Cornelius Gerhardus van Rooyen, known as Gert, was born in 1938 and lived in Capital Park, Pretoria. He had a conviction from 1979 for abducting and assaulting young girls and had served part of a sentence for it.
Between 1988 and 1989 six girls aged between nine and sixteen disappeared in Pretoria and elsewhere, most of them taken from streets or shopping areas. He worked with his partner, Joey Haarhoff, whose presence made him appear harmless: a couple offering a lift did not frighten a child the way a man alone would.
The girls who disappeared were Tracy-Lee Scott-Crossley, fourteen; Joan Horn, thirteen; Odette Boucher, eleven; Anne-Marie Wapenaar, twelve; and Yolande Wessels and Fiona Harvey, both twelve.
On January 15, 1990, with police approaching a house he was using, he shot Haarhoff and then himself.
The bodies have never been found. That is the defining fact of the case in South Africa. There was no trial, no charge, no forensic case and no burial for any of the six families, and the searches conducted since have found nothing. Claims about the fate of the girls have circulated for thirty-five years, including allegations of a wider network, and none has been established.
The entry records six disappearances and two deaths by his hand, and it does not state as fact what happened to the girls, because nobody knows. His own prior conviction is the part that was known in advance.