We Are Not Such Things (11 page)

Rhodes pulled up to Amy and asked if she was okay. She let out a low moan. Her hair was so thick, Rhodes thought, and so matted with blood—was it blond or brown? Her eyes, open but blank, rolled back into her head, yet she remained standing. After such a blunt force injury, “your brain just basically dies and deteriorates,” Rhodes told me, after I’d tracked him down to his modest single-level home in a small working-class neighborhood. He was a slender, clean-shaven man with a neat haircut and strong forearms. In his blue jeans, work boots, and checked shirt, he looked like he could just as well be baling hay in Kansas.

He’d stayed with the police force after the transition to a democratic South Africa, but had grown convinced that he could never rise in the ranks, and after twenty-six years serving the citizens of Cape Town he had retired early, at the lowly rank of warrant officer. Before 1994, Rhodes theorized, he worked too closely with black colleagues for the National Party to trust him; after 1994, he was too white for the ANC to promote him.

Rhodes had been working on his anger management issues since his retirement, so he quickly subverted this bitterness, composed himself, and shared with me a newspaper clipping from November 1993, headlined
AMY BIEHL’S FINAL MOMENTS
. His mother, bursting with pride that her son had been quoted testifying in the criminal trial on the front page of the
Cape Argus
, had kept it in a plastic folder for eighteen years. Next to the cover story was a column detailing President Bill Clinton’s praise for Linda and Peter Biehl, dotted with head shots of the couple.

Rhodes sat before me on a pink velour love seat, a doily behind his head. Nearby, a rosy-cheeked ceramic maiden peeked out from between two thriving golden pothos plants in copper pots. His wife, absent that day, had arranged amber bottles along a shelf, hung a framed oil painting of a generic alpine scene above the fireplace, and dotted the room with sculptures of roosters. Two small, silken dogs whined to protest their temporary confinement in the garage.

“Looking at her, she was already a goner,” Rhodes said of Amy.

His first instinct was to remove Amy from the scene, and he needed to extricate himself, too. A cop of any color could be a prime target in this sort of situation. The people were still chanting, though with waning verve, “One settler, one bullet.”

Rhodes opened the back of the van and, together with Evaron, loaded Amy onto the cold metal floor. Sindiswa and Maletsatsi followed, letting out escalating howls. Rhodes’s instinct was to ferry Amy to certain safety, so instead of driving to the nearby hospital, he called an ambulance to meet him at the police station down the road.

Back at the station, he parked near the rear, close to the strip of holding cells. He opened the back of the truck. There Amy lay, her eyes closed and her breathing shallow. Rhodes touched her face; she didn’t respond. Evaron picked her up, a limp 117 pounds, deadweight, and set her on the asphalt beneath a low tap. Rhodes went to fetch a sparse first-aid kit from the office.

As Evaron, Sindiswa, and Maletsatsi clasped each other, Rhodes washed Amy’s face, hoping to see the damage beneath the blood. He cradled her head and pushed her tangled hair away—so long, he kept thinking. He wrapped some gauze around the wound above her brow. He took a scratchy, gray government-issue blanket from a nearby holding cell and stretched it across her body. Maletsatsi, Sindiswa, and Evaron hovered nearby. How would they tell Amy’s mother and father about this terrible beating? Surely Amy would be hospitalized for a week or two, considering the severity of her injuries. Would her parents have to fly across the ocean? And what about Amy’s valuables—the backpack, the old Mazda itself? And where were the doctors? And why was she still lying on the pavement and not on her way to the hospital?

Victor West, a young paramedic, had been sitting in his ambulance a few miles away, chatting with his partner, when the radio cackled.

“Make your way to an urgent assault case, NY1 at the Caltex garage,” came the warbled voice.

Urgent assaults were the name of the game in the Cape Flats townships where West had operated for years. To dull himself after picking up dead or nearly dead bodies from shootings and knife fights and domestic brawls, West was drinking two shots of brandy every morning before his shift and four shots after his shift. Every day, he was called to at least ten assault cases, usually including one stabbing: young people were the perpetrators and the victims. West switched on his lights and siren and headed toward Gugulethu.

“Patient is now at the Gugulethu police station,” the dispatcher updated him.

Traffic was heavy, as residents of the townships headed home in dilapidated minivan taxis, in the back of pickups, in private cars. The men wore the blue jumpsuits of manual laborers—literal blue-collar workers—and the women wore their maid costumes—typically a button-down knee-length cotton dress with a small apron and a matching head scarf. They piled into and out of buses and vans. The ambulance hooted and swerved, making its way past the cars slowly. The streets were littered with the detritus of protests and rallies, bits of burned tire and rubbish.

It had been thirty minutes since the radio first cackled when West finally reached the police station. He and his partner navigated through a throbbing crowd that had gathered by the gates. The paramedics pulled up to the interior courtyard. Police were milling around, and three agitated young people stood over a form covered in a gray blanket, lying on the cement near a corner of jail cells. West hopped out of the ambulance and rushed over.

“We lifted the blanket and we were shocked to see a white person,” West recalled when I met him at a mall restaurant in the upscale suburb of Claremont in 2012. Amy had been, he would later say, “the cherry on top” of the general trauma of his work; a few years later, he was hospitalized for post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol addiction. He was long sober now, a round-faced man with jet-black curls, pale café-au-lait skin, and a toothpaste-commercial smile, who, with his wife, ran seminars for at-risk kids in the down-on-its-luck colored neighborhood in which they lived. How strange, he thought on that August 1993 day, how really unusual to see all that wet blond hair in tangles. West bent down and pressed his hand to Amy’s wrist and then her neck, searching for a pulse. Nothing.

