HENRI VAN BREDA
WHY DID HE DO IT?
HENRI VAN BREDA WENT TO ELABORATE LENGTHS TO TRY TO CONVINCE THE JUDGE HE HADN’T HACKED HIS FAMILY TO DEATH IN THE EARLY HOURS. THERE SEEMED LITTLE DOUBT OF HIS GUILT, BUT THE QUESTION WAS:
As his entire family lay bleeding to death upstairs, the victims of a vicious axe attack, 20-year-old Perth University student Henri Van Breda sat in the kitchen downstairs and smoked the first of three cigarettes as he called his girlfriend. The call went unanswered. When he had finished he Googled the emergency numbers that would fetch his family urgent medical assistance, despite the fact that the telephone number for the residential doctor was on the fridge barely metres away. He would later tell the court how he had tried twice to get through to the emergency services but failed, before collapsing in the hallway and blacking out.
It wasn’t until three hours later that he phoned for help. While on the phone to the emergency dispatch responder on the morning of 27 January 2015, he asked for multiple ambulances to attend 12 Goske Street in the gated community of De Zalze Golf Estate in Stellenbosch, South Africa.
However, for five long minutes of a half-hour emergency call, Van Breda simply talked about the location of the home. He was so calm and unpanicked the dispatcher thought the call might be a prank. He made no mention of the fact that an intruder had broken into his family home in the middle of the night and axed his family to death, nor immediately said that his younger sister Marli might have also survived. But this was his sworn testimony in what would be a shocking and enthralling 66-day trial, in which Van Breda became the accused triple-murderer of his 55-year-old mother Teresa, his father, 54-year-old Martin, and older brother, 22-year-old Rudi, as well as the attempted murderer of 16-year-old Marli.
Found guilty at the Western High Cape Court, Van Breda’s case for his defence, built on colossal lies, proved hopeless. Real Crime spoke with legal expert Tracey Stewart, who attended South Africa’s highest profile murder trial since that of fallen Paralympic hero Oscar Pistorius, who gave us a blow-by-blow account of Henri Van Breda’s implausible intruder story and the truth of that bloody night.
Gruesome Scene
Inside the Van Bredas’ luxurious home on the morning of 27 January 2015, investigators found the ground floor eerily undisturbed. A handbag with a purse full of cash, a laptop and a Monopoly board game sat untouched on the grand wooden table perpendicular to the front door and the staircase that led to the first floor. In c
