I WILL GET YOU!

He tried to make them believe their daughter had killed herself but she wasn't buying it

- JACO HOUGH-COETZEE

THE news was beyond shocking, beyond comprehension. Her beloved daughter, the mother of her grandchildren, was gone – and she’d taken her own life.

But how could it be? Her child would never leave her children. This was the question that kept niggling Estelle Labuschagne after Jaco Steyl, the man her daughter, Nadia, had lived with for the past six years, called to tell her the terrible news.

He said he’d found Nadia hanging from burglar bars in the bathroom of the home they shared with her three children in Weltevreden Park, Roodepoort. Steyl told Estelle and her husband, Johan, that he and Nadia had had an argument the previous night and she’d screamed at him and called him a “worthless piece of s**t”.

He’d slept in another room and found Nadia the next morning. He’d taken her body down and then took their two-year-old daughter to the neighbours before he notified authorities.

Police initially ruled Nadia’s death a suicide – but Estelle and Johan refused to accept it. Something just wasn’t right. They paid for a private autopsy which found the marks on Nadia’s neck didn’t match those of someone who’d hanged themself.

Estelle is a retired social worker and says her “social worker’s mind kicked in” and told her something was wrong from the start. After the autopsy she knew she had something to work with. “I thought, ‘Yes, you bastard, I’m going to get you’.”

Estelle took the autopsy results to the police who reopened the investigation and arrested Steyl (44) for Nadia’s murder.

Steyl was recently convicted in the Johannesburg high court and sentenced to 18 years in jail.