S2 - Ep 1. Journey

In 2018, a boy died in the clinic of an elite South African school. According to them, his death remains a mystery. We suspect there’s more to it than that. Join us as we hunt our way through a dozen famous schools to find out why Thomas Kruger had to die.

Please continue sending your information and your tip-offs – you can contact us, completely confidentially, at MyOnlyStory.org, or message us on WhatsApp or Telegram on 072 382 7030. MyOnlyStory.org is also the place to go for bonus materials and loads of resources about recovering from sexual abuse.

2019–2022 ©My Only Story NPC. All Rights Reserved.

Episode Credits:

Research, writing and editing: Deon Wiggett
Executive producer: Alison Pope 
Associate producer: Nokuthula Manyathi 
Sound engineer: Sean Jefferis
Original score: Charl-Johan Lingenfelder 
Artwork: Carla Kreuser
Social Media: Andrea Penfold

For News 24:

Reporting:  Sesona Ngqakamba 
Production manager: Sharlene Rood
Editor-in-chief: Adriaan Basson
Special thanks to Sheldon Morais and Mpho Raborife.

Additional music: Getty Images | Epidemic Sound

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TRIGGER WARNING. This podcast discusses suicide and suicidal ideation, and some people might find it troubling. 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. 

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Transcript

This is Season 2 of My Only Story. It is a co-production of the My Only Story Non-Profit Company and News24.

This is a trigger warning. If you are a survivor of sexual abuse, or if you know the people involved in this story, this podcast could be hard to listen to. If you’re feeling low or triggered, please find someone to talk to at MyOnlyStory.org

It is just before midnight on a cloudy Saturday evening in November 2018. We are in the sanatorium, or clinic, of the third-most expensive school in the country. Two boys are spending the night there.

Earlier, they watched television – the rugby test between the Springboks and the Scots.

This is Scottish Rugby TV.

TAPE: Rugby match 

But now, as it hits midnight, lights are out and the older boy is fast asleep.

But not 16-year-old Thomas Kruger. In a few minutes’ time, he will get out of his bed on the upper floor; he will put on a white T-shirt and some blue-and-white shorts; he will take out the rope he has hidden in his backpack; and, in a pair of grey socks, he will quietly step to the bedroom’s window.

Tom has done his research. He has practised making the knot. And now, after midnight, he ties the rope neatly. He squeezes through a window that seems impossibly small for a high-school boy – even a wiry one like Tom. 

Now Thomas is sitting on the sill of the sanatorium’s window. Right in front of him, in the cloudy night, lies the school’s water-polo pool.

Thomas grabs the rope. He pulls it over his neck. He tightens the noose. And then he launches himself from the window sill. Instantly, his spine snaps, because Tom did his research. He is dead long before daybreak. 

And there he hangs all night, on the side of the sanatorium, until 9am. That’s when a sister enters Tom’s room with breakfast on a tray. She finds an empty bed and, with the other staff, she frantically starts searching. Finally, a tuft of red hair catches someone’s eye. It is sticking out above the window sill, with a boy’s stiff corpse hanging underneath.

In this new season of My Only Story, we track our way through a dozen famous South African schools to try to answer a question: Why did Tom Kruger have to die? I’m Deon Wiggett and this is My Only Story – a podcast and a live investigation.

THEME MUSIC

Act I

So, where were we? 

The last time we spoke, I was working in my loft here in Johannesburg, South Africa. We had just managed to dispense of one giant menace when an even larger one arrived to shut down the world. As far as pandemics go, I have had it easy. Nonetheless: Not even during the Black Death did anyone suffer the indignity of being kicked out of their own loft by their own husband and forced to work on their laptop outside. 

Well, I wasn’t quite forced outside, but Riaan’s working-from-home has turned the once-peaceful loft into a pandemonium.

If they’ve got it reflected on their budgets then I don’t need to include it here as a budget item. Come to think of it, it shouldn’t be on my budget at all as a budget item, it’s a different business unit so it should come ...

Seriously, you try catching dodgy teachers amid such a racket. And so I’m forced to sit outside, on the stoep. Not that it’s exactly quiet out here. 

