WINDHOEK - State Advocate Seredine Jacobs yesterday appealed to the Windhoek High Court to find a man accused of killing his girlfriend and mother of his daughter by stabbing her 27 times with various knives guilty of murder with direct intent.

Jacobs submitted the State has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Johny Ryno Diergaardt, 33, killed Tiffany Tanita Lewin with whom he has a now eight-year-old daughter on March 3, 2014 at the room he rented at Erf 427, Garnet Street in Khomasdal and that he intended to kill her.

According to Jacobs, the natural inference is to assume that a sane person who engages in conduct such as that of the accused does so consciously and voluntarily. She further said the defense of Diergaardt that he did not know what happened is a total fabrication of someone who just got tired of all the disappointments from the deceased through all the years, as he testified himself.

According to the State, three psychiatrists found that Diergaardt did not suffer from any mental defect prior to and during the offence and that he fully appreciated the wrongfulness of his actions and acted with such apprehension.

She further said that the murder was not committed on the spur of the moment as the defence would have it, but that he lured the victim to his residence armed with knives.

She further told the judge that if one looks at the evidence adduced during the trial – direct and circumstantial – the lies of the accused were exposed. Boris Isaacks, who is representing Diergaardt on instructions of legal aid, submitted to the court that the State failed to prove intent.
According to him the stabbing happened on the spur of the moment and probably on provocation from the deceased.

According to Isaacks, the deceased was the aggressive one in the relationship as testified by many of the State’s witnesses.

While they concede that Diergaardt murdered the deceased, they deny intention, Isaacks told the court and asked the judge to find Diergaardt guilty of murder without direct intent. 

He further said that various of the witnesses testified that the actions of the deceased on the fateful night were totally out of character and that the stabbing was most probably caused by an “unconscious rage which drove him over the cliff” caused by the deceased’s continuous fighting with him.

During the trial it emerged that after he stabbed the deceased, Diergaardt stood over the boy and said ‘this is for the humiliation and disappointments throughout the years’.

According to the indictment Lewin and her son arrived during the early evening hours to collect some property which the accused earlier the same day had removed from her handbag.
He then stabbed her at least 27 times with knives after which he fled the scene.

Newspaper reports at the time indicated that the four-year old boy tried to intervene and managed to stab the accused on his upper thigh in an attempt to stop the accused from continuing to stab his mother.
Diergaardt maintained during the trial that he has no recollection of what transpired on the night in question, neither that the young boy stabbed him.

Judge Ndauendapo reserved his judgment until July 30 at 10h00 and Diergaardt remains in custody at the Windhoek Correctional Facility’s section for trial-awaiting inmates.