When Ruby Mashao looked at his son, David, sitting in the dock at the high court in Johannesburg, he could not see the church-going boy he had raised.
Last week, Mashao’s extended family listened as the 29-year-old confessed to how he had joined a satanic church, tried to recruit his siblings, Barbara, 22 and Sechaba, 28, and, when they refused, decapitated them with a kitchen knife. The two murders happened six years apart.
“It wasn’t my son there in court,” Ruby said earlier, sitting on the floral bedspread in his son’s room in their Roodepoort home. The walls in the small bedroom have been repainted to cover up a series of satanic and Illuminati symbols Mashao had scrawled across them. Last year, Ruby was hospitalised after suffering a stroke, leaving Mashao and Barbara at home with their uncle, Miguel Mashao.
But by 2018, the relationship had soured, with Mashao openly telling his uncle and sister he was part of the “Church of Satan”.He would later write in his confession statement: “My sister and I were at home when I decided to attack her, stab her and cut off her head with a knife.”Police officers summoned to the scene found the walls in the house had been marked with various symbols, including a swastika and numbers.
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