The Profiler Diaries: From crime scene to courtroom

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THE BACKGROUND

In his latest book about his extraordinary career as head profiler for the SA police,  Gerard Labuschagne delves into the twisted minds of the young couple who enacted their macabre fantasies by butchering  a young electrician. 

THE CRIME 

In April 2011 SA was shocked at the news of one of the most monstrous crimes ever committed in the country. The severed remains of a 24-year-old electrician Michael van Eck had been discovered in a graveyard in Welkom. 

Van Eck had secretly arranged a blind date with a woman he’d met online on April 2 2011. They were to meet in the Welkom graveyard.

The next morning he was missing and his car was retrieved at a taxi rank. 

The caretaker of the Welkom graveyard discov­ered what appeared to be blood at the entrance to the graveyard, which had been haphazardly covered with sand. Van Eck's body was found in a shallow grave and inside the grave, the police made a grisly discovery: a severed torso with body parts missing.

THE SUSPECTS

Quick detective work soon led the police to Chané van Heerden, aged 20, and Maartens van der Merwe, aged 25. 

After their arrest, Chané and Maartens were separated and the police took them back to their rented cottage. 

GRUESOME DISCOVERY 

Chané led the investigators straight to the kitchen. She opened the freezer compartment at the top of the fridge and removed something flat, almost like a frozen pizza base, in a nondescript white plastic bag, stashed between packets of frozen peas and corn.

Inside, frozen stiff, was the flattened face of Michael van Eck. The face had been skinned and Michael’s lips had been stitched closed. 

Chané removed two small medicine containers from the fridge. One contained Michael’s eyes, the other his ears. There were no other body parts in the house.

However, this cottage was to reveal even more horrors. The skinned head of a cat floated in a plastic ice-cream container in one of the cupboards.

IN THE DOCK

Because Maartens had to undergo a mental health observation, his and Chané’s trials were separated. 

Van Heerden was sentenced to at least 20 years in prison. The judge ordered her to return to court in 20 years' time for the re-evaluation of her case.

TWISTED MINDS 

Maartens was sentenced to life in prison, Here is an extract of Labushcagne’s interview with the killer. 

“I had been given permission to interview Maartens and on 18 October 2011, fellow psychologist Marina Genis and I went to the Odendaalsrus prison, where he was being held, to interview him for the purpose of compiling a pre-sentencing report. It was a fascinating interview, which he allowed me to record on video.

Maartens said he worked with his father in his father’s steel business and earned about R5,000 per month. He felt that he had become closer to his family since the murder and described himself as having had a good upbringing, although his father was a bit absent, as he was involved in politics. His mother was a kindergarten teacher. Overall, he said his parents were always there for him. His primary school years seemed normal, he had good friends, some of whom were still around, and he did well academically. He played rugby and chess at primary and high school.

He first experienced the symptoms of possible mental illness when he was about eight or nine. He ‘saw’ a dragon that would talk to him, but he couldn’t understand what it was saying. Maartens also engaged in self-mutilating behaviour from a young age; this included burning himself with a heated knife-blade, and later with a cigarette or a lighter. After he met Chané, they engaged in this behaviour together, in an almost ritual-like fashion, and it became a bonding activity. These rituals would continue until their arrest.

During high school, Maartens again experienced symptoms of schizo­phrenia in the form of auditory and visual hallucinations, seeing ‘shadows’ and hearing voices, which he knew weren’t supposed to be happening. He then lost interest in academics and began spending time with the wrong kind of friends. He also started smoking and became rebellious. This was also when he left school.

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Maartens said he didn’t do drugs at school, but by the age of 23 he was smoking marijuana, and taking CAT, cocaine and ecstasy when socialising with friends.

As an adult, Maartens started to question his beliefs, but he didn’t settle on one belief system. He described his beliefs as leaning towards the occult, with an interest in magic, but not as satanic. Chané was also not a satanist, he said, but was into Wicca, a form of modern paganism that has its origins in pre-Christianity. Maartens sought contact with other realities to explain what he was seeing and experiencing. After he and Chané started dating, his behaviour was focused on doing something special with her. So, they developed their own rituals and became a ‘cult of themselves’ ... Self-harm was a part of this.

Maartens met Chané early in 2010, but she was dating someone else at the time. He said: ‘From the moment we met, I knew she was the one for me. My heart dropped out of my chest.’

Maartens: ‘I used to burn myself. I started just after leaving school at the age of about 15 or 16. I try not to show emotions to people. I bottle it up. I would cry by myself. When I get hurt, I feel better, so I started to burn myself. I used to use a knife over a candle, later a cigarette or lighter to burn myself. I felt alone, nobody understood what I was going through.’

I asked him if this continued after he met Chané. ‘Yes, it was different then. We didn’t do it then to get rid of emotional stuff. Now it was the feeling of doing it in front of someone else and being accepted. [It] felt liberating, not being judged.’

Maartens: ‘When I was eight or nine, we had two large dogs and they killed many cats that entered our yard. Father asked me to remove the dead cats and put them in plastic bags. In the beginning it was difficult, some were decomposing, but I got used to it. I started to wonder what it [death] was like. I began to read about the physiology of cats, became interested in how the cats decomposed. As a child I never opened up the cats, [or] skinned them. Most were decomposed.’ This was, of course, very similar to what Chané said about her own childhood.

We felt we should each get a cat to kill. We went to a field. She cut her cat’s throat. I wasn’t sure how to kill mine

—  Killer Maartens van der Merwe,

Maartens’s interest was in death and what happens after death. ‘We were goths. Being obsessed with death and depression, dark emotions, being apart from society.’ He spoke to Chané a lot about this. ‘She never judged anything I did, and I didn’t judge her. My interest was to see what happened after death.’ 

