De Jong Albertus

The victim was sixty-six-year-old Albertus de Jong, a Dutch citizen and lifelong bachelor who had immigrated to South Africa from the Netherlands in the 1980s. He lived quietly on his property, the Perdefontein smallholding, located near Wallmansthal. On that weekend, attackers breached his property and confronted him in his garden. In a burst of extreme violence, the intruders brutally attacked the elderly man, hacking him to death with an axe. His attackers then dragging his heavily maimed body into a secluded spot, hiding his corpse underneath garden plants, before ransacking his home. An axe, heavily marked with fingerprints and believed to be the murder weapon, was abandoned by the perpetrators right next to where his body lay hidden. For as long as three days, his two loyal dogs stayed behind to keep watch. While one dog sat waiting faithfully at the front door of the house, the other dog sat steadfastly beside his hidden body in the garden. The grim discovery was finally made on Sunday morning, October 24, 2010, when a close female friend of Albertus drove out to the smallholding after he failed to show up at her home in Pretoria for their scheduled Sunday lunch. Upon arriving, she found the dogs guarding the premises and noticed the one dog repeatedly looking from the plants back to the house, which led her to discover his remains.