I'm Not A Monster

Marietjie Vosloo tells YOU’s Jana van der Merwe about slapping Mundolene, surviving jail and losing her husband’s love.

- Jana van der Merwe

SHE was so looking forward to getting back to the comforts of home, seeing her husband and holding her 13-year-old son in her arms again.

But soon after she’d set foot back on home soil her husband, Mike, who’d supported her throughout her ordeal, told her it was all over between them.

Marietjie Vosloo has accepted it, hard though it is.

“I still love Mike,” she says. “Love isn’t something you can just turn off. He was my true, first love and the father of my child. We’ve been through a lot.”

But she knows what happened will always stand between them like an insurmountable brick wall. She’s grateful Mike (47) waited until she was freed from prison before telling her he wanted out – she doesn’t think she could have handled the added heartache while she was behind bars.

Marietjie (34) spent 18 months in a Mauritian jail after the death of her teenage stepdaughter, Mundolene (17), on a family holiday.

Authorities initially wanted her to be tried for murder but after the autopsy report the charge was reduced to assault.

A court in the Mauritian capital, Port Louis, sentenced her to 15 months in prison – but as she’d already been behind bars for 18 months she was allowed to return to South Africa.

Marietjie had a bleak homecoming: only a handful of journalists were waiting for her at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg.

Mike was at their home in Margate, Kwa Zulu-Natal, with their son, Morné*, and Mundolene’s younger brother, Willie* (16). Marietjie’s brothers, Jan (43) and Bertie Jacobs (37), were meant to pick her up but there had been a misunderstanding and they thought she was on a later flight.