Psycho love: Light shed on Charmaine Phillips and Peter Grundlingh's secret love pact in Charmaine's Story on SABC3
Taking the rap for love?
Charmaine's Story examines the secret love pact made by South Africa's own Bonnie and Clyde duo. Alex Dodd reports
his country has seen so many hundreds, so many thousands of bloody, gruesome, sicko murders one wonders what makes certain cases linger, like Lady Macbeth's inescapably bloody hands, haunting the psyche of a nation.
In the case of Charmaine Phillips and Peter Grundlingh, the couple tried for murdering four people between Durban and Johannesburg in 1983, it was perhaps the echoes of Bonnie and Clyde - the twisted, psychotic romance of it all. Many South Africans older than 25 remember the wild, demented tale that ripped into the heart of surburban fantasies like Mickey and Mallory ripped into the values of middle America in Oliver Stone's cult movie Natural Born Killers.
Central to this haunting crazed couple-on-the run archetype was the image of Phillips - a blue-eyed, blonde-haired angelic 19-year-old who confessed to murdering the four herself. She was supposed to be everything the apartheid system had appointed itself a protector of at that time: a meek, white, Arian poppie. And with her dramatic murderous confession, she subverted notions of what it meant to be a white South African woman at the time. This fragile-boned young babe had the power to kill. And instantly, to the media, she became the bad angel skopped out of consensual heaven.
That's what makes the screening of first-time director Sara Blecher's documentary Charmaine's Story on Special Assignment on August 11 such a historic moment. Blecher's documentary is unashamedly partial.
For the first time the tale will be told by a woman through the eyes of Phillips herself. Produced by Harriet Gavshon (Ordinary People and Ghetto Diaries), shot by Giulio Biccari (Jo'burg Stories and Africa Dreaming) and edited by Robbie Thorpe (Ordinary People and Ghetto Diaries), the film was made as a pilot to a Mail & Guardian Television series of documentary love stories to be shown on SABC3 next year.
Phillips, now 34, was given four life sentences for her role in the murders. Her lover, Grundlingh, was hanged, despite Phillips's confession. For the past 18 years she has been in Kroonstad prison where she has trained as a hairdresser and is a keen artist and sculptor.
Blecher, who studied film at New York University, was doing research on a project looking at the role of security companies in this country's violence when she met an ex-policeman who had worked on the Phillips/Grundlingh case. Although Blecher had never heard of Phillips, her curiosity was instantly aroused when the cop told her the story, insisting on Phillips's innocence. She decided to follow it up.
At first Phillips was totally uninterested in meeting Blecher. She was a reformed woman and a Christian now, and had no desire to rehash her hectic history. But eventually, after "bugging and bugging" her, Blecher managed to meet Phillips and says: "We just clicked. She's completely not what I expected. She is amazingly insightful and bright ... She's a really warm person. I like her ... and the more I've dealt with her, the more I believe her tale. The story I came into contact with was about an abusive relationship - about a woman who is in prison for love," says Blecher, insisting that Phillips shows all the classic signs of having been abused. "You can tell by the way she speaks about him and you can't make that stuff up," she says.
After 15 years living in the prison, it was finally revealed that Phillips and Grundlingh had made a love pact in which she had agreed to take the blame for the murders to stop him from getting hanged.
During the course of filming, Blecher discovered that Grundlingh had written a confession, which the prison authorities kept from his lover and, as a result of this, Phillips has applied to Nelson Mandela for clemency and to the KwaZulu-Natal attorney general to reopen the case. The plot thickens.
