E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
Botha Daisy de Melker
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-77619-278-6
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Hiding among killers in the City of Gold
E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-77619-278-6
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
TED BOTHA is the author of several books in South Africa and in the US, including Apartheid in my Rucksack, Flat/White and The Girl with the Crooked Nose. He lives in Cape Town.
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CHAPTER 1
Their aliases
The Union Limited made a rhythmic sound over the tracks, as sparks shot off to the sides of the blackened wheels. The sunset, red and indigo sliced by striations of white cirrus clouds, gave way to a pitch-black sky studded with more stars than the man with the bad arm could remember.
As he sat in the cheapest section of the train steaming from Johannesburg to Cape Town in early March 1913, it was perhaps inevitable that John Maxim would meet and quickly fall under the sway of William Foster. The men had two very important things in common – a weakness for aliases and crime.
Maxim, a moustachioed, black-haired American in his late thirties, had a good story to tell. At the turn of the century, he had arrived in South Africa and quickly became a trick rider and shooter with the Wild West Show & Circus. It was owned by a fellow American, Texas Jack, who had taken the name of his adopted father, a famous cowboy and actor with one of the very first Wild West shows in America. The son started his own version of his father’s act, and eventually landed up in South Africa, taking it to towns and cities, promising ‘Marvelous Feats of Horsemanship, Shooting, Lasso Throwing!’
Young men like Maxim, drifters most of them, joined the Wild West Show & Circus for a while and then left – one of them, a teenager who would one day become a famous Hollywood star, was named Will Rogers – but Maxim stayed on. One arm was badly crushed during a performance, as were both his pinkie fingers, which remained crooked. When Texas Jack died, in 1905, Maxim didn’t have much money and his talents weren’t in high demand. He took to selling liquor to Africans, which was illegal, and ended up in jail several times. To evade the law, he sometimes used the names Maxwell or Milton.
Sitting opposite him on the Union Limited, as the train crossed the Great Karoo, sat William Foster, who also called himself Bailey, Ward Jackson and ‘Captain White’. Ten years younger, just shy of five foot ten, full of face with a high forehead, light hair, grey eyes and a long nose, Foster already had a powerful presence and a temper that was known to explode quickly.
Born of ‘a perfectly normal and responsible middle-class family in Griqualand East’, Foster’s father was Irish and his mother came from Grahamstown. After the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), when he was 16, his family – three boys and three girls – moved to Bertrams, east of the Johannesburg city centre. Foster went to a good school, Marist Brothers’ College, but ‘he hated discipline and baulked at authority’, which was where the trouble started.
He tried his hand at surveying on a gold mine, and then at photography, before his first brush with the law, in 1908. First, it was a drunken brawl, then being caught without a ticket on a train, small things that would have carried little penalty, but he fought back and ran away. In German South West Africa, he ‘borrowed’ some donkeys, and despite not meaning ‘very serious harm [for a] not very heinous crime’, he fell victim to a harsh stock-theft law: ‘This started him on a career of crime and he carried his vendetta against society and its laws to a point which approached madness.’
More ominously, some detectives at Marshall Square, the headquarters of the police’s criminal division in Johannesburg, believed that Foster had killed one of his sisters, although they couldn’t prove it. Her death had been declared a suicide, and as events unfolded over the next year, the detectives were more convinced than ever that they had been right.
After the Union Limited reached Cape Town, Foster and Maxim took rooms at Ebenezer House on Hope Street, not far from the Company’s Garden. By the time they came up with a plan to rob the American Swiss Watch Company, on the lower end of Longmarket Street, Foster had already established himself as their leader. They stole a car for their getaway and called in the help of Foster’s younger brother Jimmy, who came down from Johannesburg with Fred Adamson, the son of a butcher who knew the Fosters from Bertrams.
At 7 pm on Wednesday 19 March, Maxim waited in the car on Longmarket Street while the three others, masked and sporting fake moustaches and beards – disguises that would soon become their trademark – entered the store. The owners, two men named Hirschsohn and Grusd, were busy closing up, removing the window displays. The robbers put pistols to their heads, then bound and gagged them, putting hoods over their heads and cords around their necks. From the displays and safe they got jewels, watches, necklaces, foreign coins and cigarette cases worth £5 000. (If true, this figure is staggering. A sum of £100 in 1913 would now have the purchasing power of £13 000, meaning the gang had in its possession a haul of £650 000!)
