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

by Nigel Cawthorne

  “He threatened to kill me with it and to cut me into pieces unless I did as he asked,” Dorcas said the court. “He pushed me on the ground and took my panties off. He dropped his pants to his knees and he raped me.”

  Then he engaged her in conversation.

  “He told me he had a girlfriend in Vosloorus named Sibongile. He said he wanted me to go look for him at her home because she had stolen some things from him, but did not say what. He then asked if we could sleep together again.”

  When Dorcas Khobane refused, he raped her again. Even then he was in no hurry to leave, but someone was coming and he fled. In court, Dorcas Khobane identified Moses Sithole as Samson, the man who raped her.

  Again, in the dock, Sithole seemed amused, but he buried his head in his hands when Sibongile Nkosi took the stand. She was 17 years old in 1988 when she got involved with the 24-year-old Sithole, who then called himself Martin. Sibongile told the court that she had been afraid of him then and was still afraid now. He had often hit her and had threatened to kill her family if she left him. She said he beat her in private, then when someone visited he would put on a show of affection. Eben Jordaan suggested that his client would deny that he ever laid a finger on her. Sibongile Nkosi asked if she should strip naked so that the court could see the scars.

  Sibongile’s younger sister Lindiwe Nkosi then testified that, in October 1988, “Martin” had invited her to visit her sister in Soweto. She was 15 at the time. On the way, they got off the train at Geldenhuis station. Luring her into the veldt he asked Lindiwe if she wanted to have sex with him. When she said no, he pulled out a bottle of petrol and said he would kill her and burn her body if she did not have sex with him. Then he beat her, raped her and throttled her until she lost consciousness. When she came round, he said he would kill her and her niece if she told anyone what had happened.

  Although the rape of Buyiswa Doris Swakamisa had been dealt with in 1989, she appeared in the 1996 trial to testify about his modus operandi. Her presence in court reinforced the point that Sithole’s subsequent victims seem to have been selected for their resemblence to Buyiswa Swakamisa and explained why there had been no crimes between 1989 and 1993, when Sithole had been in prison for her rape.

  Buyiswa Swakamisa testified that she had met a man calling himself “Lloyd Thomas” in February 1989. He offered her a computer job and said he would take her to his business. Walking through the veldt near Cleveland, he produced a panga from a rolled-up newspaper he was carrying under his arm and said he was going to have sex with her. Then in a dramatic gesture he “threw the panga to one side and said if I did not want to have intercourse with him, I could run away, but had to make sure that he did not catch up with me or he would kill me. I just stood there. He came towards me and slapped me and ordered me to take off my clothes. When I did not he slapped me twice with his open hand.”

  In the event, he could not get an erection. So he forced her to kiss his neck and stick her fingers in his ears. And when he was ready, he raped her. Afterwards he was in the mood for conversation again. This time he said that “he hated women because he once had a child with a girlfriend in Alexandra and that his girlfriend had poisoned the child”. Then he tied her up, took her money and left. Once freed she went to the police, but nothing happened until, months later, she saw him in the street. She called the police and he was arrested. Only then did he give his name as Moses Sithole.

  This was apartheid South Africa and Buyiswa Swakamisa was forced to travel to the police station in the police vehicle with her rapist. He cursed her and himself for not having killed her.

  The most controversial charges levelled again Sithole were the murder of Amanda Thethe and the theft of her cash card. David Selepe been charged with her murder and pointing out where it had happened when he was killed. Amanda’s cash card had then been used to withdraw money from a cashpoint three times after she was dead. The man using it had been photographed by a security camera. Earlier the police had identified the man in this photograph as David Selepe. Now they charged Sithole with the robbery as well as her murder.

  Four weeks into the trial Siphiwe Ngwenya took the stand. She had worked at Kids’ Haven with Tryphina Mogotsi and identified the man on the security camera photo as the man who had offered Tryphina a job when she went missing. This was Moses Sithole who, for once, was not using an alias.

  Even more damning was the testimony of Kwazi Sithole, Moses’ sister. She also identified the man in the photograph as her brother. What’s more, she said that women often phoned her house about jobs her brother had offered them.

  It then came to light that Sithole had known Amanda Thethe. When he had visited her father’s home some months before she went missing, she introduced him as her boyfriend “Selbie”. In early August, the prosecution contended, her boyfriend had raped her, stuffed her underwear into her mouth, tied her blouse around her neck and strangled her. Amanda’s aunt saw “Selbie” again. He attended her niece’s funeral. This is not uncommon among serial killers, who like to relive the moment of killing.

