Two years ago, the bottom fell out of my life and my youth. I found myself back in 1997, back in Cape Town. I was a 17-year-old boy again, and I was seeing something that I almost managed to forget. But first, someone had to die. “At one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.” (Donna Tartt)
TRIGGER WARNING. If anything comes up for you while listening to this episode, there are plenty of resources at MyOnlyStory.org. Please, please talk to someone. If you're in South Africa, you can always, always phone SADAG on 0800 456 789. You deserve to be heard.
My Only Story is written & narrated by Deon Wiggett and produced by Alison Pope.
2019–2022 ©My Only Story NPC. All Rights Reserved.
Two years ago, the bottom fell out of my life and my youth. I found myself back in 1997, back in Cape Town. I was a 17-year-old boy again, and I was seeing something that I almost managed to forget. But first, someone had to die. “At one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.” (Donna Tartt)
TRIGGER WARNING. If anything comes up for you while listening to this episode, there are plenty of resources at MyOnlyStory.org. Please, please talk to someone. If you're in South Africa, you can always, always phone SADAG on 0800 456 789. You deserve to be heard.
My Only Story is written & narrated by Deon Wiggett and produced by Alison Pope.
2019–2022 ©My Only Story NPC. All Rights Reserved.
Introducing MY ONLY STORY
There is something I witnessed the year I left high school. It’s been more than 20 years now since I promised myself to forget it forever. And, in many ways, I did forget. Until now.
I’m Deon Wiggett and this is My Only Story, a podcast and a live investigation. Two years ago, everything I knew suddenly changed forever. 20 years just disappeared as the bottom fell out of my life and my youth.
But first someone had to die.
At one time of my life, wrote Donna Tart, I might have had any number of stories. But now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever tell. For four weeks in November
Over four weeks in November, MOS digs up the distant past to prevent another terrible crime being committed, this December. Get involved with MOS.org and join the investigation every Thursday from November 7, on your favourite podcast App and News 24.
INTRO MUSIC AND OPENING SEQUENCE
MY ONLY STORY – EPISODE 1
“SOMETHING I SAW”
20191009
PROLOGUE
This podcast deals with mature themes and parental guidance is strongly advised.
There is something I witnessed the year I left high school. It’s been more than 20 years now
since I promised myself to forget it forever. And, in many ways, I did forget. Until now.
I’m Deon Wiggett and this is My Only Story, a podcast and a live investigation.
INTRO MUSIC AND OPENING SEQUENCE
ACT 1
Two years ago, I was an advertising copywriter here in Johannesburg, South Africa. The work was good. My husband was awesome. I phoned my parents once a week.
Then, one Saturday, everything changed forever. Two decades of my life just upped and left and I was back in 1997. It was my last year of high school, and I was so frightened by what I witnessed that I resolved to forget it forever.
You see, forgetting comes with its own price. It bides its time, but it always returns,
demanding to be paid. I was about to learn this.
But before I could, someone had to die.
It is a Saturday afternoon in November 2017 and I should be on my way to the same out-of-the-way Mexican restaurant for the second night in a row. My husband, Riaan, has gone to America, and I’m chilling by the pool doing what I did back then – smoke a couple of blunts, read a little, swim a little – South Africa is in the southern hemisphere, remember, so November is early summer.
The Mexican restaurant is average. But it’s where the two halves of a divorced couple are hosting parties on successive nights – not out of spite, but sheer coincidence. But I’m stoned in the swimming pool and I’m running late. I don’t make time to phone my parents or text Riaan ‘Bon voyage’.
As I get into the Uber, I’m thinking about summer, and about making more informed choices from last night’s menu. Small-ish thoughts. It is the final evening of my regular life.
MUSIC: BACH CANTATA
It is five days later – Thursday – and I’m standing in a grand and sweltering church in the Cape winelands. Somehow, it’s my father’s funeral, killed in half a day by an undetected but life-threatening ailment. My father is 65 years old and I’m in my hometown, Stellenbosch, to say that he’s dead to people who know already, in front of a God I don’t believe in.
If you have lost someone that close to you, try to think of their funerals, if you can and you want. Is your memory clear, second by second, or is it a bit hit and miss? Mine is hit and miss. I have such vividly defined memories of little bursts of that day, and of that week, but most of it – I mean, I [just] don’t know; was I even there?
