Tanse pulls the trigger, and Debbie’s head snaps back from the impact of the bullet. As she falls, she cries out his name. He stares at her beautiful face with the bloody hole in the forehead and the thick hair falling over its sticky red stream. “I don’t want to die, Tanse. I want to live,” she whispers. “Why?” he asks. “Because I have to get you more pills.” With that, he takes a screwdriver and plunges it deep into her heart. “You can’t live like this anymore.”
Suddenly there is a scream from the bedroom door. Irma is running towards her friend’s lifeless body. Tanse pulls the trigger for the second time, and the girl drops to the floor with a fatal bullet in her chest. Tanse gets up and walks out of the room. In the hallway, Dennis sits shivering in his wheelchair, dumbstruck with fear. As Tanse walks towards him, Dennis starts to cry. “Don’t kill me, Tanse,” he pleads. “Please God, don’t kill me.”
“You’re a coward,” Tanse says as he lowers the gun and turns his back on the man cowering in his wheelchair.
“I always thought you were, and now I know.”
Tanse looks out into the street below. Down in a deserted alley stands a 1956 Chevy that he confiscated from a drug dealer earlier that week. It’s going to be their getaway car. He can hear Budwa at the front door. He goes over and blocks the younger man’s way before he can see what happened in the apartment.
“Whatever you do, don’t panic,” he says before stepping aside to let his friend through.
Budwa walks in and looks around. Debbie and Irma’s bodies lie slumped on the floor. Dennis sits silent and terrified in the confines of his wheelchair. Budwa says nothing. Calmly he starts rolling up the bodies of the girls in a carpet.
“Leave it,” Tanse says. “We’re going to Mayfair. I’ve got to get Johnny.” Budwa carries Dennis out to the car and climbs into the driver’s seat. The two men wait in silence until Tanse gets in. Then they head south across town to Mayfair.
At about 1am, Budwa pulls up outside Johnny’s house. Tanse gets out and knocks on the door. Barry – an old friend and gang member – opens it with three Dobermans at his feet. He says nothing, nods and ushers him in. Johnny lies sleeping on the couch, his back to the door. As Tanse walks in, Johnny rolls over and looks up with a tired smile.
“Howzit?” Johnny mumbles. Tanse draws out his gun and shoot him in the chest. “Make sure he’s dead,” he tells Budwa, then turns to Barry: “Keep quiet for as long as you can.”
And he calmly walks out of the house. That night they drive south down the Golden Highway and, just before dawn, check into a motel in Parys on the Free State border.
Across South Africa, a full-scale manhunt is soon under way for the killers. Tanse, Budwa and Dennis have been on the run for so long that time for them feels like it is standing still in a hideous vacuum of paranoia, fear and hatred. Tanse knows that the police will eventually find them. He knows what he is going to do when they do. There will be a shoot-out. The cops will kill them in the end, but he is going to go down fighting. He’s determined to kill some of them before they get him.
Crashing down from a Mandrax high, Tanse finally falls asleep. Dennis sits smoking in the gloom of the motel room. There is only one way out of the mess. He calls out to Budwa, but he’s gone out. When he returns, he’s swearing.
“Fuckin’ Porra at the café just kakked me out for not paying,” he says. “I’m standing arguing with him when I see our pictures all over the front page of the paper. Jeez, imagine arguing about a couple of cents with an oke wanted for a triple killing!” Dennis says nothing. Budwa glances up in the silence that follows. Dennis looks old. The last day has etched deep lines into his thin, pasty face.
“Get the guns, Budwa,” he orders. “Take them and throw them in the river. Tanse’s crazy. He’s going to kill us both.” Dennis is older than the other two, and a year in a wheelchair has made him less heroic than he wants to be. Budwa doesn’t reply.
“Jesus Christ, Budwa. Get rid of the guns before he shoots us both.”
