Ex-husband Discovered Hana Whitfield’s Murder Attempt, Affairs Too Late

Hana Whitfield’s former husband discovered too late that she attempted to murder her father and had three extramarital affairs.

TRANSCRIPT:

We were married, I think January 21, ’66. I left for LA two weeks later. She joined me probably about six months down the line. So we were only together that two weeks. Of all—what I found in later months, I know that from either her statement or her corroborated statement, when I found out somewhere else, that she’d had an affair—had affairs with three different guys in the course of that six months.

She was dishonest in certain areas that I consider very unfortunate, that I know to be dishonest. I mean, shacking up with somebody other than your husband is a fairly major level of dishonesty. The one that concerns me most on that is, I only found out at the very end, was her telling me, after we’d been dating for a fair while, just some details of situations back in South Africa.

And Hana was originally born Hana Strnad, or using the Czech final name, Hana Strnadova. Consequent to really, some really, really bad press surrounding her family, she changed the name to Hana Strachen.

Her father had been—she lived a pretty wealthy life. Her father and mother had come to—down originally to Rhodesia from Czechoslovakia. He’d been a very prosperous businessman.

And she’d been pretty much his pet. She’d taken—he’d taken her around after she was, you know, later teenage, I guess, to business meetings and whatnot. Unfortunately, it turned out that all the wealth that he’d gotten, he’d actually—I don’t know about all—he’d basically, he’d embezzled millions from his company. And he was tried and convicted. According to Hana’s statement to me, her mother, very dissatisfied with all sorts of things, persuaded her, more or less independently—as far as I know, just between the two of them—that he was just too bad a being and he had to be killed. She [Hana] arranged a trip with him down to Port Elizabeth it was, and to a hotel that they never visited, in a place she felt her killing him would—she wouldn’t be found out.

She folded up on it and didn’t actually execute it—she almost killed him, she was within seconds of doing so, but did not. And then, shortly, a while later, a matter of weeks, her father did get killed—stabbed to death by her brother.

She did mention, of course, the—a lot of press, a lot of public publicity. As far as I can tell from her statements, it was on the same order of magnitude of the press surrounding the Charles Manson murders here in California.

When she divorced me, in I guess ’75, one of the things she did tell me at the time was that she’d married me to avoid going back to South Africa and the extensive press that she would have felt she would face there in connection with her father’s very lurid murder.