  Amanda Thethe was not the only women Sithole had a relationship with before he killed her. Dan Mokwena, a work colleague of 19-year-old Elizabeth Mathetsa, had been sitting outside their workplace with her in early 1995 when a man walked up. Elizabeth introduced him as her boyfriend “Sello”. Dan Mokwena said that he saw Sello again a week before Elizabeth Mathetsa went missing on 25 May 1995. She was found dead in Rosslyn on 16 June. In court Dan identified the man he knew as “Sello” as the prisoner in the dock, Moses Sithole.

  The aliases continued to multiply. Mary Mogotlhoa knew Sithole as “Charles”. They had had a brief relationship shortly before his arrest. It lasted only two weeks, but he had given her a watch, which Tryphina Mogotsi’s mother identified as her daughter’s. Mary Mogotlhoa also said that, after they had broken up, Sithole had gone to the police, told them that she had stolen 500 Rand (£35) and accused her of raping him.

  Otherwise he repeatedly used the offer of a job as a bait. In March 1995, Wilhelmina Ramphisa met a man calling himself “David Ngobeni” who offered her a job. She completed in an application form he gave her, but he failed to turn up to their next appointment. Months later, she saw her potential employer again on the TV news. It was Moses Sithole and she had had a lucky escape.

  A lorry driver named Piet Tsotsetsi testified that he received a number of calls on the phone in his lorry from women about jobs they said he had offered them. He was completely mystified by this. However, at the time, Sithole was working at the same company washing the vehicles. After he was arrested, the calls stopped. Elsie Masango’s sister testified that a man calling himself “Piet Tsotsetsi” had offered Elsie a job shortly before she disappeared.

  Other witnesses testified, many of them parents who had to identify their raped and tormented daughters. No matter how harrowing the testimony, Sithole sat and smiled.

  The only time he cried was when his wife Martha entered the court to testify against him with their one-year-old daughter Bridget asleep in her arms, but afterwards refused to let him see the child. This sudden upsurge of tears allowed those whose testimony he had sat through with a look of mild amusement on his face to laugh at him.

  There was a brief respite when, on 12 November, the trial was suspended after Sithole had fallen down and re-opened his leg wound. When he returned from hospital, the grandmother of Monica Vilakazi testified that a man identifying himself as Moses Sithole had phoned her home on 11 September 1995, the day before her granddaughter went missing. He said they had met the previous month and had now found Monica a job in Germiston. The following day she left her grandmother’s house to become one of the women found at the Van Dyk Mine. Three days after Monica went missing, there was another phone call. This time the caller said his name was Jabulane, but Monica’s grandmother recognized his voice as Sithole’s. Before Monica’s funeral, the man phoned again this time identifying himself as “Mandla”. Sithole was in custody at the time and M
andla insisted that he would be acquitted. And he taunted the old woman, saying that Monica got what she deserved.

  The curious thing here was that “Mandla” was the name of one of the men David Selepe had claimed as an accomplice. This name had not been mentioned in the newspapers at that time. Perhaps the police had not interrogated the right “Mandla” after David Selepe’s death.

  Peter Magubane, the photographer from The Star who had accompanied Sithole and the two street kids to Kids’ Haven, said that he had introduced himself as “Patrick”—his brother’s name. It was there Sithole met Tryphina Mogotsi.

  Voice identification specialist Dr Leendert Jansen was called as an expert witness to identify the voice on the recordings the police had made of the telephone conversations between Star reporter Tamsen de Beer and “Joseph Magwena”.

  “I have no doubt that the unknown voice is in reality the voice of Moses Sithole,” he said. American voice analysis expert Loni Smrkovski was flown to South Africa to confirm Dr Jansen’s findings.

  Then Inspector Mulovhedzi testified about Sithole’s arrest. According to Mulovhedzi, he identified himself as a police officer and told Sithole to stop. He then fired two warning shots. Then, Mulovhedzi said, Sithole came at him with an axe.

  “He turned back and had an object in his hand and came towards me,” he said. “My life was in danger and I fired a shot at his legs… He kept on fighting. He hit me on my right hand and I fired some more shots. He fell to the ground.”

  During cross-examination Eben Jordaan suggested that there was no axe. Sithole had merely bumped into the officer and, when he turned to say sorry, Mulovhedzi drew his gun and started shooting.

  As the trial went on, the police continued to solicit the public’s help to identify eight more of the victims. Then on 3 December, in the sixth week of the trial, the prosecution introduced surprise new evidence. It was a video made in Boksburg Prison not long after Sithole’s arrest, showing him speaking about the women he had murdered.

  It had been made fellow inmates Jacques Rogge and Mark Halligan and masterminded by Charles Schoeman. They were ex-police officers who had been jailed for a three million Rand (£210,000) diamond heist in Amanzimtoti, KwaZulu-Natal in 1995, during which they had killed an accomplice. Rogge suffered from diabetes and slept in the prison infirmary where he met Sithole, who wanted Rogge to steal some pills so that he could commit suicide. But first Rogge, Halligan and Schoeman persuaded him to tell his story on camera, on video equipment that the ex-cops got smuggled in. They even drew a contract giving each one a share in the profits—Sithole’s would to go to his daughter when he was dead.

