There was a birthday to look forward to. The woman who had done so much for her family for so long was about to turn 80. After years of fierce independence, she had finally agreed to slow down and move in with her son.
Her son, Menno, had already converted a granny flat on his property for her, fitting it with new appliances and comfortable furniture so she could enjoy her twilight years close to her loved ones.
Instead of planning a celebration to welcome her into her new home, the family is now arranging her funeral – and trying to come to terms with the unthinkable way she died.
Constance Rose, known to everyone as Auntie Connie, was found murdered and mutilated in the Bellville South, Cape Town, maisonette where she had lived for more than four decades. The scene was so gruesome that even hardened police officers were shaken. Several officers vomited at the house and later asked for time off to process what they had seen.
Neighbours first realised something was wrong when they noticed that things at the blue maisonette were out of place. Connie was known for being very neat and for sticking to a strict routine. She would close her windows and draw the curtains neatly by 4pm every day.
On 19 March, neighbours saw that the windows were still open after 8pm and the curtains were oddly bunched together. Worried, they called her son, Menno, who lives in nearby Meyerhof.
He rushed over and knocked on the door. It was opened by his aunt, Aletta Rose – Connie’s sister, who had been staying with her.
She’d gone to Robertson, Aletta told him.
But what Menno could see behind her made him uneasy. There were cigarette butts scattered all over, even though Connie did not smoke. The kitchen was in chaos, the fridge had been overturned and a basin of rosemary water stood in the hallway.
His mother’s bedroom door was closed.
Menno (55) is still battling to make sense of what happened.
“When I walked into her bedroom, knelt to the floor and lifted the blanket . . . I only saw the body, I didn’t see my mother’s face. I can’t make sense of it.”
Inside the room, he made the discovery that will haunt him forever: Connie had been beheaded and her hands cut off.
Aletta was arrested in connection with her sister’s murder. The 63-year-old recently appeared in the Bellville magistrate’s court. She did not apply for bail, saying she had no money and no fixed address.
Aletta had been staying with Connie because their brother, Willem, had recently died and his funeral was due to take place that weekend. The day before the murder, the sisters had spent an ordinary afternoon together.
“They had a packet of sweets and they were sharing them. They looked fine with each other,” says Margarite van der Merwe (89), Menno’s mother-in-law and Connie’s neighbour of nearly five decades.
They had gone shopping and returned with Spar bags full of groceries. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
But later that Thursday night, Margarite phoned Menno to say neighbours were worried. Something did not look right at Connie’s house.
Menno went there with his wife, Rochelle (53). They knocked repeatedly on the front door, but no one answered. For 15 minutes they stood outside, shouting into the silence.
Finally, Aletta came to the door and told Menno his mother had gone away for the weekend. It was not like Connie to go away without telling anyone, so Menno peered through her bedroom window.
“On my mother’s bed there was no sheet or blanket and the door was closed.”
Neighbours, who could see into the room from certain angles, insisted someone was lying inside. They refused to let him leave without checking.
By then, the whole neighbourhood had gathered outside, along with the police, who had been called after someone reported seeing blood on Rose’s shirt.
Menno went back into the house with the officers and opened the door to his mother’s bedroom. He saw a shape on the floor, covered by a blanket.
He will never forget what he saw when he lifted it.
“Everything I loved was there, just destroyed. That will stay with me forever.”
Contrary to early reports, Menno says Connie’s head was not found in a Tupperware container on a kitchen shelf. It had been hidden in a plastic bag in the bathroom, under wet blankets. Her hands were discovered separately in other parts of the house. Two knives, believed to be the murder weapons, were found on the kitchen counter.
Everyone who entered the house was deeply affected, Menno says.
“When police officers came outside no one spoke.”
He was so traumatised that it took two days before he was able to give a formal statement to the police.
“This is not how I wanted to see my mother leave this Earth,” he says. “She should have gone peacefully.”
Connie meant everything to him.
“Everyone loved his mom,” he adds. “She wasn’t just a mother to me but to many in the community.”
Connie raised Menno, her only child, on her own and was a devoted grandmother to his daughters, Kim (29) and Courtney (26). She enjoyed crocheting, knitting and embroidery. Just three weeks before her death, she had told Menno to tell Courtney that the jersey she had been making for her was finished.
But it is her laugh that people remember most.
“When she told a joke, she’d start laughing before she’d even told it,” Menno says.
Kim agrees.
“That’s one thing we are really going to miss because it brought us all joy.”
Neighbour Siphonia Booysen remembers Connie as “a lovely person who never turned you away”.
“Auntie Connie wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Aletta has a violent past. She was convicted of murdering her brother-in-law in 1996. According to Menno, she stabbed him during a fight to protect her husband and served several years in prison. After her release, she had periods of homelessness before she came to stay with Connie for Willem’s funeral.
Menno, who is a lay minister and a qualified engineer, has many childhood memories of Aletta. She is closer to him in age than she was to his mother and used to fetch him from crèche while Connie worked in a factory to pay for his schooling.
Even now, in the face of such horror, Menno says he still has compassion for his aunt.
“I honestly can’t speak badly of her. She’s still family. I’m angry and deeply hurt, but there’s no hatred,” he says.
He is leaning on his faith to get through the nightmare. He draws strength from his mother’s final diary entry, written just four days before her death: “My faith is built on a firm foundation.”
He knows the road ahead will be long. He does not plan to attend Aletta’s court appearances, but says he and his family need psychological help to cope with the trauma.
More difficult still is what he knows he must one day do: face the woman accused of killing his mother.
“I know it won’t be pleasant but I have to speak with her one day,” he says. “I need my sanity back.”
