We are not such things: a South African township, the murder of a young American and the search for truth and reconciliation (EPub edition.)

In 1993, in the final, fiery days of apartheid, a young white American activist called Amy Biehl was murdered by a group of young black men in a township near Cape Town.

Four men were tried and convicted of the murder and sentenced to eighteen years in prison.

A few years later, two of the men had been freed from prison, publicly forgiven by Amy Biehl's parents, and then employed by them - to work for a charity set up in Amy's memory.

The men by now were friendly with the Biehls. They called them 'grandmother' and 'grandfather'. But to Justine van der Leun, an American journalist recently living in South Africa, this narrative felt incomplete.

Who were the other men there on that day in 1993? Why don't the eye-witness reports agree? And why did the newspapers all but ignore another violent crime, committed on the same day, in the very same area?