Fiona: the search continues
JEFF WICKS
The search for Fiona Harvey in a cold case mystery spanning across decades continues unabated as the anniversary of her disappearance approaches.
In an abduction linked to one of the country’s most notorious paedophiles Gert van Rooyen, Harvey has never been seen again.
Her last steps on the 22nd of December in 1988 through the leafy suburb of Clarendon on an errand to buy milk for her mother remains etched in the memory of the city.
While the trail has long since gone cold, and Van Rooyen took his secrets to the grave in a bloody suicide as police closed in on him, a pair of veteran detectives continue their quest to find Fiona.
Swathes of witness statements, dockets and telexes from a time passed lie with Major Mike van Aardt, the lead investigator in the now concluded Oscar Pistorius case.
A team under his command remain ardent to trace six missing girls thought to have been abducted by Van Rooyen and his girlfriend Joey Haarhoff in the late eighties.
In an exclusive interview, Van Aardt told The Witness that their probe would not be stopped until they bring closure to the families of the missing girls.
Their investigation revealed that Van Rooyen had stalked the streets of Pietermaritzburg for weeks.
“The string of abductions changed the country. It was a time when people thought that their children were safe and Gert van Rooyen changed all of that. The abduction of Fiona Harvey changed Pietermaritzburg forever,” he said.
Using modern-day forensic tools and profiling patterns, the team has a solid belief that Van Rooyen had snatched Fiona Harvey as she walked home on a clammy summer’s day.
“She had gone to the shop to buy milk and she never returned. We fully believe that Gert van Rooyen was responsible for her disappearance and the reason for that is primarily that a vehicle which we have identified as his bakkie was spotted in the neighbourhood.”
“Our investigation revealed that he spent a lot of time doing contract construction work in Howick and thus had key knowledge of the area and was very familiar. He was not a stranger and he knew the area well,” the officer said.
He said that witnesses had directly linked Van Rooyen to Harvey’s abduction.
“His bakkie was described in detail, down to the signage for a construction company on the doors and the roof racks on top of the canopy.”
He told of how the sex predator had used his young girlfriend Haarhoff as a lure in the kidnappings that followed the disappearance of Harvey.
“He used Haarhoff as a disguise and her presence alone is something that we believe helped him evade policeman who were searching for the child predator. Police officers around the country were on the lookout for a seedy looking sexual predator who had been snatching young girls and when they encountered this couple that looked completely normal, they were never given a second glance. At one point they were stopped by a traffic policeman in KZN for speeding and Van Rooyen even bargained with the man in an effort to get out of a ticket,” he said.
“Anyone who has factual information must please come forward and we will probe any lead. The cases remain open and we have not stopped searching,” van Aardt added.
Van Aardt extoled the police work of the investigative team that probed the disappearances before he was handed the case in 2011.
“The detective in charge at that stage followed up every single lead and combed guest houses all over Pietermaritzburg and Durban. He even checked every ship leaving the harbour and was incredibly thorough but sadly he didn’t come up with anything. After it was established that the case was linked to other disappearances in the Transvaal then they started working together,” he said.
The veteran officer explained how surveillance technology scattered around most cities today would have completely changed the way the case was investigated.
“Back then there was no such thing as cell-phones or cameras on the freeways, or even speed traps which we could have used to track movement. Today it is much easier to track someone and had these girls been kidnapped today, it is more likely that Van Rooyen would have been caught.”
Van Aardt said the stacks of investigation files were completely overhauled and that officers had combed through reams of evidence.
“A lot of people called in and there was a raft of information in the dockets. We combed through them to see if we could not find anything else. In Pietermaritzburg and Durban specifically people had reported that they had seen his bakkie parked outside of schools.”
He said that their probe had taken a focus on identifying skeletal remains, if any are ever discovered.
“What have done is taken DNA samples from all of the parents. They could die before we find anything and those are now on file at forensics. When we find skeletal remains during the course of the investigation, there is first an anthropological examination to determine the age, race and gender. If the profile matches the missing girls, the bones are sent to a laboratory in Bosnia that extracts DNA from the bones which are often degraded. Our labs in Pretoria do not have the capability and it is a specialised practice.”
He added that what often clothing discovered with the remains carried latent DNA, more than the bones themselves.
Van Aardt said that hundreds of clairvoyants had inundated police, and continued to do so.
“We have had thousands of clairvoyants who have come forward and they sell their visions as fact. And that ends up muddying the water. In my years as a policeman I have never had a clairvoyant solving a crime.”
“A woman came forward and said that she was a Satanist who could travel through time and space and during her travels she had seen a body being buried. For the past ten years she has been digging holes at the Hartebeesport dam. People had wild theories, that the girls were thrown into a well or that they were kept in a dungeon. We followed everything up and even searched a house, the owners were very nice,” he said.
“Anyone who has factual information must please come forward and we will probe any lead.”
“We have used ground penetrating radar to search large tracts of land, the search has not ended. They give the families a lot of false hope and it is sad for them,” he said.
“This is a very cold case. There was no electronic signature to follow and the surveillance we have today didn’t exist. There is such a huge time gap and many of the witnesses or those who could have seen something are so old or have even died. One witness we tried to interview had Alzheimer’s. We are dealing with a case out of history and memories fade, especially when you are trying to recall something from over 20 years ago,” the detective said.
