On the morning of January 11, 1990, a sixteen-year-old named Joan Booysen, small for her age, was approached in Church Square in Pretoria by a blonde woman and taken to a house in Malherbe Street, Capital Park, where she was handcuffed, drugged, sexually assaulted and shut in a bedroom cupboard. The man of the house went out. The woman was busy in the garden. Joan got out of the cupboard and out of the house, and was home by noon. At about eleven the woman, Joey Haarhoff, telephoned her sister to say she had done something that would get her hanged and could not reach Gert. Four days later, on January 15, with police pursuing his car along Van der Hoff Road west of the city, Cornelius Gerhardus van Rooyen shot Haarhoff and then himself. He was fifty-one. With his death went the only certain knowledge of what had happened to six girls who had disappeared over the previous two years.
Van Rooyen, known as Gert and as Bokkie, was born on April 11, 1938. He was sent to a reform school in 1954 for stealing a car and a rifle and jailed in 1960 for theft. He married, had six children, and ran a building business with his brothers from the Capital Park house. In 1979 he abducted two girls, aged ten and thirteen, drove them to the Hartbeespoort Dam, punched them and forced them to strip and perform sexual acts, then let them go in Pretoria the next day. He was convicted of abduction, sexual assault and common assault, sentenced to four years, and served three. Guests at his house later recalled him boasting of sex with girls as young as five. In 1988 he began a relationship with Francina Johanna Hermina Haarhoff, a divorcee known as Joey.
Between 1988 and September 1989 six girls vanished in Pretoria, Kempton Park and Natal. Tracy-Lee Scott-Crossley, fourteen, was the first. Fiona Harvey, twelve, and Joan Horn, twelve, followed. On September 22, 1989, Odette Boucher, eleven, and Anne-Mari Wapenaar, twelve, disappeared together from Kempton Park, and Yolanda Wessels, thirteen, a week later. Most were taken from streets or shopping areas. Witnesses later said it was Haarhoff, sometimes in a blonde wig, who approached the children: a woman offering a lift did not frighten a child the way a man alone would. Children's homes in the area recalled her phoning to ask whether she might take girls home for weekends and holidays. In July 1989 a sixteen-year-old from Durban, Janet Delport, was taken from a mall and got away.
After the deaths police tore the Malherbe Street house apart, and contemporary reports said forensic traces and witness statements linked the couple to the missing girls. Searches have gone on ever since: bones dug up beside the property in 2007 during work on a swimming pool, excavators on Blythedale Beach on the KwaZulu-Natal north coast in 2017 where the couple had holidayed, leads from an old company access card placing Van Rooyen in Durban. None of it produced a body. Claims of a wider trafficking network have circulated for decades and have never been established. In 2021 a woman living in England came forward to say she had escaped the couple thirty-nine years earlier.
No charge was ever laid, there was no trial, and the six girls have never been found. Their families have had no burial. George Boucher, Odette's father, died in 2020 without an answer. The case is spoken of in South Africa as one of the country's great unsolved mysteries, and the question of whether Haarhoff was a willing partner or a coerced one has never been settled either; she is dead by his hand, and he by his own.