characters > laura henkel

Laura Henkel’s story

"I have learnt to trust people again."

• Before the film
• Laura describes the attack
• Cathy arrives - 1989
• Laura's experience with the police
• The first few years in Australia
• Cathy proposes the idea of the film - June 2001
• Laura receives Cathy's letters from Sth Africa - September 2002
• 12 months after the film - November 2003
• The status of Laura's case

Before the film

Laura Henkel had a musical upbringing and a successful - though brief - career on the stage.

"I never thought I was beautiful, but I was happy with the face I had. I worked hard to keep myself young and attractive."

Laura married Peter, a promising young film-maker who became an alcoholic – and lived through 18 years of a volatile marriage before they were divorced.

Laura said, "With hindsight I should have left him by the side of the road many years ago."

After Laura had children – first Michael, then Cathy – Peter's alcoholism forced her into becoming the breadwinner. She had to choose the most lucrative jobs, which, at the time, were secretarial.

"I hadn’t wanted children, but a statement like that in the 1950s brought only condemnation."

But when the children arrived she focused on being "as good a mother as I possibly could be".

Freda, a childhood friend of Laura’s daughter, Cathy, says: "I remember just how we’d come home from school and Laura would be in the lounge with her - remember she loved her records, hey? She’d have her records playing, and she’d be dancing, dancing in the lounge. When we’d arrive home, she’d say 'come on girls, drop the bags, let’s dance'. And we’d have some lunch and she’d play piano tunes for us."

Laura’s children are very different, and she was surprised that it was Cathy who followed in her father’s footsteps and became a filmmaker. Cathy moved to Australia and Michael stayed, married and took up motorcar racing.

Laura finally divorced Peter, took up piano teaching and lived alone in Hope Road, Johannesburg, where, she said, "some people may have regarded me as a bit of an eccentric, but I had some good friends".

Laura describes the attack

"It was the eve of Christmas Eve in 1988 and it was late, and I opened the door to let the dog out, and just at that moment, someone must have been passing by.

"I didn’t actually see them pass, but suddenly from behind the bushes I heard a voice saying 'hello'. I wasn’t quite sure whether this was someone that I should know, so I walked out to the gate to talk to him. He wasn’t much older than my neighbour’s son, and I saw him just as a - an older child. I asked him which school he went to and he said he went to the school where I had been.

"And he said, 'Oh, can I use your toilet?' So - I said yes - yes, of course you can use the toilet. So he came in.

"We chatted for a while and everything was very pleasant and then, all of a sudden, he jumped up and put his arms around me. Now I immediately flung myself free, and said, 'No you mustn’t do that'.

"He hit me across my face and sent me spinning. It was such a surprise. Up to that point, I really didn’t have any fear that this was a sexual assault, a rape or anything [like that]. I was simply dealing with a little bit of a naughty child.

"He dropped his pants and he thrust his penis in my mouth.

"I was not compliant. I was not giving in, in any way. I was fighting. This child had turned into a monster in front of my eyes, and this monster was attacking me and now I was fighting for dear life.

"He must have kicked me so viciously, and then he left, and I think that he left me for dead, and he probably hoped that I was.

"Cecily took me to the hospital and there I saw myself in the mirror and I turned around to see who was standing behind me, because that reflection that I saw couldn’t possibly be me.

"They had to drill holes into my head, and they put an enormous iron cage on [my head].

"I wanted to scream, 'What have you done to my face? What has happened?' I expected them to - to put it back. In the most defiant voices they told me, 'Oh but your jaw was so shattered, we couldn’t possibly have put it back, and what the heck did you expect?'

"[Long sigh] ...for a long, long time, I have simply avoided looking at my face in the mirror. I look at the particular part that I am dealing with. I never look at the big picture. I avoid it to such an extent that I’m not even sure now what I look like any more."

Cathy arrives - 1989

Laura was afraid her attacker might return, so when Cathy arrived in South Africa, she hired an armed guard to watch the house day and night. But she couldn’t protect Laura from the real tormentors in her midst.

