Speaker 1:

It's just another school day at [Laerskool] Primary, but for 10-year-old Nicole Beston it's achievement. Three weeks ago, her stepfather had shot her at close range in the stomach and she survived. That was the day Gerhard Pieters shot his whole family.

He shot his wife, Hanlie, through the head and his seven-year-old stepdaughter, Sune, through the heart. His own daughter, Elzanne also died instantly. Then, he shot Nicole and went into the house where he turned his shotgun on himself.

Less than two weeks later, Nicole managed to attend her mother and baby sister's funeral. She now lives with her father, well-known actor Lieb Beston.

Speaker 2:

[foreign language]

Speaker 1:

Today, Nicole still struggles to grasp what really happened that fateful morning. She says it doesn't seem real. It feels like a dream. She remembers her mother and Gerhard arguing. Hanlie had said he'd hit her on her breasts. He'd insisted it had been in her stomach. Hanlie told the children to get into the car. She was going to report him to the police, but Gerhard tried to force Hanlie into the bedroom, his usual way to avoid beating her in front of the children.

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Lieb Beston:

I knew for a long time that the beating was going on, and it doesn't matter where I heard it. It wasn't from the children. It was from other sources. I decided to stay out of it. It was not my marriage. It was something of the past for me and all that was important were my two children and when they came to me they had to have peace, and therefore, I never spoke to them about what's going on there. I never asked them questions. I respected their silence.

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Lieb Beston:

Hanlie phoned me about a month and a half ago. We had a very serious discussion that evening and she told me everything that happened between the two of them. She said sorry to me for what she's done. I know that it was a true begging for forgiveness, and I forgive her totally because it's something that happened in our lives and I can't [live through] the past.

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Speaker 5:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

Uh-uh.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Speaker 5:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

Yeah.  [foreign language]

Speaker 5:

[foreign language  00:05:30]

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Speaker 5:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

Yeah. [foreign language]

Speaker 1:

Like her mother, little Sune didn't stand a chance. The bullet had penetrated her heart. Elzanne may have tried to escape because her body was found in the driveway.

Speaker 6:

I think you'll find this is the final act of showing power coupled with extreme anger. It is probably the most aggressive deed one can find is to kill your own family and then yourself.

Speaker 1:

As a criminal psychologist Urma [Laboskokne] has dealt with at least 3000 murderers. Several were family murderers who have survived. Urma says there is no distinct profile of a family murderer. Human behaviour varies as do personalities. In most cases though, you will find a long history of perceived failure, financial insecurity, sexual frustration, as well as a loss of control and self esteem.

Speaker 6:

A family murder is always the end of a process. It's never an out of the blue sudden occurrence. It happens, the beginning of it, way, way before the tragedy strikes.

Speaker 7:

Gerhard was depressed. I think he couldn't vent his feelings in any other way than being angry. I think it all begins when boys are babies, you know, but I just think maybe we as mothers, if we teach our sons to express their feelings more and then we can have much better marriage relationships. Gerhard wasn't very good in expressing his feelings and it all built up, and I think it just blew up.

Speaker 1:

Gerhard had a long history of violence. The woman he lived with before Hanlie was also abused and badly beaten, and his ex-wife had to obtain a protection order against him.

Speaker 8:

If a person goes so far as to go to a court and apply for a protection order, it's usually not the first fight, it's usually not something very light, it's usually severe. If you look at all those matters, it's been going on for quite a long time. So, if you are marrying somebody, or going in a relationship, and that person's got a protection order against him, I would think twice.

Speaker 1:

Gerhard once used a brick to smash Hanlie's car window when she tried to leave during an argument. At another stage, her arm was inexplicably broken, and Nicole remembers a time she heard him bash her mother's head against the grid of the [brine].

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Speaker 9:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Speaker 9:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Speaker 10:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Speaker 11:

[foreign language]

Speaker 1:

Here in the classroom, [Mariette Britz] could tell by Sune's behaviour that there was trouble at home, and sometime before the tragedy her suspicions were confirmed but she decided to wait for the next parent day. A decision she now regrets.

Speaker 11:

Yes, I'm sorry. I thought that life taking it's turn that at one or other time something good happens, something would come out. Sune's mother would come to me and I would be able to do more.

Speaker 12:

These are things that are kept undercover, but when they are noticed and observed, often people choose to set it aside and just pray it doesn't happen again. That's the kind of denial, that's the band-aid that gets put on something that is slowly festering, slowing burning, and is ready to erupt. The more that we repress things the more they are building a power and a ground ready to explode.

Speaker 13:

I learned that if you have a friend be nice to her because something can happen like this and you can never see her again.

Speaker 14:

[foreign language]

Speaker 13:

Sune, I loved you very much and I really want to be your friend again if I really can.

Lieb Beston:

Being seven years old and dying is ... I don't know what to say about it, but I've also got the precious thoughts that she was ours for seven years. I look upon it as she went home and she's safe now. Nobody will hurt her ever again.

