INLSA
Shandel Anne Kisten hides from the camera outside the Durban Regional Court yesterday, when she testified about the murder of her stepfather. The teenager has implicated her mother in the murder, after initially saying she had acted alone in carrying out the crime.
Teenage murderer Shandel Anne Kisten, who pleaded guilty to strangling her stepfather, did an about-turn yesterday, saying she had lied to protect her mother who, she now claims, was the mastermind behind the murder.
Kisten, who was 15 when her stepfather, Selvanathan Chetty, was murdered at his Chatsworth home, testified for the first time in her trial yesterday in an attempt to persuade Durban Regional Court magistrate Anand Maharaj that she was telling the truth this time.
“All this time everyone has said I was lying and covering up for my mother. Now I am telling the truth.
“Why don’t you want to believe me?” she asked, claiming she had lied in the written plea on which she was convicted.
Now she wanted to be allowed to amend the content of her plea to read that she was an accessory to murder and had not acted alone.
But the magistrate likened her to the “boy who cried wolf” and said she was now trying to minimise her sentence.
“It’s like you have a deck of cards and you chose which card to play and to whom,” he said.
In her initial plea, Kisten – who is being named for the first time because she is now 18 – said she acted alone in drugging Chetty with sleeping tablets and then strangling him with a dressing-gown belt.
She stuck to this version when interviewed by a probation officer – who recommended that she be sent to jail – and then made only a partial disclosure, “that someone else was involved”, to child-abuse expert Joan van Niekerk.
She later told Van Niekerk she had lied.
Affair
The first time she mentioned her mother’s alleged role in the crime was during a third interview with correctional supervision officer Adrian Moodley, apparently after he told her that she could go to jail for the crime even though she was young and that her baby boy, now six months old, would have to go into care.
It emerged yesterday that she later accused Moodley of intimidating her to implicate her mother, and even made an affidavit to that effect. She now claims the affidavit was another lie.
Yesterday she said her mother, who was having an affair, had put the sleeping tablets in Chetty’s tea.
Kisten said that her mother had started to strangle him, but he had overpowered her. Her mother had then asked for her help. She had agreed to take the rap because she believed she would get a lesser sentence than her mother because of her age, and because she was worried about who would look after her younger siblings if her mother went to jail.
But that changed when she realised she was going to be sentenced for “premeditated murder”, and that her own child would be deprived of his mother.
Kisten admitted that she wanted a lesser sentence, but said she also did not want to take the blame for something she had not done.
Prosecutor Val Melis said that Kisten’s version of events to Moodley differed from the story she told in court yesterday.
However, she said, the versions did not conflict with evidence in the docket.
“The only issue here is one of credibility. If we arrest the mother and charge her, and Kisten testifies against her, we will have a huge credibility problem,” she said.
Defence attorney Siven Samuel said he and the State and other experts had all believed that Kisten – a petite child – had not acted alone.
“Her version has the ring of truth to it,” he said, requesting that averments in her plea be amended to make her an accomplice to the crime.
The magistrate will rule on this next week.
