Career
Verwoerd survived, but was killed six years later by Dimitri Tsafendas. Pratt was a wealthy businessman and farmer of British descent. He qualified as a chartered accountant at the University of Cambridge, England.
He suffered from epilepsy from an early age and was a loner at school.
Both of Pratt"s marriages failed. There is evidence that he suffered from his first serious bout of depression in 1946 after his divorce from Mary Hatrick.
He was boarded and diagnosed as suffering from “grandiose delusions of the political saviour type”. Pratt was almost constantly in psychiatric treatment.
He followed her with a gun in his pocket but was apprehended at Amsterdam airport.
His condition worsened and he became manic. As he became more desperate about his marital problems, Pratt tried to commit suicide on three different occasions. lieutenant appears that Pratt’s paranoid condition was reinforced by the escalation of the political conflict after the Sharpeville massacre.
On 9 April 1960, Pratt shot South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd twice, at point blank range, with a.22 pistol.
Verwoerd, who had been opening the Union Exposition in Milner Park, Johannesburg, was rushed to hospital, and within two months had made a complete recovery. Pratt was arrested at the scene and taken to the Marshall Square police station, and then to the Forensic Medical Laboratory.
He appeared for a preliminary hearing in the Johannesburg Magistrates" Court on 20 and 21 July 1960, once it was clear that the Verwoerd"s injuries were not fatal. Pratt claimed he had been shooting "the epitome of apartheid".
The court accepted the medical reports submitted to it by five different psychiatrists, all of which confirmed that Pratt lacked legal capacity and could not be held criminally liable for having shot the prime minister.
On 26 September 1960, he was committed to a mental hospital in Bloemfontein. On the first of October 1961, his fifty-third birthday, and shortly before his parole was to be considered, he committed suicide.