After a painful and lengthy murder trial, the journalist still had questions about why her father had died. So she set out to meet the gang member jailed for the killing
wo days after burying her mother’s ashes in the summer of 2008, Liz McGregor received a devastating phone call. Her 79-year-old father, Robin, was also dead – and his house 75 miles north of Cape Town, where she lived, was now the scene of a murder inquiry. His car, a bronze-coloured Mercedes that had for years been his pride and joy, had been discovered by police a few miles away in a poor neighbourhood with its lights on.
Her father was a retired publisher and game farmer, the former mayor of a town in the mountains of the Western Cape that was coincidentally called McGregor. He had become a bit of a celebrity in his younger days after publishing a bestselling bookof apartheid, and was rewarded with a place on the Competition Commission in the early days of Nelson Mandela’s presidency.
Robin McGregor was a third-generation immigrant of Scottish extraction whose great-grandfather had abandoned a wife and children to seek his fortune in the South African gold fields. Cecil Thomas, the man convicted of his murder, was a 33-year-old from a Coloured family that also probably had roots in 19th-century Scotland.
After university she became a journalist, “but apartheid seemed invincible and increasingly oppressive,” she recalls. “Security police bugged our phones and every newsroom had at least one journalist who doubled up as a government spy.” Disheartened, she decided to move to England, and a job at the Guardian, until her mother’s diagnosis with dementia persuaded her to return home in 2002, where she pursued a new career as an author of nonfiction books.
Despite all the grand words in the constitution, the lofty ideals of restorative justice are just that – idealsGradually, a picture emerged of a young man who, for all that he was from a close and supportive family, had got caught up with drugs and the rampant gang culture in his home town. In her father’s car on the night of the murder he had been smoking tik – the street name for crystal meth.
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