I remember how my eulogy started. I made a very strange joke to try to break the ice – my dad was a jolly man who always made jokes during very serious situations. But that’s one of the only things I remember saying. I was broken and still breaking, in a situation that nothing in my life had prepared me for. The horror was too much for my brain to take, so it took me away somewhere safe instead, leaving my body behind in a sweltering church to just get on and do what it now must.
Our brains can give us an artificial and temporary reprieve, but they can’t change reality
itself. The narrator in Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, says, “walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another”.
I understand that. If my father’s death was a seismic blow, it was followed by weeks and
months of aftershocks as the bottom fell out of my life and my youth.
My brain was going through a period of brutal readjustment. It started with re-sorting every single memory I have of my dad, updating his status in the memory to ‘Dead’. Laughs we had. Fights we had. The memory of a beach party that always made my dad and I snicker conspiratorially –a memory shared by two of us; now, all of a sudden, the beach party is a memory that belongs to only me.
But memories are also chain reactions. One thought leads to another; it’s like you can’t
remember one thing without remembering something else first. For instance: I am thinking
about a family holiday in my last year of high school. We are in the Kruger Park. Foreigners would say we are on safari; South Africans would say we’ve come to the bush.
We are in a very small camp called Punda Maria. It’s 1997 and I am on the phone. This isn’t my phone; it’s a pay phone. It’s the only telephone for miles around; cellphones were still a new thing, and there was no reception in the bush back then. There are 20 or so people in the camp; beyond the fence is savannah with lions and leopards and horrible adders; and this one phone line is the camp’s only way to communicate with the outside world.
On the afternoon that’s now stuck in my mind, my parents are having a nap and I am on the phone to someone. We talk for a long time. My dad is awake when I get back. ‘Where have you been?’ he says, and he looks – well, back then I thought he looked irritated, now I’m thinking he was concerned.
I can’t remember what I said to my dad, who I was talking to on the phone, but it was a lie and he could tell. He was upset and I was a sulky teenager and we proceeded to have a big fight.
Why is my brain serving up this memory to me? And who was I talking to on the phone?
Of course, now that I think about it, obviously I know who I was talking to. I’ve always
Known.
I hadn’t thought of Jimmy in 20 years, but now the memories were bulleting out of this tiny little box I made for them in the deep-back of my brain. A few weeks after the death of my father – the late, great Mannie Wiggett – I was suddenly forced to think of a man who couldn’t be more different from him. I was thinking about Jimmy and I was remembering clearly what I thought I’d forgotten all those years ago.
In my last year of high school, when I saw what I saw, I was reading The Secret History,from which I quoted just now. It’s a formative and feverish novel, and it became a part of my own secret history even as I was living through it as I tried to navigate through it. One line, in particular, lodged in my mind even though. back then, I didn’t know why.
I suppose, at one time in my life, I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
It is time I introduced you to Jimmy, who is one of the men this story is about. I have to call him Jimmy for the moment – it’s not his real name, and I’ll give a proper explanation in a bit of why I can’t name him just yet.
Jimmy was a teacher. An excellent teacher, most of his students will tell you.
If none of this had happened and this was an interview about my school days, he would be one of the teachers who was a breath of fresh air.
That’s a former pupil of Jimmy’s.
In a school where, most of the teachers were cut from the same cloth, he brought a totally different kind of energy.
Jimmy may have been a breath of fresh air, but he was a deeply unattractive one. More
than anything, I’ve always thought Jimmy looks like a bullfrog. He is a large, flabby man, he sweats by the gallon, and when he sits, he plonks.
Today, he’s in his fifties and lives in a picture-pretty Cape Town neighbourhood with views of Table Mountain and the Atlantic Ocean. There’s plenty he’s done in the twenty-plus years since he’s been a teacher – but we’ll get there. The story starts quite a bit earlier, at a prestigious school for boys in central South Africa. That’s the first place I can positively report that Jimmy did what Jimmy does.
I see this kind of garden variety offender, all the time.
This is Dr Anna Salter, who’s an unflappable 73-year-old expert on guys like Jimmy. I ask, ‘could it have been an accident?’ Or did Jimmy plan all of it from the very start?
Typically it’s a plan that goes on from the beginning. It’s not that he becomes friends with a kid and then gets carried away in his surprise by… He is planning thinking It is on his mind absolutely all the time.
I was not Jimmy’s only target and I’m not his only survivor. I was one of the boys he wanted, but not an aberration or an anomaly. It wasn’t terribly exceptional when he raped me in the mouth when I was 17.
