Marlene picked up the story: “I drove
out to Bellville and arrived at her home
in Gladstone Street at about 1.15 p.m.
I rang the bell. She looked out through
the window and then unlocked the front
door. I entered the lounge and sat on
the first chair coming in. She sat on the
piano stool.
“After saying I was glad to meet her, I
asked her what she was going to do. She
replied that as long as I was prepared to
play second fiddle, so was she. She also
said she couldn’t understand how Chris
could see me and her at the same time.
But she couldn’t give him a divorce
because of the children.
“There was no ill-feeling between us.
This was the first and only time I met
Mrs. van der Linde.”
This was, if Marlene is to be believed,
no more than a matter-of-fact sort of
conversation between two women who
were rivals for the same man’s hand –
his wife, to whom he had been married
for 25 years, and his teenage lover, 30
years his junior. In fact, it was much
more than that. For Marlene Lehnberg,
sitting so cosily in the living-room chair,
wasn’t there to have a chat with her
rival.
She had come to size up the layout of
the house. For she had already planned
to murder her lover’s wife.
And the man she had persuaded
to help her do the killing was the
crippled “Cape coloured” man seen
hanging around in the street outside the
suburban house.M
arlene Lehnberg was born in
October, 1955, into a puritanical
family that was high on God and low on
cash. Her father was a maintenance man
with five children to feed – a family that
didn’t dance, drink, smoke, go to the
cinema or, in the case of the girls, use
make-up.
Marlene was academically a star
pupil at school, and taught at Sundayand I had no intention of giving them
up.”
Marlene, though, had every
expectation that that was just what he
would do. And she was prepared to
make the decision for him if she had to.
This is how she described the
blossoming of their romance: “At my
very first meeting with Chris van der
Linde, I was attracted to him, and
he took an immediate interest in me.
During April and May, 1973, an affair
started between the two of us, seriously.
He started taking me home in the
evenings after work, and sometimes
during the lunch hour we would go for
a drink.
“A while after the affair became
serious, we were intimate for the
first time. We were then intimate on
numerous occasions up to the end of
1973 or the start of 1974.
“The reason we stopped was because
people were watching us. According to
him, his wife was getting anonymous
phone calls about us. But he never
mentioned his wife’s attitude towardsschool to younger kids, but
her social and emotional
backwardness made her
a bad mixer. A lot of her
potential was cast aside
when she left school at- So too was a lot of her
religious upbringing. She
fancied herself as a movie
star, left the family home,
did a bit of modelling, and,
discarding the restraints of
her upbringing, posed in
the nude.
She was 16 when she
got her first job as a clerk
and receptionist at the
Orthopaedic Workshop,
at Mowbray, near Cape
Town. The workshop’s
chief technician was Chris
van der Linde, 47, married
to Susanna, father of three
mature children, deeply
religious and strikingly
good-looking.
A little more than a year after their
meeting Marlene and her boss were in
bed together. “I was a father figure to
her and she was good company for me,”
van der Linde was to insist when, a few
years later, the fall-out from their affair
was engulfing all of South Africa. “In
any case, I loved my wife and familyTH SENTENCE FOR
SCISSOR-KILLER MARLENE
Left, Marlene Lehnberg in a
photo taken for a model agency.
Discarding the restraints of her
upbringing, she also posed in the
nude. Right, Chris and Susanna
van der Linde on their wedding
day. Below, victim Susanna in her
later years. Background image,
an aerial view of Cape Town