restaurant, and even though she
was quite intimidating and even scary to many people, she
kind of really stood up to him and that rose
up and challenged him, and I think there was some
respect there too. And so yes, I definitely got a
sense of a person who wouldn't just back down and
(21:10):
fold away, of a person who would stand up, and
that I guess fed into all of the mystery around
why she disappeared. But it was interesting and I definitely
did get it feel like I kind of I met her.
And I'm almost glad that it wasn't just a string
of social media, because you know, I don't know how
realistic that is. I think the work that I did
(21:31):
was was far deeper. Was it was really going back
through the family into the person.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
One more thing about nineteen ninety nine before we moved
forward in time. So who reported her missing? How did
her family even know? Did she have like a weekly
phone call and they and she missed it? Or was
it somebody at work?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
No, the sounder was a baby, and so she had
being looked after by I think it was relatives or
friends or whatever. The case, and be and and and
when Vessy didn't come home, obviously there was an alarm
that went off. She had another brother who did the
initial kind of police reports and things like that. When
King she only came up later because you know, he
was living in another province. So whoever she could gather up,
(22:16):
I guess in Johannesburg would have been the family that
initially sounded the alarm. But again it was you know,
it was a week, it was a weak bell, and
it didn't ring particularly loud or particularly long before the
doctor just began gathering dust.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Did you speak to the three children, I can't remember
if you said that or not.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
I dealt with them all the way through Rise Up
until you know, the conclusion of the of the entire
trial and the entire case, when keeps her brother was
definitely a crucial kind of link to the family. But yes,
and and you know, we tell snippets of the children's
lives to the book as well, because you know, I
(22:56):
don't know what it must be like to just live
with that agon yield, having absolutely no idea what happened
to your mother. And of course, remember in South African
some of the cultures and so on. It's really really
important to be able to put spurs to rest, because
otherwise the ancestors remain restless. And so there's a huge
(23:16):
component to getting closure, and it's sending people to become
kind of ancestors and so on. So there's a real
spiritual angle to that. And of course, yeah, there was
none of that because there was no body, There was
no conclusion, there was no evidence, and so I think
that was an added layer of agony for her family.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
My first book, which was set in nineteen fifty two,
during the London smog, I interviewed she's now our grandmother,
but you know, she was thirteen at the time. Her
father walked home through the smog and he had bronchitis,
and eventually he dies a few days later. She tried
to save his life, and you know, they weren't from
a family that talked to each other very much. She
(23:57):
failed most of her you know exams, and you know,
this was a crucial time for her and it changed
the trajectory of her whole life. She had wanted to
do one thing and then she ended up because she
didn't do well on these exams and she just couldn't
pull herself out of that because of her father's death,
because of one person. It's just incredible how much, you know,
(24:18):
certainly a parent, but even a sibling, anybody dying around you,
how much it can really affect you and the path
that you go on. So did you get a sense
for what this did to the kids, aside from of
course being sad and mourning their mom and the uncertainty.
