The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (the mammoth book of ...)

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Since the end of apartheid there has been an explosion of serial killers in South Africa. Take the case of Lazarus Mazingane, who was given 17 life sentences for murder and rape, and over 700 years for other offences in Johannesburg High Court on 3 December 2002.

  Dubbed the “Nasrec Strangler”, he preyed on women commuting between Soweto and Johannesburg. Many of the bodies were found near the Nasrec Exhibition Centre. His victims are black females, mostly between the ages of 20 and 35, who are lured from minibus taxis.

  Judge Joop Labuschagne said Mazingane was a “cruel and inhuman person” who showed no remorse, and should be permanently removed from society to which he was a menace.

  “He stalked defenceless women whom he robbed and raped before he killed them,” said the judge.

  Mazingane was working as a taxi driver at the time and many of the victims were attacked along his route or when seeking transport. His first victims were throttled—not fatally—then raped. But as his vicious career progressed, he murdered by strangulation.

  “All these women were young and in the prime of life,” said Judge Labuschagne. “I listened to the evidence of mothers… and loved ones who told me of their tragic losses. Nothing I do or say today can compensate them, but perhaps they can find some compensation in the conviction of the accused and these sentences I am imposing.”

  The court also noted that some of the victims were men such as Gert Aspeling, who was shot dead when he refused to hand over his car keys after stopping to change a wheel. Mazingane then drove off with the dead man’s paralyzed wife in the car and dumped her in the veldt without her wheelchair.

  The judge remarked that the chances of rehabilitation were “very poor if not non-existent”, noting that Mazingane had already been convicted of attacking his own wife.

  In all, Mazingane was convicted of 74 charges, and was sentenced to life imprisonment on each of the 16 murder counts and life imprisonment for the most recent rape, which fell under the new legislation. He was sentenced to 18 years on each of the remaining 21 charges of rape. On the 20 counts of aggravated robbery he had been convicted of, he was sentenced to 25 years for the most recent one, and 15 years for each of the remaining 19. And he was sentenced to another 10 years on each of five counts of attempted murder. One victim had been shot three times but survived.

  He received eight years for each of three counts of kidnapping, plus two years for assault, three years on each of the two charges of illegal possession of a firearm, and three years on each of the four charges of illegal possession of ammunition.

  Twenty-eight-year-old Mazingane was already serving 35 years for a crime committed late in 1998—the kidnapping, rape and robbery of an attorney’s wife and an attack on a motorist who stopped to help. He was in jail for that offence when he came to the attention of Superintendent Piet Byleveldt, who was investigating the unsolved Nasrec killings. However, the charges eventually laid against Mazingane were only the tip of the iceberg. At the time Police Director Henriette Bester detailed the extent of the Nasrec offences: “There are 53 cases, of which 51 of the victims were killed. Of the 51 murder victims, 32 were female, all of whom were raped. Seventeen of the victims were children between the ages of five and eight, of whom 11 were girls.”

  Mazingane was convicted of only 16 of the slayings. He may have committed more that he was not charged with, but the chances are that there is at least one other killer—maybe more—still at large.

  Then there is the mysterious case of David Selepe and the murder of more black women in Cleveland, an industrial suburb of Johannesburg. On 3 September 1994, just four months after South Africa’s first multi-racial election, a woman’s body was found on in the bushes near the Jupiter train station next to the township of Heriotdale. Four days later, a second body was found next to the M2 freeway, on the other side of Heriotdale. Later that same day, the third body was found near a mine dump nearby. All three were partially naked and had been raped and strangled. There was nothing on the bodies or around them to aid in their identification. However, their clothes indicated that, before the attacks they had been neatly dressed. They were certainly not prostitutes—the usual prey of serial killers.

  Once stories of a serial killer began to circulate in the press, the Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit discovered that they had two similar cases, whose bodies had been found in the same area on 16 and 31 July. The first—that of a schoolgirl—had a curious message written on it. The murder had written in black ink on the inside of her left thigh: “We must stay here for as long as you don’t understand.” On her right thigh, he wrote: “She a beach and I am not fighting with you please.”

  Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit took over the investigation from the local Heriotdale force. So when, on 19 September, a sixth woman’s body was found near a mine dump in Heriotdale, they went to investigate. Again the victim had been strangled. Her dress had been pushed up over her hips and her jumper had been pulled over her head.

  What puzzled detectives was that none of the women they had found matched missing person reports. Although they were apparently respectable women, none of them had been reported missing. So identikits of the women were prepared to release to the press and television.

  All six bodies had been found within a radius of just over three miles so, on 21 September, the police began to search Heriotdale and the surrounding area of Cleveland in earnest. They employed a police helicopter, two dogs and some 140 officers. They found the remains of two more bodies in an advanced state of decomposition. Their clothing had been pushed up under their armpits and they appeared to have been strangled with either their own belt or undergarments.

  The police now had a total of eight dead women on their hands. All of them were aged between 18 and 30, black and well-dressed. Medical examiners established that at least two of them had been raped. And, disturbingly, there may be many more victims. The area was littered with numerous pieces of female underwear.

  Also on the 21st, the body of the women found two months before was identified by her husband. Her name was Hermina Papenfus. Aged 25, she was a nurse at the Sandringham Clinic.

  The search of the Cleveland area continued and, on 23 September, the police found a rock splattered with blood, a pair of women’s sandals and a bloodstained shirt in the bushes some 50 feet from a footpath that ran between the factories. The police believed that these belonged to the fifth or sixth victim. A search of the wider area discovered no more corpses.

  On 26 September, the body of the woman found on 3 September near the Jupiter station was identified by her father. She was 23-year-old Ntombi Maria Makhasi, a resident of Orlando West in Soweto. A student of fashion design at the Elna Design School in Johannesburg, her teachers described her as friendly and responsible. She disappeared on 2 September after telling a classmate that she would not be at school that day because she was going to the province of KwaZulu-Natal a couple of hundred miles to the southeast to visit her mother who was ill. Her father told the detectives that she used buses and South Africa’s numerous taxis and minibuses for transport. Hermina Papenfus also used the taxis.

  Dr Micki Pistorius, South Africa’s first psychological profiler, joined the investigation on 28 September. The similarities between the cases were manifest, she said. All the victims were black, young, attractive—women who took a pride in their appearance and were not destitute. The killer’s modus operandi was consistent. He had taken the women to an industrial area, raped them and strangled them with a piece of their own clothing—usually a belt, bra or pantyhose. Then he left the body totally or partially naked.

  Pistorius concluded that the killer was a black man in his late twenties or early thirties. Based on the women’s appearance, he was charming, well-dressed and well off with an expensive car—it was unlikely that women like these would go with someone who did not have a winning personality and portray himself as a man of means. Investigators thought that he might have derived some of his income from fraud or theft. He was certainl
y self-employed—at that time, few black men with a regular job would have the means or the free time to go around picking up women. Pistorius also surmised that he was married.

  The message left on the body of the first victim indicated that he had a profound hatred of women. He called his first victim, a schoolgirl, a “beach”—presumably meaning “bitch”. The written message also suggested that he had difficulty expressing his feelings. He could not tell the woman what he felt when she was alive, so he wrote it on her body when she was dead.

  Pistorius told the Beeld that the killer “feels dead inside. He probably thinks about death all the time. He fantasizes about every murder and tries to commit the perfect murder, because he has a drive to kill, but he doesn’t understand it. To kill is the only way he can release his feelings and his identity.” Asked whether he would stop killing, she said: “He can’t.”

  Another thing Pistorius noted was that Ntombi Makhasi’s body was found on 3 September in the exactly same place as Hermina Papenfus’ body had been found on 31 July. Then on 19 September, a third body was found there. Pistorius suggested that the police keep the area under surveillance. But the killer was one step ahead. His profile concluded that he was an arrogant and intelligent man who read the newspapers. He knew what was going on and switched his dumping ground.