Speaker 10:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Lieb Beston:

I know that Hanlie went for professional help. I don't know where because I didn't discuss that with her. She wasn't my wife and I want to emphasise that. Because she wasn't my wife, there was nothing I could do. But there were certain people that she had contact with and I think that those people should have taken care of something because the cry for help was there.

Speaker 1:

In contrast to Gerhard who was bankrupt, Hanlie was a successful business woman with a strong outgoing and compassionate personality. Yet, she also had her own sense of failure. This was her fourth marriage and she was determined to make it work, but while she saw a psychologist, Gerhard refused to go to therapy. Hanlie then asked Gerhard's parents to intervene and insisted he attend a marriage seminar with her. She even asked her own church for help and advice. So what went wrong?

Speaker 7:

I think she was just given the wrong advice. I think no woman can stay in a violent relationship and she shouldn't have been there, she shouldn't have stayed, or Gerhard shouldn't have been there with her in the house. I think they tried their best. I think they thought the advice they gave was good advice, but in the end it proved that it wasn't.

Speaker 1:

What was their advice?

Speaker 7:

That she should stay and work on the relationship and that she should pray for him.

Speaker 1:

For the last 10 years, [Essie] was one of Hanlie's closest friends. Yet, it was only a few months before her death that Hanlie told Essie what was really happening to her. A month before the tragedy Hanlie demanded that Gerhard leave the house, but after only two weeks she allowed him back.

Speaker 15:

I think because they work together in the same house, she felt very bad to take him away from his work the time that he was gone. She felt responsible for the situation that he was in. Hanlie's a person who believes that if you give somebody a chance you have to give it 100%, and that is what she did, she gave him 100% chance to start a new life. He didn't have the time to heal. He didn't have the time to come over the insecurity. Hanlie was very successful in her business. It could have been so different.

Speaker 7:

I think she really loved him and she really believed in him, and she was very religious. She thought that God would change him. I think she was also proud. She didn't want to have another divorce. I think she didn't want to fail.

Speaker 12:

There was nothing that she could have done. Could she have kept it at bay? Could she have prolonged this a little longer had she been this or that? I'm sure many people will have ideas about that, but at the end of the day, only he could have taken account and responsibility for his inability to respond to overwhelming feelings of jealousy, rage, impotence, powerlessness, inadequacy. There was nothing that she could have done to have altered the course of these events.

We often say things like, "We don't want to get involved. Don't want to intrude. We don't want to be disrespectful." All these mechanisms of silence enable these processes to go on and on and on endlessly until some catastrophe can, and often does, occur.

Speaker 15:

If I had another chance, yes, I would have been more supportive. I would have been more assertive by telling her to get out. What I said is, "I can't make up your mind. You have to decide yourself," and it was wrong.

[foreign language]

Speaker 5:

[foreign language]

Speaker 15:

Don't turn a blind eye. We shouldn't.

Speaker 1:

Towards the end, Hanlie obtained an interim protection order but failed to see it through. A protection order becomes final only if the complainant has appeared before a magistrate. Hanlie allowed her order to expire.

While filming at the magistrate's offices in Pretoria, a woman happened to walk in. Her face was beaten black and blue and her eyes were bloodshot. At the back of her neck was an ugly wound where she'd been bitten. Her words eerily echoed Hanlie's story. She was so distraught she hardly noticed us filming. To protect her we have disguised her face and replaced her voice, but what you are about to hear are her exact words.

Speaker 16:

At one stage you wanted me to write all the incidents, but there's not enough space to write all the incidents so I just gave you a brief summary at the top and the incident that happened now recently. I'm engaged and I fell pregnant. That was the time he kicked me in the stomach. Three months later I started bleeding and I had to have an evacuation of the uterus because of him. He made me lose the baby because deep inside of me I do really love him. I don't love what he's doing to me, and I wanted to believe that things would change. I really did wanted to believe it, but he says he only does it with me. I'm the only one that's ever provoked him like that. So, am I such a bad person that if I lock him out of the house does that mean he's got to beat me up?

Speaker 12:

We are never responsible for other people's violence, and many women in these very abusive relationships try and take responsibility for men's experience of impotence, powerlessness, and if they were only better this man would feel better and would feel more powerful which, of course, is denying what the problem really is. We are all responsible for our own emotional experience.

Speaker 1:

At Wierdabrug Police Station there are several people who are still coming to terms with their emotions and what they witnessed at the scene of the crime that awful day. Sargent Ralph [inaudible] was one of the first people on the scene. He attended to Nicole who had managed to get out of the car and was lying in the driveway bleeding profusely.

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Speaker 17:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Speaker 5:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Speaker 5:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

Yeah. [foreign language]

Speaker 1:

Nicole and Sargent [inaudible] still share a special bond. He kept her fighting for her life, and she rewarded him by pulling through. He recently promised to take her for an ice cream, another promise he was able to keep.

Lieb Beston:

May God grant that as long as I live no one will hurt this one again. That's the only thing I long for now. That she must be very happy. That she must experience love, and that she'll never never be hurt again.

Speaker 5:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

[foreign language]

Speaker 5:

[foreign language]

Nicole:

[foreign language]

(singing)

Lieb Beston:

[foreign language]

(singing)