Alice Lotter

Alice Lotter (1931 - 2009)

Brief overview:

Alice (76), and her daughter Helen Lotter (57), were savagely tortured and murdered in their Allanridge, Free State farm house on March 6th 2009. During the savage and brutal attack the two women endured more than three hours of torture.

SAPS captain Koos Venter had received a call from Alice Lotter on the evening of March 6 2009. She asked him: Captain where are you? in Afrikaans and then the line went dead. Unable to call back, he jumped into his car and chased from his home in Odendaalsrus to the Allanridge farm. At the backdoor of the homestead he found a very badly injured Miss Helen Lotter. Her face coated in blood, some teeth smashed out, she wore a bloodied t-shirt and her naked underbody was covered in blood.

A bloodied knife and scissors were found at the scene as well as bloodied beer bottle glass. He found the Alice leaning against a dining-room chair, just about to fall over. He gently helped her lie down on the carpet of the living room. He told the court, she asked him: Who are you?, while he examined the gaping wounds at her throat, arms and hands. He told the mortally-injured old woman who he was, and she replied, 'Thank the Lord that you care for us and that we can hide with you.' Venter briefly searched the house and came across the women's two dogs locked in a room. He rushed back to the women and tried to make them more comfortable while waiting for emergency service to arrive.

Alice's 'death bed confession' - she told Venter and an attending paramedic that she recognised Joseph, their gardener, and that it was him who had tortured them, and that his personal details were kept inside her passport, which was on the dining table. She said the gardener had broken into their homestead by crashing through a window after she had spotted a group of men standing outside next to their bakkie (Pick-up truck). She warned them to go away or she would phone the police. (The forensic evidence before the court earlier was that the window had broken into from the outside). She didn’t speak any other words after that and died shortly thereafter upon arrival at the hospital.

Brief Biography:

• Other Victims/Family
• Funeral/Memorial
• The Farm/Smallholding
• The Region (Land disputes, other incidents etc.)

Attack Details:

• Date and time of attack
• Weapons
• Items Stolen
  • Very little of value was stolen.
• Investigative officer/SAPS Case No:
• Torture, Gratuitous violence
  • The gruesome cruelties suffered by the murdered Miss Helen Lotter (57), and her mother Alice (76), became very clear in coroner Dr Horst Bumba’s report to the Welkom High Court. It showed that Helen Lotter’s cervix and uterus were ‘missing’ and that her death was caused by ‘sharp trauma and injuries to her lower body’. She was so extensively tortured that there were 'slabs of human fat the size of a man's hand were sliced off her body’.
  • De Bumba's postmortem testimony also described that Helen's front teeth were bashed out and that her entire body was ‘covered in bruises, chafing and stabbing wounds. Due to the extreme injuries, Dr Bumba was unable to determine whether she had been raped. Alice Lotter died from multiple, deep stabbing wounds to her neck and throat. Medical examiner Dr Wilhelm van Heusden concluded that Alice had died due to ‘asphyxiation after breathing in blood from penetrating stabbing wounds in her neck and throat’.
• Indications of Hate Crime? Threats etc.
  • The slogan “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer’ was daubed on the farm house wall.

Perpetrator details:

• Number and Descriptions
• Arrests
• Name/s and age/s of Perpetrator/s
• Country of origin of Perpetrator/s
• Trial/Conviction
  • Court 2010 - The public prosecutor Advocate Sophie Giorgi, the defence counsellors Advocate Jan Nkhahle and Mr. Lawrence Chabalala. Judge Hancke assisted on the Bench by two Assessors, Mr P Haasbroek and Mrs B Smal.
  • Trial held at the Welkom High Court. The two accused - gardener, Joseph Hlongwane (22), and Joseph Khumalo (21), both denied all the charges. The accused gardener Hlongwane's girlfriend Ms Rebecca Bochedi, testified that her boyfriend had arrived back home, covered in blood on the night of March 6th 2009. She was too scared to ask him why he was covered in blood. She also testified that she had helped Hlongwane wash the blood from his hands, and put his bloodied trousers in a plastic bag. Bochedi testified that Hlongwane ran away when the SAPS stopped at around midnight in front of their house. She did not tell the police that Hlongwane was home just before they arrived. She also did not give the police the bag with the bloodied clothes. Bochedi lived with both of the accused men in the same house in Allanridge near the Lotter farm.
  • The documents before the court show that she identified Hlonwanes clothing during questioning by the SAPS investigative team. Captain Koos Venter, head of the detective unit Allanridge, 31 years of police service, testified that this was the bloodiest and cruellest crime scene he had ever seen. He also testified that Hlongwane was linked to the murder by finger-prints found at the crime-scene by forensic experts.
  • Joseph Hlongwane (22), and Joseph Khumalo (21), were both found guilty. Hlongwane was also found guilty of murdering Allanridge resident Bongani Landu on 2 November 2007, also with broken beer-bottles.
  • During the farmers protest outside the court, ANC mayor, Mrs Mataba Leeto also led an anti-Boer protest at the same court where the trial was held, where they chanted hate-speech songs such as ‘Kill the Boer, kill the Farmer’ in support of the two killers’ getting bail. The Farmers and the ANC's protests did not clash, they were kept separated by the police.

Additional Biographical Information:

Links to Media articles:

• http://archive.is/08WfQ
• https://southafricanews.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/boer-womens-cruel-...
• http://censorbugbear-reports.blogspot.com/2010/06/tortured-farm-wom...
• http://censorbugbear-reports.blogspot.com/2009/04/odendaalsrust-law...
• http://web.archive.org/web/20100605084325/http://www.volksblad.com/...
• http://web.archive.org/web/20090518152109/http://jv.news24.com/Die_...
• https://www.geni.com/documents/view?doc_id=6000000194962045828