 January 26, 2005In Thrown-to-Lions Trial, Bloody Clothes Remain
Mark Scott-Crossley, 37, is accused of murder in the death last Jan. 31 of Nelson Chisale, 41, the man he had fired from his farm the previous November. Mr. Scott-Crossley is accused of ordering two other employees, Simon Mathebula and Richard Mathebula, to beat Mr. Chisale and dump him into a nearby breeding enclosure for 20 rare white lions, where he was devoured. All three men originally pleaded not guilty to murder charges, but this week Richard Mathebula, who is not related to Simon, changed his plea to guilty, saying he had been following his employer's orders. The trial, now in its second day, has roiled tiny Phalaborwa, a village about 280 miles northeast of Johannesburg where the proceedings are unfolding in the Circuit Court. On Tuesday, demonstrators from South Africa's governing African National Congress and the South African Communist Party chanted so loudly outside the courtroom, protesting the murder as a racist legacy of the nation's days under apartheid, that bailiffs had to order them to lower the volume. Mr. Scott-Crossley is white; Mr. Chisale was black. As outlined in court testimony, Mr. Chisale's murder was the stuff of nightmares. Prosecutors said Mr. Chisale had returned to the Scott-Crossley farm last January, two months after his dismissal, to retrieve some pots and other belongings when he encountered Mr. Scott-Crossley. According to the prosecutors, Mr. Scott-Crossley ordered his workers to attack Mr. Chisale, who was then beaten with a machete, tied to a tree, kicked and threatened with a rifle before being dumped into the back of a pickup truck. The workers were said to have driven to the 49-acre enclosure of the Mokwalo White Lion Project, a breeding ground for the rare lions near Hoedspruit, and tossed Mr. Chisale over the fence. The police later found scraps of Mr. Chisale's bloodstained clothes, a skull and some bone fragments at the site. In testimony on Tuesday, a 19-year-old security guard, Forget Tsaku Ndlovu, said he first learned of the crime when Simon Mathebula met him at the farm's main gate, his sleeves and hat bloodied, and said he had been "playing" with Mr. Chisale. To illustrate his point, Mr. Ndlovu said, Mr. Mathebula drew a finger across his throat. "I said to myself that this is not a sign of playing with somebody," he said. Mr. Ndlovu said that a domestic worker on the farm had come to warn him of the assault, but that he himself had taken no action to stop it. "I was concerned to a certain extent," he said, "but there was nothing I could do at that stage because I was busy with my work." |
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