Eish, That's Dark

In 1977, days before he was expected to walk into a cabinet position, National Party rising star Robert Smit and his wife Jean-Cora were shot dead in their Springs home. No forced entry. No robbery. Just two words sprayed in red across the kitchen wall that nobody has ever explained.

This week we open South Africa's most notorious unsolved political murder: who Robert Smit really was, the mysterious 8pm appointment in his own diary, and the stranger who showed up in Johannesburg weeks before the killing and vanished right after.

Part 2 goes further, into BOSS, the CIA, and the daughter who's spent her whole life trying to get an answer.

By 2015, Electus per Deus was broke, and the skills they'd built murdering for the Lord transferred seamlessly to murdering for cash. In part two of The Krugersdorp murders, Liz takes Jess and follows the money: A fictional orphanage, a faked death, a R3.57 million insurance claim, and the appointment murders that gripped the West Rand in fear. Then comes the detective nicknamed Bliksem, an ATM camera that unravels everything, a trial that transfixed South Africa, and a judge who needed just two words for Cecilia Steyn: puppet master.

We name and honour all eleven victims.

Content warning: this episode discusses murder, religious manipulation and coercive control, fraud, and violence involving a minor.

Listener discretion advised.

Krugersdorp, 2012. A woman claiming to be a high-ranking witch fleeing the satanic church walks into a West Rand ministry, and instead of doubt, she finds devotion. Within five years she's assembled her own chosen people, bound by tattoos, terror and murder. She will never touch a weapon, but people will die.

In part one of this two-part series, Liz takes Jess and traces how a country primed by decades of satanic panic handed Cecilia Steyn exactly the audience she needed. And how a schoolteacher, an insurance broker and a fourteen-year-old girl ended up inside a group calling itself Electus per Deus. Chosen by God.

Content warning: this episode discusses murder, religious manipulation and coercive control, claims of ritual abuse, and violence committed by a minor. Listener discretion advised.

Daisy de Melker didn't leave Johannesburg when she died, or so the stories go.

In Part Two, Jess and Liz follow her into local legend: the Turffontein house where a curtain is said to move on its own at six o'clock, the old children's hospital ward she's said to haunt, and her cell at Constitution Hill, where her story now sits, strangely, alongside some of the country's most important human rights history. Along the way, a real South African urban legends researcher weighs in on why these stories persist even without a shred of hard evidence, and why one convicted killer turned into a household phrase for messy hair and slamming doors.

This one's lighter than Part One, more legend than true crime, but every bit as strange.

Twenty minutes from Johannesburg stands South Africa's most famous haunted building: Kempton Park Hospital, empty for almost thirty years. We get into how a state hospital ended up abandoned with all its equipment left inside, the fake paediatrician who worked there for eight years before anyone checked his credentials, and the ghost hunters, TikTokers and paranormal investigators who keep finding ways past the guards. Plus the real scandal: the government has now spent more guarding this empty building than it cost to build it in the first place.

Content note: this episode touches on the deaths of infants and keeps detail to a minimum.

Daisy de Melker was a Johannesburg nurse who married three times between 1909 and 1931. Two of her husbands died years apart, and so did her own son, all in circumstances nobody thought to question until it was far too late.

The case unravelled over a fake cat, a poison register signed under a dead man's surname, and a Turffontein pharmacist who recognised her face in the newspaper. What followed was a thirty-day trial that packed the Johannesburg Supreme Court, made headlines as far away as London and Shanghai, and ended with one of the most talked-about verdicts in South African legal history.

In Part One, Jess and Liz cover Daisy's upbringing, all three marriages, the deaths, the exhumations, and the trial itself, start to finish. Part Two picks up with what happened after she was gone.

Stay safe and stay skeptical.

How does crime and punishment actually work in South Africa? This is the episode that decodes it.

We walk through the criminal landscape from the ground up: the difference between common-law and statutory crimes, why there are no jury trials, how the death penalty was abolished in 1995, and what "life imprisonment" genuinely means. Then some curveballs, like being convicted of murder without intending anyone's death.

We tie it to the cases that defined the headlines and the legal facts that'll stick with you long after the episode ends.

Content note: this episode discusses violent crime, sexual offences and gender-based violence.

GBV resources: @womenforchange.sa

Every culture has monster stories, but the best ones are never just monster stories.

This week we go deep into five of South Africa's most feared mythological creatures: the Tokoloshe, Pinky Pinky, the Grootslang, the Aigamuxa, and the Inkanyamba. We cover the full mythology of each one, what they look like, what they're said to do, and where the legends actually come from. But the real question we're chasing is why. Why does a creature that attacks sleeping people coincide almost exactly with the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. Why did a monster in the girls' toilets spread through South African schools faster than almost any urban legend on record. Why does a giant serpent guard diamonds in a desert that colonial prospectors spent decades trying to strip bare.

Some of these stories were warning systems. Some were the only language available for things that couldn't otherwise be said. All of them are still being told.

Stay safe and stay skeptical.

It is June 1990. A customer browsing in a fabric shop in Midrand finds a slip of paper. On it, in a child's pencilled hand, is a message: she's being held by kidnappers, and her friend tried to phone but was cut off. The girl says her name is Anne-Mari.

Anne-Mari Wapenaar vanished in September 1989. And by June 1990, the only two people ever linked to taking her — Gert van Rooyen and Joey Haarhoff — had been dead, and cremated, for five months.

This is Part Two of The Missing Six.

We go into the 1996 demolition where police tore the House of Horrors apart brick by brick, vacuumed the roof, scanned the walls with sonar and sifted the soil, and still found nothing. We cover the note that shouldn't exist, the sons whose names resurfaced in courtrooms on two continents, 36 years of beaches dug and re-dug, and the theories about whether Van Rooyen and Haarhoff ever really acted alone.

Content warning: child abduction, sexual abuse and the murder of children. Listener discretion advised.

Eish, That's Dark is a South African true crime podcast hosted by Jess and Liz. New episodes every Monday 🎙️🎧

Find us @EishThatsDark on Instagram and TikTok. Send us your stories: [email protected]

Stay safe and stay skeptical.

In January 1990, a sixteen-year-old girl drugged and handcuffed in a Pretoria cupboard got herself out, flagged down a car, and cracked open the biggest child-abduction case in South African history.

This is part one of The Missing Six. We meet Gert van Rooyen, the churchgoing builder with a 1979 conviction the state ignored, and his partner Joey Haarhoff, the "motherly" woman who opened the doors a stranger never could. We name every girl, walk through exactly how the couple operated, and follow it all the way to the house on Malherbe Street and the day it came apart.

Content Note: this episode covers the abduction, abuse, sexual assault, and presumed murder of children. We tell it facts-first, victims at the centre, but we don't dwell on the worst of it.

Eish, That's Dark is a South African true crime and paranormal podcast hosted by Jess and Liz.

New episodes every Monday on all podcast platforms🎙️🎧