'Source' in Siam Lee murder case had her throat slit, hands cut off

The 23-year-old woman found brutally murdered and mutilated in Inanda, north of Durban, was a “source” for investigators during the 2018 hunt for murder victim Siam Lee.

Jessica Merle Leanne Weyers' body was found dumped at a sports ground in Newtown on Monday. She was last seen leaving an apartment on Pickering Street, near South Beach, at 5.30pm on Sunday.

On Monday the police said the body of an unidentified woman in her 20s had been discovered in Inanda. Her throat had been slit and her hands cut off.

A missing person's report was widely circulated for Meyers on social media but on Wednesday her mother Leanne Claasens positively identified the body at the Phoenix mortuary.

This was the second tragic blow suffered by Claasens — her son was bludgeoned in 2018.

“On March 5 2018, my son died in Addington Hospital. Someone had hit him on the head and he suffered from internal bleeding on his brain,” she told Sunday Times Daily on Friday.

She said she had last seen Jessica on October 27.

Jessica's stepfather Trevor said she had not been in a happy space.

“We would sometimes meet her for lunch and you could see that she wasn't happy. Her [friend] would tell her what to do and he would treat her very bad. I could see in her face that there were complications,” he said.

Emergency rescue service Mobi-Claw911 — involved in the search for the missing Siam Lee — said in a Facebook post on Thursday that Jessica had been a reliable source at the time, providing information into the dark underbelly of Durban's prostitution and drug rings. At the time they simply referred to her as “Jane”. 

Mobi-Claw911 CEO Mike Myers on Friday confirmed that he had previously written a post on Facebook about meeting Jessica during the hunt for Siam Lee.

“We find what we’re looking for, the woman that everyone says is Siam, but it’s not,” he wrote.

“We can certainly see the similarity and why we have been led to her. For the purpose of this story we’ll call her Jane. Jane we estimate to be in her late 20s, in her own right very attractive ... This is a hard, streetwise girl, doesn’t pull any punches with her mouth, says is like it is.

“But we note little things. She has a cat, this cat loves her and won’t leave her alone. There is a bedraggled Christmas tree in the one corner. You soon realise, this girl has a heart and somewhere deep down in there she is hurting.”

The 2018 murder of Siam Lee, 20, rocked SA after her charred remains were found in a sugar cane field in New Hanover in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands two days after she was first reported missing in January 2018.

Lee, whose massage services were advertised on an adult website, was abducted from a Durban North house that was operating as a brothel.

The man accused of kidnapping, raping and murdering Lee, Philani Ntuli, died in June last year before his case went to trial.

TimesLIVE reported previously that Siam Lee was one of the most popular topics that South Africans searched for online in 2018.