Still Budwa says nothing. Tanse is his best friend – someone who’s given him everything he has and taught him everything he knows. But things have done wrong. The coke deals are falling through. Gang members are squealing to the cops and>>
rival gangs, and the drug highs aren’t that heady anymore. Worst of all, the police are closing in on them. They have already been in hiding for months. The pressure is intolerable. They would sit in the apartment in Hillbrow and start panicking because there are police all over the place. Then Tanse would have to sort everything out. Usually it’s just a hallucination – some washing on a line or a dust bin that the drugs and fear turn into a perpetual onslaught of police and bogeymen. Tanse is the only one who can keep it together.
Until now. He’s shot them – his girlfriend, Debbie, and Irma, their friend and partner. And then Johnny – a guy Tanse liked. Just like that. One bullet. Budwa used to laugh when people called Tanse “One Punch”, because the word on the street was that Tanse Leisher only ever needed one punch to drop you. Now it was just one bullet.
Budwa is scared. He looks across the dingy motel room at Tanse, who’s slumped into a deep sleep. Eventually he stands up, collects the two guns lying loaded on the coffee table and walks out into the sunlight.
Tanse doesn’t even hear the cops arrive. They find him the way he found Johnny – asleep on the couch. Except they don’t put a gun to him and pull the trigger. In the years that follow, Tanse sometimes wishes they had…
The trial
The South African police had been looking for Tanse for almost a decade when Budwa finally turned him in.
The State accused Tanse and Budwa of murdering Debbie, Irma and Johnny.
The trial was a media sensation. It had all the ingredients of a Hollywood blockbuster – mafia-style drugs, sex, shoot-outs, extortion and vigilantes.
Dennis Holmes was cast as the Charles Manson type leader whose disciples – including Tanse, Budwa, Debbie and Irma – fulfilled his every wish and command as he wasted away in his wheelchair. He became paralysed in a gang shoot-out some time before and, it was argued, he was determined to show that he was still in charge.
“I programmed Tanse to kill,” he claimed during the trial. While in custody he was asked to prove his power of authority, so he instructed a young female “disciple” to stick a knife into her stomach. She did and was hospitalised with severe injuries.
But the court wasn’t fooled by Dennis’s attempts at sketching himself as the gang leader. It was obvious that Dennis was a broken, bitter and somewhat delusional man whose need to be the don, coupled with his fear of Tanse, had led to some wild claims.
Budwa Thomas was cast as the young and devoted sidekick of the Mayfair gangland godfather Tanse Leisher. Ever since his 16th birthday, Budwa had been Tanse’s friend and back-up. Budwa watched him take out a bouncer at the Purple Marmalade, a big-time club in Hillbrow. Like Tanse, he was Lebanese had no intention of finishing his national service. He became Tanse’s shadow. But despite his loyalty, it was clear that the baby-faced young man was only an accessory to murder – not a killer.
Tanse Leisher was undoubtedly the murderer. Myths and legends about his infamous gangster hits and drug deals were collected from as far afield as Cape Town and presented during the trial in a terrifying line-up of drug peddling, extortion, gambling, prostitution, robbery, racketeering, assault, intimidation and theft.
But Tanse had a card up his sleeve yet. Stunning the court and the entire legal fraternity, he claimed that he’d committed the murders under the influence of the psychedelic drug LSD, which is known for its power to alter thinking processes. He shot his friends, he argued, “when they turned into vampires”. His legal team quickly used this admission in their favour, converting his initial “not-guilty” plea to one of “guilty” and arguing that due to the effects of the narcotic he had taken, his mental capacity at the time he committed the murders was affected and he could take no criminal responsibility for the deaths of Debbie, Irma and Johnny.
The court did not buy this argument, however, and in March 1977 Tanse was found guilty of murder without extenuating circumstances on all three counts and was sentenced to death three times. He was 27 years old at the time.
