South Africa: The Tapeworm Murder

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There was no doubting the guilt of the man on trial in Cape Town last week. He was Dimitrio Tsafendas, the 48-year-old parliamentary messenger who stabbed Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd to death before the eyes of scores of horrified witnesses in the House of Assembly on Sept. 6. Many of Verwoerd's loyal followers bitterly demanded the vengeance of the gallows. They did not get it. After three days of testimony by four psychiatrists, Supreme Court Justice Andries Beyers ruled that Tsafendas was insane and ordered him to be detained in prison indefinitely.

As the burly, unblinking Tsafendas sat in the dock, his head bobbing, his lips forming soundless words, the experts described him as a schizophrenic haunted by the obsession that a tapeworm was coiled up inside his stomach, gnawing and cutting him to pieces. Over the past 30 years, they added, Tsafendas had been a mental patient in five countries, including the U.S., and had escaped from at least two institutions. Settling down in South Africa, Tsafendas somehow landed his messenger's job last August (a secret government inquiry is exploring the lapse in screening); then, acting on the impulse that he blamed on the demon inside him, Tsafendas attacked Verwoerd as he was about to make his first major policy speech of the Assembly session. "I can expect a certain amount of shock and dissatisfaction among certain people," Justice Beyers noted after his decision, "but I am sure they will realize it could not be otherwise, and that it is not humane or Christian to condemn mentally ill people. I can as little try a man who has not at least the makings of a rational mind as I could try a dog."