Justice for Michaela as killer convicted
36-year-old Bradley Noble has been found guilty of the rape and murder of Cape Town teenager Michaela Adriaanse.
|||Cape Town - Gasps of relief could be heard from the public gallery on Tuesday, as the Western Cape High Court found 36-year-old Bradley Noble guilty of the rape and murder of a Cape Town teenager.
Acting Judge Yolanda Renqe said Noble had not been a credible and honest witness and that his version of events of March 19, 2015, had been “full of discrepancies and inconsistencies”.
She said she was satisfied that the State had proved its case beyond reasonable doubt.
Sixteen-year-old Michaela Adriaanse, together with several school friends, had gone to Wynberg public pool on March 19, last year, but they were refused entry as it was a school day. Instead, they headed off to Kalk Bay beach where they smoked marijuana and drank whiskey.
There, they met Noble, who introduced himself as a drug merchant from Retreat. Later in the day, Adriaanse had a fight with a school friend over a pair of sunglasses and stormed off to join a group of men from Manenberg. But she then returned to her friends, and got her bag to leave.
During the trial, her friends testified that Noble had said he would bring Adriaanse back and that he followed her. That was the last time they saw her alive.
The teenager’s friends spent the next few hours searching for her. They enlisted the help of two other men who had also been at the beach earlier that day and could provide them with a cellphone number for Noble. At about 8pm that night they caught the last train home. They went to Adriaanse’s Hanover Park home and told her parents the teen was missing.
The family reported the case to Muizenberg police station and that night they went to Noble’s home, but he was not there. They returned with police for a second time after midnight and this time found him sleeping.
He denied being at the beach, until he saw one of the schoolgirls he had been with that day. He also denied knowing where Adriaanse was, and even helped police in the search for her.
Three days later, on Sunday March 22, 2015, her body was found in a bushy area in Kalk Bay.
The court found that the cause of death was blunt force trauma caused by a large object, most likely a rock, that was dropped on her face.
Renqe said evidence showed she was unconscious when she received the fatal blow, and that there were signs of strangulation which could have been caused using the cords from her dress.
Noble maintained his innocence throughout the trial and claimed that he had had consensual sex with the teenager. He pinned the blame for the murder on State witness Trevor Benn. He said Benn had arrived at the scene and wanted to have sex with Adriaanse, but when she refused he killed her.
But, the acting judge dismissed this version: “Trevor was never at the crime scene as alleged by [the] accused.”
She said Noble was “not averse to being economical with the truth” and that he had “crumbled miserably under cross examination”.
“At one stage during cross examination, when he had to face a barrage of questions, he refused to come to court alleging that people were laughing at him.”
Adriaanse’s family, while relieved at the outcome of a guilty verdict, said the case had dragged on for too long, and that Noble had “played mindgames” with the court.
Wearing pink T-shirts adorned with photographs of the pretty teenager, and bearing the words, “Justice for Michaela” they described the teenager, the youngest of four daughters, as an extrovert with a bubbly personality.
Her sister, Nadine Adriaanse, said she was happy Noble had been convicted of both rape and murder and hopes he will be sentenced to life behind bars.
Unable to hold back tears, the sisters said they miss Michaela and think of her often.
“There’s moments when it catches you off guard, when you are alone and think of her..when she was little and I bathed her.. I miss her so much”.
African News Agency