Tanse’s time in prison
At that time, prisoners with a death sentence and maximum-security political prisoners were sent to Pretoria Central. The state referred to it simply as a “facility” – the inmates called it Beverly Hills. The prison was divided into two sections. One housed the white offenders destined for the hangman’s noose and all state-security political prisoners. The other housed the black offenders on their way to the gallows. All death-row cells had a bed, basin and a toilet cramped into one small space. There was one bright light in every cell, and it was never switched off.
“In prison, luck becomes everything”
Of the entire ordeal, the time in the Pretoria Central Prison is what made the biggest impression on Tanse, he tells >> me during our exclusive interview.
“You were never alone,” he recalls. “The warders watched you all the time. They were terrified that we might commit suicide. They hated the thought that we might kill ourselves. That was their job. They also wanted us to admit guilt before they hanged us. It was a power thing.
Death row in Pretoria Central meant being privy to all the other executions happening in the facility. The sheriff of the court would arrive almost every day with an order for an execution.
“Usually the sound of keys and the slamming of doors announced his arrival, at about 8am,” Tanse says. “But he could come at any time. They called him ‘the man in khaki’. He had a limp.”
When he came in, death row stopped breathing. The prison went completely still. Then a warder would go to the cell of the man due to be executed that day and remove his prison card from its plastic holder on the bars. The card contained the prisoner’s name and number.
“My number was 1963; I’ll never forget it,” Tanse says.
“Sometimes, the warders would joke with the prisoners by removing someone’s prison card and giving that person packing orders even if that person was not to be executed that day.
“Then they’d laugh and put it back. Big joke!” Tanse says. “But they weren’t such bad guys. Most of them had opted for prison services as part of their conscription, rather than go to the border. I guess they made a joke of everything in order to survive.”
Tanse spent time in prison during the height of the apartheid years, and black inmates were treated with particular vindictiveness.
“When a new black guy would come in, they’d hold competitions to see who could hit him the furthest across the green concrete floors of the cell. It was a game,” Tanse recalls. “Nobody seemed to mind. Everyone played along.”
While the white prisoners were afforded the dignity to face death by themselves, the black prisoners were executed en masse. Sometimes as many as six were hanged at a time.
To console themselves, the black prisoners used to sing all night. If they knew one of them was to be executed the next day, they’d let him sing solo.
“The only song I recognised was Kumbaya,” Tanse says. “They used to like singing that.”
While singing brought some consolation in prison, the inmates also believed in good or bad fortune.
“In prison, luck becomes everything,” Tanse explains. “I suppose it’s more superstition really, but you live by it. Anything to convince yourself that today you were going to live.” Not to bring bad luck upon himself, for instance, he refused to wear the too-big pair of shoes he was given on the first day of his prison term since they belonged to a man who’d just been executed for raping and mutilating a whole lot of women.
Tanse would later realise that he did have luck on his side, but in the meantime he also had curried favour with the warders.
“They liked me,” he says, “and always ended up telling me how I really didn’t deserve to die.”
Of course, most of the inmates didn’t think they deserved to die, and if they did, they would never admit it.
“We were all convicted murderers, but we all claimed innocence,” he says.
He remembers a man they used to call Cockateel who was condemned to death for raping and strangling two little boys, one of them only eight years old. Cockateel never believed he did anything wrong. “He told me he loved them so much, he didn’t want anyone else to have them…”
But even though he continued to claim his innocence, Cockateel’s time was soon up. “One day Cockateel walked past my cell and said: ‘The state president doesn’t like me. He says I’ve got to die.’ They executed him that afternoon.”
Tanse grows still, thinking back to the man they called Cockateel. I ask about the nickname. “He looked exactly like a cockateel,” Tanse explains, “and he spoke like one too – high-pitched and too fast. The first time I saw him, I said, ‘Hey, boet, now I know why they call you Cockateel.’ He just looked at me and laughed, then scratched behind his ear and squawked like a bird.”