Did this affect them in a way where it just went, boy,
this would have never happened had their mom not died.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
It's interesting, as you said that, I got an image
of a kind of a glass or a mirror, and
there's an initial break and then the cracks just begin
to kind of blow out, And I think that really
is what happens here. I think those acts began to
run the minute that she vanished. I obviously can't kind
of sit down and sort of you exactly what And
otherwise I suppose a family that was already struggling. You know,
(25:03):
there was very little money to go around. If you
imagine one person in a family earning many, many, kind
of hundreds of comets away as a cook at a restaurant,
sending whatever she could back to the family. So there
was a really kind of a poverty that was a
great disadvantage for the family. There was the distance, so
growing up away from your mother was obviously something that
(25:26):
was also really difficult. But definitely for her youngest is
under you know, I think the cracks would have been
particularly deep and particularly painful. And I think definitely, you know,
her life was affected by to a great extent. She
was at school when some of the trial was playing
out and so on, and so that kept kind of,
(25:47):
I suppose, interfering with her world. So the short answer
to your question is, without adult it impacted that family
dramatically and radically. Did they already face hardship and struggle. Yes,
I mean this would have been a tsunami that kind
of just washed over them, and everything else is obviously behind.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Well, let's move forward. This is an interesting discussion because
normally when we have these stories, there's a lot of investigation,
and then when you get to thirteen years later, it's
not as robust because it's sort of like, here's the answer,
and here's kind of what they say happen. But because
the investigation in this case was so inefficient, I think
(26:28):
the most of the information is going to start now
with the discovery of this letter. So we know, over
these thirteen years, the family gets no answers. She has
simply vanished. They have no idea of you know, she's
taken a boat to America or what's happened. So tell me,
like set the scene for where are we when this
this stack of letters is discovered under a carpet.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Yeah, so we're I mean we're in Johanna Stakes Solt
but a way away from where the restaurant is so
deepen kind of the suburbs, and there's a very regular
house and there's renovation that's under way. There's a family
that's basically trying to get a new tenants in because
the old tenant wrecked the place. So there's a last
minute scramble to try and clean the place up before
(27:10):
the next tenants arrives. The previous tenant kind of had
this really annoying little dog that had feed everywhere, and
so the house was mainly and the carpets were disgusting,
and so this family is frantically trying to get this
all together. And one of the things that they're doing
this is the weekend, and so one of the things
they're doing is they're ripping up carpets to get rid
of the smell. And you know, one of the people
(27:33):
involved in us is that the youngster, his name was Jeffrey,
and he pulls up the carpet, finds these letters and
everything just pauses for a second, because why is there
a stack of blesses lying under the carpets. And Jeffrey
is a young man, but he kind of works at
a workshop, and so he's mechanically driven, and he knows
you don't just kind of start unscrewing gearboxes and things
(27:55):
because springs will fly out and so on. So he's
quite careful with his package, starts to pull it apart,
and as I mentioned earlier, the first letter that they
come across literally starts with the words if you're reading this,
then I'm dead, and that obviously grabs their attention, and
they start to read to the rest of the letters,
and they're still trying to piece together what this lays do,
(28:17):
whether it's real, whether it's prank. They just simply have
no idea until they make a connection to another one
of their tenants who have moved out a little while ago,
a man named Conway Brown. And once that connection is
made everything kind of starts to piece together, and Conway
Brown is a really fascinating part of the story. But
(28:40):
he used to rent the house where these letters were found,
but he has moved on from there already. But once
that leak is made, there's a sense that this is
a real letter, that it could be something. Of course,
the people who find it had no idea who anybody
in the story is. They have no idea what Benzicatani is.
That not idea many of the names that I mentioned
(29:01):
in it. And so this is one of those kind
of bivotal moments that I think could have gone either way.
They could have taken the letters and said this is rubbish,
thrown it in the bin, and carried on with their renovations,
and they didn't. They kind of passed them along to
a friend who had another friend because one of those
kind of passed the letter around. And so Let's found
(29:23):
its way into the hands of a really interesting pair
of detectives. One of them was all Doc. That was
the one was called JB. And if you kind of
picture a I don't know, like a biker's bar or pub,
you kind of get the scene of who these characters
are they're private investigators. They run around searching for adventure
(29:45):
and cass and they get hold of this and start
to kind of shake the tree. I think, probably motivated
by an adventure just a thrilling story. They want to
try and see where it leads them, and so they
start to kind of poke around and see what this
is all about. They get some local police officers on board.
This is not a very different part of town, and
(30:07):
so things start to move a little bit. But at
this stage they still have no idea whether this is real,
whether it's just a prank. The less it talks about
a shallow grave, they dig up the shadow grave and
it's a thing there. So they kind of go through
this back and forth. Is this reel or is it fake?
