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A South African woman has been sentenced to life imprisonment alongside two accomplices for trafficking her then six-year-old daughter, in a case that gripped South Africa and gained international attention after the girl went missing last year.
Racquel “Kelly” Smith, her boyfriend, Jacquen Appollis, and their friend, Steveno van Rhyn, were convicted of kidnapping and trafficking Joshlin Smith, who disappeared from her home in a small township in the Western Cape in February 2024. Joshlin has still not been found, despite an extensive police search.
During the trial, a witness said Smith had told her she had sold her daughter to a sangoma, a traditional healer, for 20,000 rand (£830) and that the girl had been desired for her “eyes and skin”.
Another witness, a pastor, said Smith told him in 2023 that she planned to sell her daughter.
“There is nothing that I can find that is redeeming and deserving of a lesser sentence than the harshest I can impose,” the high court judge Nathan Erasmus said. Erasmus also imposed a 10-year kidnapping sentence on the three, to run concurrently with the life sentence for human trafficking, and ordered their names be entered into the child protection register.
Erasmus said the fact Smith, Appollis and Van Rhyn were drug users was no excuse and described Smith as “a person who is manipulative and manipulates the facts as it suits you”.
“[You] went as far as to blame your parents for your conduct in this matter,” the judge said during the sentencing in Saldanha Bay, a fishing town 85 miles north of Cape Town. “The evidence presented as to the disappearance of your own daughter was clear. Besides on one occasion earlier and yesterday, I saw no indication of remorse, but it didn’t start there because we know from 19 February 2024 the lack of concern.”
Smith’s mother, Amanda Daniels, was present at the sentencing, wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with a photograph of Joshlin’s face. The day before, a court officer read out a victim impact statement on her behalf, describing how she had “cried my eyes out” on Mother’s Day earlier in May.
Daniels’ statement said: “Kelly, you have made our lives hell on earth. I feel like my heart has been ripped from my body. You have broken [this family] apart.”
Daniels is now caring for Smith’s two other children, of whom Joshlin was the middle child, and said she was constantly afraid they would go missing too.
South Africa police said they had extended the search for Joshlin outside the country. Soon after her disappearance, Gayton McKenzie, the leader of the populist, minority Patriotic Alliance party and now sport and culture minister, offered a 1m rand (£42,000) reward for her safe return.
Kidnappings have soared recently in South Africa, with more than 17,000 in the 12 months to 31 March 2024, almost treble three years earlier, according to South African police data.
Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this story