Does he believe there was anyone who was executed during his time in Beverly Hills who really was innocent? Tanse thinks for a while.
“Actually,” he says, “the only guy who I think was innocent was the only one who admitted he was a murderer!”
Ben Greet was young – about 18, Tanse reckons. He was a simple guy who’d made a suicide pact with his girlfriend because they weren’t allowed to get married. They drove out onto a deserted road to shoot themselves. The girl shot herself first.
“Then, shame, poor Ben chickened out,” Tanse says.
So he put the girlfriend in the car boot and drove to the nearest police station. He told them he’d killed her. He wanted to die, he just didn’t want to do it himself. Everyone must have known what had happened, but he’d confessed and stuck to it.
“He told me he wanted to be together with her in heaven. As he walked past my cell on the day that they hanged him, I remember thinking that he looked just like an angel.”
As the country was going through tumultuous political times, Tanse found himself locked up with some famous political prisoners.
“We never moved from our cells unless we were taken to the warder,” he remembers. “It was the only time you got to see the other inmates.
“There were a lot of political prisoners on our side… Breyten Breytenbach, Solomon Mahlangu.”
Probably the most famous of his fellow inmates was Dimitri Tsafendas, the man who assassinated former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd.
“The warders would always ask him: ‘Tsafendas, why did you kill our president?’ He would say, ‘The worm told me to do it.’
“Sometimes he was so normal. Other times he was nuts. He didn’t make any sense at all.”
Re-trial and appeal
Tanse had not been in prison for a year when a new Criminal Procedure Act became effective, and this new turn allowed him to qualify for a re-trial based on the argument that he suffered from a psychopathic disorder.
This time his defence was handled by “death-cell lawyer” Joe Magua with the help of Mayfair Catholic priest Father Clayton Jackson. Especially during his time in prison, Tanse relied on his faith to pull him through, and Father Jackson provided much-needed spiritual guidance. Tanse carried a rosary with him in prison and even admits during our interview how the prison guards loved it. “They’d always ask if they could have my rosary when I was dead,” he says. “They loved my rosary.”
Despite overtly displaying his religion and the new arguments proposed during his re-trial, there was no reprieve for Tanse, and he was sent back to “Beverly Hills” to patiently await his execution.
Two years later, his case was back in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court (the forerunner of our current Supreme Court of Appeals). Magua again headed the team, which also included Dr Percy Yutar and Magua’s clerk – a talented young graduate called Gary Mazaham who persisted with the case long after the money had dried up. After months of preparation, the defence produced their key witness – an American psychiatrist who also appeared during the trial of one of the most famous criminal minds of all time, Charles Manson. During the Manson trial, he gave evidence on the impact of drug abuse on the physical and mental behaviour of those under the influence.
This was someone who could prove that Tanse was indeed of unsound mind when he committed the three murders in 1976. He testified that the drugs taken by Tanse Leisher at the time of the murders had impaired his judgment without affecting his physical ability to perform the killings. The prosecution had, until then, successfully argued that this was not possible. They had insisted that if Tanse were so drugged up that he was unable to think clearly, then he wouldn’t have been physically able to fire the revolver.
The witness dispelled this opinion and convinced the court that the impact of drugs could cause one to have control of body but not mind.
Magua won the case. Tanse was given a reprieve and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
He was released in September 1987 almost 12 years to the day that he had shot Debbie, Irma and Johnny in the spring of 1976.
Tanse was 38 when he was released. He is currently a successful race-horse trainer and is enjoying numerous wins from his stable, Godspeed, in Eikenhof.
He’s determined that he’s a changed man. “I’ve done a lot of bad things,” he says, “but people change and they learn. I’ve learnt so much about life and how to live it.
“When I was in prison, I came up with a list of priorities that I call the ‘F factor’. In order of importance, life is about five things: faith, females, family, freedom and food. Nothing else. I guess it just wasn’t my time to die.”
