Baars Barry

Age 55. On the night of October 30, 2017, fifty-five-year-old former police officer Barry Baars was murdered on his guest and game farm, Daskop, located about eighteen kilometers outside Ficksburg in the Free State. For twenty-eight years, Barry Baars had built a reputation as an exceptionally security-conscious man, having previously served as a colleague in the East Rand firearms unit of the South African Police Service. Despite the extensive security gates and burglar proofing installed at his residence, there were no signs of forced entry when his body was discovered the following morning. On Tuesday, October 31, 2017, at approximately nine in the morning, farmworkers arrived at the main house and found Barry Baars wrapped in blankets, lifeless on his bed. He had suffered extreme trauma from being shot five times with a nine-millimeter pistol. The state prosecutor would later describe the killing as a severe case of overkill; the gunfire had completely destroyed his lower jaw, and he sustained two bullets to the chest, one to the neck, and a final fifth shot fired from below that struck between his rectal area and sexual organs. Inside the farmhouse, a small kitchen safe had been tampered with but remained locked, while a larger safe in the bedroom stood wide open with the keys still in the lock, though several firearms were left untouched inside. The subsequent South African Police Service investigation, led by provincial spokesperson Colonel Thandi Mbambo, initially focused on Barry Baars's thirty-eight-year-old domestic worker, Angelina Nthabiseng Ledwaba, who was identified as the last person seen with him. Court summaries revealed that Angelina Nthabiseng Ledwaba had been involved in a sexual relationship with her employer, and on the evening of the crime, Barry Baars had fetched her from a Caltex petrol station in Ficksburg. According to her initial accounts given to the police, she claimed that while they were in the bedroom, she noticed strange masked men outside, but Barry Baars had brushed off her warnings. The state later arrested and charged four individuals with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and aggravated robbery. Alongside Angelina Nthabiseng Ledwaba in the dock were her co-live-in lover Abel Eric Phalatsi, her former lover Thabiso Johannes Motaung, and Mpho Daniel Hlalele, who was a farmworker and former bodyguard to a local municipal speaker. Although cellphone data placed the accused near Daskop farm on the night of the shooting, the legal proceedings concluded unexpectedly. In September 2022, Judge Mapina Mathebula of the Bethlehem Circuit High Court acquitted Angelina Nthabiseng Ledwaba and her three co-accused of all charges. The judge sharply criticized the police for allowing a private investigator to take over the crime scene, which compromised the integrity of the official investigation and left the brutal murder of Barry Baars unresolved in the eyes of the law.