A forensic expert and private investigator are convinced they have found one of the abducted victims of notorious 1980s paedophile Gert van Rooyen, despite dismissals by the missing girl's family.
Now 41 years old, Lea Sloane claims she is Fiona Harvey, who was abducted in 1988 when she was 12 years old. She was reportedly walking to the shop to buy milk when she was snatched. A white pick-up truck used in her abduction with an advertisement for Van Rooyen's building-contracting business on it would later link him to this crime.
Harvey was one of six girls believed to have been abducted and murdered by Van Rooyen and his partner, Joey Haarhoff, between 1988 and 1989, though some believe there were many more girls.
Tracy-Lee Scott-Crossley, 13, Fiona Harvey, 12, Joan Horn, 13, Anne-Marie Wapenaar, 12, Odette Boucher, 12, and Yolanda Wessels, 12, disappeared between August 1 1988 and November 2 1989. None have ever been found.
The escape of one girl, Joan Booysen, gave police the information they needed to find Van Rooyen and Haarhoff.
Van Rooyen shot Haarhoff dead, then killed himself, as police closed in, preventing the families from tracing their children. Parents have searched unsuccessfully for them in what became one of SA's most famous cold cases.
In June 2017, police forensic investigators excavated unsuccessfully a number of sites around Blythedale Beach, north of Durban, where they suspected the victims may have been buried as Van Rooyen had spent his final holiday nearby.
In an affidavit, forensic expert Franswa Stassen, who worked for the police's forensic unit for 25 years, says he found three points of similarity between Sloane and Harvey: two freckles on her upper lip and another on her nose.
"The photos do not look identical but there are corresponding and similar marks, with the freckles," he told the Sunday Times. "I was worried about the nose and ears, but then I heard her nose was broken and she had ear operations.
"It is my opinion they are the same person," he said.
But after viewing photos of Sloane's face, Harvey's elderly father told investigator Leon Nel that she "did not have the same eyes" and he never wanted to be contacted again.
Harvey's sister declined to respond to questions by Sunday Times and asked us not to contact them again. Her parents are in their 80s.
In an interview with Sunday Times this week, Sloane said she had given DNA samples to the police and would do anything to prove that she was Harvey.
Asked about her abduction, she said she remembered walking hand in hand with a friendly man and woman, who had offered to buy her sweets. She woke up in a room shared with five other girls, and from time to time Zulu-speaking girls came in and an Indian girl.
She recounted extreme sexual abuse and violence at the hands of Van Rooyen and Haarhoff.
Sloane said the couple had burnt her hands and feet so badly it was impossible to match her fingerprints with Harvey's. Her fingertips are very smooth. "Joey turned the stove on until it was boiling red and placed my hands on it, and then my feet. It was an awful experience."
She claimed Van Rooyen had released her at a remote location one night, after an unknown amount of time, which could have been months or years, during which time she outgrew her top.
"We drove many hours, over a gushing river. I thought they were going to kill me," she said in a monotone, her eyes looking into the distance.
After her release, she revealed that, she had hitched lifts with truckers to Pinetown and later to the house where her family had lived, which was empty and locked up. She then got help from a "street father", before being sold into the sex trade by a crime family.
Sloane said she looked youthful because she was obliged to have beauty treatments while working as a high-end courtesan.
"I want to get other girls to come in. I just want to get the truth out there," she said.
Sloane was in tears during the interview because her story was not being believed. She said she feared for her safety after getting a threatening message on Facebook.
Nel, who was a police officer for more than 15 years, has worked on many missing children cases. Earlier this month he tracked down two-year-old Kamvalethu Ncwadi, who was snatched from the verandah of her mother's East London home a week before Christmas...