Tanse pulls the trigger, and Debbie’s head snaps back from the impact of the bullet. As she falls, she cries out his name. He stares at her beautiful face with the bloody hole in the forehead and the thick hair falling over its sticky red stream. “I don’t want to die, Tanse. I want to live,” she whispers. “Why?” he asks. “Because I have to get you more pills.” With that, he takes a screwdriver and plunges it deep into her heart. “You can’t live like this anymore.”
Suddenly there is a scream from the bedroom door. Irma is running towards her friend’s lifeless body. Tanse pulls the trigger for the second time, and the girl drops to the floor with a fatal bullet in her chest. Tanse gets up and walks out of the room. In the hallway, Dennis sits shivering in his wheelchair, dumbstruck with fear. As Tanse walks towards him, Dennis starts to cry. “Don’t kill me, Tanse,” he pleads. “Please God, don’t kill me.”
“You’re a coward,” Tanse says as he lowers the gun and turns his back on the man cowering in his wheelchair.
“I always thought you were, and now I know.”
Tanse looks out into the street below. Down in a deserted alley stands a 1956 Chevy that he confiscated from a drug dealer earlier that week. It’s going to be their getaway car. He can hear Budwa at the front door. He goes over and blocks the younger man’s way before he can see what happened in the apartment.
“Whatever you do, don’t panic,” he says before stepping aside to let his friend through.
Budwa walks in and looks around. Debbie and Irma’s bodies lie slumped on the floor. Dennis sits silent and terrified in the confines of his wheelchair. Budwa says nothing. Calmly he starts rolling up the bodies of the girls in a carpet.
“Leave it,” Tanse says. “We’re going to Mayfair. I’ve got to get Johnny.” Budwa carries Dennis out to the car and climbs into the driver’s seat. The two men wait in silence until Tanse gets in. Then they head south across town to Mayfair.
At about 1am, Budwa pulls up outside Johnny’s house. Tanse gets out and knocks on the door. Barry – an old friend and gang member – opens it with three Dobermans at his feet. He says nothing, nods and ushers him in. Johnny lies sleeping on the couch, his back to the door. As Tanse walks in, Johnny rolls over and looks up with a tired smile.
“Howzit?” Johnny mumbles. Tanse draws out his gun and shoot him in the chest. “Make sure he’s dead,” he tells Budwa, then turns to Barry: “Keep quiet for as long as you can.”
And he calmly walks out of the house. That night they drive south down the Golden Highway and, just before dawn, check into a motel in Parys on the Free State border.
Across South Africa, a full-scale manhunt is soon under way for the killers. Tanse, Budwa and Dennis have been on the run for so long that time for them feels like it is standing still in a hideous vacuum of paranoia, fear and hatred. Tanse knows that the police will eventually find them. He knows what he is going to do when they do. There will be a shoot-out. The cops will kill them in the end, but he is going to go down fighting. He’s determined to kill some of them before they get him.
Crashing down from a Mandrax high, Tanse finally falls asleep. Dennis sits smoking in the gloom of the motel room. There is only one way out of the mess. He calls out to Budwa, but he’s gone out. When he returns, he’s swearing.
“Fuckin’ Porra at the café just kakked me out for not paying,” he says. “I’m standing arguing with him when I see our pictures all over the front page of the paper. Jeez, imagine arguing about a couple of cents with an oke wanted for a triple killing!” Dennis says nothing. Budwa glances up in the silence that follows. Dennis looks old. The last day has etched deep lines into his thin, pasty face.
“Get the guns, Budwa,” he orders. “Take them and throw them in the river. Tanse’s crazy. He’s going to kill us both.” Dennis is older than the other two, and a year in a wheelchair has made him less heroic than he wants to be. Budwa doesn’t reply.
“Jesus Christ, Budwa. Get rid of the guns before he shoots us both.”