And that’s even before the hadedas arrive. 

Still, give me a hundred hadedas, but do deliver me from the violence of Riaan’s work life.

When Season 1 ended, I was writing the book, even though my mind kept wandering. I was over Willem Breytenbach; I was ready to start seeing other paedophiles. That is when I happened upon a mystery that would soon take over my life.

This story is not about our previous paedophile, but, if you haven’t read the book, I do need to give you thirty seconds of context from thirty years ago. The events of six days in August 1990, at Grey College in Bloemfontein, directly inspired my urgent new quest. But I’m tired of talking about a bullfrog named Willem Breytenbach, which is why you won’t hear his name from my lips again. So to get us up to speed, here are Derek Watts and Masa Kekana from Carte Blanche on M-Net.

TAPE: Carte Blanche

Carte Blanche reports on Ben, who became my first brother back in Season 1.

I’m not going to relitigate the apparent conspiracy of silence in Bloemfontein, but after I got the full story, I phoned up some teachers and asked them to explain themselves. This did not go down well. Here is Johan Volsteedt, legendary former headmaster of Grey College, in an extremely confrontational Afrikaans interview.

TAPE

These things were not so well known back then, he says, and I interrupt to ask if that’s why they kept it quiet.

Listen to me, Mr Wiggett, just you listen – I’m answering as well as I can, but you’re not going to nag at me. I’m not interested at all. 

TAPE

Maybe this is my favourite sentence: I … I know what I know and I know that I knew nothing about those things back then. What is your answer to your own question?

TAPE

I ask if Grey boys are expected to keep quiet, and he says ‘nah’.

I think you get the gist. Basically: The current headmaster of Grey College – his name is Deon Scheepers – pleads ignorance of what happened before his tenure started in 2013. But his predecessor, the now retired Johan Volsteedt, says he can’t remember as far back as 1990, when he was the deputy headmaster. The headmaster at the time, Dr Michau Heyns, died in 2020 after a long battle against Alzheimer’s, Netwerk24 reports. And so nobody takes responsibility – not headmaster Deon Scheepers, nor Johan Volsteedt, who lived on the Grey College campus for sixty years .

My interview with Johan Volsteedt – or, as they call him at Grey College, Mr Grey – left me both furious and fearful. Furious that teachers have conveniently forgotten the lives that were ruined on their watch. And fearful that schools have not changed a bit since Grey College avoided a scandal by allowing a paedophile to become some other children’s problem.

But could that still happen today? If these grand schools have grown more compassionate and less arrogant in the past 31 years, we would have much less to worry about. But if these schools have only grown more arrogant, we are up a creek without a paddle. 

From where I’m sitting on the stoep, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that we are talking more about about the fact that boys also suffer sex abuse. In 2017, we met Collan Rex from Parktown Boys in Johannesburg. Here’s eNCA.

TAPE

In 2019 came the news of Fiona Viotti at Bishops in Cape Town.

TAPE

eNCA again.

TAPE

And earlier this year, we heard that Dean Carelse has been arrested in Australia after quietly leaving Pearson High in Port Elizabeth. 

This is Australia’s 7News.

TAPE

He means Dean Carelse.

Carelse.

An hour’s drive from Brisbane on Australia’s Sunshine Coast.

TAPE

Things would only get worse for Dean Carelse – but we’ll talk plenty more about him soon.

It’s good news that sexual predators are being exposed, because that means people are being warned against them. There is bad news though – and it is considerable. Even though there is a pattern that is plain to see, the schools do not bother. The people in charge have not felt the need to connect any dots. If they would care to look though, they would keep hundreds of children safe. Is that not a reward worth playing for?

On an autumn’s afternoon, 18 months ago, I’m sitting on the stoep and I’m sifting through the tip-offs I received from Season 1. On a random scrap of paper, I notice a note I made. All it says is ‘St Andrew’s College!’, with an exclamation mark. What’s that about?

