In this interview with Chris Steyn, two grieving parents describe their 14-month fight to bring to justice the alleged killer of their daughter Kerry Vorster. The suspect's whereabouts are a mystery after he was released, allegedly without paying bail, having no physical address and without providing a contact number. The police allegedly took four months to try to obtain the post mortem report that was delayed further by two months, apparently because of electricity supply issues and the pathologist being on maternity leave”. Although the police promised to rearrest him on receipt of the report and the prosecutor promised to subpoena him on evidence of a cell phone number placing him at the crime scene, her family have seen no such progress. Now, 14 months after the murder, they have been told the fingerprints are still to be verified, meaning - with the huge forensics backlog - this simple matching exercise could take four years. Her father charges: “The violence was such that he severed her jugular vein, her carotid artery, and penetrated her lung…he could have killed a wild boar with the power that he used with that knife….He intended to kill her. He stabbed her with force enough to kill a wild animal.” In voice recordings left on the phone of his estranged wife, the suspect claims that the victim had attacked him and had stabbed herself in the back. Listen to those recordings here..Listen here.Edited transcript of the interview.Chris Steyn (00:01.24)Two grieving parents, whose daughter's body was found in a pool of blood, have been battling for fourteen months for justice.Paul and Sue Sullivan are with me now. Welcome.Paul and Sue Sullivan (00:14.478)Thank you. Morning, Chris.Chris Steyn (00:17.212)May we start with your daughter's name, her age, please.Paul and Sue Sullivan (00:22.73)Her name is K-E-double-R-Y and her maiden, Kerry Forster, V-O-R-S-T-E-R.Chris Steyn (00:39.42)When she was killed, how old was shePaul and Sue Sullivan (00:44.237)She was 45 years old.Chris Steyn (00:46.578)Sue, you went to the scene that morning, what did you find?Paul and Sue Sullivan (00:50.705)Okay, so I received a phone call at about 10 in the morning from her landlady saying, Kerry is dead. It was very traumatic, very traumatic indeed. And I couldn't get hold of Paul, I couldn't get hold of her ex-husband, anybody. So I ended up driving there by myself. And when I got there, the landlady said to me, Yes, she's in there. We know she's dead. I said, how do you know she's dead? Have you actually been into to see? She said no. So I actually went into the room and she was lying. She was kneeling with her head on the ground and her bum up in the air and her head was covered in blood on the floor. And I touched her back just gently to make sure she wasn't breathing and I could feel she was cold. So she'd obviously been dead for quite a few hours. And I said goodbye to her and told her I loved her. And then I went back outside. She had also tried and had managed to pull the knife out of her back and it was lying in her one hand. There was also a great deal of blood and the cottage they were living in was in disarray with broken glass apparently and furniture knocked over and what have you. Clear evidence of quite a violent sort of a fight.Chris Steyn (02:30.054)Who else was on the scene, Sue?Paul and Sue Sullivan (02:32.683)When I got there, it was just the landlady, and the landlord was also there. There could have been servants there. But not at that stage. The security arrived a few minutes later. But it was, there could have been staff there, but the only people I saw were the landlady and the landlord.Chris Steyn (02:56.508)So when did somebody known to her become a suspect?Paul and Sue Sullivan (03:02.986)In the early hours of the morning, apparently, the cottage immediately next door to her, they heard a lot of screaming and stuff. And they saw him sitting in the garden with his head in his hands, the boyfriend with his head in his hands. And then almost straight after that, apparently, their alarm went off. What we've established is that he jumped over the fence to run away, which was, I presume, about five, six o'clock in the morning. Obviously, I wasn't there. And so the security people came, did a sweep of the property, didn't see anything wrong, because obviously they didn't go into the cottages. They looked in the gardens, and they switched the alarm off, and they went away.Later, I think about 9 o'clock or 10 o'clock, the landlady saw that she was dead. They looked in her window or something, and they called the security company, and the security company picked him up on the street, straight outside the house.Chris Steyn (04:21.372)So why is he not awaiting trial at the moment? Why is he not on trial?Paul and Sue Sullivan (04:26.47)He was held in remand for four months and twice refused bail. And then inexplicably, we've asked for an explanation, but they won't give it to us, other than to say his constitutional rights were being violated or something. But he was released from the police station without a physical address, without bail, and without any form of contact cell number or relatives or family or anything. He was just basically booted out of a police station in the short pants he was arrested in. And he immediately went back to the scene of the crime, which was near the Midrand police station, and went to the landlady and asked the landlady for his clothes, which she gave him in a black rubbish bag and videoed herself giving it to him and she also gave him R500 Rand and a lift to the Boulders Shopping Centre in Halfway House. And that was the last anyone heard of him until we managed to trace his estranged wife, who moved from Pretoria to Cape Town to escape