The route William Jacobs and Norman Arend chose on their Friday night sojourn from Western to Coronationville took them past the hospital.
What should have been a place of safety and serenity turned into a mini-war zone on May 25, 1973, as a horde of Young Guns, the youth arm of the Fast Guns, robbed and attacked passers-by, armed with pangas and knives.
They held up Jacobs, Arend and a third friend, demanding money. Jacobs pulled out 30c, which was everything he had on him.
Back then a newspaper cost 5c, a large packet of chips 19c and 225 grams of cheese wedges 29-1/2c.
“Spare my life,” Jacobs begged, but the young gangsters set upon the trio, stabbing Jacobs in the chest and back. Despite his injuries Jacobs managed to break free, but as he ran he heard Arend, trapped by the hoodlums, screaming behind him.
Arend was one of three people to be killed that night while Jacobs, a father of three, was among four injured.
If the idea of a gang attack right outside the Coronation Hospital sounded bad, it still wasn’t as brutal and shocking as what went down in the wards on July 22 1974.
That was a day that rocked Western and the neighbouring coloured ‘hoods; that was the day Desmond Stuurman died bloodily and violently.
The Spaldings gang boss, just 19, was said to have just been released from custody after a few months, possibly even that day.
His friend Oscar Rodgers had been injured in an attack and Stuurman decided to visit him, making the mistake of travelling alone.
Rodgers had been the intended target of the Fast Guns when his Spaldings gangmate, Abie Johnson, had been killed in the first gang-on-gang violence in early 1972. He escaped injury that night, but had been injured subsequently and was recovering in hospital.
The circumstances of how Rodgers had been injured are unclear — one report said he was shot, but people from back then insist he had been stabbed.
Stuurman must have been spotted going to the hospital, possibly by someone who ran back to the Vultures lair. At least four of them stayed at Deon Flats, one of a collection of blocks scattered around Western, all given regular first names.
A group of nine arrived at the hospital after dark, as Stuurman was about to leave, armed with axes, pangas and knives.
Stuurman and the Vultures saw each other instantly and the Spalding darted back into the hospital, racing through the corridors and bursting into the ward where Rodgers lay, looking for a place to hide.
Anthony “Gogo” Jacobs, holding an axe, burst in first, delivering a blow so hard to Stuurman’s head that blood started spurting. The others were right behind and they also came in, swinging with their pangas and lunging with their knives.
Stuurman tried fending off the blows with his hands, getting off the floor and running away from them and into the women’s ward where he tried hiding under a bed.
But his assailants dragged him out and swung away at him with their weapons in front of horrified nurses and patients.
Ebrahim Khan was the first doctor on the scene and his attention was drawn to a massive wound on the right side of the dying man’s head. Brain matter was protruding.
Stuurman was still alive. He was unconscious, but in a state of shock. There was nothing Khan could do and the felled gangster died soon afterwards.
Weitz dies a few months later
The post-mortem photos presented at his murder trial showed that his skull had been badly fractured. One chopping weapon had also opened a massive wound across his right collar bone. There were defensive wounds on both his forearms.
Stuurman’s funeral was well attended, especially by members of the opposing Fast Guns, showing their respect.
Leon Weitz, the policeman who had edged Stuurman in the featherweight final of the amateur boxing tournament at the SA Games in Pretoria the previous year, had been lying badly injured in hospital in Cape Town for more than a year.
Weitz, a recipient of the State President’s Award for his boxing skills, had been paralysed after suffering brain damage when the vehicle he was travelling in overturned while doing duty in the operational area on the Caprivi Strip in May 1973.
He died three months after Stuurman at the age of 26. He was praised by Frank Braun, the president of the South African Amateur Boxing Association and former head of the National Olympic Committee, who believed Weitz would have been a tough competitor had South Africa been allowed to participate at the Olympics.
And that’s the closest Stuurman came to being praised for his boxing skill by the white establishment.
Vikkie Fly leaves his marks
The Vultures handed themselves in to the police soon after the murder said they’d intended only to teach Stuurman a lesson because of the ruthlessness they had endured at the hands of the Spaldings. One complained that Stuurman had shot at them. They hadn’t planned to kill him.
The only asset claimed in Stuurman’s estate was R50 that had been paid for bail while he was awaiting trial on an unspecified charge.
In the end six men were convicted, including Albert Ford, who had been present at the killing of Johnson more than two years earlier. Farrell “Bisa” Adams, George “Georgie” Adams, Andrew “Totie” Matthews and Michael “Toy” Maneson were also found guilty.
Georgie told police that he and Stuurman had been friends through school and even for a while afterwards, but the Spaldings turned against them. The Vultures used axes and the Spaldings revolvers, he complained.
The policeman interviewing them asked them about scars on their arms. Georgie and Toy both replied they’d been stabbed by Vikkie Fly, a Spalding.