Is it real? Is it fake? And eventually they get
(30:28):
their way through to Conway, who is one of these
really interesting characters. And I know this because I spent
many many hoursts seeing and interviewing him in jail, and
he is one of these really kind of interesting characters
who kind of just it almost feels like his entire
life has been a stream that swept him along and
(30:49):
kind of bancing around from one thing to the next,
and he kind of gets discovered and just confex us
kind of amazing. He just starts to talk once he's cornered,
and you know, it's interesting because he kind of talks
about these black claus and his memories. Then he talks
about wanting to get one of these things off his chase.
(31:11):
But he's kind of the real first piece that comes
together for these detectives, and so they get him into
a room. Let's take his confession, and you know what,
it turns out that the lester is talking about a
real case. Conway starts to help them put some of
the pieces together. He talks about who wrote the letter
(31:35):
and the fact that they are not dead, even though
they say, if you're really mister and I'm there, we'll
get to all of that just now. He tells them
art the fact that two police officers were involved in
the crime. He talks about his other friends, and crucially,
he talks about what happened to Bensicittani. He describes in
(31:56):
a very dramatic way how first she was in essentially
brought to this very dark kind of spot outside of
the main city and then stabbed. He talks about how
she survived that attack and was discovered in the hospital
a little while later recovering, and then this brazen operation
(32:17):
with the assistance of the police officers to go and
kidnap her a second time from hospital to if you like,
finish the job. He talked about how she had then
been left to die inside this bus on a farm
kind of a host there outside of the city again
and eventually buried in a shallow grave. And a shallow
grave that keeps getting mentioned, of course, is at the
(32:39):
very house where the letter was discovered. It's behind the garage,
so behind where you would park a car. The side
of the shallow grave is right there, and he kind
of really helps the police piece all of this together
and the domino starts to fall.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
So Eric, the private investigators, and Betty are at the restaurant.
Is there anybody else any other restaurant workers there?
Speaker 2 (33:04):
So it's impossible to tell. We don't know exactly what
transpired there. What we do know is that, according to
to Conway Brown, is that Bessie Kattani was interrogated, then stabbed,
then kidnapped again from hospital and left to die eventually.
So there's kind of a lot that happens around it.
(33:26):
But you know, there isn't this one moment, There isn't
this one evening where this all unfold. The real story, actually,
the story that I try and tell in the book,
is actually of how the investigation managed to bring together
the circumstantial evidence that we do have, because there was
never a smoking gun. You know, nobody burst into the courtroom.
(33:49):
It was rather this amazing case where you had all
of the circumstantial evidence coming together, and then the course
trying to make sense of all of that back it
up a little bit. Let me just say that once
Conway Brown was detained, arrested and questioned and confessed, there
were essentially six men who then were arrested for this crime.
(34:14):
So the first and the most important, I would argue,
is probably a man called Carrington laws He was a
private investigator who, at least according to the trial and
the evidence that emerged, was accused of being the kind
of masterminded at all. He was also the author of
the confessional letter which was proved to the trial itself.
(34:36):
There was also Conway Brown, who was somebody who get
befriended and who worked for Carrington Lawson. They were the
two brothers, both police officers called the Ranger brothers. That
was their surname. And then two out of figures, one
named Dirk and one named four. So essentially there were
(34:56):
six men who were eventually arrested for this crime on
a letter that came out under the carpet. They immediately
went to war against each other, and so Conway Brown
turned state witness. So did them do? So three of
them immediately rolled over and said we're going to cooperate
(35:17):
with the prosecutors. Caringson Lawson and the two police officers,
the Ranger brothers stood firm and did not compare to
anything and decided to stand trial for that particular case, accused,
of course of kidnapping and murdering DESICATII. Something else happened
at the same time, which is that the station level
(35:40):
police officers escalated the case up to a higher level
of the police and the prosecutors, if you like. In
South Africa, so if you imagine, there are detectives that
work at police station level, and then there are always
that work at the provincial level or the national level,
and so this case got bumped up the ranks, if
you like, again because of some connections between the investigators
(36:03):
and some more senior investigators, and so very quickly you
were in a situation where a provincial protective took over
the case, a man named Harold Van Bate, who was
a really seasoned detective who had investigated some really big
crimes in the years that he'd been busy on it.
