Unforgiven: Face to Face with my Father's Killer

​Author: Liz McGregor
Publisher: Jonathan Ball
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
Of all the stories a child could want to tell about a parent, the last would be their murder. Especially a parent like Robin McGregor. A lively, loving maverick of man, who was viciously stabbed to death in his Tulbagh home in August 2008. Cecil Thomas of Saron was sentenced to 25 years for the killing, and another 15 for aggravated theft. It took a long time for McGregor’s daughter to 

tell this story, and getting there was a slow and painful journey.
Liz McGregor is a journalist and an author, so constructing material into a logical sequence is her craft, but one can only imagine in this case, also an emotional challenge. She opens the book with the scattering of her mother’s ashes. The whole family had gathered for the memorable occasion. Two days later, their father was dead. The subsequent tale she tells weaves from the grisly details of the murder itself, to the trial, to the verdict and through her attempt to get her life back after the horror of it all. She tells how she subsequently writes a book on rugby, finds love, suffers serious injuries, surgery and crippling pain following a freak accident involving a recovering alcoholic. She seeks out help as grief and rage come back to haunt her, she is coming apart – ‘but I have always written my way out of despair’ she says. And this book would be the proof.
In it she also looks back over her father’s life and his dynamic, unorthodox approach to it. She looks into his ancestry and visits Scotland. She reflects back on her own life and significant times with him. The turning point came in January 2018 she says, ‘I steel myself to start my exploration of Cecil Thomas’s life, even though the very thought of it sets my nerves jangling, exacerbated by an ongoing insomnia.’ The exploration is intense. Obsessive. It takes her to Tulbagh. It takes her deep into the dark and murky world of prison, the Numbers gangs and the slippery field of restorative justice. She is determined to meet her father’s killer face to face to finally find out the truth of why he did it, so long after the litany of maddening lies that were heard in court.
The prison system throws up obstruction and cul de sacs, and then she meets Chris Malgas – ‘an anomalous figure in fatigues with a soldierly bearing’ who knows his way around the innards of incarceration. Together with Alan, her now husband, Chris supports her through this quest that she describes as ‘to hear my father’s voice one more time.’ To hear him ‘describing the events leading to his death’. She will never hear that, and ultimately will never know the truth. But what she has unearthed along the way, is an extraordinarily revealing account of one good man’s life, beliefs and finally his murder – one of so many thousand that happen every year in this complex country. Sadly, it makes for compelling reading. ​