his harassment. She also took his mother, in other words, her mother-in-law, with her. She was sleeping on the floor. The son was sleeping on the couch. The old lady was sleeping in the bed. They took her away from the old age home because of harassment from him. And she sent us a note saying that she is so sorry about what her husband had done, that they were not divorced, and she was absolutely appalled. And if we ever need her help, she will offer it. And she has now offered to, if the police were interested in re-arresting him, she has offered to lure him out of hiding by saying, you can see your son, because he has a young teenage son. But in the meantime, Chris,Paul and Sue Sullivan (06:53.783)..he sent her a cell phone message.We have the recording which we will send to you I then traced him myself through his cell number. And the fact that he had said in the email, in the message, he said to his wife, there's a picture here of a red Ferrari for his son. And he'd sent money. from an ATM in Selby. So I got in my car and I drove to Selby because people don't repair Ferraris in Selby. Selby is like Somalia. But I found a very smart premises there and I assumed that's where he worked.I came home, I phoned him, they confirmed he worked there. I phoned them and said, described him, she said, yes, he does work here. And then they put me through to him, which I didn't want them to do. He's Afrikaans speaking. My Afrikaans is appalling. I tried to say in Afrikaans that I had an accident in a Ferrari, but he picked up my accent very, very quickly. My voice he must have picked up very, very quickly. And he said to me, I know who you are and I want you to know that I have my side of the story as well. And then the phone cut off. That was the 10th of May. The next thing was I got a letter from an attorney. His attorney purportedly, but it can't be his attorney because he could never afford to pay for one, asking me to refrain from telling his employers about himself because he had been formally dismissed because I asked his employer did he tell you where he was in the last six months? Working for somebody else or did he tell you he was in jail? And obviously they did an investigation and they fired him immediately.Paul and Sue Sullivan (09:18.655)That was the 10th of May. Since then, we've never heard of him.In the meantime, this prosecutor, Baba, B-A-B-A, said if we only had the phone number, we can pinpoint this guy down to a five square meter area and we can arrest him and we can place him at the scene. It is irrefutable evidence upon which we can subpoena him or go to trial. So we gave him the number immediately. He did nothing with it. He did not act upon it. He did nothing with it. We might as well have just written it on a piece of toilet paper and flushed it down the toilet. He did nothing with it. We told him where he worked, what his phone number was, what number he was answering to. Jane also phoned him and he answered to the same number, but Baba did nothing, almost as though he had been bribed to do nothing or he was afraid of doing something. This man has no money. He was unemployed for nearly two years. He lived off Kerry's money. He was a violent man who physically manhandled me twice because I asked him to return the remote to our gate, to our property.And he hasn't been heard of since. Normally, he would phone his ex-wife and say, how's my son getting on? He's concerned about his son. And she said the other day that she hadn't heard from him since the 10th of May, since I got him fired, and she found that very strange. She believes that he's dead. I don't know if that's true. I don't think that that's true. If it is, it would have been an accidental drug overdose. It wouldn't have been a suicide. He's a coward. He wouldn't have done that. I've tried to trace him, but you need a special code that the police have on your cell phone. And the cell phones he's been phoning from appear to belong to other people who live in Lesotho and another one in the Cape. They must be people whom he's just paying R20 to borrow their cell phones to try and make calls from them. But the actual phone he had was his own phone and Baba had every opportunity to arrest him or subpoena him at the premises at which he worked in Selby…Paul and Sue Sullivan (11:45.823)…or to advise him that he was a person of interest in a murder case or subpoena him as a witness and not as a suspect. He could have acted, he did nothing. It was gross negligence. He just did not care.Chris Steyn (12:02.226)Paul, I just want to go back to the actual police investigation. What is the status status now with the DNA?Paul and Sue Sullivan (12:10.533)Well, first of all, after they released him, they said when they get the post-mortem, they will re-arrest him, which we have in writing. They couldn't get the post-mortem because there was too much traffic, because the electricity was off, because the gentleman who deals with handing out the post-mortems wasn't there, and because the mortuary wasn't open, and that was on a Wednesday afternoon. And they were all sitting there, Captain, Inspector, and somebody else from the Midrand Police saying we will have to wait another two months for the pathologist to return from maternity leave before the post-mortem will be available. Jane Lipman obtained the post-mortem four hours later. They again did not bother to subpoena him or do anything about it or question the post-mortem or send us a copy of it or indeed allow us to read it or anything else. We haven't seen it. Now they say, well, they didn't act on the postmortem. So we thought, they'll act on the cell phone trace. They acted on neither of those two matters.And now they are saying that they need further input