That’s when I remember Charl Kruger – or, to be more precise, I remember about some guy who phoned me from Port Elizabeth right in the middle of Season 1. It was November 2019 and I was also on my stoep, but back in the old world, before the Great Lockdown. At that point, the only thing on my plate was exposing old what’s-his-face. Yet somehow Charl Kruger got hold of my number. We say hello and then almost instantly he launches into a long story about the death of his son, Thomas Kruger, in Grahamstown just the previous year. I am impatient to get off the call. I do feel for Charl – he seems kind and gentle and possibly permanently broken – but I cannot help him. I can’t help most people I would like to. And so, at the earliest chance, I tell Charl ‘I’m sorry for your loss’, and then I make my excuses and I hang up the phone.

And then, on the stoep, it is four months later and I’m looking at a scrap of paper that reads ‘St Andrew’s College!’ and I’m remembering how distracted I was when someone told me his life tragedy. And so I rummage around; I find Charl Kruger’s name and number; and, on the spur of an autumn’s afternoon, I call him back and I ask if he’ll please tell me again about the violent death of his son.

By the time I hang up the phone, the autumn’s day has turned into dusk. On the stoep, my mood has been veering from excitement to horror and back to excitement again. It’s maybe a bit insensitive to say so, but the Kruger mystery has me spellbound. 

And so I sit back in my chair and, like a real detective, I light my metaphorical pipe to stare at the pieces of the case. There are tragic heroes and colourful villains and a violent death that may have been avoided. Still to come are secret signals, confounding code names, the suggestion of conspiracy, and stakes that rise and rise.

During the long lockdown that follows my conversation with Charl, I would get uncomfortably close to the personal lives of teenage boys. My social-media habits will turn bizarre. I’d learn the names of almost everyone at St Andrew’s College. I’ll trail my way through the inappropriate pictures posted by schools on Facebook and Instagram. Until, much, much later, I discover the most dangerous platform of them all: WhatsApp. As I get deeper into a WhatsApp group, I will find myself closer and closer to a group of vicious teachers across the country who help themselves to the children in their care. 

They think out games to play. They compare notes and exchange pictures. They hide each other’s secrets, for the secrets are also their own. Except, lately, there’s been one exception. We may as well call them Deep Throat; for once, it happens to be apt. 

THEME

Let’s reveal the secrets, one by one. Let’s give up the game – the very large game – that I believe to have led to the death of Thomas Kruger. This stretches so much wider than one school. It’s an infestation.

As our story starts, there is only one question I must ask you to answer: Can you honestly say you trust every teacher at your child’s school?

END OF ACT 1

Act II

After my call to Charl, it is obvious to me where my journey goes next. To the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

TAPE: Eastern Cape

Eastern Cape Tourism.

We see people boating.

We see a whale.

Buffalo.

Mr Mandela

Shall we?

My name is Charl Kruger, I’m 50 years old and I’m a financial adviser from Port Elizabeth.

Well, “Port Elizabeth” is what the Eastern Cape’s commercial hub used to be called. But then, a narrative complication in the form of a name change.

My name is Charl Kruger, I’m 50 years old and I’m a financial adviser from Gqeberha.

When we started production on this season, the city now known as Gqeberha was still called Port Elizabeth, so that’s what it’s called in most of our tape. In the same vein, Grahamstown is now called Makhanda, but almost everyone we recorded still calls it Grahamstown. Be assured: we’re not using the colonial names out of nostalgia; quite the opposite. Rather, we’re telling a story – playing a game of cat and mouse – with firmly colonial roots. The action is not really set in Gqeberha or Makhanda; these are stories that bloomed and festered in Port Elizabeth and in Grahamstown.

The names have changed, but the mystery remains. Why did Thomas Kruger have to die? And why was it necessary to break his father too?

Charl always wanted to be a father. On the day he finds out that his dream is coming true, the World Trade Centre is still standing in downtown Manhattan. It is two months before 9/11 – July 2001 – when Charl arrives  home and his wife tells him the big news.

It was just the most wonderful wonderful day, it wasn’t like we tried too hard, we fell pregnant naturally.

Thomas is born on 20 March 2002.

It’s very difficult to explain to somebody that within 30 seconds of knowing a human being you are ready to kill for it. Tom is the most incredible little chap. From the time he was born he is wild, the guys climbing the tree, climbing the jungle gym and falling off and cutting his chin open. But the most incredibly emotional and empathetic little boy that I’ve ever met.