He examined her bloodied body and found what Rhodes had not: in addition to the crack above her brow, she had suffered two large fractures on the back of her head and a deep stab wound in her chest.

“What struck me most is that she had long boots on,” West recalled nineteen years later. But his memory, which seemed to him so sharp and true, was flawed. In fact, the medical examiner’s photographs show that Amy was wearing black lace-up oxfords with a 1990s-style square toe and square heel.

“Is she okay?” Evaron asked. Maletsatsi and Sindiswa stood behind him. Shouldn’t she be taken immediately to the hospital? And then shouldn’t someone call her parents? What about her car? The women were becoming increasingly hysterical, and had begun to shout questions. The paramedics didn’t answer. They pulled the blanket over Amy’s damp, unmoving face.

That evening, after Amy’s friends had gone home, a contingent of gruff police officers swept into the small station, questioning everyone, the cops even, taking over rooms and telephones. These men, with their jowls and barrel chests and packs of quickly disappearing cigarettes and bottomless cups of black coffee, were the Riot and Violent Crimes Investigation Unit, and they would begin the inquiry into Amy’s murder.

The big bosses were not thrilled about this particular crime; the entire nation was already experiencing an extended anxiety attack over the threat of mass race-based violence, and now this? The top brass was prepping for a major governmental transition, and everyone was hoping to avoid bloodshed. Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners had been freed in 1990, after twenty-seven years. Soon thereafter, he and his comrades conducted protracted negotiations with the apartheid leadership, with the end goal of free, democratic elections in which people over eighteen of all races could vote. Everyone recognized that in a country with, roughly, a 10 percent white population and a 90 percent nonwhite population, free elections would mean the end of minority rule. The country remained in flux.

Foreign governments disapproved of apartheid and so South Africa had been subject to trade and arms embargoes. The country’s leadership and its white citizens had become global pariahs. Apartheid had become the
cause du jour
among American and European pop stars and actors. Mandela was an international hero and, despite laws and legal titles, his influence extended to most black South Africans, as well as a growing number of white, colored, and Indian South Africans. Anti-apartheid political violence was spiraling. Protests, strikes, and rallies were being held almost daily. President F. W. de Klerk of the National Party could see the writing on the wall. The regime, which had recognized that Mandela was their best shot at a bloodless power handover, was negotiating with their former enemies. The ranks of the ANC were growing. In a March 1992 referendum, nearly 70 percent of the all-white electorate had voted “Yes” to allow a process that would ease negotiations toward the dismantling of apartheid.

The election, which Mandela’s African National Congress would handily win, was to be held in April 1994, in eight months’ time. But in late 1993, that seemed unimaginably far away. The country balanced on a precipice; the smallest tilt and it risked collapsing into all-out civil war. Far-right white-power groups were preparing for Armageddon, and more moderate whites were panicking about how they would survive black leadership; many whites were nervous that payback was coming, and that all semblance of order would break down when that payback arrived. And while it is clear, in hindsight, that democracy was on its way, the black population was deeply distrustful of the status quo power structure and often suspected the media of spreading propaganda, as it had done for decades. They were nervous that they would be hoodwinked and would never truly see freedom, and so they continued mounting protests and rallies. For years, the apartheid government had fomented violence in black areas; the government had surreptitiously provided assistance to certain black political groups and vigilante mobs that warred against each other. Now the government had a situation—in part of their making, if indirectly—that needed to be contained, and quick. A dead white girl was bad. A dead white girl killed by a black mob was very bad. A dead pro-ANC white girl killed by a black mob was very, very bad. The absolute worst, however, was this: a dead white girl with ANC sympathies killed by a black mob, and the girl was, of all things, American. South Africa was hoping to reinvent itself in the national and international media, and this did not augur well. Within two days of Amy’s death, a gunman attacked a bus running from Cape Town to Pretoria, and the
Cape Times
headline read
SA WORLD’S MOST VIOLENT COUNTRY
. The pressure was on.

As the sky grew dark, the detectives set up their satellite offices and barked to each other. Ilmar Pikker, a hulking chain-smoker with a curly red beard, headed up the investigation. He was a workaholic with a taste for meat, fried food, and Camel cigarettes. He loved the force more than life itself, every night rounding up punks, kicking in rickety doors, staking out terrorist meet-ups. Back then, he didn’t have a complicated relationship with his job.

Journalists began to slink around outside the station, alerted to a possible cover story by the staticky noise on the police radios. In Gugulethu, the news passed from neighbor to neighbor. Those boys, they killed a white lady, they ran her down, they beat her to death by the gas station, they stabbed her. She was walking around, one witness recalled, “like a Barbie covered in ketchup.”

Some township residents were buoyant, some blasé. Some were watching the news on TV with great interest. A few were busy pawning Amy’s watch and books. Some took off for their auntie’s place one township over because you knew the cops would come making trouble any minute now, so let them pick up some other kid. Since Amy had spent time socializing and working in Gugulethu, some residents remembered seeing her smiling face; she looked like a nice person, and it was a shame that they had killed her like that.