from the pathologist 14 months later. And that the fingerprints on the murder weapon, which they seized at the scene, being apparently a household knife, they are doing a fingerprint exercise on. That fingerprint exercise will be of no value. If it was a household item, it will have his fingerprints on it, most probably his, and Kerry's, and their maid, and everybody's. It really won't be of any value. There might be other forensic values, the blood on it or something like that. I don't know. But they are waiting for these fingerprint results to come back. They have been waiting 14 months for the fingerprints to be done. It's not as though they are looking for somebody who broke into a house or a serial killer that they don't know who it is. They got a copy of his fingerprints when they arrested him. They've got Kerry's fingerprints. It's merely a matching exercise. It would take five minutes using a cell phone. And they have taken 14 months. And when I complained about Baba being incompetent, which he is,Paul and Sue Sullivan (14:35.374)…they gave it to Chief Prosecutor, who handed it to what appears to be a junior prosecutor,, who wrote and said, don't worry, everything's under control. We're just waiting for the fingerprints. We'll keep you posted. That was nearly four months ago. We haven't heard another word from them since, other than to hear that there's a 240,000 case back load and we could have to wait up to four years for these fingerprints. Chris Steyn (15:56.167)How many statements have they taken? How many investigators have there been from the police's side?Paul and Sue Sullivan (16:01.27)The police had one investigator, the first initial investigator, who produced a factually incorrect report referring to our daughter as his wife, which she was not. We don't know what else is in the report, but he missed the fact that there were drugs there. He didn't bother to look in the drawers or try and find them or anything else. In fact, our son-in-law found a packet of...that white powder, Tik, whatever they call it. And the fact that it looked like he killed her in the early hours of the morning, it's a strange time to be awake. It appears he was working on his motorcycle because he had no transport other than a really bad condition motorbike. And Kerry, we think, told him that he must leave because she had decided she didn't want to live with him anymore and she wanted to remain on in this little cottage they had rented. And that led to, well, he is a violent man who drinks and takes drugs, and this led to the fight. He's a big, strong guy. She's just a normal-sized woman, I mean. The violence was such that he severed her jugular vein, her carotid artery, and penetrated her lung to the extent to which her lung...deflated, he could have killed a wild bear with the power that he used with that knife. And when you attack somebody with a knife, generally you would stab them in the leg or stab them in the arm if you wanted to stop them hurting you or to defend yourself. If you wanted to kill with intent, you would go and stab them in the neck, just as if you had a gun and you wanted to chase the robber away, you may shoot him in the leg, not in the head. He intended to kill her. He stabbed her with a force enough to kill a wild animal. So to get back to your question…there was the original investigator. Then there was another investigator after that…Paul and Sue Sullivan (18:22.217)…who was equally untrained, unsophisticated, incapable of writing a coherent report in even, I would say, Grade four English. They then passed it on to Baba, and I complained about Baba with all the justification in the world, and it got to a chief inspector, a chief prosecutor who apparently is the senior prosecutor in the Court. And he handed it to another prosecutor who appears to be a fairly junior woman who wrote us the letter saying they were waiting for the further forensic input and the, specifically the fingerprints, and she would get back to us.And she's never got back to us. They are uncontactable by telephone. We have heard nothing in three or four months.Chris Steyn (20:14.46)It must be very triggering for both of you to read about all the women whose bodies are being found all over the place and you have not been able to get any justice for your daughter.Paul and Sue Sullivan (20:23.068)Yes.Paul and Sue Sullivan (20:28.028)Very much so. Very much so. I mean, it's very traumatic what's happened to these women, and we're really pleased to hear that they've set up a task force and they've set up, they've got forensic people coming in. ,,,all these lovely words. Unfortunately, we actually don't believe that it's actually happening. You know, it's all very well, it's just words. If you compare what overseas journalists are saying about these serial murders and overseas...private investigators are saying,,, a task force that has this sort of framework to work from? You start at this place, you track footprints or tyre prints or something, you look for security cameras everywhere. There's a whole methodology to tracing and finding a serial killer. All I think our police have done is send out a bunch of untrained policemen in their...police bakkies to drive around in circles looking for somebody who might have killed somebody. I really don't believe they will solve the problem unless somebody is an informant. They should get someone from overseas who is trained to find serial killers. That person doesn't exist in South Africa and if they do, the police force have got rid of him. The police that are there at Midrand are absolutely diabolical.Chris Steyn (21:56.892)Thank you. That was Paul and Sue Sullivan speaking to BizNews. 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