We Are Not Such Things (26 page)

Regardless, in 1993, at the beginning of the case, Mandela had still not been elected, and the courts remained a white man’s domain in a white state. In South Africa, there is no jury system: a single judge hears and decides upon a case. The judge in the Amy Biehl matter was a “splendid” fellow, according to Niehaus: a distinguished white man named Gerald Friedman. These days, Friedman is a long-retired widower who lives out by the wild coastal beaches on the southern peninsula near Cape Town.

Niehaus’s junior prosecutor was Leon Nortier, a socially awkward, hard-nosed young Afrikaner. After years as a prosecutor, Nortier had grown so habitually antagonistic that he had begun to cross-examine family and friends during Sunday lunch, and had subsequently moved over to a private practice. Before, he wore the shabby clothes of a lawyer on state salary, but these days he dresses as the well-paid defense attorney he is: the silky turquoise tie against the crisp white shirt, the silver watch, the shiny black shoes. He carries around an engraved silver keychain that says
I trust in your unfailing love, Psalm 13:5,
and spends much of his working day chain-smoking at his desk.

The defense attorney, Justice Poswa, was a black man whom Niehaus described as “very experienced but arrogant.” Niehaus posited that the judge preferred him to Poswa because “I showed respect, I didn’t make him cross.” In the intervening years, Poswa had become a judge himself and then had finally retired and moved to a brick estate overlooking the red-sand beaches in Umhlanga, a vacation-slash-retirement community just outside the city of Durban adjacent to the Indian Ocean. I had visited Poswa, now in his eighties, in his silent, spit-shined home, where his diminutive wife tiptoed around, sweeping up little invisible piles of dirt. Though Poswa had told me on the phone that he had valuable information on the Amy Biehl case, he didn’t seem to remember much at all, and said sadly that his children had cleaned out his old files years earlier.

In 1993, Poswa’s junior counsel was a young Xhosa woman named Nona Goso. I have never been able to find Goso, who had also represented the four men ultimately convicted of Amy’s death at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997. She had allowed her bar license to lapse a few years earlier. I called an organizer of an event at which Goso had spoken in 2010, but the organizer didn’t know where she’d gone. Easy told me a rumor that Goso was on the board of the regional railroad, but most of the numbers listed for the railroad were out of service. She didn’t show up in any phone books and Poswa didn’t know her whereabouts.

In old quotes and videos, Goso appears thoughtful and intelligent, a slender woman with close-cropped hair and a gentle manner that seemed incongruous for a litigator. She was a young black female attorney from the townships who rose up during apartheid, got herself a legal education, and made her way in a world of aggressive and immodest men of all colors who, despite their political differences and various incompetencies, believed in the common myth of their own supremacy. Whatever she had gone through, the fact remains that Nona Goso, on purpose or accidentally, had disappeared herself.

If it came down to pure legal talent, Niehaus reflected, he had been sure he could beat Poswa and Goso. But it wouldn’t be so easy. After recanting early confessions, the defendants categorically denied being at the scene, and there was no evidence placing them there. Niehaus had no DNA samples, no fingerprints, and no forensic trace. One confession was thrown out, but the two remaining were weak and insubstantial. Amy’s passengers weren’t much help. Sindiswa had initially insisted that she’d seen Easy at the crime scene but had later testified that she was “not sure.” And so far, for all the people standing on the street that day—and police claimed the number topped two hundred—no witnesses from Gugulethu had come forward to testify.

Niehaus and Pikker had tried to convince two twelve-year-old boys who had been playing soccer on the Caltex field to come forward, with little luck. At the behest of the American government, Niehaus had dispatched Pikker to offer the boys and their families a tremendous deal in return for their testimony: a new life in the United States.