  On 8 October, another woman’s body was found near Geldenhuis train station, which is one stop from the Cleveland station, on the opposite side of Heriotdale from Jupiter station where Ntombi Makhasi had been found on 3 September. The new victim had clothing stuffed in her mouth and had been strangled with her pantyhose. There were some indications she had been raped, but the body had been lying in the veldt for several days and was badly decomposed.

  It was plain that this was the work of the same killer, even though he had dumped the body in a new location. The police then looked back in their files and discovered that two other women’s bodies had been dumped near Geldenhuis station, one on 6 August, the other on 3 September. The modus operandi in the 6 August case was almost identical. The victim was found with her jumper pulled over her head. She had been strangled with her own blouse which was still tied around her throat and her panties and pantyhose had been stuffed into her mouth.

  On 13 October, the police offered a reward of 200,000 Rand (£14,000) for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer. Four days later, a man identified his daughter from a picture in the newspaper. She was 26-year-old Amanda Kebofile Thethe who was last seen leaving her parents’ home at 9 a.m. on 2 August. She was going to pay a bill in Johannesburg, then go on to Soshanguve, north of Pretoria, some 50 miles away, where she worked as a teacher. As her body had been found on 6 August, she had already been buried in an unmarked grave.

  Although the police had repeatedly appealed to the public to report missing persons, Amanda Thethe’s aunt Nomvula Mokonyane spoke out about what had happened when the family had tried to report her niece’s disappearance to the police. A week after Amanda disappeared, they had gone to the police station at John Vorster Plain, Johannesburg, to report her missing, only to be informed that they could not do so due to “lack of stationery” and they were told to go to another station. So they went to the station in Krugersdorp, near where they lived. A week later, when they inquired if any progress had been made, they were told that the file had been mislaid. Plainly, little had changed in the police force since the old apartheid days. However, Mokonyane did praise Brixton Murder and Robbery for their handling of the case since Amanda had been identified.

  On 20 October, another victim was identified by her parents. Her name was Malesu Betty Phalahadi. The 25-year-old had last been seen alive on 2 September and was thought to have been travelling by train to visit a friend in Mabopane, near Soshanguve, where Amanda Thethe worked as a teacher. But 2 September was the same day Ntombi Makhasi disappeared. Both Malesu Phalahadi’s and Ntombi Makhasi’s bodies were found the next day Malesu’s near Geldenhuis station; Ntombi’s near Jupiter station.

  Curiously, Malesu’s parents had only been alerted to the fact that their daughter might have been the victim of a serial killer when a woman phoned Malesu’s mother Grace Lehlake on 19 October and asked if she knew where her daughter was. As Grace did not, she asked the woman the same question. She replied that Grace should call the police and hung up. Who this woman was remained an intriguing mystery. Was she the friend that Malesu was supposed to be visiting? If so, why did she hide her identity and why did she not contact the police directly? Or was it someone who knew the killer? If so, why wait two-and-a-half months before calling?

  But there was another distressing discovery to be made in the case of Malesu Phalahadi. Her fiancé was a local policeman, who found out his lover was dead when he recognized her clothes among the evidence being examined at the Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit.

  Both Ntombi Makhasi and Malesu Phalahadi had been intending to head northwards through Pretoria when they had gone missing, so detectives began to throw their net a little wider. They then discovered that there had been two similar cases in Pretoria West, some 30 miles to the north. A woman’s body had found by a cattleman in a patch of open field on 19 August. The same man found a second body about 330 yards from the first on 7 October. Both women were black and neatly dressed. They had been strangled with their stockings and left partially clothed. Once again they had no possessions that could aid identification. One of them was later exhumed in the hope of finding evidence that would tie their cases to the Cleveland murders. Pretoria and Johannesburg are more than 30 miles apart. This reinforced the idea that the killer had a car.

