‘A hopeless sense of betrayal’

A pregnant woman convicted of murdering her first baby and her ex-lover has been sentenced to 15 years in jail.

Chantel Hartzenberg will give birth to her second child behind bars later this year.

Hartzenberg was sentenced in the Western Cape High Court by Judge Vincent Saldanha on Friday.

The court found that on October 15, 2007, Hartzenberg stabbed her former boyfriend Clyde English to death outside his home in Parow. Later she went home, climbed into bed with her six-month-old son Calum and suffocated him. She then tried to slash her wrists.

English was found by his mother, Jo-Anne English, on their stoep in a pool of blood.

Police went to Hartzenberg’s home and found her in a blood-stained bed with Calum and a knife.

The court heard English was not Calum’s father, but that he supported the boy and his mother. It is understood that Calum’s father, a man named in court only as Shane, is also the father of Hartzenberg’s unborn baby.

In court on Friday, Judge Saldanha said two mothers lost their sons in the tragedy.

“Yet another mother, Chantel Hartzenberg’s mother, almost lost her daughter, who in the aftermath of her violent actions attempted to take her own life. The deaths appeared to be violent consequences of misplaced anger, a hopeless sense of betrayal and the futility of a dysfunctional relationship. This was a tragedy that with hindsight, should and could have been avoided.”

Hartzenberg’s anger came from lack of maturity so that, rather than terminating the relationship with English, she “chose a cold-blooded option of fatally stabbing him”.

Hartzenberg told the court that when her baby was born it would be placed in the care and custody of Shane’s parents.

She appeared to possess the potential for rehabilitation but would be haunted for the rest of her life by her murder of her first-born child, said the judge.

He sentenced Hartzenberg to 12 years for the murder of English and 12 years for the murder of Calum but parts of the sentence were to run concurrently, making it an effective 15-year sentence.

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