The contents of this article will largely deal with the unsolved murder of Priscilla du Toit but, in truth, the headline can be generally applied to many victims of gender-based violence in South Africa (SA).
There is one absolute truth that is, without a shred of reasonable doubt, undeniable in the case of the 42-year-old fitness guru whose battered body was found in her Fourways residence on Thursday 17 October 2019: She and her family were failed by the South African Police Service (SAPS).
Why Priscilla du Toit was failed by South Africa’s police
A year has come and gone and after the murder case was handed over from Douglasdale’s homicide unit to SAPS’ national office in Pretoria, authorities are nowhere near zoning in on a prime suspect.
Du Toit’s brother Patrick Rosslee did not hold back his tongue in lambasting Douglasdale police for their amateurish handling of the investigation.
“I actually sought legal advice to find out if there was any way that I could sue them. But, I was told that it would only be possible if they were liable for my sister’s death, which they were not,” he exclaimed over the phone.
Comm lines between family and investigators are broken
At the root of the strain felt by Du Toit’s family are the non-existent lines of communication between them and the lead investigators in the case.
“We are the ones who pick up the phone and call in every now and then to ask for updates in my sister’s investigation. We never hear from them,” Rosslee added.
However, this infraction is almost completely dwarfed by the shocking nature of the way this investigation was handled before it was passed on to national’s homicide unit.
The gross mishandling of the crime scene
To put everything into context, let’s revisit the facts of the case that were provided to us by members of the Du Toit family.
The last time anyone heard from Du Toit was on Monday 14 October 2019. At approximately 21:46 she had posted an excerpt from Steven Furtick’s sermon about purpose, on her Facebook page.
Between then and when her barely recognisable body was discovered three days later, Du Toit was met with an extremely violent end to her promising life.
Neighbours had stumbled on the gruesome discovery on that Thursday morning and alerted Douglasdale police.
At the crime scene, Rosslee was with his mother Freda and close friends of Du Toit, including three males who had a personal relationship with the deceased.
Alarmingly, responding officers did not cordon off the scene. Unauthorised people were granted leeway to trample all over the evidence and according to Rosslee, the forensics team did not even bother to collect the victim’s broken nails that were strewn all over the floor.
“We had to package the broken nails and send them in at the police station begging the guys to have a look at it for foreign DNA,” the brother claimed.
Sure enough, 17 days later, when national’s homicide unit reconstructed the crime scene in search of forensic traces, none were ever found.
This, we’ve come to understand, was due to the fact that Du Toit’s home was cleaned by domestic workers on multiple occasions in the days after her body was removed from the crime scene.
“Can you believe that no fingerprints were ever taken? I mean, not a single fingerprint was lifted by those guys. Tell me, how is that normal?” Rosslee charged.
The ‘damaged’ complex CCTV footage
Till this day, nobody knows how Du Toit’s killer managed to slip into the high-security residential complex in Fourways.
Coincidentally, footage captured by CCTV cameras on that fateful night was lost due to supposed damage to the computer’s hard drive after multiple bouts of unplanned load shedding.
This was the reason offered to Rosslee and his family when they probed the complex’s security for information.
Priscilla du Toit: Will her family ever get closure?
With no physical evidence acceptable in a court of law, no concrete suspects and very few people willing to come forward with information, Du Toit’s murder investigation has hit a dead-end.
For the family, a year has passed and the hope of finding closure in the loss of a daughter and a sister is slowly diminishing.
Du Toit’s death, much like cases of many South African women who die in the hands of unscrupulous men, remains unsolved.