By David Jenkin

“I think from the moment I started telling this story I knew that it would move into another realm that would take me on a whole new adventure,” says Eliseev of the case that became the subject of his book, Cold Case Confession: Unravelling the Betty Ketani Murder. The confession note, discovered in 2012, had been hidden under a carpet for a decade, containing chilling details about the fate of a mother of three who came to Johannesburg in search of better prospects and one day vanished.

The investigation took four years and spanned five countries and Eliseev followed it every step of the way, covering the story for Eyewitness News when it first broke and keeping it in focus as the puzzle started coming together. He had been eager to take on a larger writing project and he quickly realised that this would be it, and the story took shape as events transpired. The end result was an account that read like a crime thriller. “All of that natural suspense of whether people were going to go to jail, whether bones were going to be found, whether DNA matches were going to be a hit – I went along for the ride with that story and so it came very naturally, that narrative.”

Eliseev says that by the end he had spent about 100 days in court listening to complex testimony. “It was a difficult story to unpack,” he says, “I had to get to know the family, I had to do a multitude of interviews, the story itself stretched across various continents, it was difficult to get hold of people, to get hold of information, and to be frank, sometimes those delays in the court process were absolutely brutal.”

The book had initially been planned for publication in 2013, but those delays meant holding it back until 2016.

He says he’s glad that it worked out that way because he got to tell a balanced story from both perspectives, which included the eleventh-hour testimony of those now sitting in jail for the murder. Also, he adds, it signals that the trial was fair because the defendants did everything they could to put up the strongest defence they had.

“The trial was extensive, the cross-examinations were gruelling, they lasted sometimes for up to 10 or 12 days, all of the forensic evidence was examined, everything was done through the court process, and done in an open forum so we could witness it.”

During this time, Eliseev still had to juggle his daily responsibilities. “The pressure was tremendous,” he says, “At the same time the Oscar Pistorius story blew through town, you can imagine what kind of pressure all journalists, all media organisations, were under. And so I sometimes found myself having to run between courts juggling those kinds of stories.”

In addition, Eliseev’s young son was born in the midst of it. “The book actually was conceived before he was even born and so it was one of those books that lived with me all the way through some very big moments in my personal life, and also professional life.”

Eliseev has made a wealth of the original material from the case available on his website, including the confession letter, recordings from the courtroom, the DNA report, and witness confessions.

“What we do as storytellers hasn’t changed,” he says, “But the way we tell stories has.” Referring to the use of video, social media and digital platforms, he says, “All of that technology is available to us and I’m not one of those people that believes it’s a threat to the act of storytelling, I think that it just makes us tell stories in different ways.”

He says the purist in him wanted the story to live in a book, but he realised that all the extra material lent itself to other mediums. “So throughout the court case, for example, it was live-tweeted, I was telling it on radio, on digital like Daily Maverick et cetera, I was writing longer analysis pieces, I was keeping a blog on my own website, and when the book came out it was just a good opportunity to put together a slicker website to give it a digital home. So the idea behind it was to give people a slightly richer experience should they want it.”

Public Protector Thuli Madonsela described the Ketani case as a “relentless pursuit of justice”, a sentiment Eliseev agrees with.

“I think that it shows that (the criminal justice system in South Africa) is capable of amazing things and it’s capable of terrible things, it’s not just a kind of black and white it works or it doesn’t work, I think we’re somewhere in-between. If you consider that Betty Ketani was dismally failed by the system back in 1999, nobody even looked for her, they just shut the police case and it was all gone. Thirteen years later it fell into the right hands and suddenly you had people that were digging up a site three times over to try find bones, they were sending those bones to Bosnia to get DNA links, they were pulling policemen away from KwaZulu Natal to Gauteng to do the handwriting analysis.”

In spite of the crisis of confidence facing South Africa’s criminal justice system, he concludes that it was good to be able to show there is another side, where amazing work is done by truly dedicated people whose names and stories we may never know.

For more information, visit alexeliseev.co.za. Alternatively, connect with him on Twitter.

*Image courtesy of Pan MacMillan South Africa