The local dating scene, especially as you age, is dire with a capital D.
Between gents flashing their guns (semi-automatic and muscular) on Bumble, the cat-fishers, the damaged divorcees, the marrieds who’re mightily interested and the overwhelmingly meh, you’ve got to have the resilience of a Joburg ratepayer to keep going as a South African singleton.
Should you join the local padel club to find love? What about hanging around in the school parking lot to nab a yummy mummy?
Turns out, you need not put in anywhere near this kind of effort. If recent news is to be believed, the way to find a significant other is to go to jail. In lockup, it seems, love is easier; in prison, cellmates morph into life mates.
A few weeks ago, News24 published a story by journalist Jana van der Merwe claiming that two of South Africa’s most infamous murderesses have found love in each other’s incarcerated arms at Joburg Prison, on the southern edge of the city.
One of the inmates in question is Cecilia Steyn. This “cult leader” was given 13 life sentences in 2019 for being the mastermind behind the murder spree that left 11 people on the West Rand dead in the mid-2010s. She’s pictured in a fuzzy snapshot that accompanies the article, embracing Suretha Brits — the Pofadder beauty who’s serving 25 years for having her husband, Leon, killed in 2020.
Steyn is especially known thanks to the excellent, record-breaking Showmax series Devilsdorp. It detailed how this patently manipulative and bizarrely charismatic 42-year-old puppet-mastered her way around the grim Krugersdorp CBD for years. She ran a faux satanic cult, whose members killed brutally and opportunistically for money. They left a trail of tragedy in their wake and devastated many lives.
Steyn is clearly bad news. And yet there she is, if the article is to be believed, in the throes of 18-month-old lurve.
Van der Merwe’s piece details how the duo met in prison hospital and have recently found themselves in nearby sections of the maximum-security section of the complex. Now, “a source” the journalist spoke to says, “they see each other daily until the doors of their respective cells slam shut. They allegedly do prison courses together, play netball together, sing in the choir and belong to the same book club.”
May I be the first to state, for the record, that life in Joburg jail sounds pretty sweet, even sans a sweetheart.
A friend wondered whether we should try to get ourselves in there to improve our dating lives — but, he added: “Knowing how the National Prosecuting Authority can’t prosecute anyone successfully, we might have to offer to litigate against ourselves to do so.”
Should you join the local padel club to find love? What about hanging around in the school parking lot to nab a yummy mummy? Turns out, you need not put in anywhere near this kind of effort
A captive audience
A follow-up article by the You magazine team also states that the relationship with Brits isn’t the first that divorced Steyn has had since she got to jail. In it, “a second source” says: “I seem to recall Cecilia was in a relationship with someone else. What happened to that girl? Until recently, she was very much in love with that woman.”
Cecilia Steyn — breaking hearts and shaking inmates’ confidence daily? Whatever the truth, it certainly sounds as if she’s had more success than us single shmos on the outside. Who wouldn’t swap botched blind dates and dumpings via WhatsApp for a nice book club meeting with your beloved? A dating pool that’s an, erm, captive audience might be the trick.
Of course, the doubly depressing thing is this: these lockup lovebirds are no outliers. At least they are geographically close and have some common interests, even if they are dastardly and/or centred on chest passes.
By comparison, there’s a very long list of next-level criminals who found spouses from beyond prison walls. American serial killer Ted Bundy tied the knot while behind bars, and so did his counterpart Richard Ramirez (aka The Night Stalker), who married a magazine editor.
Lyle and Erik Menendez famously killed their parents, and then both got hitched in prison. Lyle did so twice.
Hell, even actual cult leader Charles Manson almost tied the knot while in California state prison. He had the girlfriend and the marriage licence, they just didn’t follow through.
That Manson was in his 80s, and his squeeze in her 20s, could drive the least bothered aloner to scream: “Seriously, and I’m single?”
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