‘WHAT HAPPENED WAS BRUTAL'

The family of a woman whose body parts were found in the Vaal River share their heartache and shock at the gruesome find

- JANA VAN DER MERWE

EVEN in a country hardened to crime, this one stands out. A young mother disap­pears after telling her mom she’s waiting for an Uber to fetch her from a Johan­nesburg shopping mall.

A search ensues but there’s no trace of her – until nine days later when a man and his son go fishing along the banks of the Vaal River.

The boy spots something in the water that looks like a body part. That’s exactly what it is – and soon more and more parts of the body are found in the water.

It doesn’t take the police long to iden­tify the victim, thanks to a tattoo the woman had on her forearm: Wietzue 11.09.2019 – the date of her wedding.

Her husband, Wietzue Botes, has a tat­ too on his wrist too: Yolandi 11.09.2019, inked in the same curly cursive on his forearm.

The woman is Yolandi Botes (35) and in the days following the gruesome dis­covery, the story behind her murder gets more and more disturbing.

A room in a guesthouse in Kempton Park is found drenched in blood. There are puddles on the floor, smears on the walls. The basin in the bathroom is filled with it and a white chair in the shower is covered with it. Police find a bloodied knife under a mattress.

For Yolandi’s family, it’s excruciating. They want to know what happened and are raising funds to hire a private inves­tigator to get to the bottom of it.

DNA tests are needed to see if the blood in the room belonged to Yolandi – but there is such a backlog in DNA testing that it could be weeks or even months before the results are known.

Differing stories about the kind of life Yolandi led have also bubbled to the sur­ face. To her mother, Ria van Deventer, she was a devoted daughter.