(36:25):
And the prosecution was very quickly taken on by a
man named Helman Brewdray, who was a senior council. I
don't know what the American equivalence is, but here in
the UK it would be a sault somebody who's kind
of at the top of the legal ladder, if you like.
And so very quickly this case started to become more
(36:46):
high profile, more interesting. I was reporting on the radio,
so it started to the snowballs started to are supposed
to go in terms of how it was being investigated.
When I started reporting on this, the arrested a really
made and that escalation to the senior prosecutors that happened,
and so there was a now for the first time,
(37:07):
a real investigation bolding. So this wasn't now just kind
of routine little interviews and so on. This was a
proper effort to try and get to what actually happened.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Thirteen years later, exactly right.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
And the really interesting part also is that havent Bordering.
I mean, if he passed away sadly during the COVID years,
but if you imagine a giant, a man he was
in africaner and white South African who had worked in
the prosecution service for a really long time and had
also been involved in prosecuting a Party era crimes. So
(37:43):
in other words, he would have been somebody who was
sending he was sending people to the gallows who were
posing a party. If you can imagine that he'd come
from a family of police officers and so on, and
so here he was trying to get justice for this
black woman who had come from the provinces and they
had been murdered by these white men, and so it
was this kind of really interesting dynamic. But he was
(38:05):
the lead prosecutor, kind of was the lead detective now,
and things still moving, and they were trying to find
ways to basically build the case so that they could
take it to trial because they had these six men.
Three of them had confessed that you would never build
a case like that because well, people who fall out
tend to lie about each other. So you need more,
you need more than that. And so they started to
(38:28):
tackle this investigation from different directions. One of the ways
that they were trying to solve it is through the
handwriting analysis, because the letter was hyped, but there was
enough on it in terms of side notes and signature
that could give them a handwriting match.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
There was a signature on this letter correct because he
thought he was going to be dead. I guess correct.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
If you go along with what the courts found, then
this is somebody who's a seasoned investigator used to taking
and making statements. So it almost had the feel of
an affidavit of a police statement. If you like this
confession letter that began with if you're reading this, then
I am dead. And so they started to try and
match their handwriting, but there was a very small sample
(39:14):
and it wasn't quite conclusive enough. And there was this
moment in an investigation where the main detective had this
wonderful idea to go into the prisons and essentially request
all of the letters that parents and Lawton had been
writing in jail, to request very random things like an
eye player or whatever for to listen to some music
(39:35):
or to complain about something. And so they were then
able to do a proper handwriting analysis.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Was he denying that he wrote this letter?
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Oh, right from the beginning, So he was basically he
was basically saying that he was being framed, particularly by
Eric and also by kind of everybody else. But he
was basically and all the way through this case always
maintained that he was the big of somebody who was
trying to bring them and it was, you know, his
line in court was, you know, I remember I was
(40:07):
in the court room the one day and we were
talking and I kind of asked, you know, well, what's
the strategy and carrying some laws and just simply said,
you know, our strategy is simple, prove it. It was almost
a challenge to the prosecutors to say, well, you know,
push this past that level where circumstantial evidence is heavy
enough to actually secure a conviction. And I don't think
(40:28):
that carry Sym Lawson and his team ever imagined that
that could happen. But so the handwriting was really really crucial,
and they brought in some handwriting analysis and that was
part of the case, but it still wasn't enough. A
major major part of this investigation was, well, if you
say that basically Katina was killed, where's her body? Yeah,
(40:52):
you can't have a murder case without a body, because
what happens is between the two years time basic Katania
arrived boats that she had taken to America like you said,
and goes bye, sorry about that, I'm back. So they
needed to prove that she had actually been killed, and
that was really really difficult because they went to the
shallow grave the letter. It was like a pirate matter.