Charl says that Tom’s empathy was obvious all his life. For instance: It is the winter of 2018, a few months before Tom’s death.

One afternoon I need to go down to Builder’s Warehouse and I say to Tom, please come with me. He says, “with the greatest of pleasure”. On our way down the hill, coming up to Builder’s Warehouse he says to me “Dad, please, I would like you to take me to a home for abandoned babies, I want to go and volunteer to help to look after these babies.”

We arrive unannounced and knock on the door and say, Tom would like to volunteer to help you out with these babies. 

We have to now go through a massive process with SAPS vetting.

That is extraordinary though for a 16 year old kid, had he been expressing an interest in children’s issues or does this come like a bolt out of the blue?

Completely out of the blue, for me it was unbelievably heart-warming that a strapping 16 year old boy wanted to give back to society looking after these totally abandoned babies.

This was a few months before Tom’s death in 2018. Now, to reduce confusion and heartache, there are two years I must ask you to keep track of today: 2015 and 2018. These years are central to both this episode and to our entire story. 2015 and 2018. 

In 2015, Tom is desperate to get into St Andrew’s College; in 2018, Tom is desperate to get out of St Andrew’s College by means of a sanatorium window. In 2015 and 2018, Thomas sets his mind to his goal – and both times, his plan succeeds.

So it is 2015. We are in Port Elizabeth and Tom is a grade-7 pupil with a big dream: He wants to go live at a legendary boarding school. It’s the splendid St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown, where character is built and boys grow into men. This is one of their war cries:

TAPE: War cry

But as marvellous as St Andrew’s is, it is also marvellously expensive – the school’s vast campus and hallowed staff and science labs and 3D printer do not pay for themselves. The parents must pay – and very few parents can afford to. 

Thomas come to me one night with fully completed scholarship application forms for St Andrew’s College. I am absolutely blown away that he had gone off by himself and , and did that all by himself and presented it to me. He’d completed the application form, written the letter that describes why he thinks he should get his scholarship.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that he’s done so much good outside of the school and has invested so much of his time in doing good for others.

We stick with 2015, but let us drive 90 minutes away from Port Elizabeth, into green and rocky mountains, to see what’s been cooking in Grahamstown at the object of Tom’s desire.

As we drive into the St Andrew’s campus in 2015, we find a school in the throes of a new era. A flurry of new teachers have just been installed – chief among them a sweeping new broom in the shape of principal Alan Thompson.

TAPE

In 2015, in a video on the school’s YouTube channel, Principal Thompson addresses the parents.

TAPE

From an armchair, in front of an unlit marble fireplace, we see a stoutish, middle-aged man with a square face and a slight but settled frown. 

At this point, Principal Thompson has been in office for six months – and his administration boasts of early successes.

It is the usual kind of private-school shtick: We’re the best because sport, sport, sport, sport, sport, sport, a bit of academics, and then a quick look in from these guys …

Oh, and then.

These stunning outcomes give some insight into just how fine an education you can buy. That’s if you have R300,000 per boy per year, including boarding but excluding optional-not-optional extramural activities.

Indeed, it doesn’t take Alan Thompson long to acknowledge the financial and reputational challenges these expensive schools face.

And then the new headmaster expresses his wish in an unusual royal plural.

Still in 2015, it is a few months later, and we are at the Kruger family home in Port Elizabeth.

We get sent an email from the school to say he’s been awarded the scholarship. Ecstatic, ecstatic.  The two of us are beaming with pride knowing full well that he had done all of this by himself. Just absolute elation that he’s been accepted into this fine institution. Thomas was over the moon, we were all ready and set for Tom to start his new journey at St Andrew’s college in 2016   

We are still in 2015, and the Kruger family arrive on campus for a grand tour of their son’s new home.

We are just blown away by the beauty, the heritage, the culture, the beauty of the campus, how friendly everyone was. 

As the Krugers stroll across the vast campus, they would have noticed the six distinct hostels, or houses, where the boys of St Andrew’s board. The oldest one, Upper House, dates from the 1850s – and they just don’t build them like this anymore. Elegant, old-world dormitories that seem both grand and intimate – like Hogwarts in Harry Potter, but with South African accents.

