Employee Attacks [Pt2] : Murdered, Tortured, Robbed or Raped by their Employees

OLIVIER: Lauren, 28, Sunningdale, KZN; 06 Sept 2007

Lauren Olivier, 28, was left tied up and gagged while dying with 40 wounds after she had called him 'a kaffir', claims gardener Makhela Johnson Thabethe in a signed confession... he'd only worked there a month...

Censorbugbear & ILuvSA

26-Oct-2008 DURBAN HIGH COURT. South Africa. The man who had killed Sunningdale KZN mom Lauren Olivier in her luxury home on Sept 6 last year, confessed to his crime before a Durban High Court judge on Monday - but while the prosecutor accepted his guilty plea, she also warned the judge that it was not necessarily the whole truth.

"We cannot gainsay his version," state advocate Yasmin Vahed said of Makhele Johnson Thabethe's written plea... The judge agreed, sentencing the gardener to 30 years in prison.

According to the forensic report in the court documents, Mrs Olivier had suffered more than 40 puncture and stab wounds - not 19 as initially reported. The ferocity with which Mrs Olivier had been killed had sent shockwaves through the close-knit Sunningdale community. She was bludgeoned and stabbed while the young mom, still frail from childbirth, was also holding her baby, Jack.

The gardener claimed that she'd called him a kaffir and had refused to pay his day's wages... so he'd beat her with a monkey wrench, then stabbed her repeatedly, tied her up and gagged her to stop her from raising the alarm - and then just climbed out of a window and left.

Thabethe, pictured above, this week confessed to bludgeoning and stabbing the frail young mom but also wrote in his confession that he 'had left her baby unharmed'.

He then stole a mere R70 ($6,50), her cellphone and MP3 player and went into hiding for over a year. The police investigating team however regularly conducted interviews with the suspect’s family and never gave up trying to find him.

Eventually, they had found the suspect hiding inside his family's house. He said in his confession however that he'd decided to go home and turn himself in because he felt guilty.

The chairman of the Durban north and Umhlanga community policing forum, Haden Searles, said Mrs Olivier’s widower Tony was “pleased” with the arrest. “He is happy about the arrest but it has opened up a lot of hurt and bad memories for him,' said Searles.

Her father Lindsay Shankland said they'd had only one question for her killer: Why? "We have battled with this so much, and all we want to know is why he did it," Olivier's father Lindsay Shankland said. And while the breakthrough in her murder 'would help with the healing process, it would in no way provide closure. An empty feeling would be with us; my wife and my two other children forever ,' her father told the news media.

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