Joy Aken follow-up

Two years ago, Gavin Foster wrote in The Crest about the 1956 murder of Pinetown teenager Joy Aken (read that story here). The response to this 56-year-old murder story was astonishing.

In the photo: Murder accused Clarence Van Buuren behind sunglasses, as he was often seen during the trial

Story: Gavin Foster

A single murder hardly raises a ripple nowadays, but the abduction and murder of Pinetown teenager Myrna Joy Aken, followed by the manhunt for and arrest, trial and execution of Clarence Gordon van Buuren was one of the biggest South African news stories of the 1950s.

The saga had – and still has – all the elements of a bestseller. There was a missing young virgin and an intelligent, charismatic villain who had a fan club of women virtually swooning on the courthouse steps daily. There was more than a hint of the supernatural, with a psychic headmaster finding the young woman’s stripped and mutilated body stuffed into a stormwater drain under the national road 100km south of Durban. Then came the convicted man’s futile struggle to avoid the noose and, in the end, the final chapter in a wasted life acted out on the gallows in Pretoria.

Joy was abducted by van Buuren, who lived near her in Pinetown, on October 2, 1956 when she accepted a lift home from Durban after work. She was never seen alive again and her body was only discovered eight days later by well-known local psychic Nelson Palmer, near Mtwalume.

Van Buuren was captured the following day at Pinetown Girls’ High School. His trial attracted huge interest and dominated headlines nationally until he was executed on June 10, 1957, the day before his 34th birthday.

I spent a long time researching the Joy Aken case after a friend, Toosie Hudson, told me how much interest it had stirred up at the time. The more people I spoke to, the more leads I was given and the more I realised how big the story had been. But if I thought I could clear my desk – and my memory banks – of the Joy Aken saga once I’d written the piece, I had another thought coming.

I mentioned at the end of my article that I was considering collaborating with Highway advocate and bestselling author Chris Marnewick on a book about the murder. I’d contacted Chris after reading – also in The Crest – an interview wherein he said his interest in crime writing had been triggered when his father told him, then eight years old, about Joy Aken as they drove past Pretoria Central Prison in 1957. His dad mentioned that it was there that Clarence Gordon van Buuren would swing for the murder.

Chris also remembered being sent to buy a copy of The Star on June 10, 1957, with the front page giving details of the hanging. I contacted Chris and we swapped information.

Soon after The Crest came out with the story, my phone started ringing – a couple of calls a week, all giving me leads. Hazel England, then curator of Pinetown Museum, was enormously helpful from the beginning. The Creek sisters – daughters of Pinetown’s mayor at the time and friends with the Aken family – were wonderful to chat to.

I had a call putting me in touch with the sister of one of van Buuren’s previous two wives, and she filled me in on a dark and sinister side of the man that hadn’t been revealed publicly before. I spoke to Joy’s brother, Graham, to whom van Buuren had shown the Beretta .22 pistol used in the murder a few weeks before the killing. Graham, with his brother, Colin and the psychic, was present when their sister’s body was found.

But, most importantly, I had a call from a very helpful gentleman called Ricki Hamilton, who had been Gehri Strauss’s partner for 47 years. Ricki told me that Gehri, who died in 2007, was the Daily News crime reporter at the time of the van Buuren affair, and he had some papers concerning the murder that I could have.

What Ricki produced when I arrived at his home was a gold mine. A battered old cardboard suitcase, it was full of newspaper reports and magazine articles on the case – many more than I’d unearthed while researching my first story. There were Gehri’s notebooks revealing his thoughts as he followed the case, and photographs of the crowds at the trial, the accused and the cops who caught him, the prosecutors and various locations identified in the investigation.

Best of all were the original handwritten letters from van Buuren to Gehri from death row. Some of these were stamped as censored by the prison officials, while others are simply endorsed – with underlining – “through the back door” to show that they’d been smuggled out. However they found their way to Durban, all revealed just how devious and manipulative the murderer was in trying to get the journalist to help him raise sympathy for his struggle to escape the noose.

Gehri Strauss and van Buuren developed a curious friendship during the trial. Ricki told me how Gehri would hide a nip of brandy in the courtroom’s toilet cistern for the murderer, and van Buuren agreed to remove his sunglasses briefly for Gehri’s photographer to get a picture of him without them – nobody else was accorded that privilege.

Gehri was also allowed to visit van Buuren on death row, in the hour before his execution, a privilege otherwise unheard of in South Africa. Ricki told me that according to Gehri, when he walked into the cell to see the condemned man, van Buuren asked him why he looked so glum. “It’s not you they’re going to take and hang just now,” he quipped.

While I was following up leads and interviewing people, Chris Marnewick was not sitting idle. His efforts were well rewarded. We had agreed that a book written by two people wouldn’t work, and I lacked the energy to get up in the small hours to write before starting the day’s work. I continued helping Chris with occasional research and happily gave him full access to what I had.

The coincidences were incredible. One of the first things Chris came across in the Strauss papers was an edition of The Star that he had been sent to buy as an eight year old on the day of the execution. Then, in 2011, while he was searching archives for the case record, he discovered that his father-in-law was one of the interpreters during the trial.

Later on, an erstwhile employer, a Pinetown attorney put him in touch with the widow of the investigating officer, Detective Sergeant Frans Steenkamp. For some reason, Mrs Steenkamp had kept the Joy Aken police docket when she destroyed most of her husband’s other papers. After more than half a century of having the case writ large in his memory, everything came together for Chris with the acquisition of the full trial record.

Chris now lives in New Zealand, but was in Durban recently for the launch of his book, in Afrikaans initially with an English version to follow.

With all that’s happened in the last couple of years, one thing is for sure. Joy Aken has not been forgotten.

Gavin Foster is researching the Pinetown kitchen cupboard manufacturer and serial killer Peter Roy Barber, who killed his English mistress and her daughter in 1973, and murdered and mutilated at least two of his black female employees over the next six years. He was executed on November 20, 1980. If you were involved with the case in any way or have any information on it, please contact Gavin on gavfos@telkomsa.net or 083 657 8241.