An elderly couple searching South African brush land for rare seeds to sell online were kidnapped, robbed, murdered and fed to crocodiles in 2018, a court in South Africa was told on Tuesday, according to local media reports.
Rod Saunders, 74, and his wife Rachel Saunders, 63, had just posed for a selfie with BBC presenter Nick Baily after filming a segment for the BBC TV show Gardeners’ World, in which they sought out rare Gladioli flower seeds in the Drakensberg Mountain area, before they met their disastrous fate.
Mr. Saunders, a horticulturist, and Mrs. Saunders, a microbiologist, bid the television crew farewell in early February 2018 and set off to camp at a nearby dam. They told the crew they were off to harvest rare seeds to replenish the inventory of the Silverhill Seed shop they ran as an online store from Cape Town—and which could serve as the motive as locals in the area apparently complained about the removal of rare seeds for commercial gain.
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On Feb. 10, just two days after the BBC crew last saw them, local police received a request for ransom. Three days later, police discovered that someone was using their ATM cards in the Kwa-Zulu Natal national park area.
On Feb. 15, Sayefundeen Aslam Del Vecchio, 39, and his wife Bibi Fatima Patel, 28, were arrested after cellphones used by the couple were traced to their residence.
The two were charged with the couple’s kidnapping and murder, and face life in prison if found guilty. “It was established on Feb. 13 that the defendants were drawing money from various ATMs which amounted to theft of $42,000 and there was the robbery of their Land Cruiser and of camping equipment,” a court was told Tuesday. “It is alleged that between Feb. 10 and 15 at the Ngoye Forest the accused did unlawfully and intentionally kill Rachel Saunders and between the same dates did unlawfully and intentionally kill Rodney Sanders.”
A third suspect, Mussa Ahmad Jackson, was also arrested but was released after cooperating with the authorities, telling them that the couple accused of the murder had complained that the foreigners were stealing seeds.
The remains of the couple, still entwined in what was left of their sleeping bags, were recovered by fishermen on Feb. 14 and 17 in the river, but due to the mutilation by crocodiles—and the frequency bodies are found in the river—they were not immediately linked to the missing botanists. Local fishermen reported that remnants of the sleeping bags, including zippers, were seen in the teeth of crocodiles months after the bodies were retrieved from the dangerous waters.
Police later recovered the Land Cruiser used by the couple and identified their blood in the vehicle.
The remains of Mr. Saunders were positively identified on April 25, 2018, and those of his wife on June 6 after DNA checks could be carried out in the morgue in the remote area. The court was told that the pair was beaten to death with a blunt instrument and then thrown off a bridge into the croc-infested waters.
Police initially feared the suspects had ties to ISIS after messages on their phone used terms the terrorists often embraced, including the need to “kill the kuffar [non believer] and abduct their alias, to destroy infrastructure and to put fear in the heart of the kuffar,” the court heard, though the prosecutors are not pursuing terrorism as motive.
The trial is expected to continue for several weeks.