“The American embassy said the government is prepared to fly this lady and her family to the States, give her a place to stay, her kid can go to school, a job, everything,” Pikker told me. “Dream come true. When the court case was on they’d fly them back, put them up in a nice hotel. I said, ‘Do you realize what you’ve been offered here? A new life, a wealthy life, a house, a brilliant education for your child.’ But then they heard the dog yelping early one morning and when the mother came out, the dog’s stomach had been sliced open. The dog survived, stitched up, but the woman said no. She would have had a chance to not be a menial worker.”

The woman and her now grown son still remained in Gugulethu. I’d met him once to see what he remembered of Amy’s murder, and he still wondered what would have happened if his mother had taken the offer. Now, in his early thirties, he had a wife and three kids whom he could barely afford to feed, and he kept getting contract jobs doing IT work that lasted only a few years. He still lived on the family lot, in an add-on to the back.

As the trial wound down, with a sure victory escaping him, Niehaus was at a loss. “The court may be on a ride to never-neverland, where it would not discover the truth, should witnesses decide what evidence to give,” reported one local paper.

Niehaus turned to Pikker again. “He was at court every day, and if I needed something, I’d say, ‘Go fetch!’ and he would,” Niehaus remembered. Now Niehaus needed Pikker to go fetch a few nice-looking, decent Gugulethu citizens who were willing to speak before a judge about what they’d seen on August 25, 1993. More important, they needed to have seen the three men sitting at the defense table in the act of killing Amy Biehl.

Pikker trolled the township and, through his network of informants, tracked down three witnesses: two sisters who had called the tip hotline in the early days and the woman with the cropped hair who had handed Leon Rhodes the note with the names. The women agreed to testify behind closed doors, away from the group and visible only to the judge.

“How did you convince them to testify at all?” I asked Niehaus.

“Oh, you know, soft-soaking, telling them it was for the good of the community.”

“Did they gain anything else?”

“They get money. How much, I never know that.”

Pikker estimated that witnesses in Amy’s case had probably received somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 rand each (according to the exchange rate of the day, between $3,000 and $15,000, a massive windfall for someone living in poverty).

The woman who had handed Rhodes the note with names was called Miss A, and she was the prosecution’s most important witness. When she testified behind closed doors in October 1994, Miss A cinched the deal for the state. She was eloquent, she withstood cross-examination, and she could not be intimidated by lawyers. She also cried when she remembered Amy’s murder.

“The witness is crying, shaking, when they explain story,” Easy said. “They do this on purpose. They want money.”

“She was particularly good at tearing them apart,” Niehaus recalled, admiringly.

She was a “poor, poor lying witness,” Poswa told the papers at the time. He insisted that Miss A was aligned with the ANC and had a personal bone to pick with the accused, allegations Miss A contested to the judge’s stated satisfaction. Twenty years later, when I met Miss A, I found her room peppered with ANC literature; she was a longtime member.

Within weeks of the women’s testimony, Niehaus and Poswa submitted their final arguments, and on October 24, 1994, Judge Friedman issued a 120-page verdict, condensing the nine-month trial into a stack of typewritten words on paper. In the verdict, Friedman broke down the events of August 25, 1993, as he saw them: the mob, the beating, the injuries, the witness testimony, the defense’s explanation. Throughout, he addressed all lawyers formally: Misters Niehaus, Nortier, Poswa; Ms. Goso. He addressed policemen and expert witnesses by their titles at first—Detective, Sergeant, Constable, Doctor—and then referred to them by their last names. He addressed the young black women who testified by their first names. As was standard, he referred to Mongezi Manqina as Accused 1; Easy Nofemela as Accused 2; and Vusumzi Ntamo as Accused 3. For two days, Friedman sat before the court and read aloud the logic behind his decision. At the end, he found all three men guilty of murder.

Niehaus was relieved that the long, tedious trial was over, but he felt, oddly, that he cared more about the guilty verdict than did Amy’s parents. He had met them once or twice in his office, and they had seemed to him curiously disconnected from what he considered the reality of their daughter’s death. He spent time with them once socially, if he remembered correctly, at a dinner at a U.S. embassy official’s house in the tony suburb of Constantia, just down the road from Pollsmoor Prison, where the accused were serving time. The man, Peter Biehl, you could see he was in pain. But the woman, Linda?

