Two Bits – Do you believe in ghosts?

This was a question I was confronted with this week when a police forensics team, accompanied by a television crew, pitched up on Blythedale main beach with a mechanical digger and spades in yet another attempt to solve the mystery of six missing girls.
About a year ago, I had a call from a SATV journalist who wanted any information I had on construction in the Blythedale beach area around 1988 – 1990. She said she was working on a ‘big story’ and was quite guarded about it, as journalists tend to be about their ‘scoops’. So I said okay, I’d look for material but I want to be tipped off she was ready to break the story. I managed to find some articles about Blythedale in our archives and emailed them off, then forgot about it.
I was up to my elbows repairing my pool pump last Wednesday afternoon when I got a message from her, “Police digging for Gert van Rooyen victims.” I grabbed my camera and set off. Sitting on the beach watching the police digging away, I gradually heard how the day’s events had come about.
About 15 months ago the journalist, Alet Wright, got a phone call from a man who used to live in Blythedale. His was a strange story. His two-year-old son had found a new friend and, not uncommonly at that age, the friend was invisible. I have no idea why kids invent invisible friends, but there you have it.
The man and his wife (who want to remain anonymous) didn’t think much of it, until one day it came out that the invisible friend was, in fact, dead. Questioning him, they found out that the friend, whose name was “Sheraton”, was a girl and she had told the little boy that she had been beaten by bad people.
The man thought this was all a child’s fantasy until one day he got the shock of his life. He saw, he says, a little blonde girl standing at the end of his swimming pool. One moment she was there, the next – gone!
Alet wasn’t sure what to make of this tale, until she contacted a spiritualist who goes by the name of La-Renta Marx. (I know, I know, but you can’t make things like that up). She was absolutely convinced that the child had been speaking the truth. What’s more, she said, there were two, maybe three, bodies of little girls buried on or next to the beach, probably under a pipeline of some kind.
One of the articles I had passed on to Alet was from The North Coast Courier of October 13, 1989, about the then new parking area and ablution block at Blythedale.
That sparked her interest and with a little more digging she found out that the project had included a storm water drain onto the beach. She reckoned she had found a possible burial site.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention that Van Rooyen and his lover and accomplice, Joey Haarhoff, had spent a weekend at Blythedale in a house they had rented from the Stassen family in ‘89. Police tore up that house later, looking for bodies of three girls they thought might have been their victims at the time, Odette Boucher (11), Anne-Marie Wapenaar (12) and Yolande Wessels (13).
I felt a little sceptical – no, quite a lot sceptical – that they would find anything after 25 years, but the police forensics team were quite earnest. They declared an area around the pipeline a crime scene and set to work with a will. The leader, a brigadier whose name I didn’t catch, said they felt there was enough information to warrant another look at the area.
Is the word of a two-year-old and a ‘feeling’ by a spiritualist enough get the cops moving? Maybe they’ve been successful with less in the past, and what do I know? Life has so many twists and turns, my scepticism doesn’t count for much.
I met Jenny Rutledge on the beach. She’s the ‘mayoress’ of Blythedale. Been there forever, running Minivillas, and knows the area like the back of her hand. I thought she was a no-nonsense type who would scoff at spirits, but she surprised me by saying that there could well be some truth in the stories.
Some years back, she said, she’d had a couple of Free Staters staying at Minivillas. Down-to-earth Afrikaners who had never heard of Van Rooyen.
The wife came to Jenny after a while, saying that her husband was sleeping badly because every night a young blonde girl would appear in his dreams. The girl was pleading with him to help her. He couldn’t go back to sleep after that and was in quite a state. Jenny said she had no reason not to believe the man. He was seriously disturbed by the phenomenon.
Nevertheless, being a very practical person, she doubted very much that the police would find anything in the way of evidence this time.
“I know this beach. I walk here every day. The sand shifts all the time, coming in and being taken out. Bodies could not have lasted all that time – it’s impossible.”
Not to mention the crabs that scuttle all over the beach. Crabs would have been attracted instantly to buried bodies, no matter how deep, and stripped them. Then shifting sand and water would have done their work. A body or skeleton might last 27 years in a dry atmosphere, but in the humidity and pounding waves of the North Coast?
Nevertheless, as I said before, the police took their work seriously and had a good look. And found nothing.
Perhaps this whole saga will be laid to rest now.
Or perhaps another spiritualist will “see” the girls sometime in the future and set the ball rolling again. I, for one, hope not. It must be dreadful for their families, having the memory constantly brought back, like scratching at an open wound.
What can be gained by finding their pitiful remains? It was 99% certain that Van Rooyen and Haarhof murdered them, so would uncovering their remains now bring closure on those awful, hideous crimes?
I hope they can be allowed to rest.