Johannesburg - Ruthless and inherently unscrupulous. Manipulative. Struggles to tell right from wrong. In desperate need of psychological evaluation.
These were some of the ways Leone Steyn was described by the defence and the prosecution in her sentencing proceedings on Thursday.
When she was 17, Steyn laid the groundwork for a more than three-year scam that netted her R592 000 in cash and goods she defrauded from churches and an online counselling service.
Using the counselling service MobieG, Steyn created more than 50 profiles of fictitious children she claimed had been rescued from a Satanic porn ring, and had the service solicit donations from churches across the West Rand.
Sometimes pretending to kill her characters off through suicide to garner sympathy, Steyn also got the company to donate thousands of rand to the fake safe house where the children were supposedly being kept.
After pleading guilty to this bizarre fraud earlier this month, the now 23-year-old appeared on Thursday in the Roodepoort Magistrate’s Court for sentencing proceedings.
It began with her defence attorney Quentin van Huyssteen arguing that because his client had taken the court into her confidence and confessed, the 15- year minimum prison sentence would not be appropriate.
Her remorsefulness, youthfulness and her status as a first-time offender meant the young woman should be spared the inhumane conditions of an overcrowded prison.
Rather, Van Huyssteen argued, she should either be given a suspended sentence or placed under house arrest, though in both cases she should be expected to pay back – as agreed – R270 000 over the next five years to the director of MobieG and the complainant, Stephnie Crouse.
Van Huyssteen called criminologist and psychologist professor Anna van der Hover to explain Steyn’s harsh upbringing. At 17, she began using drugs, and the court was told of how she had been admitted to a rehabilitation facility recently and had given up her crack cocaine habit for the past two months.
Van der Hover described Steyn as “a good manipulator” based on her keeping up the safe house hoax for years, and that she had struggled to discern between right and wrong. Because she felt powerless in her own world, Van der Hover said Steyn regained her power by killing off her fictitious characters.
Magistrate Andrea Davie asked Van der Hover if Steyn’s conduct could be perceived as “a child being mischievous on the internet”, with the professor saying this was not the case.
The case resumes on Monday.