Niehaus never quite understood that woman. He shook his head and furrowed his brow.

“The man was grieving, but she seemed too…too…at ease about the whole thing,” he said. “They were very involved but—I couldn’t understand the woman’s way of reasoning, or thinking, or whatever.”

“Did she seem at peace?” I asked.

“Could have been. To me, this is just strange behavior for a lady whose child got killed in such a terrible way.”

Niehaus also never thought the boys would get amnesty at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission a few years later. Yes, he believed that the crime had a political element to it—the attack was unplanned, but the kids had been at an organized PAC rally before. But to Niehaus, whatever little political motivation there may have been to the commission of the crime did not make it any less gruesome or justifiable. Anyone who saw the photos could see that they’d gone after Amy Biehl with vengeance and fury.

Had the Biehls opposed amnesty at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Niehaus was pretty sure the men would have spent the full eighteen years behind bars, forgotten. But the Biehls sat before the country and said, “Amy would have embraced your Truth and Reconciliation process. We are present this morning to honor it and to offer our sincere friendship.”

Niehaus simply couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

“Unless you’re such a big believer in God that you could have that much forgiveness in you…” He paused. “You can forgive them, but to employ them? At the Amy Biehl Foundation? Listen, I don’t understand that woman’s head, and I don’t think anybody in their right mind that is legally orientated would ever be able to understand it.”

He took a drag and blew the smoke out toward the ceiling. He would get me the file. He called his secretary and spoke briefly in Afrikaans. The file was missing, he said, hanging up. He’d give me a call when it showed up.

“This girl, she was doing what she could to uplift the blacks and she got killed.” Niehaus frowned. The city unrolled behind him, sloping gently down to the shores.

After six months of talking on the phone and communicating by email, I met Linda in person in July 2012. She was sitting at a hotel breakfast table in a crisp white dining room high above the swirling Atlantic, eating bran flakes and drinking black coffee. She had landed in Cape Town the evening before and was staying in a cliff-top five-star hotel in the most expensive part of town, paid for by a South African entertainment mogul friend of hers.

In that bright dining room, Linda was as distinctive and immaculate as in pictures: her crimson lipstick and platinum bob just so, a tailored silk eggplant-colored jacket, a patterned cashmere scarf of greens, oranges, reds, and purples around her neck. She wore heavy rings on her fingers, among them an oversized band punctuated with an enormous silver skull. Strung around her neck was a strand of silver that ended with a cluster of carved beads that were also, if you inspected them closely, tiny skulls. She carried a large shiny purse that, mom-style, contained various plastic Baggies full of gum, tissues, snacks, chargers, creams.

Linda had been blessed with lifelong good looks. Here was a woman who had suffered neither an awkward adolescence nor a pained old age, who had been the easy recipient of glances and compliments since childhood. Now, as she headed toward seventy, she rejected nips, tucks, paralyzing jabs, and plumping injections. She enjoyed eating, and her physique reflected this. Her face was a constellation of lines rarely witnessed on upper-middle-class American women her age. It was quite purposeful, this effect. When she was younger, Linda had seen a photograph of an aged Georgia O’Keeffe, her tawny skin and strong features forming a landscape on her face. Linda found O’Keeffe, all wrinkles and confidence, unbearably beautiful, and had decided that she would emulate the artist as she aged.

Linda Biehl was born Linda Shewalter in Geneva, Illinois, a scenic hamlet set on the banks of the Fox River, just west of Chicago’s suburbs. In Linda’s childhood, and still, Geneva was the stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings: handsome shingled homes in modest colors, a red-brick courthouse, a tree-lined and spit-shined main street. The population has always been almost entirely white and financially comfortable, the school system is top-notch, there are over thirty public parks, and wildflowers bloom by the water. The town maintains a quaint little windmill, set on a square of trim, jade-green grass.