Stellenbosch is world renowned for its wine, gorgeous scenery, and beautiful people. It’s the home of students working towards their future, successful businessmen and respected professors. But don’t let the luxury and blue mountains fool you. The sleepy town hides numerous crimes that rocked this community, the country and the world. The acclaimed author and journalist Julian Jansen’s third book reads like a crime novel and contains never before published information on each of the crimes.
An extract has been republished below with permission from the publishers.
TW: descriptions of sexual violence and gender-based violence.
FELICITY CILLIERS: Justice thanks to a father’s perseverance
Eleven years had passed since the murder of his beloved daughter, and no one would have blamed Johannes Cilliers for losing hope that justice would ever be served in her case. But the broken-hearted father continued to pressurise the police. He shared his suspicions about the murder with them, again showed them where the murder took place, and kept insisting that a breakthrough in this cold case was possible.
The tragic tale began on Wednesday 30 May 2007. On the farm Longlands, between Stellenbosch and Kuils River, a man who was on his way to work early in the morning made a gruesome discovery in the vineyards. Among bare grapevines, a half-naked woman lay on her left side. Under her head was a large stone. Her denim skirt was pulled up.
As the man went closer to investigate, he saw blood on the woman’s head. Next to the body was a hole in the ground, as if someone had been digging a grave. The shocked man ran off to call the workers nearby. The deceased was the 28-year-old Felicity Cilliers, a seasonal worker.
Two days earlier, the single mother of three young boys had been at her parental home in the nearby Vlottenburg area when she had gone to borrow sugar from her sister, Dalene. That was the last time she was seen alive. Her father, Johannes, and the community searched for her for five days. Magdalena Papier, with whom Felicity stayed, said that at about 21:00 on that Saturday she had sent Felicity to Dalene to borrow sugar. Dalene recounted that Felicity had left without the sugar. She became worried the next day when she heard that Felicity had never returned to Papier’s house. Felicity’s minor children, one still a baby, were getting anxious; they missed their mother. Two days later, Dalene reported her sister missing at the Stellenbosch police station.
A family friend, Andrew (Wiele) Jordaan, who had also participated in the search, told investigating officer Koos Brand and other police officers that he had seen Felicity that evening at a 21st birthday party. The two of them had later gone to his house and had consensual sex. They then returned to the party. That was the last time he had seen Felicity, Jordaan said. During the autopsy, the pathologist, Dr Deidre Abrahams, found that the deceased had been struck with a blunt object on the head, face and neck. The blows had been so forceful that her lower jaw was fractured.
There was also evidence of vaginal penetration with ‘excessive force’, blood aspiration (inhalation of blood into the trachea and lungs) and slight swelling of the brain. Abrahams recorded the cause of death as ‘blunt trauma’ and ‘strangulation’. Two suspects who were arrested were later released, as their DNA could not be linked to the DNA collected during the autopsy.
A few months after Felicity’s body was found, there was a similar discovery on a neighbouring farm, Goedvertrouw. The half-naked body of 17-year-old Samantha Sauls was found in a naartjie orchard. She, too, had wounds to her head that appeared to have been inflicted by a blunt object.
Samantha was the daughter of Edwin and Amanda Joon. The latter had mixed feelings when she heard that the 22-year-old Jordaan had been arrested for the murder of her teenage daughter. She cried out: ‘Oh no, I just hope it’s not someone I’ve had in my house!’ Samantha’s parental home was a stone’s throw from Felicity’s, and their bodies were discovered 2km apart. Could it have been possible for the police to see a connection between the two murders at that stage already?
During that time, residents said that another woman from Vlottenburg had narrowly escaped being raped one weekend and had managed to flee from her alleged attacker. Amanda Joon told a tabloid newspaper she had been living on the farm for more than 30 years, but this tranquil area had now become a ‘place of murder’: ‘It seems to me that they watch you, they follow you. And it’s not strangers, it’s people you know. Why did he have to hurt her?’
She wanted to look Jordaan in the eye at his court appearance and ask him: Why did you do it?
Her family had known him for a considerable time and could not believe that it might have been him, but other people who knew him told the police that Jordaan had long had his eye on Felicity. He had apparently kept pestering her to have sex with him, but she’d refused. The farm community started raising fears of a serial killer in their midst, and many people were scared to leave their homes at night.
A police spokesperson, Superintendent Billy Jones, dismissed the allegations about a serial killer as pure speculation. He could not or would not say whether the murders of Samantha and Felicity were connected and just stated that the police were investigating all possibilities. On 20 June, Jordaan confessed to Samantha’s murder before Magistrate Nobby Mzamo.
According to Samantha’s uncle, Dawid Lukas, the accused was a family friend and lived in the same house as the deceased. He said ‘the pest’ was constantly pursuing the deceased, and on the day she disappeared, Jordaan and Samantha had been ‘very lovey- when they left his house. But before that, they had drunk papsak wine, sung and told stories. When Samantha decided towards the afternoon to go to her boyfriend’s house on a neighbouring farm, Jordaan accompanied her and the pair walked off with their arms around each other. Following a plea agreement with the state, Jordaan was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment.
Meanwhile, Felicity’s killer was still at large, and this was where investigating officer Koos Brand and his team of detectives may have dropped the ball. It was too much of a coincidence that there had been two murders in the same area and in the same commu-nity in the space of three months and that there were striking simi-larities between the circumstances of the murders. Both of the vic-tims were women, both had been hit with a blunt object and both had been left for dead half-naked, in a vineyard and an orchard, respectively.
In 2022, a member of Brand’s investigating team tried to explain that they had sent off the DNA found at Felicity’s murder scene for analysis and that, at the time of Samantha’s murder, they had still been awaiting the results. At that point, prior to Samantha’s murder, the DNA of Felicity’s killer had not yet been in the police’s database.
‘When Andrew Jordaan was interrogated about the murder, he decided to enter into a plea agreement with the state. The police were probably so excited that Jordaan had confessed to Samantha’s murder that they forgot about the unsolved murder of Felicity. That docket of Felicity was still open, but they never investigated whether Jordaan might be linked to it. Besides, Brand retired around that time.’
A decade later, and only as a result of continuous pressure on the part of Felicity’s father, Johannes Cilliers, the investigation into her death was taken over by Sergeant Kelvin Moses, who again started questioning people.
Among other things, Cilliers had to point out to Moses the site where his daughter’s body had been discovered 10 years earlier. He showed Moses a newspaper report about the murder and told him the story of Samantha’s murder, and that a man from Vlottenburg had been arrested for Samantha’s murder shortly after that of his daughter, and that her body had been found in similar circumstances as his daughter’s.
Cilliers told him Jordaan had been one of the last people to see his murdered daughter alive, and that the very same Jordaan had been jailed for Samantha’s murder. He had already been released on parole and was living in Zoar in the Southern Cape. Moses’s interest was aroused at once. He immediately went to dig out the docket for Felicity’s murder from the police archives. He wanted to check whether there were any similarities between the modus operandi of the two crimes. In the docket, 387/06/2007, Moses saw that the deceased had been strangled, raped and left for dead in a vineyard. In light of this information, he decided to make Samantha’s convicted killer a person of interest. Jordaan was in his sights.
