OP-ED: All We Are Saying is Give Tapeworms a Chance By Glen Retief
of Tsafendas by Harris Dousemetzis. Dousemetzis argues that Tsafendas killed Verwoerd for political reasons and then faked his tapeworm to escape torture and the gallows.
Thus, at any number of points in the story Dousemetzis tells, Tsafendas might have settled down and had a good life for which, we are told, he deeply longed. Even as late as 1996, long after any threat of execution had receded, he still discussed the worm in some detail with his first biographer, Henk van Woerden — a man even Dousemetzis admits Tsafendas trusted. Tsafendas told Van Woerden he’d contracted the tapeworm as a boy, but medicine had killed only half of it. Until the end, Tsafendas left instructions in his will for his body to be biopsied to find the worm.
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