Joy Aken murder

The vicious murder of Myrna Joy Aken by Clarence Gordon van Buuren in 1956 made news throughout South Africa, and many of the questions it raised remain unanswered.

By Gavin Foster

It was sheer ill fortune that brought Clarence Gordon van Buuren into Myrna Joy Aken’s life late in 1955. Joy was a shy 18-year-old from a decent, loving family, while he was a hardened criminal, with convictions for car theft, fraud, theft, forgery, escaping from custody and firearms offences.

Joy lived with her parents in Old Main Road, Pinetown, in a house where the police station is today. Van Buuren lived nearby with his third wife, Yvonne, and their two children. When he killed her on October 2, 1956 Clarence was 33, and Joy just 18.

Back then, Pinetown police station was right next door to the Aken home, and when Joy played her records the young policemen on duty would shout at her to turn up the volume. Van Buuren lived in Pinetown Flats on the opposite side of the road, about 75 metres east, above the tearoom next to the fancy new Pinetown High School that opened in 1955. Van Buuren had moved there with his third wife after being released early from a five-year prison sentence in 1953, and worked for a while at the Umgeni Power Station in Pinetown – now the site of the Power Centre.

After being fired for theft, he was hired as a rep at Globe Electrical in Smith Street, Durban, and with the position came a 1951 Ford Anglia.

Joy worked nearby at British Motors and on the morning of Tuesday, October 2, 1956, when Van Buuren saw her sitting at the bus stop, he offered her a lift in his company car. Joy knew him slightly so she accepted and arranged for a lift back with him that evening as well – she wanted to get home early so she could attend dancing lessons.

“He seemed like a very nice person,” remembers Joy’s brother, Graham, who met Van Buuren socially a few times. “He used to come to my workshop for a chat, and he even showed me his gun – he’d just had it fixed – a week or two before the murder.”

Joy left work that afternoon and waved goodbye to two friends as Van Buuren’s car turned into Aliwal Street with her aboard. That was the last time anybody except her killer saw her alive.

Eight days later, Joy’s brother, Colin, visited a well-known psychic, Nelson Palmer, who lived at 11 Cheriton Drive in Pinetown, a stone’s throw away from the Van Buuren and Aken homes. It was afterwards widely reported that Palmer, in a trance, stated that Joy’s body would be found in running water, about 60 miles down the South Coast, on the northern side of the road.There is some doubt about whether it was quite as simple as this though, because evidence had already been found to indicate Joy’s body was hidden near Umtwalumi, 96km south of Durban.

Palmer and Joy’s brothers drove down the coast, and after searching for a while in the wrong place moved downstream towards the main road, where Joy’s body was discovered, pushed head-first into a culvert. She had been shot a number of times and then mutilated: some of her organs had also been removed.

Interestingly, friends and family I spoke to remember that Joy’s mother was given the location of the body by another psychic, a Mrs Getcliffe, who added that a dog would help them find the missing girl’s remains. When Colin Aken went searching with Nelson Palmer he took with him the family dog, Patches, on a lead, and when they neared the place where the body was, the lead, for no apparent reason, became detached from Patches’s collar, and the dog led the searchers straight to the body.

Van Buuren lay low until October 11, when he emerged from the bush behind Pinetown High School (now Pinetown Girls’ High) while police were searching the area, and fled across the school sports field towards Old Main Road.

Shots were fired and Van Buuren dropped his pistol and surrendered to a young policeman, Hendrik van Dyk, in the grounds of a house beside the school. From there he was marched straight across the road, through a hostile crowd of local residents, to the police station.

Van Buuren’s defence was a pack of lies from beginning to end. He claimed that, even though he was giving Joy a lift home so she could leave early for her dance lessons, he’d stopped off at a pub on Durban’s beachfront after picking her up, leaving her alone in the car. He said when he wanted to leave after an hour or so he discovered the car was missing, and thinking Joy had taken it, he went back into the pub for a few more drinks. When he emerged again he saw the car was now parked near where he’d left it, and when he opened the door Joy was lying dead on the floor behind the front seats.

In a panic, he drove around for the rest of the night, stopping at a petrol station and various pubs where he consumed numerous brandies, before dumping her body where it was found 100 km south of Durban. Of the mutilation he knew nothing – or so he said.

The Judge President of Natal, Mr Justice Broome, sitting with two assessors, didn’t believe his story, and sentenced the murderer to death. Clarence Gordon Van Buuren was hanged on June 10, 1957, the day before his 34th birthday. To this day, nobody knows exactly where Van Buuren killed Joy, or what happened between when he picked her up at work and when her body was discovered.

*Originally published in The Crest, Sept-Oct 2010.

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