The husband of Kathy Odendaal says he is not satisfied with the life sentences given to her killers and if he could, “he would execute them himself”.
The two men who gruesomely murdered Pretoria resident Odendaal last year were on Thursday sentenced in the Pretoria High Court to life imprisonment.
Acting Judge Chris Eksteen gave Mohlatsi Alfred Matlala, 24, two life terms and 37 years imprisonment for a range of crimes, including the murders of Odendaal and a Lynnwood gardener, Wilson Mapadahanya, in October last year.
Matlala was also convicted of robbing Odendaal’s neighbours and attempting to murder their domestic worker’s three-year-old daughter.
Jacob Tshepo Dithung, 30, who was convicted of murdering, robbing and attempting to rape Odendaal and breaking into another house in the area, was sentenced to one life term and a further 20 years imprisonment.
Eksteen said the accused acted mercilessly and arrogantly. They clearly had no respect for the lives of others and had not once shown any remorse for what they did.
Society needed to be protected against them, he said.
Dithung had embarked on a violent crime spree over a period of three days in the Lynnwood area.
His crimes became increasingly violent and arrogant and filled one with abhorrence.
He said Mapadahanya never had a chance against his two much younger attackers, who ran away laughing after shooting him to death.
Thereafter, they mercilessly attacked Odendaal’s neighbours in their home, seriously assaulting two young students with the butt of his firearm and shooting a defenceless child in her mother’s lap for no reason.
The judge described Odendaal’s murder as particularly callous. She had been tortured and repeatedly stabbed after a terrible struggle.
Hardened policemen had described the scene as the worst they had come across.
Eksteen hailed the workers of a refuse removal company who caught Matlala as heroes. They had overpowered him despite a firearm being pointed at them.
Eksteen said these types of crimes, where people were overpowered and killed in their own homes, had become an epidemic.
A spirit of dissoluteness, arrogance and a lack of respect for other people’s lives and property seemed to prevail.
Odendaal’s husband, Gideon, said he was not satisfied with the sentence.
“Our country’s laws don’t give them what they deserve. They deserve death sentences. If I could, I would like to execute them myself,” he told reporters.