Still Budwa says nothing. Tanse is his best friend – someone who’s given him everything he has and taught him everything he knows. But things have done wrong. The coke deals are falling through. Gang members are squealing to the cops and>>
rival gangs, and the drug highs aren’t that heady anymore. Worst of all, the police are closing in on them. They have already been in hiding for months. The pressure is intolerable. They would sit in the apartment in Hillbrow and start panicking because there are police all over the place. Then Tanse would have to sort everything out. Usually it’s just a hallucination – some washing on a line or a dust bin that the drugs and fear turn into a perpetual onslaught of police and bogeymen. Tanse is the only one who can keep it together.
Until now. He’s shot them – his girlfriend, Debbie, and Irma, their friend and partner. And then Johnny – a guy Tanse liked. Just like that. One bullet. Budwa used to laugh when people called Tanse “One Punch”, because the word on the street was that Tanse Leisher only ever needed one punch to drop you. Now it was just one bullet.
Budwa is scared. He looks across the dingy motel room at Tanse, who’s slumped into a deep sleep. Eventually he stands up, collects the two guns lying loaded on the coffee table and walks out into the sunlight.
Tanse doesn’t even hear the cops arrive. They find him the way he found Johnny – asleep on the couch. Except they don’t put a gun to him and pull the trigger. In the years that follow, Tanse sometimes wishes they had…
The trial
The South African police had been looking for Tanse for almost a decade when Budwa finally turned him in.
The State accused Tanse and Budwa of murdering Debbie, Irma and Johnny.
The trial was a media sensation. It had all the ingredients of a Hollywood blockbuster – mafia-style drugs, sex, shoot-outs, extortion and vigilantes.
Dennis Holmes was cast as the Charles Manson type leader whose disciples – including Tanse, Budwa, Debbie and Irma – fulfilled his every wish and command as he wasted away in his wheelchair. He became paralysed in a gang shoot-out some time before and, it was argued, he was determined to show that he was still in charge.
“I programmed Tanse to kill,” he claimed during the trial. While in custody he was asked to prove his power of authority, so he instructed a young female “disciple” to stick a knife into her stomach. She did and was hospitalised with severe injuries.
But the court wasn’t fooled by Dennis’s attempts at sketching himself as the gang leader. It was obvious that Dennis was a broken, bitter and somewhat delusional man whose need to be the don, coupled with his fear of Tanse, had led to some wild claims.
Budwa Thomas was cast as the young and devoted sidekick of the Mayfair gangland godfather Tanse Leisher. Ever since his 16th birthday, Budwa had been Tanse’s friend and back-up. Budwa watched him take out a bouncer at the Purple Marmalade, a big-time club in Hillbrow. Like Tanse, he was Lebanese had no intention of finishing his national service. He became Tanse’s shadow. But despite his loyalty, it was clear that the baby-faced young man was only an accessory to murder – not a killer.
Tanse Leisher was undoubtedly the murderer. Myths and legends about his infamous gangster hits and drug deals were collected from as far afield as Cape Town and presented during the trial in a terrifying line-up of drug peddling, extortion, gambling, prostitution, robbery, racketeering, assault, intimidation and theft.
But Tanse had a card up his sleeve yet. Stunning the court and the entire legal fraternity, he claimed that he’d committed the murders under the influence of the psychedelic drug LSD, which is known for its power to alter thinking processes. He shot his friends, he argued, “when they turned into vampires”. His legal team quickly used this admission in their favour, converting his initial “not-guilty” plea to one of “guilty” and arguing that due to the effects of the narcotic he had taken, his mental capacity at the time he committed the murders was affected and he could take no criminal responsibility for the deaths of Debbie, Irma and Johnny.
The court did not buy this argument, however, and in March 1977 Tanse was found guilty of murder without extenuating circumstances on all three counts and was sentenced to death three times. He was 27 years old at the time.
