Case of Killer South African Ranger's "Gay Cure" Camp Continues

As the case of the man charged with murdering a 15-year-old boy in his South African "gay cure" camp drags into its third year, the ranger says he is not to blame, reports Gay Star News today.

Echo Wild Game Rangers camp owner Alex de Koker and employee Michael Erasmus now face charges of murder, child abuse, neglect and assault with intent to cause serious injury.

"Yes I was negligent. There are a lot of things I neglected to do," said De Koker, who denied the murder charge, calling it "a blatant lie." De Koker is charged with the death of 15-year-old Raymond Buys, shown in the photo emaciated and fighting for his life.

At the beginning of 2011, Buys' parents signed him up for a training course that promised to "turn boys into men." Ten weeks later, he arrived in the hospital malnourished, dehydrated, covered in burns and wounds with his arm broken in two places. He lay in intensive care for a month before he died.

De Koker told the Vereeniging Regional Court that Buys' injuries were self-inflected or caused by fights with another boy at the camp, and said he had chained the boy to his bed every night because he "heard a rumor that he wanted to commit suicide."

But other campers testified last year that Buys was chained to his bed every night, wasn't allowed to visit the restroom and was once forced to eat his own feces. He added that the boy was beaten with planks, hosepipes and sticks when he failed to finish manual labor tasks. He also testified that he saw De Koker tie Buys to a chair naked and electrocute him with a stun gun.

"I sent my son on this course to make him a better man, to give him a better future," Wilma Buys told The Telegraph, as reported by EDGE last April. "I trusted Alex de Koker with his life."

Buys' death is allegedly the third among the teens who attend the courses run by de Koker, who is allegedly a member of murdered white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche's Iron Guards movement. Two other men have reportedly died in the same camp: Erich Calitz, 25, in 2007 from brain injuries; and Nicholas van der Walt, 19.

According to Calitz's sister, Mathilda Groenwald, her brother was beaten when he asked to quit the camp. De Koker, she said, "told him he wasn't gay and he would make a man out of him."

De Koker was slapped with a suspended sentence in 2009 over Caltiz's death but escaped charges for van der Walt's death, which was ruled to have been from a heart attack.