I've Seen The Darkest Side Of Life

In an exclusive prison interview Hardus Lotter tells us about the tough lessons he’s learnt in the nine years since killing his parents

- Jana Van Der Merwe

WITH his eyes downcast, he comes shuffling into the office of Sevontein Prison in Pietermaritzburg, painfully thin in his baggy orange over alls. He reaches forward to greet us with icy hands.

“Thank you for coming,” Hardus Lotter says in his deep voice.

The 29-year-old Durbanite sits at the table and folds his pale, bony hands, almost as if in prayer. His skin is in bad condition and his lower lip is split on the inside.

In a crime that rocked the country in 2008, Hardus (then 20) and his older sister, Nicolette (then 26), killed their parents, Johnnie and Riekie Lotter, at their home in Westville, Durban.

The mastermind of the murder was found to be Nicolette’s fiancé, Mathew Naidoo, the self-proclaimed “third son of God” who had enthralled the brother and sister. Naidoo was sentenced to an effective 25 years behind bars, Nicolette to 12 years and Hardus to 10 years.

In six months’ time Hardus will be eligible for parole, having served six years of his sentence.

He wishes he knew then what he knows today. It was Mathew (then 21) who’d systematically persuaded Hardus – over the course of more than a year – that his and Nicolette’s parents were obstructing the work of God, he says.

Under his influence the siblings couldn’t think rationally anymore, they said, even as their parents were desperately pleading for their lives.

“If I could turn back the clock, I’d go back to where it all started, to the day I met Mathew. I’d never have befriended him. I’d have made sure my sister stopped seeing him.”

But his regrets came much too late, Hardus tells us today in the first exclusive interview he’s given since the murders nine years ago.

HE AND Nicolette didn’t think things would get so out of control that night, Hardus says. But they did.