ALLEGED wife murderer, Arnold Terblanche, will once again appear alongside his co-accused in the Gqeberha Magistrate’s Court next Monday, in connection with the murder of Terblanche’s estranged wife, Vicki Terblanche.
The matter was postponed to March 28 after Magistrate Kriban Pillay dismissed Terblanche’s bid for bail in January this year.
Since his bail was denied on January 28, Terblanche had taken matters to the Gqeberha High Court to appeal the decision.
High Court Judge, Glen Goosen, dismissed the appeal, stating that a court of appeal will not lightly interfere with a trial court’s exercise of its discretion in relation to bail.
He added that the determination of what constitutes exceptional circumstances, which in the interest of justice warrants the release of an accused, involves a value judgement. It relates to the discretion exercised by the court considering bail.
“In relation to these two critical aspects, the magistrate made a value judgement in deciding that having regard to the nature and gravity of the offences and the appellant’s personal circumstances, the circumstances relied upon by him were not as such to entitle him to release in the interest of justice,” Goosen said.
“In coming to this conclusion, discretion was exercised. I am not persuaded that it was wrongly exercised. There is, in my view, no basis to find that the court a quo (the court from which an appeal was taken) was wrong or had wrongly exercised its discretion,” he added.
Terblanche’s co-accused, Vicki’s boyfriend, Reinhardt Leach (32), and Dylan Cullis (24), abandoned their bid for bail late last year.
The three face charges ranging from murder to the conspiracy to commit murder, after Vicki’s body was found in a shallow grave in Greenbushes in October 2021.
She was allegedly suffocated with a pillow and/or strangled and drugged with Schedule six medication, Percocet. She had allegedly also been robbed.