Voice of Garman. In 1.2 km turn left on Strand Street
Early on in this project, I spoke to someone who spoke to someone who gave me
Jimmy’s home address in Cape Town. I look up his house on Google Street View. It’s quite an old picture and the property doesn’t look like much. But a lot can change in 10 years time.
Garman voice: Turn right onto Beach road M6
I wonder what it looks like now?
I am possibly just driving past a man who has loomed so large in my life. There’s a car parked outside his house. Is that his car? Is he meters away? I am going to have one more drive past. And then I am driving to his work. His most basic of daily routines. Driving to the office. Everything is changing. I am not the one who does not know about him. He is the one who does not know about me. Beep. I’m sitting outside your house.
END OF ACT 1
ACT 2
This is not a story of rape and molestation. This isn’t Leaving Neverland. If you haven’t seen it, in Leaving Neverland, two men of about my age talk about their rapes by Michael Jackson
– I am supposed to say alleged rapes. It is gripping and harrowing viewing, and the two guys in there, James and Wade, both feel like they’re my brothers. But it’s not what this is.
I’m not going to tell you all the details of what Jimmy did to me. And neither will the other men in this programme. Each instance was deeply illegal and a devastating personal invasion, and let’s leave the topic of teenage penises there.
This story isn’t about that. It’s about whether it’s even possible to catch a man like Jimmy. And whether it can be pulled off in time for December.
Music starts dongelly because it’s You don’t see how much I want you
Because summer is coming. It’s the southern-hemisphere’s summer holidays, which has always been a magical time for Jimmy. You see, Jimmy loves the beach. Just loves it. It’s his happy place; the happiest place on earth.
Right now, in November, parents across South Africa are making lists of things to take to the seaside next month. Jimmy is getting ready too.
It is January 2019 and the height of summer in Johannesburg. I am sitting upstairs in the loft of our house, half of which is now my office – I no longer work in an ad agency. I work in my loft as a detective or reporter or something, along with all the financial complication you’d expect from a career change like this. But I figure: this won’t take long. Jimmy’s been bad at covering his tracks. Two or three months, that’s it, you’re done, hope you love Christmas in jail.
My half of the loft used to be part of Riaan’s neat and exclusive study, but since I’ve moved into half, his has also deteriorated. To Riaan’s long-term heartache, anything that belongs to me seems to creep and expand autonomously. It’s a good thing I’m otherwise adorable.
On my desk, in my half of the loft, is a pristine stack of index cards. I am about to start
compiling a history of Jimmy’s life. If I’m going to catch this bull frog, I’ll need to become the world’s foremost expert on him and his pond. To find evidence and other survivors so that we can tell the police and ruin his well-laid plans. But my voice is not enough. I need me and two or three or four others – not just me, but, for the record, Me Too.
At my desk, I type Jimmy’s real name into Instagram. He does still love the company of much younger men. Yup, and he still loves the beach.
These guys don’t look underage, but the contrast between them and Jimmy is still striking, their universally hairless young bodies against his flopping expanse, his hands trying to melt into the shoulders of whichever pretty boys are being gripped on that particular picture. I make my way through Jimmy’s Instagram in a rather unsystematic way. Seeing his picture affects me profoundly. At the beginning, just remembering the way he smiles increased my everything – heart rate, breathing, fear and also gloom. My body is still afraid of him, still wants to get me the hell away from him. It’s never good when he smiles. So I look at two or three pictures, and the stories they tell, and then I have to escape my loft and go outside and pace, agitatedly, across the grass.
In addition to Instagram, I’ve been working my way through his entire Twitter and public Facebook to trace where he’s been, and with whom. For instance: at one point, he spent quite a bit of time with a good-looking guy in his late 20s – don’t worry, that’s way too old for Jimmy. My favourite photograph from that time of his life shows the two of them on a hike along Table Mountain. I can picture good-looking guy having said to Jimmy, “come along just once, a bit of exercise will do your stress levels a world of good”. But on this picture, they’ve barely even started, and Jimmy knows he has made a mistake. He shouldn’t have said yes. His body will respond catastrophically to the exercise. By the end, his face will be purple red, his giant T- shirt will be soaked, and he will feel angry and inadequate. I allow myself to quite enjoy this.
On my index card of Jimmy, I make a note of the date when he’s at Table Mountain. I also need to find out the other man’s identity. ‘Good-looking guy’ gets an index card.
I find pictures of Jimmy’s mom and dad. His father is a bit inscrutable, but his mother is the sweetest-looking lady with sensible blouses and kind eyes. I search around a bit; I find their full names; his parents get an index card each.
