days in South-West Africa, when Gerda had left school and moved in with the Therons.
Today Elsa (divorced in the meantime) lives in George in the Southern Cape and, with her two sons, upholds the family tradition of hard work. They operate a successful family business, renting out heavy construction machinery, also to the mining industry up north. Elsa also has a daughter, now finished with school, who many people consider to be even more beautiful than her older cousin, Charlize. She has albums filled with newspaper clippings and photos of Charlize, and the cousins keep hoping that one day they will be reunited with Charlize.
In numerous conversations Elsa has talked openly about the lives and fates of the family, presenting me with a chronicle, warts and all. What hurts the family, what they don’t understand, is why Gerda and Charlize summarily cut their ties with the Therons. Moreover, why Charlize’s father was presented to the international media as an alcoholic and a scoundrel, initially even accused of assaulting his wife and daughter.
Elsa’s version of the domestic tragedy differs from that of Charlize, who had never mentioned it before 2000. Elsa remembers how she often used to lie on their bed with Charles and Gerda, chatting. Charles would read the paper, or sometimes peel oranges for them while they were talking. He liked to eat his oranges with salt. (In Hollywood Hills, Charlize likes to make freshly squeezed orange juice from the oranges that grow in her own garden.) But Elsa also admits that her brother, like other males in her family (even those related by marriage), liked to party around a bottle. And where there is drink, one can expect trouble.
As a prelude to the fatal events, Elsa goes back to Sunday, 16 June 1991. She and Gerda took their children to the church next to the primary school, as was their custom. After the service, Elsa and Gerda waited outside in the winter sun while their children attended Sunday school. Elsa knew that Gerda was worried about her marriage and asked whether it wouldn’t be better if she and Charles got divorced. Gerda replied that she felt she had to stay for Charlize’s sake, and, besides, she added, the finances of the business were too complicated.
The next Thursday, Charles attended an auction in Pretoria, where there was heavy machinery for sale. He ate two meat pies and arrived at his sister’s house with a fish – a snoek, as a matter of fact. He asked Elsa to give the fish to Gerda. Late in the afternoon Elsa drove to Gerda’s house with the fish. Gerda was unresponsive, didn’t want the fish, rejected Charles’s peace offering. That evening Charles dined in a restaurant with some business associates and his brother Danie.
The next afternoon, Friday, 21 June 1991, Gerda took Charlize to a studio in Johannesburg to have photographs taken for the portfolio she would need to enter the Rooi Rose modelling competition. Charles didn’t want to go along and chose to spend the afternoon at his sister’s house instead. His brother Danie and his wife, Engela, had come from Kuruman for a visit. When Danie came to visit, he always stayed with his sister Elsa, for he and Gerda did not get along.
Danie had bought a new pickup and he took Charles for a drive. On their way back they stopped at a bottle store in Rynfield for a 20-ml bottle of Underberg, a bitter herbal drink used as an aperitif. Charles complained of a headache and said that the pies he had eaten the previous day had upset his stomach. He hoped the Underberg would help. Danie bought a bottle of vodka.
Back at Elsa’s place, the family sat around the kitchen table: Danie and his wife, Engela, and Elsa and the kids. Elsa’s husband, Jacques, was away on a business trip. Everyone was in high spirits. The boys, especially, liked to listen to Charles’s stories. He liked to regale them with tales about hunting and animals. That evening the kids were entranced as he demonstrated how little birds are fed by their mothers. In the early evening, amid all the chatter, Elsa and Engela made coffee and sandwiches. Danie poured vodka for himself and for Charles. Charles also drank the Underberg for his stomach.
That was how Elsa described the scene around her kitchen table during the first part of that evening, which would end so tragically. This scene of everyday domesticity differs drastically from the speculation by journalist and author Lin Sampson, in an essay in her book Now You’ve Gone and Killed Me. The Therons consider it just another attempt to portray them as a clan of unsophisticated plot dwellers, whom Charlize and Gerda were lucky to escape from; plot dwellers with a pickup in the driveway, eating Vienna sausages and biltong for supper.
“The drink lent an air of drama and bravado to a night in which past hurts fluttered like wounded birds,” Sampson wrote. “Perhaps they remembered that Gerda had once threatened – as Engela later testified – to shoot Danie and Charles and spread their brains on the walls. Perhaps they were aware that Engela felt Charles was married to a ‘possessive woman’ who had him ‘under her thumb’, as she also told the hearing. They might have talked, too, of all the times Charles had been locked out of his own house.”
According to Elsa, the family decided to let it be, not to persist in trying to give their side of the story to counter all the untruths being sent into the world. It would just bring them further hurt.
She tells how Gerda and Charlize stopped in front of the house after the photo session at about half past nine that Friday evening. Gerda stood in the kitchen door and asked Charles for their house key. He invited her in, asked her to wait five minutes, and they could drive home together. But Gerda didn’t want to sit down, and said that she and Charlize were leaving. She walked out with the key.
When Charlize came out of the toilet, having followed her mother inside, Charles asked her why she hadn’t greeted anybody on her way in. He had taught her good manners, she was supposed to greet people when she entered a room, especially her own family. But Charlize followed her mother outside.
The atmosphere in the kitchen was suddenly tense. Charles was upset, the jovial mood had been spoilt. He went to the telephone on the kitchen wall and phoned home. He talked to Charlize. Elsa and the rest of the fami-ly could hear that Charles was upset. He slammed the phone down. If she locked him out again, he threatened, he was going to shoot the lock to pieces. He had a small .22 pistol with him that he had borrowed from a friend because he was considering buying it from him.
Elsa told him not to be stupid, and advised him to sleep in the caravan if he needed to. She remembers that he put a comforting hand on her shoulder and asked his brother Danie to take him home in his new pickup. To reach his house, just four street blocks away, they had to drive up Cloverdene Road and make a right turn into Seventh Road. Number 56 was a few hundred metres along, on the left side of the street, hidden behind a high wall and trees.
As they walked out, Charles asked Elsa whether he could sleep at her house if Gerda had locked him out. The caravan was too cold, he said.
She laughed and assured him that she would always have room for him.
Charles walked out, wearing his leather jacket against the cold. Danie went along reluctantly, for he and Gerda avoided each other.
Elsa says her two brothers had barely been gone ten minutes when an alarmed worker came to call them, speaking about a shooting at Charles’s house. Elsa and Engela hurried to Seventh Road and found Gerda in the kitchen. She was leaning against the stove, clad in her winter pyjamas. Elsa smelt gunpowder and asked Gerda: “What happened? Where’s Charles?”
Gerda answered: “In the bedroom . . .”
When Elsa reached the main bedroom, Charles was lying on his stomach between the bed and the wardrobe with its yellow doors, at the entrance to the en-suite bathroom. She saw blood on the back of his leather jacket. She knelt and turned his head to look at his face. She called out his name. Under her hand his face was still warm. His glasses were broken.
Shortly afterwards the police and a doctor arrived. Charlize was sitting in the lounge, covered
