Murder mystery as son stands trial over South African family axe slaughter

HENRI van Breda seemed to have a life of privilege but if prosecutors are right, he’s responsible for slaughtering three members of his family, writes Andrew Rule.

Henri van Breda is facing trial for the axe murders of three of his family.

BEFORE the night an axe killer destroyed the van Breda family, they used to do fun things like go shark-cage diving together.

They could never have guessed it would have been safer to swim in open water with a Great White than be home in bed.

Some time after midnight on January 27, 2015, someone with an axe killed Martin and Teresa van Breda and their eldest son, Rudi — who studied mechanical engineering at Melbourne University — and injured their teenage daughter, Marli, so badly she still can’t recall what happened.

But the middle sibling, Henri — who studied physics at Melbourne Uni — emerged from the bloodbath with only a few scratches, none from an axe.

The 22-year-old is now standing trial for murders that made headlines across the world.

A judge is weighing up whether the handsome, expensively educated Henri slaughtered his parents and his brother and left his younger sister for dead.

But even if he gets the benefit of the doubt in South Africa’s most notorious murder case since the Oscar Pistorius trial, it’s unlikely anyone will look at the once wholesome-looking young man the same way ever again.

With his blond hair, white teeth and beach house tan, Henri looked like a poster boy for a private school prospectus — although in court recently, he has looked pudgy and morose, with rings under his eyes.

Regardless of the verdict, he’d be as welcome as a crocodile in a kindergarten if he fronted at a Scotch College reunion in Perth, where he was educated after the family migrated to Australia in 2006.

Henri, Marli and Rudi van Breda and their parents Teresa and Martin.

The evidence against the poor little rich kid is circumstantial but seems damning.

For Henri to “walk”, the judge will have to allow that a random attacker could have slipped through a narrow opening into the family’s well-fortified house to butcher complete strangers.

To be fair, the defence scenario of a motiveless, random attack is only a little more bizarre than the prosecution case that one member of a respected and respectable South African-Australian family went berserk.

South African police see many violent crimes, but the scene that confronted them at the van Bredas’ comfortable house in a secure golf course estate was something else again.

Here, besides three dead bodies (and one barely live one) police found a strangely calm young man, relatively unscathed despite his hardly believable story of tackling an intruder wielding an axe and a knife with bare hands.

He was either crazy brave — or crazy killer.

Homicide detectives get used to sorting survivors from suspects at crime scenes, and soon made up their minds.

They didn’t buy Henri’s bizarre story.

For a start, they wondered why he had not managed to call emergency services to the scene for some hours.

This despite the fact his 16-year-old sister, Marli, was lying in her own blood a few metres from him, alive despite terrible wounds.

Then there were Henri’s trivial and suspiciously regular knife cuts — inflicted, he claimed, after he wrested the axe from the killer, who had then supposedly produced a knife.

Henri had neat parallel cuts on his chest and arms, all in spots where he could have done them himself.

He told police he avoided the axe attack by chance because he was in the lavatory at the time, emerging in time to see a tall, black man “laughing” as he hacked at brother Rudi’s body.

Detectives would have been intrigued by the fact both parents were killed.

Marli van Breda was badly injured in the attack.

Colombian and Mexican drug cartels might slaughter entire families as revenge — but by shooting, not with an axe.

And cocaine cartel killers do their mass murdering in Central America, not in a gated community in an elegant university town like Stellenbosch, east of Cape Town.

This crime appeared to be personal, not commercial or criminal.

Killing both parents might not be common, but there are enough examples of it to influence the way investigators think.

The most notorious case in recent history is that of the Menendez brothers in Beverly Hills in 1989.

The first police to the scene immediately suspected Lyle and Erik Menendez of killing their parents, who had been shot repeatedly with shotguns.

One detective at the Menendez mansion asked the brothers if they had the tickets from the cinema where they claimed to have been watching a film at the time their parents were shot. Another investigator said soon afterwards: “When both parents are hit, our feeling is usually that the kids did it.”

A third officer declared, just after the Menendez murders: “These kids fried their parents.”

But there was no proof to back up the hunches, so the murderous brothers went free for years (on a giant spending spree) until someone close to them tipped off the law.

The result was the biggest celebrity trial of the decade after the OJ Simpson circus, with the difference being the Menendez brothers went to prison for a very long time.

From the start, the brothers attracted suspicion and comment because of their extraordinary calmness — almost as if their parents’ murders had happened to another family.

No one knows for sure all that goes on in such outwardly happy, successful families, and the van Bredas were no exception.

They moved to Perth in early 2006, then later to a luxury house at Buderim in Queensland, now being sold to help fund Henri’s defence and to support Marli.

 

A WRITER fascinated by the case has pieced together a picture of a family under tension not obvious on the surface.

Julian Jansen, an investigative reporter in South Africa, is waiting for the trial to finish so he can complete his international book, The De Zalze Murders: The Story Behind the Brutal Axe Attack.

At the heart of the case is this: what sort of young man might take an axe to his sleeping parents, brother and little sister?

The De Zalze housing estate where three members of the van Breda family were killed.

Whichever verdict the court reaches, it has to grapple with that question.

Jansen suggests that, behind the facade, Henri was unravelling.

Two years before the murders, he started his physics course at the University of Melbourne, where brother Rudi studied mechanical engineering.

But in mid-2014 Henri quit the course for what he would call a “gap year”, and rejoined the family in South Africa, where his parents had returned in 2014 to pursue a new business.

In holiday snapshots, they look like a model family, but neighbours told police of raised voices on the night of the murders.

If he is found guilty, Henri will probably be seen as a charming psychopath, much like the Menendez brothers, but Jansen’s research suggests he dropped out of university after showing signs of disturbed behaviour, possibly aggravated by drugs.

If his sister has recovered enough from brain injuries to recall anything of what led to the attack, she is not saying.

She is living with relatives while she finishes secondary school, but Henri is not.

While on bail, he has moved from rented room to rented room with a girlfriend he met last year at the Capsicum Culinary Studio chef school near Cape Town.

He has since dropped out of that course, too.

Which is a pity, because if he does go to prison, being qualified as a jailhouse cook could be an asset.

Providing, of course, the authorities let him anywhere near knives and meat cleavers.

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