Just like in Harry Potter, the students at St Andrew’s get divided into houses – there’s even a Sorting Hat, of sorts. Here’s the central point: the house to which you’re assigned at St Andrew’s is every bit as crucial as in Harry Potter. If you’re in Gryffindor, you never get to see the dorms at Ravenclaw or the dungeons at Slytherin. That’s St Andrew’s for you. You see school through the eyes of your house; its leaders and culture completely dominate your high-school experience. If you’re in Espin House, you’ll be there from grade 8 to matric, and it’s highly unlikely that you’ll spend much time in the bathrooms at Merriman House … or be hugged in the hallways of Upper House.

Of the six houses, today we need to note just one of them: Espin House, where Tom Kruger will live until the last year of his life: 2018. So let us move three years forward now, from 2015 to 2018 and the final days of Thomas Kruger’s life.

It is Thursday 15 November 2018 on one of the impeccable green fields at St Andrew’s College. Thomas and his classmates are standing ready to participate in one of their school’s great traditions. On paper, it seems like an excellent idea. Together with the grade-10 girls of sister-school DSG – that’s the Diocesan School for Girls – the grade-10 boys of St Andrew’s will embark on the legendary John Jones Fish River Journey, or simply ‘Journey’. For the next three weeks, without phones but with adult supervision, they will hike, row, scramble and climb their way from the source of the Great Fish River, until finally, on Day 21, they reach the river’s mouth on the Indian Ocean and everyone sprints over the sand and into the sea while laughing and crying and congratulating each other, like in this audio from 2016 – we’re so good it’s unbelievable.

TAPE: 2016

But back to Journey’s start on an impeccable green field. We’re standing next to the Kruger family and a crowd of other parents who have all come to see off their sons and daughters. Young Thomas has been at St Andrew’s for almost three years now – and they have been turbulent years, to say the least – we’ll talk about that next time. But by November 2018, it looks like Tom has put the worst of it behind him. 

This is actual audio from Tom’s class getting ready for Journey. 

TAPE

Next to a wide green field in Grahamstown, Charl Kruger captures the scene on video. I would say Tom looks like any slightly awkward high-school boy embarking on an adventure, laughing and yelling and hugging his mates and fist-bumping random people. In four days’ time, he will be dead.

As the parents leave, the boys and girls stand ready for inspection. 

There is a company there with sniffer dogs

They are instructed to put down their backpacks in a row in front of them. Charl Kruger has one last look through the fence.

I see and I get the feeling that Tom’s nervous

The kids have received lists of items they need to take – and also of items that are strictly forbidden.

It gives me no pleasure to say this, but the sniffer dog should reconsider his or her career in security. 

The sniffer dog walks straight past his bag, I could see him almost jump for joy.

I’m really not here to give the sniffer dog shade; he or she is not a bad dog. Merely extremely incompetent. Maybe, if the dog detected what Thomas was hiding, everything would have turned out differently. But, instead, off the sniffer dog trots to the next group, presumably finding nothing in those backpacks either.

As the new group place their backpacks down I call Tom over to the fence that we’re looking through for one last goodbye. I have a, a black bangle that Thomas gave me 6 years before this. I take it off and I put it on his wrist and I say to him, my boy, this is the most valuable possession I have, please bring it back to me safely.

And those were the last words I say to Thomas Lester Charls Kruger.

I went to see Tom in 1st Avenue funeral parlour, um, to say good bye to him and I removed the brangle off his wrist in the room, in the funeral parlour.

Is that the bangle on your wrist there?

I do have the bangle on my wrist bloody thing’s about to bust so I’m gonna go and have it tattooed on onto my wrist here.

END OF ACT 2

Act III

TAPE OF ALAN THOMPSON IN 2020

Headmaster Alan Thompson again, but now during the pandemic.

TAPE

But first, another trigger warning, for bagpipe music.

TAPE

Saint Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, and 10,000 km away, at St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown, the Scottish spirit is still vigorously celebrated. Sooner or later, always, there are bagpipes.

