The ex-husband of the woman accused of kidnapping Zephany Nurse has come forward to clear his name.
|||Cape Town - The ex-husband of the woman accused of kidnapping Zephany Nurse has come forward to clear his name.
The 51-year-old man rubbished allegations that he once raped and even tried to kill his former spouse.
This was in response to the accused’s claims in her plea explanation that he once stabbed her, fractured her arms, broke her nose and raped her after locking her up for a few days in his room.
Read the plea explanation here
Also read: #ZephanyNurse accused tells her story
The 51-year-old woman faces charges of kidnapping, fraud and the contravention of the children’s act for allegedly snatching newborn Zephany from Groote Schuur Hospital in 1997.
The true identity of the teenager was discovered only last year, when her younger biological sister started high school at the same school as her.
Classmates noticed their striking resemblance, and the sister told her parents. The girl’s biological father, Morne Nurse, met her for himself, began his own investigation and then reported his suspicions to the Hawks.
DNA tests revealed that she was indeed the long lost Zephany Nurse the family had been searching for.
The accused was arrested on February 26 last year.
On Wednesday the accused’s ex-husband admitted to the Daily Voice that he regularly assaulted her.
The Mitchell’s Plain man said the first time he hit her he broke her arm. But he denied the rape allegations.
He said: “I never raped her, I never locked her in any room because I never had a room at my mother’s house.
“I jumped from one house to the next and at my mother’s house we slept in the living room, so there was no way I could lock her up in there and forcefully have sex with her.”
Showing his wedding photographs, he said he met the accused when they were both teenagers living in Manenberg back in 1982.
They married in 1988, but divorced two years later, when he went to jail for armed robbery.
He said he had been “making the rounds” with her friends before hooking up with the accused.
“She actually hated me… then one night in the club while I was sitting down, she approached me and said ‘open your legs’.
“I sat there surprised but I opened my legs and she sat in between them and laid back into me, and just like that we started dating.”
The self-confessed playboy said when both of their families moved to Mitchell’s Plain, he began seeing a woman with whom he had three children while he dated the accused at the same time.
Later the couple moved to Sea Winds and he says their love for each other blossomed.
“We decided to get married, I didn’t want to, it was more of her idea and I went along with it,” he said.
“Our relationship was nice. If I were ever to say I loved a woman, it would be her because she understood me, but she never took things serious, always laughed things off.
“Even after I came home after getting shot, she sat on this very chair and instead of being worried, she said something along the lines of, ‘Ja, maybe now you will get a real job’.”
He said that after his conviction, the accused visited him often in jail.
His ex-wife married her current husband in 1994.
He said he was shocked to hear that the accused had been arrested for allegedly kidnapping a child.
“I once met that kid [Zephany], she was about two or three years old,” he said.
“I went to her house once and then suddenly I saw this child running in shouting ‘mommy, mommy’ and I looked at her and said ‘and now?’
“She told me it was her child and I asked her with who.
“She told me she was seeing someone and even showed me a picture of the father of this child.
“I told her ‘naai man’, how can you have such a light-skinned child? But then we laughed and I left it at that.
“And now to hear she might have stolen that child… I remember she cried a lot after her two miscarriages when we were together, even got depressed.
“But she would never have passed off someone’s child as mine. I have a lot of kids, I don’t know how many but I can see immediately that they are mine.
“I feel sorry for her. She was a nice person, she’s just lying about me doing all those things to her, and maybe she’s trying to get sympathy from the court.”
The accused, who is out on bail, is due back in court on Monday when cross-examination is due to take place after she testified this week.
Daily Voice