Marlene Lehnberg; Cape Town -South Africa

Hometown Murders Podcast

Marlene Lehnberg (15 October 1955 – 7 October 2015) was a South African murderer more commonly known as The Scissor Murderess. She was 18 years old in 1974 when she and hired killer Marthinus Choegoe stabbed Susanna Magdalena van der Linde, the wife of Lehnberg’s 47-year-old lover Christiaan van der Linde, to death with a pair of scissors. At 19 she was then the youngest woman to be convicted of murder in South Africa. Both Lehnberg and Marthinus Choegoe received the death penalty, but this was later set aside and she served 11 years of her 20-year sentence in Pollsmoor Prison outside Cape Town.