My son was framed – anguished mother
Hazel Gietzmann has assembled a dossier in defence of her son who is serving a prison sentence for murder, but Ipid isn’t interested
|||Cape Town - The photographs displayed on the mantlepiece of her Durbanville home bear mute testimony to the pain she has endured for the past 12 years.
One is a picture of Caryn Lindesay, a petite, teen beauty queen whom she describes as “the daughter she never had”; the other is a photograph of her son Alan, the man found guilty of killing Lindesay. “This is a very heartsore story,” Hazel Gietzmann said, clutching a dossier she’d compiled.
It was the first time she had spoken publicly since the 2003 murder. Gietzmann believes her son is innocent, the victim of a corrupt police system. She’s assembled the dossier in an effort to prove her son was framed, and has taken the issue to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid). “It is time for me to tell my story,” she said.
Gietzmann was speaking just two weeks after a full Bench of the Western Cape High Court delivered its judgment in an appeal her son had lodged against his life sentence.
Lindesay was found bludgeoned to death with a claw hammer at her mother’s home in the Villa Capri complex in Parow on May 9, 2003. She had been stabbed several times
During his trial, Alan Gietzmann denied that he played any role in the killing, saying he had found Lindesay’s bloodied body and raised the alarm. The court convicted him of murder after it found he was obsessed with Lindesay, who had ended their relationship.
During the trial, the court heard evidence that Alan had attempted on five occasions to hire homeless men to rape and murder Lindesay two weeks before she was bludgeoned to death. The vagrants testified, and identified Alan as the man who had approached them to carry out the killing.
However, it later emerged that three of the homeless men – Deon Camphor, Willem Witbooi and a man known only as “Ougat” – were paid a reward for coming forward.
At the time, defence attorney William Booth submitted that the fact that key witnesses were paid placed a question mark over the case. He also took issue with the fact that the accused had been identified in the dock and that a formal identification parade was not held.
To this day, the evidence of the payments has bothered Hazel, who wrote to Ipid in 2009 to ask it to look into the matter. She said she was still awaiting feedback.
However, Ipid’s national spokeswoman, Grace Langa, said the matter had been investigated, finalised and closed. “The matter could not be taken for criminal process as there was no substantial evidence against the (police officer concerned),” she said. She added that remedial action was recommended instead.
Hazel said she knows she is fighting a losing battle and that her lack of legal knowledge made the situation even more challenging.
She has no money to pay an attorney, and her husband used all of his pension money to fund the legal costs of the criminal trial.
But this would not stop her from fighting, she said.
She couldn’t think of a reason anyone would want to frame her son: “We want to know. There are lots of questions but no answers… All I want is for the truth to come out.” But it isn’t the only battle that Hazel has had to endure.
She also feels that everyone has forgotten that she too had a special bond with Lindesay, who lived with the family for some time.
Her eyes welled up as she recalled evenings with the teen, teaching her to knit, doing house chores and chatting. “I called her my bud. She was a bud that opened up into a beautiful rose,” she said, adding that Lindesay had very low self-esteem and that she tried her best to change that.
Her son had no reason to kill Lindesay, she said, adding that they were “very much in love” up until the day of the murder. If any of her grandchildren ask about them, she tells them that Alan’ has moved to the US and that the woman in the photo next to his is his girlfriend.
Weekend Argus