(41:13):
There was an x markster spot, but there was nothing
buried there. And it's interesting because they kept digging it out.
So there were several attempts at it and each time
there was just nothing. And eventually, once the police investigation
kind of escalated high enough, there were a couple of
forensic investigators that were brought in and they were really
(41:34):
well connected and so they were able to reach out
a little bit further and bring in a very specialized
unit that investigates a pritt Era crimes across South Africa.
So if you imagine anti apartheids campaigners or activists who
were taken outs and killed by the state police and
then disappeared, this unit went around and found their bodies
(41:57):
and tried to bring closer to the family. You remember,
we had the kind of the truth and reconciliation process
in South Africa after a parties and so this unit
was really specialized in excavating graves, and so they came
in and I think this was the third or fourth
time they were digging up to spray desperately hoping to
find some evidence, and on this one final attempt they
(42:20):
brought in this very specialized units. They set up kind
of a sifting process to go through everything, and if
you can believe us, six tiny little bones washed up.
So there was nobody There was no skeleton, but there
were six tiny little feet bones that were discovered very quickly,
backed for evidence and captured by the police. But there
(42:44):
was another problem, right because well, what if it was
a bone that belonged to somebody else, what if it
was an animal bone? What it? You know, there were
so many what ifs. The forensic labs in South Africa
had to go tign to all DNA from these little bones.
But the tuble is they'd been in the ground for
over a decade and they were tiny, and they weren't
(43:06):
kind of the kind of bones that were really easy
to work with. So the South African forensic services weren't
able to get DNA from them, which seemed like a
really big setback. But again I keep talking about the
stars aligning. But through some connections and some previous work
that South Africa had done, they were able to reach
out to a forensic laboratory in Bosnia. And the reason
(43:31):
that's interesting is because Bosnia of course had gone through
its own Balkan walls, and so the experts there were
incredibly skilled at pulling DNA from incredibly decomposed and damaged
tiny pieces of bone. And so they went to the
International Commission for Missing Persons and managed to find some
(43:52):
experts there who said, well, give us a crack, and
so these bones were then shipped off to Bosnia and
there they managed to get a hit and match the
DNA to Bensicatanese family. And I know that it's difficult
for a global audience to understand this, but for South
Africa to do that level of investigation, it's almost unheard of.
(44:13):
I mean, it's a really huge effort to unbirth the truth,
to bring in forensic experts, to find international partners to
DHL samples across and then to invite those experts to
come and testify in a country. And it was incredible
because Carryings and Lawson and the two brothers put up
(44:35):
as legal defense. Carrington was represented by one of the
country's top lawyers, top criminal lawyers, who was really well
known around the country. So they had an incredibly powerful
defense team. And they were grilling the handwriting and analysts.
They were grilling the people who turned against each other,
(44:58):
and they were grilling DNA experts who blew over from Bosnia.
But there was an incredibly solid witness who blew over
I think the same was Thomas Parsons, and he was
kind of this incredibly seasoned investigations that he had done
a million different court cases. I think he was. He'd
been involved in a lot of the kind of international
(45:20):
genocide cases and so on. And as he was being grilled,
there was this line, I'll never forget it. He said,
you know, to me, it doesn't really matter what happened
to this bone. It could have been picked up by
a blackbird and dropped on my desk. She was trying
to defend the kind of the chain of custody, said,
it doesn't really matter because the kind of test that
(45:40):
you do to call DNA out of these bones, you know,
they simply don't lie. You can't plant DNA inside the bone.
