On the morning of the last day of his life, a food parcel was delivered to Casper Kruger in the Pinetown police cells, outside Durban. He had been held there for a month on a hijacking charge under the name Jacques du Plessis, and nobody holding him knew that he was one of the most wanted men in South Africa. His fingerprints had gone off for analysis when he was booked in, and the results could take six to eight weeks. A woman thought to be his girlfriend had been seen several times in a silver car with two other men.
Captain Karen Middleborough grew suspicious and ordered his cell searched. The four officers who went in found him armed with a firearm. In the shooting that followed Inspector Eric Maphri was badly wounded in the chest and Middleborough was hit in the hand, and Kruger took the four officers and several prisoners hostage. It was Sunday, April 9, 2006. Negotiations failed, sharpshooters were brought in, and one shot to the mouth killed him instantly.
Senior officers came to the station, and one source told the Daily News that the top brass were very angry. The police spokesman, Director Bala Naidoo, said an investigation had begun into how a gun had been smuggled into the cells and that the police wanted to speak to the girlfriend, who worked in the marketing department of a local community newspaper. She would not comment. It was not known exactly when the police realized who their prisoner was.
The murders had been fifteen years earlier and some three hundred miles away. Kruger and Philip van der Merwe went to the Botanical Gardens in Emmarentia, in Johannesburg, and picked up gay men. They beat them, got their cheques, their bank PIN numbers and their cash out of them, and then killed them. The money went on large quantities of liquor and on women hired from escort agencies.
The three who died were Adriaan Combrink, a pharmacist; Johannes Loggienberg, a telephone operator; and Johannes Kruger, a bank manager.
Kruger was arrested in November 1991. He was convicted the following year together with Van der Merwe and a third man, Petrus Nieuwenhuis, who had taken part in one of the killings and turned state witness against the other two. Kruger received three death sentences and thirty-three years.
Then South Africa changed. The death penalty went with the old order, and his sentences became three terms of life imprisonment and twenty-two years.
He did not stay put. The first escape came before his trial, from the holding cells at the Johannesburg Magistrate's Court, where someone smuggled him a blade and he sawed his way out. In May 1997 he broke out of Pretoria Central Prison with Jano Nortje, the so-called suitcase killer, who had cut up an elderly man and been caught carrying the remains; that added eight years. Later he got away again from a clinic he had been taken to after complaining that he was ill. He went to Durban and took another name.
What ended it was a meeting at Knowles Spar, a supermarket in Pinetown, where he met a woman to do what he called a business deal. They drove to a place on Otto Volek Road, and there he pulled a gun, tied her up and put her in the boot of his car. She untied herself, got out and went to the police. A few days later, on March 8, 2006, he was arrested for hijacking and gave his name as Jacques du Plessis.
The Thursday before he died he appeared in the Pinetown Magistrate's Court for a bail hearing. The court was not satisfied that the police had properly confirmed who he was, and remanded him to April 14. He was dead five days before that date, and before the fingerprint results came back.