De Klerk's ex-wife found strangled to death

Marike de Klerk, the last of South Africa's white first ladies, has been strangled in her Cape Town flat in a grisly murder which, according to investigators, was probably committed by someone known to her.

The investigators hunting her killer said there were no signs of forced entry, nor of theft. The 64-year old ex-wife of former President F.W. de Klerk was strangled to death with bare hands. She was found dead on Tuesday afternoon, slumped back with her legs folded under her, outside the bedroom of her luxury second-floor flat, on a peninsula facing Table Mountain.

Police at first did not correct an assumption that Mrs de Klerk, who frequently said she was depressed, had killed herself. But yesterday they said she had been attacked, probably on Monday morning.

Mr de Klerk said in a statement from Sweden that he was ''devastated and deeply shocked'', and was in touch with the couple's three children. The former South African president, who was a joint Nobel laureate in 1993 with Nelson Mandela, had been due to attend a ceremony marking 100 years of the peace prize. He said he would immediately return to South Africa.

In South Africa yesterday, black leaders issued numerous tributes to the conservative former first lady, who is known to have strongly opposed majority rule. But rather than affection, their comments betrayed pity for the tragedy of De Klerk's unhappy last few years.

F.W left her on Valentine's Day 1998, to live with Elita Georgiades, the wife of a Greek shipping magnate. After her divorce, Mrs De Klerk became engaged to a Johannesburg businessman, Johann Koekemoer. He suffered a nervous breakdown and the relationship ended..

A security guard at Mrs de Klerk's compound - a block of luxury flats built in a pyramid shape at Dolphin Beach, Blaauwberg - found her in the passageway leading to her main bedroom at 3pm on Tuesday. She was dressed in pyjamas and had, according to pathologists, been dead for 36 hours. The alarm had earlier been raised by her hairdresser who had come to the flat for an appointment.

Known as deeply conservative, Mrs De Klerk met her husband at the University of Potchefstroom while he was studying law and she was preparing a Bachelor of Commerce. They were married on 11 April 1959 and raised three children, Jan, Willem and Susan. When Willem had a relationship in 1989 with a mixed-race woman, Erica Adams, she barely disguised her displeasure.

She founded the Women's Outreach Foundation whose principal impact, after South Africa's first all-race elections in 1994, was to criticise the African National Congress for being soft on corruption. Her own view of women was, she said in 1991, that their role should be to ''serve, heal and inspire men''.

Despite apparently advocating a backseat position for her gender, Mrs De Klerk appears to have been influential during her 38 years of marriage to F.W. In his book on South Africa's transformation, Tomorrow Is Another Country, veteran journalist Allister Sparks recounts that, in 1983, Marike interrupted her husband during a speech to the National Party Women's Federation, accusing him of ''talking nonsense'' when he suggested that political rights should be extended to black people.

Sparks also writes that when F.W De Klerk was writing his seminal ''power sharing'' speech in the dying days of apartheid, the president had to sit at the dining room table of his Cape Town residence, rather than in his study, because ''Marike wanted to watch her favourite television show''.

While police sources admitted they believed Mrs De Klerk was killed by someone she knew, they insisted they were keeping an open mind. Supt Wicus Holtzhausen said there was no sign of a forced entry into the flat but that ''it is very difficult to speculate. At this stage we have no suspects at all''.

South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world and is one of the few countries whose citizens are more likely to be murdered than to die in a road accident. Seven years after the end of apartheid, firearms remain very common; about 21,000 people were murdered last year, mostly in the country's poor townships.

- INDEPENDENT