‘One of us will watch the place for a quarter of an hour,’ Foster told the bound men. ‘He’ll shoot if you try to raise the alarm.’
The robbers went their separate ways, with Foster taking the loot, which he planned to hide away and then distribute when the heat died down. On 20 March, he took a taxi from Hope Street, placing four items in the back of the car, including a leather trunk and a very heavy ‘cabin trunk’. The taxi drove to the Cape Town railway station, where Foster intended to leave the bags in the baggage storage, right under the nose of the authorities.
But Foster made two mistakes. The cabin trunk was so heavy that it could barely be carried, which a baggage handler at the station later remembered. When Foster didn’t have the right amount to pay for the storage, he made a fuss about getting the exact change back. When the police did a check of the station two days later, the handler recalled Foster and the heavy trunk, and the police found the loot. They told the handler to alert them as soon as Foster returned. Within a few days, Foster was caught in Cape Town, and his brother and Adamson in Johannesburg. The only one they didn’t catch was the American rodeo man, Maxim.
The three men – Foster, his brother and Adamson – were arraigned for trial a few days later. Sitting in court was a young woman who paid particular interest to the main accused, who was calling himself Ward Jackson. Pretty with dark hair, Peggy Lyons, formerly Peggy Korenico, was a showgirl at the Empire Palace of Varieties on Commissioner Street in Johannesburg. She was also Foster’s girlfriend.
The men were taken to the Roeland Street jail in Cape Town to await their trial in May, two months later. Several days before their appearance, special dispensation was given, for the very first time in the Cape Province, for a prisoner to get married. Foster wed Peggy, who was also pregnant with their first child.
On 22 May, the three men were brought to the Supreme Court on Keerom Street. When Foster entered the courtroom, he was dressed in oversized clothing that he had borrowed from other prisoners, and his hat was pulled low over his eyes. He smiled at Peggy, who was in the public gallery. During evidence, the confusion of names was finally cleared up, when the heavily coated man admitted that he wasn’t Jackson but William Foster, while the man they thought was William Foster was his brother Jimmy.
All the shenanigans didn’t impress the judge, John Kotze, who was nearing the end of a long career and had a reputation for being smart and fair. He quickly summed up the insouciant, disrespectful Foster, and so did the jury. Within 25 minutes, they returned a verdict of guilty for all three men, and Kotze threw the book at them. Each man was sentenced to 12 years of hard labour at the country’s main jail, Pretoria Central.
Peggy fainted, while Foster stood in the dock, frozen. The punishment was outrageous, he cried out, especially for his brother Jimmy, who was younger than him and had his whole life ahead of him. As he was led out of court by a side entrance to be driven away in the large police motor van – ‘a sinister dark conveyance’ called a Black Maria – Foster swore that he would get his revenge.
A reporter covering the case described Foster as ‘dark and saturnine looking, and his face wore an air of suppressed fury’, little knowing how true his words were, an omen for the bloody murder spree that was coming.
The massive building behind the stone walls looked not entirely disagreeable at first glance: solid, red brick, two storeys, lying solitary between the koppies on the outskirts of Pretoria. On closer inspection, though, one noticed the armed men in uniform standing in its shadows, the barred windows, the castle-like turrets on each side of the main gate. Behind the walls, the corridors were long, the stairs cold metal, the cells small and dark. Pretoria Central was also known as just ‘Central’, and sometimes as ‘the Citadel’.
Criminals of every stripe were kept inside its walls – political renegades, thieves, rapists, fraudsters, con artists, murderers – although it was perhaps most famous for being the main place of execution in the country. Since its opening eight years earlier, in 1905, only men had swung from the gallows, and another seven years would pass before the first woman would take that last walk.
Prisoners fell into three categories. First offenders, which included even murderers, were meant to be kept apart and only allowed to mix with others for weekend exercise, but they all had to come together during work hours anyway. Second offenders could include men who hadn’t been in a prison before – say, if they had paid a fine instead – and for them it...
