The very sad part of
this story is the fact that we had to destroy everything ever written on our
group about Eugene. I felt that it was
an unfair request given the timespan we had to do it in. Without those details, it is difficult for me
to remember everything that went on.
Although I remember a lot, it would have been better if we had those
posts as a reminder of what went down.
Even still, Eugene could now have seen how hard we worked for him and
where TM, JK and PP entered the game.
Ben believes that Eugene knows what he is doing with the previously
mentioned people, but I do not agree.
Eugene has been institutionalised and he is a very private person – who would
he or could he have trusted other than those three who popped up long after the
dance had started.
I now have to rely on
the emails to remind me of all that happened.
When one is in the middle of a war, we don’t remember the individual
bullets and that is what has happened to me.
JK was pushing hard
for money from the group. On the 21
April 2015, I received an email from JK.
I am going to type out the email so that you can see what a slimy
character we were dealing with.
Hi Dianne
Please see the email
that I sent to Piet Croucamp. I was
under the impression that the was handling the money situation. I double whether there is sufficient money to
cover the total bill but what I suggested was that we see how much has been
collected and then negotiate with counsel regarding his fee. (All
the fees were for the state and not for the advocate nor JK. I have dealt with many parole hearing issues
and have never heard of a prisoner having to pay) As for the last weeks
work Gene had R10 000.00 paid in (by us)
R1000.00 went (sic)the sheriff for urgent service and copies.
Counsel and I spent 2
full days in court. This excludes the
drafting the day before.
We are meeting with
Gene tomorrow. I however don’t know what
is going on and still have not received his parole conditions.
In short I don’t know
what to say about getting Gene out and what we will still need to do. I am enclosing for your information a copy of
the Application. I look forward to
hearing from you. Best regards, Julian”.
One of the emails he
forwarded to me was dated 13 February 2015 which reads: “Dear Piet, Advocate Roelof Du Plessis
contacted me to ask what the situation was with regard to the payment of his
account or a portion thereof is. Can you
please let me know what the situation is regarding this. Best regards”
On 21 April 2015, I
sent an email to Ben Kruger, Dewaldt Louw and James Marx. “Gentlemen, I have got this out of JK by
playing his game. Please peruse
everything carefully and remember that the last application – the costs went to
the state. (why then was he asking for
money when the state paid for the parole hearing?) I have forwarded all the
legal documents to another criminal lawyer who has been in practice since
1991. He knows E personally and was with
him as a policeman at Vlakplass. I will
hear from him later today or night with how we can proceed”. I then attached the documents showing that
Clive Derby-Lewis was also being represented by JK (and I had been told that
EdK had specifically requested that JK not represent any other person) and that
the money requested was also for Derby-Lewis.
Ben’s response to me
was: “There is just no more money. Period. Piet Croucamp is welcome to raise whatever he
wants, but as far as I am concerned our group has been tapped dry. Ben had not given much thought to the
attached papers and answered me too quickly.
Thus, I had to explain in my next contact with him.
“Ben…but this game I
played to get this info out of JK. All I said is that Piet does not hold the
keys to the group or the money. The money is not the problem – the problem is
for us to get someone else to take over because JK obviously does not give a
continental shit. Even his argument (in
my limited knowledge) is flawed in the papers. Apart from that – how the fuck could he charge
the charges he has charged??
Please go through the
documents careful and give me a way forward.
If we do not get JK removed and someone else onto this, we may as well
wave goodbye to Eugene. See us all back
in the same damned place in six months time.
MC
This was a very busy
day for me – the 21st April.
My next message to the gentlemen after I researched case law was this, “…it
is the legal documents that go with it that is of concern to me. How to get him out without JK being
involved. How do I get E to fire JK. I have someone who can go and be at JK’s
offices tomorrow when E is supposed to be present – but I don’t trust the time
frame and therefore need someone to sit there with JK until E arrives and
before they go back to court. I have a
criminal lawyer who is prepared to take on the case tonight after he has
perused the documents…was all geared up to go this morning and now I can’t even
get out of the fucking bed. I am so
frustrated with this”.
It was at this point
that we hatched the plan to pull Eugene out and no one knew about it, least of
all Ben, Dewaldt and James Marx.
Ben did send me a
rather telling email “…and remind him (JK) that he told Piet Croucamp in the beginning that he would take the case
for free because he will get a lot of publicity if successful”. Ben did not think it was prudent to change
lawyers at that stage but I knew that we would lose the parole hearing – which is
exactly what happened on the reasons I thought it would happen. So back to prison went Eugene. And now Ben told me that I could tell JK to
go jump in a lake … I wanted him to drown.
I am not a lawyer but I had spent 7 years on this case so I was very
clued up on the parole process – I knew that JK had fucked up and that Eugene
was going to go back to prison. I was
right but it gave me no satisfaction because we were back at square one. I was frustrated and angry because I knew
that JK was fucking up big time, I could not get to see EdK myself and all his
visits were being controlled by TM, PP and JK.
In the meantime,
Eugene was being used by the prosecutors to sort out cold case files. He was
taken out of prison by the prosecutors a number of times to help them. Sadly, after I was asked to remove all trace
of Eugene on FB, I also, once he was properly free (and I will explain that properly
later) I destroyed the photographs that I had of Eugene when he was still in
prison with a group of prosecutors.
I still get very
angry when I hear the words “prime evil”.
He deserves a pardon – even if he is out on parole (and who knows what
those conditions are apart from him not being allowed to speak to the
public?) Eugene will unfortunately
never know how hard and how many people were rooting for him.
When I was first
asked by JK to remove the FB group, my response was “Not a fuck. Not until I hear it from the mouth of Eugene
de Kock myself”
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