Honour the dead – understand their last moments – face the horror

Autopsy — taken from the Greek “autopsia” meaning “to see with one’s own eyes.”

The post-mortem, criminal autopsy is where the body reveals and surrenders the secrets of rapists, killers, murderers and butchers. The secrets of death from “unnatural causes”, the traces left by the lives of those who think they will escape justice.

A month after Hannah’s rape and murder, and just a few kilometres from the Cornelius home in scenic Scarborough, the mutilated body of 14-year-old Camron Britz was found in the bushes alongside Slangkop Road near Ocean View. Her killer had shoved grass and reeds into her mouth before strangling her with the pink lace of her hoodie and sodomising and raping her.

Anna and Willem wanted to honour their only daughter. They wanted the world to remember her as the bright, clever and outgoing young woman she was. Consumed by the unfathomable grief of parents who have lost a child this way, they wanted to turn the horror into something healing.

That is how I found myself sitting across from them in a shady restaurant a year ago as Anna begged me to help make something of her dream.

In April this year Anna Cornelius drowned.

The 56-year-old criminal lawyer had gone for a swim in the ocean she, Hannah, Willem (a former chief magistrate) and their son Dries, who suffers from severe autism, knew and loved so well.

Anna had just recovered from a bout of flu when she had sought peace and solace in the water. Anna was a tiny ball of energy and determination. Her gentle and piercing blue eyes, when they were not filled with the tears she fought to hold back, shone with commitment and love.

For the past week, in the trial of the four men who are accused of abducting Hannah and Cheslin and then later assaulting them both and murdering and raping Hannah, have made front page headlines. Willem, still mourning the death of his daughter and wife, has not attended the trial. There is no need. Nothing can be done to assuage this monumental loss.

In the same court, the sentencing of a 40-year-old man who poisoned, strangled, smothered and then raped the three-year-old Courtney Pieters after she had died, before breaking every bone in her body in order to bury her in a in a shallow grave in Elsies River, was expected to take place.

This week the Cape High Court heard how Cheslin had been bundled into the boot of Hannah’s small car before he had been taken to a field, hit on the head with a brick and left.

The men then drove off with Hannah.

Anna, on the day she and Willem met me, let slip a crucial detail.

She had told me that as a criminal lawyer she had had to peruse the autopsy reports of many young women killed and raped by the clients she had been paid to represent in the past.

“Now I am looking at my own daughter’s autopsy report,” she told me, staring straight ahead.

We know now what Anna and Willem knew then.

After the three men, later joined by a fourth, forced Cheslin into the boot they forced Hannah to sit in the front passenger seat.

What followed was a prolonged nightmare of a journey where the men drove around attempting to score drugs between pulling over to smoke. Cheslin, who broke down several times while testifying, said that he had heard Hannah “speaking softly” asking the men what they were going to do to Cheslin and what it was they wanted.

After dumping Cheslin the four men drove Hannah to a deserted spot where they repeatedly raped and sodomised her, stabbed her with the knife and the screwdriver and had dropped a rock on her head, perhaps more than once.

Hannah was found by police lying face down, her jeans ripped off to below her knees. When her body had been turned over, the investigating officer testified that blood had oozed out of her eyes and mouth.

At the weekend I drove to Scarborough and to the place in the ocean where Anna’s lifeless body had tumbled out of the sea. It was a magnificent day and as an achingly beautiful orange ball of a sun set I stood on the shoreline thinking of Anna, Hannah and all the women, children and girls and boys of South Africa who have died horrific deaths at the hands of men.

We can cry an ocean of tears for them all but until we find the source of this extraordinary rage towards women and children, until we fix the circumstances that deliver this capacity for such cruelty and heartlessness, until the criminal justice system begins to work for the women of this country, we drown, each day, in our private sorrows. DM