Stories that grabbed the headlines

The Herald

09-05-2025

It was a decade of huge breaking news that was transforming the future trajectory of SA, events and conflicts that were changing the face of the world, and even in Nelson Mandela Bay and the region further afield, a series of stories that would rock the city and beyond. All would be covered extensively by The Herald.
The year 1990 would signal in the massive, seismic shift for a violence-torn, isolated SA in turmoil and witnessing rising civil unrest that had already reached boiling point.
It was a precarious moment that would precipitate the release of Nelson Mandela, the unbanning of the ANC and other organisations and the task of slowly repairing a broken, bloodied and divided nation.
It would culminate in the country's first democratic elections in 1994, to be followed by the opening and exposing of historical and sometimes unbearable wounds and atrocities by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and then the start of the arduous task of rebuilding, restoring, reforming and, most crucially, reconciling.
But in Nelson Mandela Bay, a series of stories, crimes and tragedies would also leave their mark.
From the horrific and vicious rape attack on Alison Botha to the darkly mysterious and still unsolved execution-style murder of two close friends in a suburban home, the frenzied fatal stabbing of a young teenage sports star by her older sister, and the corporate fun family weekend away on a river tubing adventure which would end in a nightmare and the loss of 13 lives.
These local and national events are what former news editor of The Herald, Pat Sydie, remembers most about his time on the newsdesk.
'The job of news editor is a difficult one because you're stuck in the middle — between the news reporters and the senior editors and responsible to both,' Sydie says, in his trademark, good-natured style.
Sydie recalled some of the local stories that made big news during this period in SA when the country was undergoing a huge transformation.
* In 1990, while SA was focused on the release of Nelson Mandela and the beginning of lengthy post-apartheid negotiations, Stewart 'Boetie Boer' Wilken b egan a killing spree in then Port Elizabeth, with a modus operandi that criminologists would describe as being highly unusual as he targeted very different victims from sex workers to young boys across races.
The Herald's coverage was featured in a TV documentary on Wilken's crimes broadcast by Showmax in 2023 entitled Boetie Boer: Inside the Mind of a Monster .
* In May 1994, an execution-style double murder in Walmer rocked the city and remains unsolved to this day.
Close friends Felix Coetzee and Scott Ayton w ere found brutally murdered by d omestic worker Elsie Mati who was confronted by a gruesome scene when she arrived for work at the Ayton family's Alcock Road home.
Coetzee was bound, gagged, blindfolded and sitting upright on a chair in the lounge. He had been shot in the back of the head.
Ayton was i n a bedroom, where he had been slain in a similar fashion. No arrests were ever made in the puzzling case which left police baffled.