Music
There are pictures of a young guy I’ll call Zak. He’s on the beach with Jimmy, both of them in swimshorts. Zak is a beautiful young man and I recognise his look. Smart, kind and fresh- faced. It always strikes me as a certain look. Jimmy’s look.
As I scroll back and back, themes emerge. Young men appear suddenly, most with a certain look. They become central to Jimmy’s life; some get taken on overseas trips; many get taken to the same seaside town. Then, as they appeared, they disappear again. In the meantime, his mother seems sweet and trusting and kind.
I make screen grabs of everything. Jimmy’s life is taking shape in front of my eyes.
Kulula flight good morning
My first big breakthrough comes in March. I go down to Cape Town; I meet some old friends and journalists; I am told some gossip and some rumours and hearsay. I can’t repeat any of it here, because hey, rumours and hearsay. Or, as they call it in detective shows, ‘clues’.
By now I know the names and faces of everyone in Jimmy’s extended circle. Know them well enough that when someone says, ‘I know this guy, Mike’, I immediately go, ‘Mike de Wit?’, which isn’t his real name. So my friend who knows Mike tells me a bit about what Mike told him.
Now, Mike is quite a bit younger than me and he was once a central character in Jimmy’s life. He’s a beautiful guy with a certain look – I can only imagine Jimmy’s excitement the first time he caught sight of Mike.
I’m surprised to hear Mike has been spilling the beans on Jimmy, but I figure, if he’s talking about Jimmy to other people ... why not me? If I can get fresh-faced Mike to tell me what he knows about Jimmy, that’s it, game on.
I know exactly where to find Mike, so I send him a message.
It’s an unseasonably chilly evening when Mike and I meet in a coffee shop. I get there first and I get us a little wooden table close to the door. There’s just one other customer. At the back, a television quietly blares some soccer. I am drinking white wine, because in my head it’s still summer, even as a gust of dead leaves blow past the window.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mike enter the coffee shop, but I’ve buried myself in a
novel. I don’t want our meeting to be awkward. You know how it’s weird when you’re
meeting someone and you make eye contact a few seconds too early? Almost immediately, you both have to look away to stare intently at absolutely the first thing you see, you at some balsamic vinegar, me him at an occasional chair. It’s awkward enough when it happens
with a friend; when it’s a stranger arriving for an awkward conversation it really isn’t ideal... I read my novel it intensely and, when Mike reaches the table, I look up, I get
up, I say ‘Hello, Mike’ and I try to shake his hand. ‘Hello, Deon’ he says, briefly extending his hand to me, but it’s not much of a handshake and I’m not sure he used my name – I’m kinda having to reconstruct our dialogue here.
He sits down at the table, or, rather, his right-hand side sits down next to the table and he crosses his legs both in the direction of the door. ‘What would you like to drink?’, I ask him. ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘I’m okay for now’. The waiter is heading for our table, but I shake my head at him while trying to say ‘aw shucks’ with my eyes. The waiter doesn’t mind. He’s barely gotten back to his soccer match when someone scores a goal.
Back at the wooden table, young Mike is being somewhere between passive-aggressive and just regular active-aggressive. ‘Say what you want to say,’ Mike says, ‘and then I’ll decide if I’m going to tell you anything’. I wanted to tell him about this process, this investigation, in quite a matter-of-fact way, but my heart is beating wildly and my wine glass is emptying rapidly and I don’t know if I can get through to Mike.
On an inkling, I take a different tack. I decide not to hide my hurt it from him. ‘Let me tell you my history with Jimmy,’ I say to Mike I’m done, and Mike is staring at me. It doesn’t feel like empathy to me. It feels like scepticism and condescension. I clearly remember what he said. ‘Well, first thing I have to say, is that I have a very strong personality,’ he says. I take this to mean ‘Can you get a grip on yourself? We are not alike and our experiences aren’t alike and whatever happened isn’t that bad.’
Thankfully, I’ve managed to secure more wine from the soccer-fan waiter, so I take a huge gulp and bite my tongue somehow both at the same time.
Out of everything I thought I might hear, none of it was this. At that moment, even though I’m supposed to be, like, a reporter or something, I turn into someone who feels mocked about my past trauma; someone who feels barely believed. This must be what women feel like.
