We Let That Kid Into Our Home & Hearts

Three families are broken and a town is torn apart by the horrific slaying of two teenage girls

- Jana Van Der Merwe, Marizka Coetzer & Carla Coetzee

HIS eyes are swollen and red and pain is etched in his face. Understandably, Ronnie Hough is still try­ ing to come to terms with the fact he’ll never see his daughter, Sharnelle (17), again.

The discovery of the bodies of Shar­ nelle and her best friend, Marna Engel­ brecht (16), recently sent shockwaves through the small North West town of Stella – and things took a twist when po­ lice announced Sharnelle’s ex­boyfriend, Xander Bylsma (19), had confessed to strangling the young women.

We meet Sharnelle’s father at a lodge near Vryburg. Ronnie works as a feed supervisor on a farm about 50km from Stella. He vividly recalls how happy his daughter sounded when he phoned her at the Stella Hoërskool hostel the night before her murder to discuss her plans for the next day.

Sharnelle and Marna were supposed to take the school bus to Koster, where Sharnelle would spend the day with her mom, Sonja, Ronnie’s ex­wife, and Marna was going to play netball.

“When she answered her phone, she and Marna were jumping on the bed,” he says, his voice filled with emotion. “She was laughing so hard – I almost couldn’t hear what she was saying.”

“They were always so silly,” Ronnie’s second wife, Anna, says softly.

“You could hear nothing was wrong,” Ronnie says.

He was puzzled when he woke at six the next morning to find a cryptic message that had been sent from his daughter’s phone at 4.17am.

“Daddy, I’m sorry. Marna and I are leaving this place,” it read.

Ronnie called Sharnelle’s phone but this time there was no laughing voice on the other side. No one answered.

At 6.30am Ronnie called the house­ master. “He told me my child was dead and that it had been suicide.”