Laura’s son Michael responded to the attack with an accusation of blame: "In Laura’s case, a certain amount of it was brought upon by herself. The fact that - to invite a person into your house, after midnight, to come in and have a cup of tea or something like that, in the current situation, is not done."

Later he denies that this constitutes blame: "That’s not blaming somebody. What do you say to the person? You say, 'There is a vicious lion. You go into the lion park and you say those lions are man-eaters. Do not get out of your car.'"

Laura explains, "He didn’t look like a vicious lion. He looked like a handsome, presentable young man. I mean - what does he think these people look like? That they’re walking around with a label on their back that’s says 'Rapist'? I mean - does he think that I am so unintelligent that I would let a person into the house who was dicey?"

Laura’s neighbour, Cecily, doubted her when Laura told her she could identify the attacker.

"When I showed Cecily the photo and pointed to the boy, she actually said to my face that I must be mistaken, because he looked such a nice boy, and she knew him. People don’t realise how devastating it is to be disbelieved when you are so adamant, as I was about my attacker.

"I just wanted to die. Life had ceased to be of any value whatsoever, and I just wanted to die. And so I was totally un-cooperative in any kind of healing process."

Laura’s counsellor at the time, Ruth Benjamin, told Cathy that Laura was "very depressed [and] suicidal".

"If you go into the garden and you pick a beautiful rose, and you put it into a vase, you might say, is that rose dead or alive? It looks alive, but in actual fact it’s been cut off from its source, so it’s alive, but it's dead in a way. And often after these traumatic things, or even a terrible illness, the person gets it into their mind that they’re alive but they’re not alive. They’ve been killed in a way. It’s that kind of, as I say, death imprint, and I think suicide goes a lot with that."

Laura's experience with the police

After Laura reported the attack to the police, the matter was delegated to a retired female police reservist, Myra Carel, who had the foresight to go to the school the attacker told Laura he attended, and ask them for their school magazine. When Laura saw a photograph of the rugby team in the school magazine, she immediately picked out the attacker and felt overwhelmingly elated, as now that she'd found him, he would be punished.

But, when Laura’s daughter Cathy visited the police officer in charge of the investigation, Jan van der Mescht, he told her the suspect was overseas, that the boy’s father had threatened to sue him for false accusation and it was "his word against my mother’s".

Van der Mescht gave Cathy photocopies of some of the documents from the file and advised her to drop the case.

Cathy said, "My main concern was keeping Laura alive and getting her to Australia, so I took his advice. I had no idea how important the issue of getting justice was to become, and I was to bitterly regret that decision."

Cathy spent seven months in Johannesburg, trying to support Laura through her rage and depression, several face operations and suicide threats, while trying to organise Laura's move to Australia.

Eventually Laura agreed to move to Australia, her emigration was approved, and Cathy sold the house, packed her belongings and made arrangements for the trip. Laura said goodbye to the world she had come to completely mistrust.

The first few years in Australia

When Laura left South Africa, she felt angry and betrayed.

"It seemed as if the entire world was saying to me, 'You brought this on yourself'. I just wanted to withdraw and have nothing to do with any of them."

When she arrived in Australia, Laura lived in a small flat in Sydney for several months, but didn't cope well with her new circumstances, and her depression deepened.

"I stopped playing the piano and my creative spring dried up. I put on weight, so that no man would ever look at me in that way again. I was having memory lapses and trouble with even simple words and phrases and I really believed that my face was so disfigured that I looked like a monster."

Laura went into psychiatric care for three years, and then moved into a small housing commission flat and became a virtual hermit. They called it post-traumatic stress, but for Laura, life was meaningless, and she wanted nothing to do with the outside world. And time did not heal.

