'Cultist’ child killer guilty of premeditated murder
|Published
Child killer and self-confessed cultist, Daniel Smit, is expected to hear his imprisonment fate soon after his conviction for the murder of 13-year-old Jerobejin van Wyk in February 2022.
Smit, 58, will be sentenced at the Western Cape Circuit High Court sitting in Vredendal following his conviction on five criminal charges by Judge Hayley Slingers on Monday.
Smit was found guilty of attempted murder, kidnapping, premeditated murder, violating a corpse and defeating the ends of justice.
Sentencing proceedings are underway at the circuit court where more witnesses for the defence and State will be called in mitigation and aggravation of sentence.
On Monday, the defence’s expert witness, psychologist Casper van Zyl, took the stand. Van Zyl had referred Smit to Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital after his arrest for a 30-day evaluation to assess if he was fit to stand trial.
In his plea, Smit admitted that he was the driver of the Ford Bantam bakkie and that he had driven recklessly and negligently on February 2, 2022.
Smit admitted that in an angry state, due to the boys allegedly having stolen fruit from his yard, he chased Jerobejin and a friend in his white bakkie, and when he caught up to Jerobejin, he knocked the teenager down.
He loaded Jerobejin onto his bakkie and when he arrived back at his home with the teenager, he told Jerobejin to go to the kitchen where he served the boy a cold drink and a sandwich.
Further in his admissions, Smit said he had been part of a cult and joined the group at 13 years old where he was “taught how to do black magic and to cast spells on people” and over time he got involved in Satanism.
“As I saw Jerobejin standing there eating the sandwich and drinking the cold drink I had given him, it suddenly came over me.
“I walked to the boy and in a swift movement, with my hands, as I was taught in the occult, I broke his neck,” Smit said.
In an attempt to conceal the boy’s body from his daughter who was a home tutor, Smit said he hid Jerobejin’s body in the freezer.
During the trial, Smit told the court that while he admitted to murdering the teenager, he disputed that it was premeditated murder.
The State did not accept his plea to alternative charges and resumed the trial.
During the trial, the court heard how Smit had violated Jerobejin’s corpse when he dismembered the teenager and burnt parts of the corpse in a fire with tar poles. He disposed of other body parts in a drain on his property.
Cape Times