Tanse’s time in prison
At that time, prisoners with a death sentence and maximum-security political prisoners were sent to Pretoria Central. The state referred to it simply as a “facility” – the inmates called it Beverly Hills. The prison was divided into two sections. One housed the white offenders destined for the hangman’s noose and all state-security political prisoners. The other housed the black offenders on their way to the gallows. All death-row cells had a bed, basin and a toilet cramped into one small space. There was one bright light in every cell, and it was never switched off.
“In prison, luck becomes everything”
Of the entire ordeal, the time in the Pretoria Central Prison is what made the biggest impression on Tanse, he tells >> me during our exclusive interview.
“You were never alone,” he recalls. “The warders watched you all the time. They were terrified that we might commit suicide. They hated the thought that we might kill ourselves. That was their job. They also wanted us to admit guilt before they hanged us. It was a power thing.
Death row in Pretoria Central meant being privy to all the other executions happening in the facility. The sheriff of the court would arrive almost every day with an order for an execution.
“Usually the sound of keys and the slamming of doors announced his arrival, at about 8am,” Tanse says. “But he could come at any time. They called him ‘the man in khaki’. He had a limp.”
When he came in, death row stopped breathing. The prison went completely still. Then a warder would go to the cell of the man due to be executed that day and remove his prison card from its plastic holder on the bars. The card contained the prisoner’s name and number.
“My number was 1963; I’ll never forget it,” Tanse says.
“Sometimes, the warders would joke with the prisoners by removing someone’s prison card and giving that person packing orders even if that person was not to be executed that day.
“Then they’d laugh and put it back. Big joke!” Tanse says. “But they weren’t such bad guys. Most of them had opted for prison services as part of their conscription, rather than go to the border. I guess they made a joke of everything in order to survive.”
Tanse spent time in prison during the height of the apartheid years, and black inmates were treated with particular vindictiveness.
“When a new black guy would come in, they’d hold competitions to see who could hit him the furthest across the green concrete floors of the cell. It was a game,” Tanse recalls. “Nobody seemed to mind. Everyone played along.”
While the white prisoners were afforded the dignity to face death by themselves, the black prisoners were executed en masse. Sometimes as many as six were hanged at a time.
To console themselves, the black prisoners used to sing all night. If they knew one of them was to be executed the next day, they’d let him sing solo.
“The only song I recognised was Kumbaya,” Tanse says. “They used to like singing that.”
While singing brought some consolation in prison, the inmates also believed in good or bad fortune.
“In prison, luck becomes everything,” Tanse explains. “I suppose it’s more superstition really, but you live by it. Anything to convince yourself that today you were going to live.” Not to bring bad luck upon himself, for instance, he refused to wear the too-big pair of shoes he was given on the first day of his prison term since they belonged to a man who’d just been executed for raping and mutilating a whole lot of women.
Tanse would later realise that he did have luck on his side, but in the meantime he also had curried favour with the warders.
“They liked me,” he says, “and always ended up telling me how I really didn’t deserve to die.”
Of course, most of the inmates didn’t think they deserved to die, and if they did, they would never admit it.
“We were all convicted murderers, but we all claimed innocence,” he says.
He remembers a man they used to call Cockateel who was condemned to death for raping and strangling two little boys, one of them only eight years old. Cockateel never believed he did anything wrong. “He told me he loved them so much, he didn’t want anyone else to have them…”
But even though he continued to claim his innocence, Cockateel’s time was soon up. “One day Cockateel walked past my cell and said: ‘The state president doesn’t like me. He says I’ve got to die.’ They executed him that afternoon.”
Tanse grows still, thinking back to the man they called Cockateel. I ask about the nickname. “He looked exactly like a cockateel,” Tanse explains, “and he spoke like one too – high-pitched and too fast. The first time I saw him, I said, ‘Hey, boet, now I know why they call you Cockateel.’ He just looked at me and laughed, then scratched behind his ear and squawked like a bird.”