TAPE

By 2021, principal Alan Thompson has seen two entire cohorts through high school – most recently Tom Kruger’s class, who matriculated last year, 2020, but without their friend, dorm mate and classmate Tom, who missed his matric exams by more than two years.

In the media, we report thoroughly on Cabinet ministers and do deep-dives into the tenures of even minor CEOs. But seldom do we take the opportunity to rate the famous headmasters. These elite headmasters have monumental influence in the world of education, but we don’t even know their names – never mind their views on the issues facing our children.

What can we do about naughty schools and teachers who won’t listen? I think maybe it’s time for some discipline around here – some detention time for the teachers who have failed. If a huge investigative hoo-hah is the only way these schools will listen, well, let’s have a big hoo-hah. It’s not that I have something against schools. It just seems to me that some schools have something against children.

TAPE

That’s me, earlier this year, on the St Andrew’s campus in Grahamstown. I am standing outside the two-storey sanatorium with producer Alison Pope and we are trying to work out through which window Thomas hung himself.

TAPE

Along with the swimming pool, the sanatorium forms the northern reaches of the St Andrew’s campus. 

But before I got on the ground in Grahamstown, there is something else I didn’t appreciate: The fact that Tom’s adoptive home, Espin House, is barely three minutes’ walk from the sanatorium. It’s like a lop-sided triangle, with the sanatorium and the swimming pool on top and Espin House at the bottom.

So here I am, in front of the sanatorium, with Espin House to my left and the polo pool on my right. I imagine Tom’s young body hanging stiff in the breeze –  I have the same question on my mind that most of us do: What could possibly have been so bad that a boy with his whole life ahead of him, would just decide one night to end it all? And to end it all so publicly?

TAPE

For the record: Suicide is almost always a tragedy. But if someone is driven to suicide and we are trying to understand why, there are clues to be found in how they chose to die. Where and how and when did they do it? All of this is significant, and we’ll talk about all that later this season. But for now, from the sanatorium in Grahamstown, I cannot stop staring in the direction of Espin House. Why hang yourself just minutes from your dorm? I’m thinking: one could do worse than to dig around Espin House for a bit. Maybe Espin House can shed some light on the untimely death of Tom.

Deon there are no words to describe the loss of a child, and it’s highly cliched to say, no parent should ever have to bury a child, your life gets turned upside down, there’s just no way to describe the pain. I suppose I can describe it to you, boet, it’s like you getting flu and your body, your body starts to ache, well multiply that by a thousand times and that’s how I feel sitting right here now. And it won’t go away. You can’t drink it away, you can’t, there’s nothing I can do to get rid of it.

I haven’t been able to work, most days I cannot get out of bed, still to this day, and it’s nearly three years down the line. This loss and pain, knowing that Tom in my eyes was carrying a burden that was too great for him to share.

He shared everything with me Deon, he just couldn’t share that with me, I think he realised there that there was no way out for him other than to, to end his own life. And actually there was a way out, there was a way out, he could have, we could have dealt with it.        

I ask Charl what he would say to other parents.

My primary objective to all of this is to prevent it from happening to your child, because from what I’ve read and investigated over the last 2 and ½ years, is that this is rife in institutions across South Africa, and it’s gotta stop, because this can happen to your child, ok?  Cause it happened to my child and the outcome was lifechanging for everyone involved. More heartache and pain I have never felt in my life before, I’m not scared of pain, but this is not a pain you wanna go through.

So the primary objective is to make sure that this does not happen to your kid, and if the institution has enabled it, they need to be held accountable for their actions.            

Since Tom’s horrible at the end of 2018, Charl has been consumed by getting justice for his son – and changing the system that led to Tom’s death.

The institutions need to be held accountable, but most of all, the abuser needs to be held accountable 

But first, I want to bring us back to the stoep, 18 months ago, to the afternoon I phone back Charl Kruger. After our long conversation, Charl forwards me three voice notes. Three voice notes he found on his late son’s iPhone.

To be honest: as much as Charl got me drawn to this case, it was the voice notes that got me hooked. Week after week, I’d find myself listening to the same three voice notes over and over as they tumbled me into an apparent universe of secret codes and signals. When you listen to the voice notes, you’ll be as baffled as I used to be. What do these words mean? And what’s the deal with the strange emojis I keep seeing in other WhatsApp conversations between teachers and teenage boys?