And so that DNA evidence really really stuck, and it
gave the prosecution a body, It gave them handwriting analysis,
it gave them the testimony of those who had turned
state witness, and suddenly it's impossible. If you imagine a
(46:03):
kitchen with all of these ingredients scattered everywhere, Suddenly it
all came together into this one case. And in that
case took four years to work its way through the
legal system in South Africa. Wow, but work its way
through the legal system it did. The lead investigator, which
I told you about how Van Bake I think he
was on the stand for about eight days and had
(46:23):
a breakdown while he was testifying, got hostitialized, came back
and finished the job. You know. The prosecutors that what
they could to present all of their evidence, and it
was an incredible, incredible case to follow.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
What do you think was the message that was being
telegraphed out to South Africa to have all of these
top prosecutors to have this investigation the DNA analysis. Why
do this for you know, a woman, particularly a black
woman from not a very you know, a nice area.
(46:58):
I mean, what really was the whole point was this political?
What were they doing?
Speaker 2 (47:03):
I don't think it was political.
Speaker 3 (47:05):
I think that I mean, I genuinely believe that the
people who were involved in this case, kind of right
down from the station level all the way up to
the very top levels of prosecutors and police offers, I think.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
That they wanted to solve the case. I think they
were genuinely drawn in by the mystery. I think it
was one of those cases that does not come around Austin.
I think it's a once in a career case for
many of these police officers and prosecutors and so on.
And then I think as it went further and further along,
as it got to the High Court, as it was
(47:41):
kind of challenged in the Supreme Court, as it was
appealed in the Constitutional Court, it kind of brought a
different message, and that is this equality before the law. Right,
It's this idea that you don't have to be rich,
or white or powerful to get justice. It's an idea
that ratically at least you know, a justice system should
(48:02):
be blind, is to treat everybody the same. And so
I think it definitely kind of carried that message. And
I'm looking at a copy of the book now and
as a quote on it at the back by a
lady called tulimadon Sella who was the nation's public protector.
She led an oversight units that was basically trying to
keep anigh on the government and what it was spending.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
We would say in America, a watchdog.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
A watchdog, and she is an incredibly respected woman, Tulia
modon Sella, and her quote is a relentless search for
truth and justice. Cold case compassion is a story that
inspires confidence in the system and the firms that indeed
we are all equal before the law. And I think
that was an interesting aspect. And you asked me right
(48:48):
at the beginning about some of the major themes, and
that that was definitely one of them. I remember being
asked to write for a global policy magazine about what
is said about the South African justice system to the
outside world. African justice system all often seems kind of
like a wild wild West, so like a jungle and
corrupt and unfair and so on. But then at the
(49:09):
same time that this was happening, we had all these
other big cases. You probably wouldn't remember, but there was
the case of a man who had been extradited from
the UK to Central for killing his wife. This was
the divine case there was to ask for the stories,
case that blew into town and also kind of showed
the power of our That was another case that I
reported on too, so the Pastorias case and so on,
(49:32):
and so I think at that particular time, the South
African justice system was being looked at by the world,
and this was a story that told a very different tale,
a tale that if you get the right people together,
if you put in the effort, if you overlook some
of the kind of the differences of the past and
so on, if you don't just assume that cases and
poor neighborhoods don't need to be investigated, you can altogether
(49:55):
these most incredible investigations and you can give closure to families.
And you know, I was there that on the day
that it all came together and there was a guilty
verdict and character lawson was sentenced to thirty years in jail.
The Ranger brothers were sent to jail, and I was
there with when the family got that news. I was
(50:16):
there when they made a trip up to Johannesburg from
the Eastern Cape. So essentially it's quite difficult to explain,
but it was a spiritual ceremony to try and bring
Betty Posiini spurred back home to the Eastern Cape. So
they went to the grave site. Now with the bones
having been discovered there they could put some of that
earth into a coffin and bring her home. They went
(50:38):
to the bus where she was left to die and
perform some ceremonies. If I paused for a second, I
can kind of stop feel them in my rib cage.