  Then two more victims were identified. One was 28-year-old Dikeledi Daphney Papo, whose body had been found in the search of Heriotdale on 21 September. It could not be established when she had gone missing or what she had been doing beforehand. The other was 25-year-old Dorah Moleka Mokoena. She had been found in Heriotdale on 19 September. Interestingly, she worked as a cashier at the Danville toll booth to the west of Pretoria and she had left home on the morning of 9 September to take a taxi to work, but had never arrived.

  Three days after Dorah Mokoena disappeared, a man had phoned her boss, saying that Dorah had been in an accident and would not be returning to work. He asked for her salary to be paid into her account, as she was in a critical condition and needed money. Her boss then asked the man who he was. He fell silent for a minute, then said his name was “Martin”.

  Then the body found on the M2 freeway in Heriotdale on 7 September was identified. This was 24-year-old Refilwe Amanda Mokale who went missing on 5 September. Her body was found two days later next to the M2 freeway in Heriotdale. She had been studying fashion design at Intec College in Pretoria. The day she disappeared, she was seen on Church Plain in Pretoria, talking to a man who, she said, offered her a job selling mobile phones. She had an appointment to meet him again the following day. The eyewitnesses said that he was a black man between 25 and 30 years old, who spoke Zulu. Other women who had been offered jobs by the man came forward. An identikit was drawn up and published on 10 November.

  Meanwhile, the identification of the two victims found in Pretoria West lent more clues. One of the women was 30-year-old Peggy Bodile. She had an appointment with an unknown man on 4 October at the Paul Kruger statue on Church Plain in Pretoria, echoing the case of Refilwe Mokale. Her body was discovered three days later.

  The other was 32-year-old Joyce Thakane Mashabela. She left home to visit her sister by taxi on 9 August. Her body was found on 19 August. But on 14 August, a man calling himself “Moses Sima” phoned Joyce’s employer, claiming he had found her identity papers while walking through a patch of veldt on his way to work. He handed them over to the family the next day, insisting that he had found only the papers and knew nothing more. But that begged the question: how did he know where Joyce worked or what the number was?

  On 10 November the police identified the body of the girl found on 16 July, which they believe was the killer�
�s first victim. This was 18-year-old Maria Monene Monama, who was still at school. She was last seen on the morning of 14 July when she left home on her way to Pretoria. Although her body was found two days later, her parents did not discover what had happened to her for four months.

  Then the last body, that of 24-year-old Margaret Ntombeni Ledwaba, was identified.

  By 18 November, the police were closing in on a suspect. He was a 31-year-old black man, living in a house in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg and some 12½ miles from Cleveland. Although he was married, he did not live with his wife and he was often seen in the company of other women.

  A suave and a flashy dresser, he drove a Mercedes-Benz, fitting the profile. He was also self-employed, owning and running a women-only computer school called the Vision English Girls College from offices he rented in Pretoria. And, like many independent businessmen in South Africa, he owned a number of taxis. But things had been going badly. The college’s four employees had not been paid their salaries. He owed 50,000 Rand (£3,500) in rent and utility bills. The Mercedes was not registered in his name, but that of a black woman. Although he was paying the instalments on the car, he was 20,000 Rand (£1,400) behind on the payments. He had come to the attention of the police when a woman had contacted them, complaining that the suspect had offered her a job, but had then tried to rape her.

  The suspect’s name was David Abraham Selepe. The problem was that he had fled his creditors two weeks before, supposedly going overseas on business. He had not gone that far. On 15 December, he was arrested trying to sell the Mercedes in the port of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, 280 miles to the east. Detectives found newspaper clippings of the Cleveland killings in the boot. There were also footprints on the lid, suggesting that someone had been locked inside.

  Returned to South Africa, he was questioned for the next four days. Apparently, he waived his right to legal representation. The police said that he confessed to the murder of 15 women in the Cleveland area—four more than they were investigating. They did not get around to questioning him about the women found in Pretoria West. While he was happy to make a verbal confession, the police said, he refused to sign a written confession.