But then, late one night on the stoep, I’m listening and re-listening to the same three voice notes, when a new word suddenly strikes me as odd. That’s the moment I make a connection that’s been staring at me since the start. The connection is bacon.

Sometimes, the word ‘bacon’ is spoken or written. Most often, though, the bacon is an emoji. Do have a look at the bacon emoji on your phone – it’s two crispy rashers in horizontal parallel; in the current iteration of my phone’s keyboard, it’s between the waffle and the T-bone steak. 

I do love me some bacon, but every time I see the bacon emoji now, I feel nauseous. It has come to mean something else to me now, and it makes me lose my appetite completely.

Anyway, enough talking about the clues and the codes in the voice notes – shall we have a quick listen? 

The voice of young Tom from beyond the grave – 

next time, on My Only Story.

If you’re listening to this podcast in September 2021, this is both a manhunt and a live investigation. Did you know Thomas Kruger? And do you think you know where this story is heading? Please get in touch with me via MyOnlyStory.org. Unburden yourself. Let me in on your secret and Iwill take care of the rest.

Wherever you find an elite school, you’ll find a code of silence. But when a code of silence creates a hiding place for the dregs of humanity, it needs to be overridden by a code of decency. A code of honour and of righteousness. You know, all those noble values that are codified and espoused by every elite school, but then get subsumed in the name of reputation and of secrecy and silence.

Silence does not save children from harm. Determination does. And that is really what my only story is about. Having a voice. Making a big noise. Trying to keep children away from the adults who want to deceive them. 

Help me to complete this investigation; in the next six weeks, in the South African spring, help me to get rid of a ring of teachers who may have their eyes on a child near you.

As the boys and orchestra of St Andrew’s College valiantly set out on their five-verse-long school hymn, I need to say a huge thank you to the dozens of people who have already given me their time – the boys and girls, men and women, parents and guardians and various people of compassion. And here’s a big shout-out to the teachers and coaches who have been willing to talk to me so far. If you’re an adult participant in these stories, you’re either for us or against us. If you’re for us, please get in touch; if you’re against us, we’ll get in touch with you.

The headmaster of St Andrew’s, Alan Thompson, responded this week to questions from News24. He said Thomas Kruger “was a very well known and much loved member of the community. We have reviewed every step of this incident and believe that we did everything possible in the best possible faith with the information that we had.  We were in regular contact with Tom’s parents and Tom himself was engaging in a positive way. This is a tragedy unlike anything we have seen before or since.”

Headmaster Thompson says the death of Thomas remains unexplained. “We do not know, and to speculate and to engage with rumour would dishonour the memory of Tom, which we cherish and respect deeply. We investigated every aspect of this incident, reviewed it independently, and found no obvious triggering event.”

For more reaction from Alan Thompson and other parties, see the reporting on News24.com.

Whoever you are, please continue sending me your information and your tip-offs – you can contact me, completely confidentially, at MyOnlyStory.org, or message us on WhatsApp or Telegram on 072 382 7030. MyOnlyStory.org is also the place to go for bonus materials and loads of resources about recovering from sexual abuse.

My Only Story is written and edited by me, Deon Wiggett. The executive producer is Alison Pope; the associate producer is Nokuthula Manyathi; and the sound engineer is Sean Jefferis. The original score is by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder and our artwork is by Carla Kreuser. Additional reporting by News24’s Sesona Ngqakamba. News24’s production manager is Sharlene Rood and their editor-in-chief, Adriaan Basson, is our editorial advisor. Special thanks to Sheldon Morais and Mpho Rabarife.

At MyOnlyStory.org, there are loads of links to people to talk to, depending on where you are in the world. If you’re in South Africa, you can always, always phone Sadag on 0800 456 789. It’s sequential and easy to remember – 0800 456789.

My Only Story is out every Thursday at 5am South African time. Subscribe on your favourite podcast app and follow the developments all week long at news24.com 

This has been a co-production of the My Only Story Non-Profit Company and News24.