Tunnel Theft of 1977: ‘We will probably never know who did it’

The Krugersdorp News received an overwhelming response from the community about the article, Revisiting the notorious Tunnel Theft, which featured on the front page of the May 3 edition.

To recap, over the Easter weekend of 1977, one of South Africa’s biggest thefts took place.

This happened when someone under the alias ‘Mr Nightingale’ dug a tunnel from a vacant shop in the CBD to the vault in Standard Bank, and stole the equivalent of around R20 million today. The only suspect, Mr Nightingale, was never found. The Tunnel Theft has caused many theories and speculations from the community on who committed the crime.

One of these theories was in the spirit of a joke among friends.

Willem Swanepoel was working at a mining company at the time of the theft, and everyone at the company had different theories about it. Willem said that when the identikit of Mr Nightingale was published in the newspaper, all his colleagues saw similarities between the identikit and a co-worker named John, due to the curly hair. On top of this, John lived on Nightingale Street in Rant-en-Dal and was a miner in his younger days. This was a joke in the workplace that John’s’ colleagues should give the info to the police to investigate him. The only reason they did not do this, was because, at the time of the theft, John was always in the presence of someone at work. Willem also added that John was also too civilised to be involved in such acts.

A Mr Van der Merwe also gave a promising theory.

According to Van der Merwe, he was a repo man in 1977, where he had the task of repossessing a blue bakkie in Witpoortjie. When he arrived at the house where the bakkie was supposed to be, nobody was home. He said he asked the neighbours where the owner was, and they told him the owner has not been home in a couple of days. Van der Merwe proceeded to break into the premises to look for the bakkie, where he allegedly found expensive watches around the house, and mining equipment, including mining struts, lights and pickaxes in the garage. He says that the biggest clue he found was a blueprint of the Standard Bank in the garage, but he never told anybody, including the police, about this. Six months later they found the bakkie in Johannesburg, where it was filled with dirt in the back.

The most plausible theory was by retired Lieutenant General Johan de Beer, one of the investigating officers of the theft. Johan said this was in his 42 years as a police officer, the most professionally executed theft he had ever seen. He said that the thieves must have been mining engineers due to how professional and precise the theft was executed.

“I still believe to this day, that the thieves must have been foreigners, and they must have left the country within the weekend the theft took place. I also suspect that the thieves went to Australia, because six months after the theft, a theft took place there, with details relating almost the same as the tunnel theft here. If I were to find out today who did it, I would walk up to them and shake their hands,” Johan said.