'Hippy' killer to turn on ex-lover

Once they were teenage lovers; now they are bitter foes in a murder trial.

Phoenix Racing Cloud Theron was this week convicted of killing her mother, Rosemary Theron, 39, and of defeating the ends of justice by Judge Robert Henney, who sentenced her to 20 years' imprisonment in the High Court in Cape Town.

He suspended five years of the sentence in terms of a surprise plea agreement reached in court on Friday.

Theron, 19, is now expected to testify against her former lover, Kyle Maspero, 18, whom she blamed for initiating the murder. Maspero is due to stand trial on May 26.

Maspero's lawyer, William da Grass, said the full story of the murder still needed to be told. He said Theron's allegation that Maspero suggested the murder "impacts negatively on my client's prospects as far as sentencing is concerned".

"It has never been our intention to steal a march on the justice system, but I do believe that the whole story hasn't been told yet," said Da Grass. "That should happen relatively soon."

Rosemary was strangled with a rope, allegedly by Maspero. Theron and Maspero buried the body near their home in Fish Hoek. In March last year, they reported the mother as missing to the police. Later, with the help of a friend of Maspero's, Godfrey Scheepers, they moved the body to Strandfontein.

Scheepers, 20, is due to stand trial with Maspero.

Theron was defended by leading Cape Town advocate Francois van Zyl, who will also appear for honeymoon murder accused Shrien Dewani. The Briton is due in court again on May 12.

On Friday, Theron told the court of a family life plagued by drug and sexual abuse.

Her plea-bargain statement revealed a story of childhood neglect by her mother "virtually since birth". She was sexually abused by a friend when she was six, and later by her grandmother's boyfriend.

"The accused was born from a relationship between her mother and her father, who lived in a caravan at Noordhoek as hippies," read her lawyer from the plea statement.

"She travelled with her mother and father all over South Africa in a cart and horses. Her parents made a living from selling puppets and attended so-called rainbow gatherings and trance parties, where hippies got together. Her parents smoked dagga and took psyche-delic drugs on a regular basis."

When Theron's parents broke up, she went to live with her mother in a caravan on a farm occupied by hippies in Knysna. She said she starved while her mother meditated for hours. She was also sexually abused by one of her father's friends.

She was only six when her younger brother was born in her presence outside a caravan they lived in.

"The deceased fell pregnant again and when she returned from hospital with a baby girl, she put the baby in the accused's arms and went to sleep. The accused had to look after and care for the baby, giving her bottles at night and washing and changing her nappies," the plea read.

Her mother sent her to live with her father at the age of 12 and she was home-schooled until she was 16, when her father enrolled her at Knysna High School. She then started drinking and smoking dagga and attended trance parties with her mother.

When she moved in with her mother in Cape Town last year, she found her house in a mess and her younger sister uncared for and dirty.

She said Maspero suggested that they kill Theron and discard her body in the veld. She agreed because of a "deep-rooted sense of wanting to protect her younger sister from what she endured as a child".

She hugged her mother after an argument and Maspero crept up from behind and strangled her with a rope.

The plea agreement caught Maspero's defence by surprise because the matter had been set down for a pre-trial conference.