And then they took her coffin back home to the
Eastern Cape. They were able to bury her and essentially
to make peace with the ancestors. And that's that's a
hugely important thing. And I think that the story in
(51:01):
many ways for that sale too, along with this incredible
kind of a nice investigation and who had done it
and so on.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
So the folks, so I guess that was the Ranger
brothers and Conway Brown. Those are the folks who took
plea deals. Is that what they did?
Speaker 2 (51:19):
No, it's so confusing because there are so many characters.
We have to actually publish a couple of pages to
guide people through all the characters. Initially, so Conway Brown
was the kind of the first Domino that fell. Without him,
nothing would have gone any further. If he had just
clammed up and kind of said, I'm not talking to you,
there's a good chance that this would never have been solved.
(51:40):
But he spoilt everything else. And then Paul and Dirk
were also then the characters who took the plea bargains.
Charents in Lawton, who was the author of the confession,
and the Ranger brothers stood firm and they didn't take
any plea bargains and they rolled the diets and said
we can see this and we believe that we're going
(52:01):
to get acquitted. But in the end, ultimately just to
me that remained to get sent to jail. They were
convicted for it. Conway Bryan also spent time in jail,
by the way, which is where him and I had
many many interviews. And the Ranger brothers too had spent
time in jail. I think they'd been released. Paul and
(52:21):
Dirk some deals, and so you kind of had different
characters turning on each other, but the author and the
two police brothers were the ones that wanted to see
the trial through.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
Wow and Carrington never ever kind of after the conviction
or appeals. He never caught to writing that letter that
ruined so many people, Thank goodness.
Speaker 2 (52:43):
No, So I mean I had made a huge punts
of efforts to try and hear more of his story,
to interview him, to present it. I was fortunate in
the fact that he spent many days on the witness
stamp too, and so I am able to represent his
side of the story to a huge extent because it
was running through the course. But the reality on it
(53:06):
is that you know, there are so many questions left
an answered here, and you know this is a story
that spreads out than just Bosnia. It's actually I talk
about it in the book, but it's it's a case
and a story that takes place across five different countries.
So you have South Africa where it kind of all
plays out. Then you have Bosnia that helped with the
(53:29):
actual DNA investigation. You have somebody who's in New Zealand
who the lesson was actually addressed to, who's never come
forward and was never tracked down. There were a couple
of people in Australia that played its new role, including
the daughter of the restaurant who was never extradited. Although
there was a lot of talk about that, and there
(53:51):
was even a UK link was one of carrying some
DX wives who also played a kind of a role
in the story but never came through. And the story
kind of went across the globe. And there are many
many pieces still missing there. And one of the ones
that I'm most fascinated by is, well, why did Conway
not take that letter after hiding it? How could somebody
(54:14):
forget a letter that's important and then just move out
of the rented home and leave it lying under the carpets.
I think I got close to some of the answers
through the interviews with him. I also feel like I
got pretty close to why the letter would have been
written to begin with, because if you look at all
(54:34):
of the inviting that was going on, I think probably
some more of an insurance policy in case something happened.
So if you can picture the scene, you feel like
somebody like Eric or somebody else would be out to
get you. You are probably a little worried about it,
so you would write this letter, give it to a
friend who hide never imagine your friend would then just
(54:56):
forget it under a carpet, and then the rest of
course this ste but you know all of that is explored. Obviously,
it much creates a detail, and I know that you know,
talking about it now, it kind of feels a little
bit like a strobe light onto a really interesting story.
But hopefully that gives you the thread. And as I said,
the beauty of that of the book is that it
was written very naturally along the process of the trial,
(55:19):
and so it kind of lays it out very chronologically
and gives you that lovely merriage of building up of
course to the end, will those who who are responsible
for essentially get justice.
Speaker 1 (55:41):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, All About the
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and
Don't forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(56:02):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Amerosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer.
Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff,
and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook
(56:24):
at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more.
And if you know of a historical crime that could
use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked,
email us at info at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also
take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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