AN EIGHT-year-old East London girl who went missing from her Haven Hills home on Thursday night, sparking a massive search, was found dead in a manhole close to her home.
Revern Varrie’s half- naked body was discovered on Friday evening and a man has already been arrested for her murder.
A bucket containing blood-soaked clothes was found in the child’s home.
“Police using rescue dogs found the girl’s body in a manhole, covered in sewage with scratch marks on her nose and chin,” police spokesperson Captain Leon Fortune said yesterday.
A postmortem examination will be conducted today to establish the exact cause of death.
The manhole where she was found was featured on the front page of the Saturday Dispatch. Residents were pictured peering into the sewer, not knowing that they would later find Revern stuffed deep inside.
Her body had been crammed in so far that police had to recover it from a linked manhole.
Blood was found a short distance from her home close to a large drainage tunnel. At the other end of the tunnel was the manhole.
The little girl’s disappearance mobilised the Egoli and Buffalo Flats communities to join police in an intensive 18-hour search for her. The suspect was among them.
Revern’s grandmother Dawn Groep discovered the child was missing from her bed when she arrived home from work at 10.20pm on Thursday.
Yesterday, she spoke about her anger and frustration at Revern’s murder, saying she was hurting because she had raised the Grade 3 pupil as a baby. “What has happened is wrong. No one had a right to hurt my baby in this way.” She said she had assumed the child was sleeping over at her cousin’s house next door when she initially found the girl missing.
“As I prepared for bed I had a growing feeling of unease, so I went to my cousin’s house and when I found she was not there I started panicking because where else could she be?”
Groep said she started knocking on every door in the neighbourhood without any luck. Then the police were called in and the search began.
Egoli resident Joyce Welman said she joined in the search shortly after midnight, and was convinced Revern would still be found alive.
“We thought that she had not been taken long enough to have been harmed in that way, so the search from that moment until we found her was not for her body, but for a living child.”
The Dispatch joined in the hunt by putting Revern’s face on hundreds of posters around the city.
The murder has angered the communities where she lived; dozens marched on the Buffalo Flats Police Station on Saturday afternoon.
Some protesters bayed for the suspect’s blood and a memorandum demanding he be denied bail – and that the death penalty be reinstated – was handed over to police. “The community was so angry and hurt at the incident that they felt that if he was released into their midst something might happen to him,” said Welman.
The suspect is due to appear in the East London Magistrate’s Court today.
