After a few seconds, the eyes of Evaron’s assailant widened with shock and he ran away without explanation. Evaron turned again toward Amy. “She was being butchered to death.”
A scrawny slip of a teenager with dark skin had grabbed a bunch of Amy’s hair to steady her, and, balancing himself upon her legs, rained down on her head with a brick, slamming it into her skull once, twice, three times. He stood up and kicked her with all the strength he could muster, landing a blow to her torso, and then bent down again with his brick.
“Like wild animals,” Amy’s friend Maletsatsi told an American news team several years later.
Others muscled in, some short, light-skinned boys with bricks. They wanted a part of the action. Then the handsome man who had tripped Amy pushed his way into the center of the mob and he, too, brought down a large stone upon her head. He turned to a friend on the outskirts of the group.
“Give me your knife,” he demanded in Xhosa. His friend handed over a six-inch switchblade. The others stepped away to give the man space. He knelt down on Amy’s thighs.
“What did I do?” Amy asked. “I’m sorry.”
He plunged the knife, all the way to its hilt, into Amy’s body, just beneath her left breast, puncturing the soft blue-white skin, inserting the blade straight into her heart.
The Gugulethu police station on NY1 is about a quarter mile from the Caltex. At around 4:40 P.M. that winter Wednesday, a rangy young cop named Leon Rhodes was sitting in a police truck. Back in the 1990s, the South African Police often drove small yellow pickups with narrow cages built into the back flatbeds, where criminals were placed for transport. They still have similar trucks, and I once saw one at that very Caltex, where a cop was filling its tires with air. A shirtless handcuffed man, missing a couple of teeth, sat in the back, wailing loudly. I peered in, before the cop waved me away.
“Will they take the handcuffs off soon?” I asked Easy, who was with me at the time.
“No, they gonna punish him, throw tear gas in, leave him until someone feel for him and unlock him,” Easy said, with some exaggeration. “Now he’s facing layers and layers and layers of pain.”
Rhodes was one of the only white police officers in Gugulethu, twenty-nine years old and a ten-year veteran. He’d been working in Gugulethu for most of his career. He had just returned to the station from following up on a radio call that reported a truck being stoned in a far corner of the township. Rhodes sat in his vehicle in the driveway, filling out paperwork. Suddenly, a harried man rushed through the open metal gates and rapped on the driver’s side window. Rhodes looked up.
“You must seriously and urgently go down the road,” the man said in Afrikaans, a language black people were required to learn at school. “They’re stoning a vehicle with a white lady by the Caltex.”
Rhodes revved the car and took a sharp turn out of the station, immediately crossed the light at Lansdowne Road, and sped north toward the garage. He could see stones and glass glinting on the road in the distance. A crowd of people was gathered around the gas station, spanning up and down the street. On the residential side, to Rhodes’s left, young people were chanting and toyi-toyi-ing. The people in the street made way, and Rhodes drove through.
As the yellow police vehicle approached, the mob by the station broke up, its members disappearing into the slim side streets, over back fences, over walls, through alleys, into settlements, into houses. The toyi-toyi of some spectators grew less enthusiastic and the chants diminished. Rhodes could see a white woman now, standing, supported by two black women and a colored man. Her small chest rose and fell. She let out no words, only sobs.
A battered car lay on its side, pitted by stones, splattered with petrol. Rhodes parked near the exit where Amy stood.
After nearly a decade in Gugulethu—and one of the deadliest in South African history, at that—Rhodes was used to death and mayhem. He knew his colleagues of all colors smacked around suspects, and he knew vigilante cops did whatever they wished to township residents. He had clocked dozens of hours sitting at the edges of settlements, watching people kill each other for a variety of reasons: girls, domestic issues, family feuds, vigilante justice, turf battles, political dustups, drunkenness, unbridled and unspecified pain and fury, ennui. He couldn’t drive back into those ganglands, since the sandy pathways didn’t allow for cars, and he was just a single cop on the beat, a man with no interest in walking alone into a war.
So he had grown accustomed to simply watching small massacres from the sidelines, in the vague hope that his presence might deter some residents from killing other residents. On more occasions than he could count, he’d rolled into work in the dawn hours to find a body or two, revealed by the morning light, strewn across the streets. He’d seen death and ferocity up close nearly every week. All that was remarkable about this particular case was the color of the victim’s skin. He had never seen a white person beaten in Gugulethu. Sure, some delivery drivers had been struck by pebbles and scratched up, maybe their vehicles damaged by bricks, but they usually sped off.
Rhodes pulled up to Amy and asked if she was okay. She let out a low moan. Her hair was so thick, Rhodes thought, and so matted with blood—was it blond or brown? Her eyes, open but blank, rolled back into her head, yet she remained standing. After such a blunt force injury, “your brain just basically dies and deteriorates,” Rhodes told me, after I’d tracked him down to his modest single-level home in a small working-class neighborhood. He was a slender, clean-shaven man with a neat haircut and strong forearms. In his blue jeans, work boots, and checked shirt, he looked like he could just as well be baling hay in Kansas.
He’d stayed with the police force after the transition to a democratic South Africa, but had grown convinced that he could never rise in the ranks, and after twenty-six years serving the citizens of Cape Town he had retired early, at the lowly rank of warrant officer. Before 1994, Rhodes theorized, he worked too closely with black colleagues for the National Party to trust him; after 1994, he was too white for the ANC to promote him.
Rhodes had been working on his anger management issues since his retirement, so he quickly subverted this bitterness, composed himself, and shared with me a newspaper clipping from November 1993, headlined AMY BIEHL’S FINAL MOMENTS. His mother, bursting with pride that her son had been quoted testifying in the criminal trial on the front page of the Cape Argus, had kept it in a plastic folder for eighteen years. Next to the cover story was a column detailing President Bill Clinton’s praise for Linda and Peter Biehl, dotted with head shots of the couple.
Rhodes sat before me on a pink velour love seat, a doily behind his head. Nearby, a rosy-cheeked ceramic maiden peeked out from between two thriving golden pothos plants in copper pots. His wife, absent that day, had arranged amber bottles along a shelf, hung a framed oil painting of a generic alpine scene above the fireplace, and dotted the room with sculptures of roosters. Two small, silken dogs whined to protest their temporary confinement in the garage.
“Looking at her, she was already a goner,” Rhodes said of Amy.
His first instinct was to remove Amy from the scene, and he needed to extricate himself, too. A cop of any color could be a prime target in this sort of situation. The people were still chanting, though with waning verve, “One settler, one bullet.”
Rhodes opened the back of the van and, together with Evaron, loaded Amy onto the cold metal floor. Sindiswa and Maletsatsi followed, letting out escalating howls. Rhodes’s instinct was to ferry Amy to certain safety, so instead of driving to the nearby hospital,