Does he believe there was anyone who was executed during his time in Beverly Hills who really was innocent? Tanse thinks for a while.
“Actually,” he says, “the only guy who I think was innocent was the only one who admitted he was a murderer!”
Ben Greet was young – about 18, Tanse reckons. He was a simple guy who’d made a suicide pact with his girlfriend because they weren’t allowed to get married. They drove out onto a deserted road to shoot themselves. The girl shot herself first.
“Then, shame, poor Ben chickened out,” Tanse says.
So he put the girlfriend in the car boot and drove to the nearest police station. He told them he’d killed her. He wanted to die, he just didn’t want to do it himself. Everyone must have known what had happened, but he’d confessed and stuck to it.
“He told me he wanted to be together with her in heaven. As he walked past my cell on the day that they hanged him, I remember thinking that he looked just like an angel.”
As the country was going through tumultuous political times, Tanse found himself locked up with some famous political prisoners.
“We never moved from our cells unless we were taken to the warder,” he remembers. “It was the only time you got to see the other inmates.
“There were a lot of political prisoners on our side… Breyten Breytenbach, Solomon Mahlangu.”
Probably the most famous of his fellow inmates was Dimitri Tsafendas, the man who assassinated former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd.
“The warders would always ask him: ‘Tsafendas, why did you kill our president?’ He would say, ‘The worm told me to do it.’
“Sometimes he was so normal. Other times he was nuts. He didn’t make any sense at all.”
Re-trial and appeal
Tanse had not been in prison for a year when a new Criminal Procedure Act became effective, and this new turn allowed him to qualify for a re-trial based on the argument that he suffered from a psychopathic disorder.
This time his defence was handled by “death-cell lawyer” Joe Magua with the help of Mayfair Catholic priest Father Clayton Jackson. Especially during his time in prison, Tanse relied on his faith to pull him through, and Father Jackson provided much-needed spiritual guidance. Tanse carried a rosary with him in prison and even admits during our interview how the prison guards loved it. “They’d always ask if they could have my rosary when I was dead,” he says. “They loved my rosary.”
Despite overtly displaying his religion and the new arguments proposed during his re-trial, there was no reprieve for Tanse, and he was sent back to “Beverly Hills” to patiently await his execution.
Two years later, his case was back in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court (the forerunner of our current Supreme Court of Appeals). Magua again headed the team, which also included Dr Percy Yutar and Magua’s clerk – a talented young graduate called Gary Mazaham who persisted with the case long after the money had dried up. After months of preparation, the defence produced their key witness – an American psychiatrist who also appeared during the trial of one of the most famous criminal minds of all time, Charles Manson. During the Manson trial, he gave evidence on the impact of drug abuse on the physical and mental behaviour of those under the influence.
This was someone who could prove that Tanse was indeed of unsound mind when he committed the three murders in 1976. He testified that the drugs taken by Tanse Leisher at the time of the murders had impaired his judgment without affecting his physical ability to perform the killings. The prosecution had, until then, successfully argued that this was not possible. They had insisted that if Tanse were so drugged up that he was unable to think clearly, then he wouldn’t have been physically able to fire the revolver.
The witness dispelled this opinion and convinced the court that the impact of drugs could cause one to have control of body but not mind.
Magua won the case. Tanse was given a reprieve and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
He was released in September 1987 almost 12 years to the day that he had shot Debbie, Irma and Johnny in the spring of 1976.
Tanse was 38 when he was released. He is currently a successful race-horse trainer and is enjoying numerous wins from his stable, Godspeed, in Eikenhof.
He’s determined that he’s a changed man. “I’ve done a lot of bad things,” he says, “but people change and they learn. I’ve learnt so much about life and how to live it.
“When I was in prison, I came up with a list of priorities that I call the ‘F factor’. In order of importance, life is about five things: faith, females, family, freedom and food. Nothing else. I guess it just wasn’t my time to die.”