Mike really isn’t a bad guy; he’s just hurting. He has just seen more of Jimmy that he should have. He does want to help – I mean, clearly he doesn’t want to be here, talking to me, but still he came. He’s full of bravado, but he’s
terrified of Jimmy – terrified of Jimmy’s revenge if he even finds out we met for coffee, even though neither of us have had any.
‘So in the time that you knew Jimmy,’ I start to ask Mike, but he shakes his head. He wants to help, but he doesn’t trust, me and I’m out of ways to convince him. This is hard for me too, and I wasn’t expecting any of this to go like this.
Mike’s legs, which had been wanting to walk out since the second they arrived, are finally joined by the rest of his body. We agree to exchange more messages, but I think we can both tell it will go nowhere. Mike doesn’t like me, and I’m beginning not to like Mike. I try to seem cheerful and confident, but I’m not feeling it. Mike didn’t want to have a glass of water with me.
I pay the bill and leave the little wooden table and the quietly-deafening soccer match
behind. As I get into the cab, I am still fuming, but now, now mostly at myself. I should have stayed in control of my emotions. I made Mike think that I’m weak. It was my first big break, and I’ve blown it.
[TAPE: Honourable speaker, I am appalled. I am appalled.]
We are in South Africa’s parliament in Cape Town. The lawmakers are debating a national rape crisis. And something has just happened halfway through a speech that makes this parliamentarian change course completely.
[I refuse to look at my notes and to have a normal conversation or a normal debate.]
Her name is Marie Sukers from a tiny Christian party, and some opposing lawmakers just heckled her.
Audio: [How can we as women in the middle of a debate raise our voices and hecle like that and say that we are feeling the crisis. It is not good enough. It is not good enough. Our people deserve better from us, from us [From us!]
I normally have no time for this woman’s party – for one, I don’t believe it’s possible to pray the gay away. But today, in this speech, she’s nailing it.
[We all now need to stop the debate.]
In a country on a planet awash with sex crimes, the very real question that should be asked of me is: what makes my rape so special I get to make a whole production about it? The answer is: nothing does. My privileged upper-middle-class rape occurred in privileged conditions, for a rape. But it is the rape I can try to correct Jimmy is the rapist I think I know how to stop.
Much worse than what happened to me, has happened to much of humanity. But all of us who were hurt like this were spotted by a monster. I’m talking about Jimmy, because he is my monster. If you have your own monster, this is about him too.
Later, in my loft, as I stare once more at my monster’s LinkedIn profile, something suddenly clicks for me. Something that would, as they say in detective shows, blow this case wide open.
The first time I read Jimmy’s LinkedIn page, I was struck by a lie. His working life didn’t start in the year that he claims. It started seven years earlier. Now, I can’t give you more precise dates, because I may indirectly identify Jimmy, and that’s something I’m not allowed to do yet. Only once I provide enough evidence can I name Jimmy in the public interest, and before the summer holidays.
The whole messy meeting with young Mike taught me something important. I need to find men who have had more time to process their pasts and stare down their fear. I must find men older than me, not younger. I need to go back to the seven missing years – the time between Jimmy’s graduation in the Eighties and the so-called start of his working life in the Nineties.
I will get to exactly how I met Jimmy, but what matters more right now is what he told me back in the Nineties. That he used to teach at one of South Africa’s most famous schools.
That’s not on his LinkedIn profile. That’s where I should go next.
MUSIC Vivé le Grey
Next time, on My Only Story.
END CREDITS
My Only Story is written by me, Deon Wiggett. The producer is Alison Pope. The sound
engineer is was Paul Shafer. And the final mix is by Shaun Jeffers Our original score was composed by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder, and
our artwork is by Carla Kreuser.
Now, In November 2019 this story is part of a live investigation. What we know about Jimmy is still evolving and you’ll hear all about it right here as quickly as I can write it. There is also continuing coverage on the story from News 24 who is our publishing partner. It’s editor-in-chief Adriaan Basson is our editorial advisor.
I need to say a huge thank you to the dozens of people who have already talked to me and please continue sending me your information and your tip offs. You can contact me, completely confidentially, at MyOnlyStory.org. I do need your help to finish the story.
MyOnlyStory.org is also the place to go for bonus material and loads of resources about recovering from sexual abuse.
The following is hugely important
If anything’s come up for you while listening to this story, please, please talk to somebody. At MyOnlyStory.org there are loads of links to people to talk to depending on where you are in the world. If you are in South Africa, you can always, always phone SADAC on 0800456789.
MyOnlyStory is out every Thursday in November on your favourite podcast app and News24.
This has been a production of Fairly Famous.