Victor “Vikkie Fly” Felix was no great swordsman, so to speak, but executed hit-and-run attacks on rival gang members. A quick slash in a public area and he would be gone, almost flying away.
Some attributed old scars to “Koshen”, the nickname for Lemmy Trenton, another Spalding.
Vincent takes revenge
Two other accused were acquitted in court, but a ninth suspect, 15-year-old Freddy Hollander, didn’t even make it to the trial in January, 1975.
Around 6pm on Christmas Eve of 1974 Hollander, known as Billy, was walking down Ruben Street with a friend, Donovan Miller, when he bumped into Vincent Stuurman, 16, at the time, outside a liquor store.
The entrance is pretty much exactly on the corner of Steytler Street.
There had been 10 Stuurman children — five boys and five girls — which happened to be exactly the same for Cameron Adams and his siblings. Desmond had been No. 3 and Vincent No. 5.
Hollander, known as Billy, already had a reputation as a bully.
According to the version Vincent gave to police, Billy had threatened to kill him.
“Here is the laaitie, I still want to stab him,” said Billy, adding menacingly: “I stabbed his brother.”
At this point his friend pulled out a knife and gave it to Hollander.
“Fight me with your fists, Billy,” replied Vincent, but Hollander said he didn’t know how to box. The truth is that Vincent, unlike Desmond, wasn’t a boxer. The knife was his weapon of choice.
Black Christmas
When Vincent pulled out his knife Miller ran away while Hollander ducked into the bottle store, a dingy place where all customers were served over a counter. The space was smaller than a boxing ring — Hollander had no way out.
Vincent followed Billy inside and stabbed him once in the chest, the blade sliding into the heart. Hollander dropped and Stuurman ran away, hopping into a taxi, a red Valiant with a black roof.
When the majority of white children their age were probably at home gearing up for Christmas festivities the next day, Stuurman was killing and Hollander was dying.
The post-mortem photo of Hollander showed the face of a youngster who didn’t even look like he had hit puberty. If people had been asked to guess his age some would surely have suggested as young as 12 or 13.
His eyelids are almost fully closed, leaving only a small gap through which he stared out blankly. And with his mouth slightly open, he could have been a kid on the brink of falling asleep, perhaps excited about the idea of waking up on Christmas Day.
But the sticker on his right breast, with 4906/74 neatly written on it, and the open 2cm wound caused by Vincent’s blade, almost dead centre of his chest, dispel the illusion.
Several years later Vincent admitted that avenging Desmond had been the motive for killing Billy.
Peace time in Western
In late 1975 Vincent was found guilty of murder with extenuating circumstances at a trial in the Supreme Court in Johannesburg where it emerged he had been caught for theft of a soccer ball in 1972 and had been ordered to pay the plaintiff 98c in reparation.
Stuurman was sent to Porter school, a reformatory in Tokai, Cape Town, an institution that exists to this day.
Around the same time Stuurman’s friend, Cameron Adams, was also being shipped to the Mother City, apparently enlisted into the South African Cape Corps, where he served in the mid-1970s, mostly as a boxer.
Within a year of Twakie’s murder, police were able to negotiate a truce between the gangs. In May 1975 they offered to provisionally withdraw charges against Fast Gun and Spalding members for six months, and if they stuck to that for six months, the charges would be dropped permanently.
The offer worked and there was peace in Western for a while.
In June Gladys Smith launched the Western Youth Social Association, a social platform for youngsters, including gangsters.
She had been shocked by Twakie’s murder, but what really got to her was when her seven-year-old brother Andrew returned home one day and excitedly spoke about how he’d witnessed a gang fight. This, he told her, made him want to become a gangster.
Murder at Yours and Mine
Gladys, in her early 20s, formed the association with supposedly reformed gangsters serving on the committee. Lemmy Trenton was the secretary of the new club.
The truce lasted into 1976, but it didn’t quell general violence.
In February some Fast Guns went to the Yours and Mine nightclub in Lilian Road in Fordsburg one Saturday night.
They’d had a run-in there with a chucker-outer, Michael Vilakazi, the previous night, stabbing him in the arm.
They found him manning the door as usual. While the band was taking a break and many patrons were still inside, they noticed Vilakazi running across the dance floor, a knife sticking out of his back.
Fazel Haffagee, a part-time employee at the club, initially thought it was a joke until a friend he was talking to told him: “No, look at the blood.”
Then he recognised the three Fast Guns chasing him — Richard “Fellas” Timmerman and Henry “Housa” Ford, both back on the streets having served time for the killing of Abie Johnson, as well as Edwin Obermeyer, 16 years old at the time.
Obermeyer, armed with a panga, reached Vilakazi first and struck him on the face, but the Zulu man carried on running, heading to the empty stage and picking up one of the instruments to try to shield himself.