‘We felt we should each get a cat to kill. We went to a field. She cut her cat’s throat. I wasn’t sure how to kill mine, I choked it and stabbed it to kill it as fast as possible. Her cat took 10 minutes to die. She skinned her cat. She asked if I wanted a part of her cat to take with and I said a tail.’

He went on to say, ‘Most of the things we did we did in our own world. It was like it wasn’t real. The killing of cats was like a dream. I have nightmares about what we did. I have never had a problem saying I committed murder, killed Michael van Eck.’

Afterwards he said he felt guilty about killing the cat, but he kept it inside until he could burn himself. He didn’t want to show anything in front of Chané. However, these weren’t the last cats they killed.

I asked him what he expected from the murder. ‘To know something more about what happens after someone dies. I never had fantasies about killing someone, until I could start discussing these things with Chané. But the murder didn’t help me understand.

‘After the two cats Chané and I killed together, it satisfied a need. Like the cutting, it fulfils an emotional need. You want to go back there and do it again. I knew she liked the skinning. One time I bought her a cat. I said we can keep it alive or she can skin that cat, and she said she would rather skin the cat. She took pictures while she skinned it. The one I bought her, she wanted the bones. That cat was buried in the backyard. That was the ice-cream container. After a while we dug up that cat. I was not involved in the killing of that cat. She let the cat bleed into the container. This was the cat on a cross. Chané was an artist; she likes visual art. I didn’t participate in that.’

This was documented in photographs that they had taken and which the police had recovered.

I asked him why they moved away from cats. ‘Something different. Like a variety, to experience something different. If we did the same thing, it would become mundane. Do something different, a ritual together.’

For me, this is a key statement in their process of becoming serial murderers.

‘So,’ I asked Maartens, ‘you also wanted to do something different?’

‘For me, I wouldn’t care if I did something different. For me, I didn’t care about rituals — if I did something with her, anything with her, just be with her.’

How did things progress to Michael van Eck?

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'We discussed it from a spiritual side. Chané discussed it a lot. She said she liked stitching. She said she wanted to stitch human skin. I said she could cut my back and stitch it. She said she would like to do that, [and] she got needles ready. But as time progressed, she didn’t mention it any more. Weeks later, I mentioned it and she said she will tell me when she was ready to do it. I don’t think she wanted to hurt me.

‘I had an interest in death, wondered what it feels like to see another person die.’

Me: ‘To see or cause?’

Maartens: ‘Started off to see, was curious about the eyes. Then we talked about killing. I talked about what it would feel like to kill another person. She said we make a perfect partnership, as I am not a small guy, I am big built. We could get a person and she could stitch as much as she wanted to and take as much of the body parts.' 

Maartens: ‘We walked to the graveyard. She arranged a meeting for that night. He had intention to have sex. They didn’t know each other. He sent an SMS and she showed me. He said she must have the least amount of clothes on as possible. That didn’t make me feel good. I would hide and overpower him. He arrived, they talked, don’t recall what they talked about. I had a knife.

‘I saw he was starting to touch her. At that moment, I snapped. I came out and stabbed him as many times as I could. He screamed a lot of things; she said a lot of things. I don’t know how many times I stabbed him. Eventually he died.

‘I took the body, put it behind the wall. I zoned out and she was busy cutting. After a while she called me and said she was having trouble cutting off his head and asked my help. I took the knife and cut off part of his head and she did the rest. She wanted his feet and arm, and she wasn’t strong enough and she asked me.

‘We took the body and carried it to one side of [the] graveyard. We dug a hole. Hole wasn’t big enough, so we decided to cut off his legs to get him in. I had to do that. Afterwards we got into his car. She drove. While driving we discussed where to leave the car and decided to leave it at a taxi rank so it would get stolen.

‘The body parts were in the living room in plastic bags. She started to cut up his face. I was listening to music on the computer, my back to her; I didn’t want to watch. Monday, she went to work. I said I would bury the parts. I buried them in the backyard.’

I asked Maartens if he had achieved what he had hoped to achieve by committing the murder, and he said ‘no ’...

We did discuss what would happen if police arrested us. We decided to commit suicide if caught

—  Killer Maartens van der Merwe

'We did discuss what would happen if police arrested us. We decided to commit suicide if caught. 

'I thought I would experience something that would make me understand death and the things I have seen. Hoping Chané would be happy having him to cut up. She wanted to skin and stitch and have bones; she didn’t care for killing. If she could have been a pathologist, except if she could keep the bones. She wasn’t very different after everything that happened. Didn’t seem happy. I could see she didn’t get out of it what she wanted. I didn’t get anything out of what happened.’

I asked him about the souvenirs they kept; what was the intention? ‘Chané is an artist. She is sentimental, to keep small memories for us.’

What about the knife the police found on the dish rack? He said it was the knife used to stab and dismember Michael.

Me: ‘Did you think of the consequences?’

Maartens: ‘Didn’t think of consequences. Before, we did discuss what would happen if police arrested us. We decided to commit suicide if caught. She was at work when the police called to lure her to hospital. She called me and said it was most likely the police and what should we do. Agreed to meet at hospital. Subconsciously, I knew we would get caught.’

Me: ‘If you had never met Chané, would you still be here in prison, would you have done what you did?’

Maartens: ‘No, neither would she. I have had a lot of time to think about it. If we hadn’t met, we wouldn’t be in prison. I am not sorry for having met her; I love her. I am sorry for what has happened. We bring out the best and worst in each other.’

The Profiler Diaries 2, Penguin Random House R300