It is believed that the Dr Louis Heyns was hijacked and murdered elsewhere before his body was dumped at a notorious spot.
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Cape Town - As police retrace the final moments of slain Stellenbosch university lecturer Louis Heyns, it is believed that the well-known paediatrician was hijacked and murdered elsewhere before his body was dumped at the notorious spot at the Strand beachfront, dubbed Lovers’ Lane.
The decomposing body of Heyns, a father of three who had been married for 33 years, and worked as a lecturer and paediatrician at Tygerberg Hospital, was found in a shallow grave on Thursday.
“It looks like he wasn’t killed here, but killed somewhere else, possibly in the Helderview area. He could have been hijacked,” the Strand police community forum’s Therese Hartley told Weekend Argus.
Hartley was among a group of police officers, neighbourhood watch members and community policing forum members at the crime scene on Friday.
According to Hartley, cameras picked up Heyns’s car on the N2 and then again in Helderview.
The area where Heyns’s body was found, among milkwood trees between Beach Road, the ocean and adjacent to a public toilet, is clearly unsavoury. Graffiti in the toilets advertises sex with other men, while the area is littered with empty cooldrink bottles, chips packets, used condoms, and a pair of men’s blue underpants.
Hartley said: “There are an incredible number of male prostitutes here. This is their get-together place. It’s not a very nice place. It’s very dangerous.”
A manager at surfing academy Sonsurf, next to the murder scene, who would not be named, said they always chased away men from the scene.
A jogger running past on Saturday agreed: “We know this is a notorious area for men looking for sex to come to. I’d be crazy to walk here at night.”
A 44-year-old Strand resident told Weekend Argus he had lived in the area all his life, and knew about Lover’s Lane as a pick-up spot.
“About six or seven years ago they cleaned up the area. They came with spotlights and lots of police officers were walking up and down the beach, and they cleared the entire area. But soon it was back to normal again,” he said.
Meanwhile, Heyns’s grief-stricken family are making arrangements for his funeral service next week.
Andre Mouton, Heyns’s brother-in-law and family spokesman, told Weekend Argus they had hoped to have a memorial service and funeral this weekend. But the authorities were still finalising the pathology report.
“The body will only be released on Monday,” he said, adding that the family was struggling to cope with the tragic events. They were however doing well “under the circumstances”.
“We’ve struggled to come to terms with the way he passed on.
“If he was killed in a car accident or something like that it may have been easier to accept, but to think that he was killed in such a way is very hard to process. We have been told three people have been arrested, so we will let the law take its course,” Mouton said.
But police remained tight-lipped about the progress of their investigation.
Police spokesman Captain Frederick van Wyk declined to reveal any information about the suspects, or to say whether anyone had confessed.
Insiders close to the investigation said however that police managed to trace Heyns’s cellphone records, which led them to a chop shop in Malmesbury where they found his grey Peugeot.
The source said that when police swooped on the Boland town, they arrested three men. One was the shop owner, and two were brothers.
Van Wyk said the investigation was still at a very sensitive stage and declined to confirm if further arrests were expected.
The three suspects will appear in the Somerset West Magistrate’s Court on Monday.
Weekend Argus