Cathy proposes the idea of the film - June 2001

"Seeing my mother shut herself away for all those years, I felt as if I’d lost her, and nothing I could do would bring her back,’ said Cathy. "Finally, in desperation, I proposed going back to Johannesburg to try and get the case re-opened. Laura was dubious at first, but she agreed. It was becoming clear that without some form of justice, she would never get over it."

When Cathy set off on her first trip to South Africa in 2001, Laura said, "I would like to see him found and confronted. I think he should know the deep and lasting damage that he did to me. I need to know if his life has been affected or if he is sorry for what he did. I need to believe that there is some form of justice operating in this world."

But when Cathy visited the police, all the evidence relating to Laura’s case hads vanished.

Cathy came back feeling as if she’d achieved very little.

But, said Laura, "The very fact that someone was prepared to believe me and to listen for the first time got me going again".

She made the first tentative step, and joined the University of the Third Age.

"There we have one group that is studying philosophy and then there’s the discussion group, and both of them I find very stimulating."

In her own words, Laura was "learning, slowly, to get on with people" and made a few friends.

"There was a slow awakening there that perhaps somebody else could be interested in my dark secret, my nightmare, that I’ve been trying to sweep under the carpet - and I’ve spent years and years and years trying to forget it and to put it aside, and now here’s an opportunity where perhaps you can draw some good out of it."

Encouraged by Laura’s tentative steps, Cathy returned to South Africa in September 2002. Read Cathy's web diary.

Laura receives Cathy's letters from Sth Africa - September 2002

When Cathy returned to South Africa, her investigations gathered momentum and she started to understand the broader societal context of Laura’s attack.

"My letters back to Laura about my progress were starting to have an effect and she was beginning to see the bigger picture."

Laura said, "If we are going to have a safer world for women, the first thing that we’ve got to do, is the painful process of exposure, which is what I’m doing now. And that, if - if women go on trying to hush it up and ignore it and pretend it doesn’t happen, they are never going to address any kind of steps to stop it and then it will just carry on."

But she was also acutely aware that legal justice is anything but certain …

"The very fact that they opened the case. The very fact that they’ve investigated him. The fact that he knows he’s being investigated. And he knows that I still know and I am still convinced. And he knows now that he has not fooled me, and he has not fooled you, and he’s also battling now to - to come to terms as to whether he’s going to be able to fool the police."

While the police investigation stalled– and there seemed little hope of legal justice – Cathy achieved some other significant victories for her mother.

Her brother Michael finally started to understand how his comments had hurt his mother. After she’d moved to Australia, Laura had had very little contact with her son and granddaughters, and the attack was a taboo subject that was like a barrier between them. She felt Michael still blamed her.

But Michael apologised and took small steps towards reconciliation.

Michael’s apology enabled Laura to forgive him. She says of the apology: "Although I could understand where he was coming from, I still needed him to apologise for me to fully forgive him. And, I have found from experience, that forgiveness is a double blessing. It helps the forgiven and the forgiving, and it sets you free. But I’m afraid I can never forgive the attacker, because if I do that, then I am condoning what he did, and I can never condone what he did."

At the end of the film Laura said: "I still get depressed sometimes, and angry that my attacker has not yet been brought to justice, but I have come out of my isolation and I am renewing my faith in human nature."

12 months after the film - November 2003

After the film, Laura said: "My greatest achievement has been that I have learnt to trust people again. I am learning to like, even love, humanity, society, life itself."

The status of Laura's case

Laura's case has been handed to the Director of Public Prosecutions in South Africa, who is continuing the investigation.

The Special Director of Public Prosecutions is Thoko Majokweni who says of the case: "We have the docket and we've looked through it. We have discovered that there are a number of gaps that exist in the investigation that needs to be done and we are taking it very seriously. We are putting some steps into having it further investigated to see if, at the end of the day, we can proceed with the case or not."

The Department of Public Prosecutions has contacted Laura in Australia and is discussing the strengths and weaknesses of her case in order to decide on a course of action.

Find out more...

 Mini-doc transcript - Laura's story