Rick Turner: Thirty Years On by Jann Turner

Cape Town. Christmas 1977. I was thirteen years old. That seems like a very long time ago now, in a galaxy far, far away. We were living in a period of Civil War. Rebel armies, gathered in hidden bases were plotting strikes against the evil apartheid empire. Security Police Storm Troopers hunted down rebels and imprisoned or killed them. And the Empire’s sinister agents continued to enforce the banning order that had kept my father imprisoned in our home for five years.

I saw the recently released “Star Wars IV; A New Hope” for the first time that Christmas and the mythical tale of good and evil resonated for me in ways that I’m sure George Lucas could never have imagined. Otherwise it was a quiet Christmas in Cape Town with my mum. On Boxing Day my sister and I flew unaccompanied to Durban to spend the rest of the holidays with our father. He was unable to visit us in the Cape because the absurdly titled “Minister of Justice” had confined dad’s movements to the magisterial district of Durban, forbidden him from teaching, publishing or even being in a room with more than one person at a time. We knew the Minister’s agents were watching us because they made their presence felt with the slashes they left in dad’s car tires, the firebomb they threw into our house one night and the truckload of cement they had dumped on our lawn for a laugh. We saw them following us when we drove around the game reserve, we heard them listening in to our phone conversations and we met them when they raided our house in the middle of the night. I knew they would be there over the holidays because they’d been there, on the shadowy edges of lives, ever since I could remember... read the entire article

Who Shot My Dad? by Jann Turner

This article appeared in the UK's Independent on Sunday on November 9, 1997 and in the South African Mail & Guardian for the week of August 29 to September 4, 1997

I began searching for my father's killer in 1989. I was living in New York City at the time. I read in the paper that an investigative journalist called Jacques Pauw had blown the lid on a place called Vlakplaas, South Africa's Death Squad HQ. Horror unfolded in the forms of Almond Nofomela and Dirk Coetzee and for the first time I pictured my father's murderer as a person, rather than a state or a system. I called the New York Times and asked them to put me in touch with Jacques Pauw. As it happened Jacques was going to be in town the very next week.

We had dinner in a restaurant on St. Marks Place, later we walked the chaotic, carnival streets of the East Village and all the time we talked about murder and mayhem in a country more than half a world away. Jacques said to me that night that he didn't think I would ever find my father's killer. I was more than sure that he was wrong, I was absolutely certain.

Now my search is over. I suppose the story was never going to have a happy ending, but I never expected the truth to be so depressing. The truth is I will probably never know who came to our house in Durban that night in January 1978. I'll never know who it was that fired the shot through my sister's and my bedroom window, who it was that ran away from the house as my father lay bleeding, who it was that left me trying in vain to resuscitate a dying man.

No one has applied for amnesty for the murder of Dr. Rick Turner. Over the years there have been a series of leads, flutterings of hope when it seemed we might discover who killed him and why, but we've always ended up with the fantasies of cranks or hitting the wall of silence surrounding BOSS and the Security Police. This week I slammed into the very last cul de sac. I am tired of it, tired of returning to the horror of the night my dad was killed, tired of pushing and pushing to get to the ever elusive truth about who killed him and why, tired of doing this alone. There is a chance - because the cut off date for receipt of applications is an ever-receding one - that someone will. But it's unlikely...read the entire article