The news poster caught my eye as I drove to work this morning: “Kotzé by vriend gevang”.

Friend? Can the man possibly have a single friend left on this planet? Isn’t it an oxymoron to talk of a “friend of Johan Kotze”?

Kotze, if you have missed the ongoing news coverage of the past few days, is the Limpopo businessman arrested this week after a week-long manhunt. His alleged crimes: forcing three of his casual workers at gunpoint to rape his wife and to mutilate her using nails, pliers, a screwdriver and a grinder, or possibly allegedly doing so himself.

As if those details weren’t horrific enough, he also allegedly killed his stepson — his estranged wife’s teenage son. He allegedly made her listen as she was being raped, and the 19-year-old begged for his life, only to have it ended with a single shot to the head.

Many insults have been hurled at Kotze in the media, and as he was taken into police custody. Some called him a pig. I wouldn’t grace him with the name of any animal, because even the wildest animal in the most violent Tennysonian nature red in tooth and claw couldn’t come close to creating the horror of Kotze’s alleged crimes.

And anyway, pigs are extremely intelligent, gentle creatures, with flesh so close to our own that their organs and tissues are used in human transplantation and regularly save lives.

Kotze has also been dubbed the Modimolle Monster. Modimolle is the area of Limpopo that, according to the government’s website “enjoys mostly tourists who visit for holidays rather than day tours”. It is likely to “enjoy” a very different, uglier picture in the mind’s eye from now on, as images of a woman gang-raped and mutilated with nails, pliers, a screwdriver and a grinder, having to listen as her son is killed in the next room, become indelibly etched in the nation’s consciousness.

Of course, Modimolle’s monster is innocent till proven guilty, and Limpopo police have said Kotze is “co-operating” with investigators as they prepare for his first court appearance. So far, there hasn’t been even the vaguest suggestion that he stands wrongly accused. Fleeing the scene of the crime is just one of many indicators that the man will be found guilty, guilty, guilty, but of course that’s for a judge to decide.

And what of the workers he allegedly forced into his heinous path? There were three of them, two of whom have already been apprehended. The third is not likely to be far behind, by all accounts.

A criminal law expert has said that as the men were allegedly forced at gunpoint to rape Kotze’s estranged wife, they are “likely to be charged in court but could claim they were acting under duress”.

No doubt they will, but to me, it beggars belief that any man could have achieved an erection at all under such circumstances. Extreme stress, duress, call it what you will, is proven to be a passion killer, a complete weapon of erectile dysfunction.

There has already been a suggestion on a radio news report, by an apparent “expert”, that extreme stress can in some instances have the opposite effect, and force sufficient blood flow into a “duressed” penis to cause an erection.

I don’t know if I would be alone in finding that extremely hard to believe.

What I do believe is that if Kotze is found guilty of all the crimes of which he stands accused (as is looking very likely), then it’s lucky we no longer have the death penalty in this country. Death would simply be too good for a monster like that.

I believe justice would be the long, slow, lingering death that is life in prison without any possibility of parole, with inmates who would have no compunction about doing to him as he did to his estranged wife.

Tags: crime, Johan Kotze, Modimolle