‘What have they done to you?’
She lay naked and motionless on the floor of the bedroom.
For an hour, the desperate mother had screamed at curtained windows: “Chantelle, it’s Mama. Can you hear me?”
Nearly 12 hours earlier, at noon on Friday, 20-year-old Chantelle Barnard had driven to Benoni to drop a key with her former landlord’s 33-year-old son. She, her boyfriend Brandon Ackerman and his mother Letitia had moved out of a townhouse on the same property the day before.
The accused was due to appear in the Benoni Magistrate’s Court on Monday morning, where he was expected to face charges relating to Chantelle’s murder. Next Monday, she would have been celebrating her 21st birthday.
When no one had heard from her by 5pm, family and friends started searching for her.
Chantelle’s car, with her wallet inside, was still parked at the townhouse.
A grieving and visibly upset Suzette Barnard said that when she found her daughters body, she "looked like a porcelain doll, soft and peaceful on the one side, but on the other side of her face it was blue". Photo: Antoine de Ras
THE STAR
The landlord’s son told those who enquired that Chantelle had met up with a tall, handsome man and the two seemed very familiar. She had left with him.
The 33-year-old proffered his left hand in greeting, claiming to have accidentally cut his right hand with a grinder.
The Barnards went to the police and filed a missing persons report. After scouring the neighbourhood and surrounds, Suzette and Fanie Barnard decided to return to where their daughter was last heard of.
Across the road, a nine-year-old, seeing the back-and-forth commotion, asked her grandparents what was happening.
The girl remembered sitting on the porch with her grandmother that afternoon and, when her gran went inside to get ice cream, hearing a scream. She had not thought of it until then.
The information was relayed to the Barnards, with Suzette now desperate to speak to the landlord’s son again.
Eventually, she ended up at what she thought was the main bedroom window, banging and screaming at the house shrouded in complete darkness.
Only when the landlord and father of the 33-year-old arrived did the backdoor swing open, revealing the son dressed only in boxer shorts.
Suzette pushed her way inside and pointed to the blood splatter on the kitchen floor.
The 33-year-old repeated his claim regarding the grinder accident.
“There were also scratches on his arms and on his back,” said Suzette later.
Making her way through the house with a friend, Suzette found a blanket on the lounge floor. Beneath it lay a bloodied pool cue and a pool of blood.
“I knew. I just knew,” said Suzette.
Chantelle thought about love and life often. Last week, she wrote in her diary: “Today I was at Lizel’s mother’s funeral and it strikes me that we don’t have any guarantees that we’ll have a long life and I feel a deep heartsore come over me.”
On Friday night, Suzette and her friend made their way through the house, looking into two bedrooms before being confronted by a third, where the door was closed.
“My girl. My poor girl. What have they done to you?” sobbed Suzette as she clutched her daughter’s lifeless body.
Chantelle’s naked body, bar her black shoes, lay on the floor.
Her hair was still wet. That and the blood splatter found in the bathroom have family members believing that Chantelle’s killer washed her body to try to destroy evidence.
“She was so cold and the cut to her throat was so deep. She looked like a porcelain doll, soft and peaceful on the one side, but on the other side of her face it was blue,” Suzette said.
At her parents’ smallholding in Midrand, a small shrine with pictures of Chantelle take pride of place in the Barnard home.
“I speak to her. I get up in the middle of the night and I tell her everything,” said Suzette. - The Star
http://www.iol.co.za/news/what-have-they-done-to-you-1.1051729#.Ui9Ncz_8bKc
