Justice delayed as reparative death camp killer has unpaid legal fees

By Melanie Nathan, June 19, 2013.

Today, in Vereeniging, South Africa, the ongoing murder trial of the owner of Echo Wild Game Ranger Camp, Alex de Koker, 49, and his co-accused, Michael Erasmus (20) was postponed yet again,  due to the accused murderer’s inability to pay his legal fees resulting in the withdrawal of his third attorney.

De Koker and Erasmus stand accused in a series of crimes related to the torture and murder of 15 year old Raymond Buys, the young teen perceived as gay for being effeminate and sent to de Koker’s Game Ranger camp to”man up.”

Counsel withdrew from the case  due to outstanding payment of legal fees.

It would seem that not much justice is happening in and around this court, given the antics at the last Court hearing where extra police with assault weapons were called in to thwart a possible escape hatched by right wing Boerebond supporters of de Koker, who had shown up in a mob and also where mere moments after the explicit testimony of a a young witness to the horrific torture endured by young Buys, de Koker was allowed to marry a woman in the Court.

Witness and tent-mate Oosthuizen, 19, told the Court that Raymond Buys was beaten repeatedly with plastic piping, wooden planks and sticks while forced to carry out manual labor by de Koker and Erasmus.  He said  Buys was chained to his bed after he tried to escape and forbidden from going to the bathroom, repeatedly soiled himself, and was forced to eat his own faeces.   Oosthuizen said, after Mr Buys tipped over a container of washing powder, he was forced to eat what he had spilled and vomited foam. He had once seen Mr Buys in a hut at the camp with a pillowcase over his head, being shocked with a stun gun by Mr de Koker and Mr Erasmus. The Court was told that Buys had severe diarrhea for two weeks. Buys was starved and after two month at the camp landed up in a hospital where he died after being in coma for two weeks.

What is so shocking is that the murder of young Buys is not the first, as Echo Wild Game Rangers has seen the deaths of 2 young teens, perceived as gay because effeminate, when in  2007, 18-year-old Eric Calitz and Nicolaas van der Walt, 19,  both died in similar circumstances.  de Koker was handed a suspended sentence in 2009 over Calitz’s death but escaped charges for van der Walt’s death, which was at first ruled to have been caused by a heart attack. It was reported that de Koker told Calitz  that he wasn’t a “moffie” (like saying “fag”) and he “would make a man out of him.” It was later found in a possible cover up that the authorities had failed to report that the teen had been strangled.

The idea of the camp is to apparently make men of teens and to “cure”  ‘”feminine traits’ in male youths…” another way of saying gay reparative therapy, instead in this instance that therapy involved “beating the gay out of the kid” – torture and if torture didn’t effect the desired change, then certainly murder would; after all a dead teen is not a gay teen.

The case was postponed- again – so that De Koker can approach the Legal Aid Board for legal aid. The hearing will continue on October 14.

Melanie Nathan, [email protected]
@melanienathan1

OUR PRIOR COVERAGE on the CASE:- See Earlier coverage where we ask – “Were they murdered for being gay? A picture of a beaten dying teen, a picture of a Nazi-like flag – and in between a Game Ranger Camp to make “Moffies” into men”