True crime expert Emma Kenny has named the 1994 attack on Alison Botha as the most harrowing case she has ever dealt with, a story so grisly it now forms the basis of her new touring show, The True Crime Survival Guide.
Kenny, who has toured the country with shows like Killer Cults and Murderous Minds and written two non-fiction books, debuted the new show at this year's CrimeCon, an annual true crime convention in London. She brought three cases to the forefront, letting the survivor stories speak for themselves.
Why women dominate the true crime audience
Addressing allegations that true crime fans are “ghouls” seeking to be “titillated” by traumatic cases, Kenny said the opposite is true. She told Express.co.uk: “First of all, about 80% of your audience is female, unless you’re looking at gang stuff, then you get a higher core male audience, but that’s because men like to believe it would never happen to them. [They believe] you would have to be in a gang to get killed.”
“But women are ostensibly the listeners and viewers, and it’s because we have higher agreeability and higher empathy. It’s our natural connection with the stories, and the justice we want to see for victims,” she added.
“Also, there is that desire, emotionally, to imagine, ‘How would that feel?’ I think that’s the most telling part of this whole community. We’re not there as voyeurs or for the macabre. We’re certainly not there to be titillated by the information. It actually horrifies us.”
Psychological rehearsal and prevention
Kenny said psychological rehearsal is another huge part of the community’s appeal. She explained: “We want to imagine what we’d do differently and how we’d respond. Prevention lies in the patterns. If you’re in a situation where you do something that would save your life, because you’ve heard information from one of those stories…”
“If it was so macabre and so distasteful, you wouldn’t have the police involved [in the true crime community], you wouldn’t have ambulance services, the families… no-one is telling that story to excite people,” she said.
“Of course, will there be occasional people who are of that ilk? Yeah! But then there will be occasional people in your social network who you’re not even aware of who will beat their wife behind closed doors.”
The Alison Botha case
Her new tour goes through the “worst” cases, telling the story of Heather Saul, who shot her attacker when he entered her home, and Elizabeth Shoaf, who was held captive in a bunker and sexually abused for 10 days. It is the case of Alison Botha, however, that sticks out.
Kenny said of Botha’s killers: “[Her killers] need to be put to death. I’m someone who hated the idea of the death penalty. I was vegan. I thought it was the most inhumane thing. And I still think it is inhumane, but inhumane doesn’t mean undeserved, at times.”
In 1994, Botha was abducted by two men close to Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa. The men raped her in the bushes and stabbed her “so many times that doctors could not count her wounds”. She was disemboweled and her throat was slit, and she was left for dead in the bushes. Close to death, Botha managed to drag herself out to the road, and though plenty of cars drove past her, a vet finally stopped and rushed her to hospital.
Kenny says Botha “should have died” in the attack, and she was left “clutching her head” so it didn’t fall off. She suffered 37 stab wounds to her abdomen and 16 cuts to her throat that left her nearly decapitated. The knife missed her main carotid arteries, however, and Botha survived.
Her attackers were Theunis Kruger and Frans Adriaan du Toit, who were sentenced to life imprisonment for the brutal assault. Judge Chris Jansen, who originally sentenced them, said: “[Alison] crawled naked on a dirt road to the tarmac where she lay down, then two cars stopped by her. The first driver just looked at her like that and then drove off, and the second one helped her.”
Afterwards, Botha’s attackers were using the knife they disemboweled her with to butter bread, and planned the abduction and murder of a second victim later that day. Though Botha miraculously survived the 1994 incident, she has suffered medical complications in the aftermath, including a brain aneurysm in 2024.
Kenny now wants to bring awareness to not only Botha’s case, but the cases of other survivors, and discuss what the public can learn from them. Tickets for CrimeCon 2027 are on sale now.