'Wild like an animal'
Obermeyer, Timmerman and Ford chopped through it and carried on attacking him.
Vilakazi sank to his knees under the weight of the attack, with Obermeyer and Timmerman hitting him on the head with pangas.
The assailants, who were being covered by fellow Fast Gunners Frank Jacobs, Errol Ramners and Raymond Paulsen to ensure nobody interfered, took Vilakazi outside onto the pavement where they kept stabbing and slashing at him.
Timmerman stabbed him with a knife in the chest, leaving it there. Ford pulled it out and stabbed him with it again.
Then they ran away and Vilakazi, still alive, made the mistake of trying to get up. One of the Fast Guns looked back and saw him moving, then called the others and they returned. “All six of them came back. They grabbed him, they were hitting him wild like an animal,” Haffagee told the court.
Then they ran off, getting into a car around the corner.
The coroner said of all the blows, only one, which was probably administered last, was fatal, because it would have caused Vilakazi to collapse immediately.
The murder of Wieliewalie
The six accused ended up being acquitted, though one former gangster who knew the characters didn’t believe Paulsen would have done anything to the bouncer. “He couldn’t hurt a fly.”
Paulsen, with a two-month-old baby at the time of the trial, had been arrested at the courthouse while getting married in the registry office.
By March 1976 the 10-month-old peace deal seemed to be on shaky ground. Two policemen tried arresting two youths in Newclare, but found themselves being surrounded by about 50 men and youths.
Then a 16-year-old, identified as a Fast Gun, charged at them with an axe, chopping at their car. One of the cops shot him once, injuring him slightly.
But in May, almost exactly year after the police had convinced the gangs to stop warring, the deal fell apart.
Timmerman, Ford and Desmond “Wieliewalie” Bowers were visiting Bower’s girlfriend, 16-year-old Pamela Endriene, around 9pm on May 23, a Sunday.
She and Bowers were at the front door and Timmerman and Ford were at the front gate to the yard.
Ford suddenly shouted: “Desmond, we need to run because the Spaldings are coming and they’re armed.”
'Soup bones'
He had just spotted five of them appear at the corner, about three houses away.
Bowers pushed his girlfriend into the house and ran off, following Timmerman and Ford, but he had lost valuable time.
Timmerman and Ford hurdled over fences to reach the next corner where they took cover behind a hedge.
But the Spaldings were on top of Wieliewalie as he vaulted the fences they had already cleared. Eventually he went down in one yard and didn’t get up. The attackers didn’t stay long.
The two Fast Gun leaders found Bowers in the front of Gladys Nelson’s property, and Timmerman then headed off to find transport and call Bowers’s mom, Maud Herklaas.
Bowers was severely injured. Of all the postmortem photos, his looked the worst, even worse than Desmond Stuurman.
His head was covered in hack wounds, several of them deep. His back was peppered with stab wounds and his left hand was almost chopped in half, sliced through the palm from the index finger to the ring finger. There was also a gaping wound on his left leg.
When describing how she found her son, Herklaas told the court that the wounds reminded her of “soup bones”.
Timmerman found a minibus and they took Bowers to Coronation Hospital, where he died in surgery.
Fighting in court
Timmerman and Ford identified five attackers, including Peter Patterson and Lemmy Trenton.
Having both been convicted for the 1972 murder of Abie Johnson based on the testimony of people like Trenton, Timmerman and Ford were accused of manufacturing evidence as payback.
They told the court that none of the assailants had worn hats, which conflicted with what some of the residents saw when they looked out of their windows during the attack.
They didn’t recognise anyone, but they noticed that the attackers had cotton hats.
Trenton was recognised because he had a pronounced chest, a deformity shared by his brother. Bowers’s girlfriend had noticed the chest, but Trenton’s lawyer pointed out that it could have been the brother.
The five all produced alibis.
Two were members of the Riders, the youth gang for the Spaldings. One, whose mother testified he was in church at the time of the attack, said he had joined the gang as a way of avoiding constant harassment to and from school, especially by the Young Guns. His story is typical of many youths today.
It’s not clear what had sparked the attack, but in court they spoke about an altercation at a party on the Friday night before.
Parties and stokvels, often run by the gangs and even attended by rival members, were frequent in the township. And once enough alcohol had flowed, people were inclined to open up old wounds.
Offence had been taken and a grudge formed.
With the gangs still operating, even without a level of violence, the peace deal had been doomed from the start.
The Western gang war had resumed. The flames of animosity were burning again and it was only a matter of time before Vincent Stuurman and Adams returned from Cape Town.
An inferno was coming.
• The fourth instalment of the five-part series 'WILD WESTERN: The rise of Westbury’s gangs' will be published in the Sunday Times.
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