  The use of such evidence was contentious. It was illegal to make unauthorized recordings or videos in prison. It was also illegal to publish a prisoner’s story without the written permission of the Commissioner of the Department of Correctional Services, so it was unlikely that they could have made any financial gain. Indeed Charles Schoeman and his cohorts faced possible criminal charges. Then there was the vexed question of how the ex-cops got hold of the video equipment in the first place. When the video had first come to light, the Department of Correctional Services wanted to conduct an internal investigation, but the deputy attorney-general asked them to hold off so that she could keep the existence of the video secret until the trial.

  This brought up all sorts of legal issues and the trial had to be suspended once again. When the proceedings resumed on 29 January 1997, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, former-wife of President Mandela, was present. Sithole smiled at her; she did not smile back.

  The video showed Sithole sitting back, smoking or casually eating an apple. He began with the first murder. In July 1995, he said, a woman he killed had shouted at him when he asked for directions. But he had turned on his not inconsiderable charm and arranged to meet her for a date. Then he had strangled her.

  “I cannot remember her name,” he said. “I killed her and left her there. I went straight home and had a shower.”

  He then relayed in detail how he had killed 29 women.

  “I don’t know where the other nine come from,” he said. “If there was blood or injuries, they weren’t my women.”

  He did not like blood and he did not want to see the faces of his victims as he took their lives. Consequently, he strangled his victims from behind, he said. However, he was obviously not so fastidious when he led his fresh victims into a field of rotting corpses.

  He said that all his victims had reminded him of Buyiswa Swakamisa, the woman he claimed had “falsely” accused him of rape in 1989. He also said that he had not raped any of his victims, but that some had offered to have sex with him to save their lives. He had the opportunity to attack other women but did not do so because they were “sincere and without pretensions”.

  On the video, Schoeman asked Sithole if there was one victim that stuck out in his mind. Sithole said he particularly remembered Amelia Rapodile, one of the ten women found at the Van Dyk Mine. Training in karate, she put up fierce resistance.

  “She started to fight,” he said. “I gave her a chance to fight and I tell her, if you lose, you die… She was using her feet and kicked me. Then she tried to grab my clothes, but she could not grab me. I just tell her bye-bye.”

  Charles Schoeman said he did not want to testify, claiming that his life had been threatened. But after being promised indemnity for the making of the video and any charges surrounding it, he took the stand. He said that they had originally made audio recordings of Sithole’s story, but he was so disturbed by what he had heard he had contacted the police. Then Captain Leon Nel of the East Rand Murder and Robbery Unit provided video equipment which was smuggled into prison by Schoeman’s wife. But as there had been police involvement and Sithole had not been cautioned or told that the tapes might be used at his trial, his attorney objected to their use.

  DNA evidence took days as it was new to South African courts and the techniques used had to be explained in detail. However, as many of the corpses were in an advanced state of decay when they were found, DNA evidence only linked Sithole to some of the victims.

  There was another trial-within-a-trial over the confession Sit-hole made in the Military Hospital after his arrest. Sithole claimed he had been coached, coerced and denied legal representation. He also claimed that the crime scenes had been shown to him by the police, rather than the other way round. On 29 July, the judge admitted confessions made in the Military Hospital and the video tape into evidence. Finally, on 15 August, the prosecution rested.

  Sithole took the stand in his own defence. He claimed that he was totally innocent of all charges. Everything he had said in his confession had been fed to him by the police. He admitted knowing one of the rape victims, Lindiwe Nkosi, as she was the sister of his girlfriend, but he denied raping her. He also protested his innocence of the rape he had been sent to prison for in 1989. But Sithole did not stand up well under cross-examination and The Star said his testimony was “rambling, often incoherent”.

  Finally, on 4 December 1997, Moses Sithole was found guilty on all 38 counts of murder, 40 counts of rape and six counts of robbery. One of the two assessors felt that Sithole should not be held accountable, but he was overruled by the judge and the other assessor. It took three hours to read the judgment. The following day, Judge David Curlewis sentenced Sithole to 2,410 years in prison. He was given 50 years for each of the murders, 12 years for each rape and five years for each count of robbery. These sentences would run consecutively, so that there would be no possibility of parole for at least 930 years. The judge said that he would have no qualms about imposing a sentence of death if it had been available and he refused to give life sentences as that would have meant Sithole could have been eligible for parole in 25 years and he had no faith in the parole boards or prison authorities to keep him in jail after that.

  “Nothing can be said in favour of Sithole,” said Justice Curlewis. “In this case I do not take leniency into account. What Sithole did was horribl
e… I want to make it clear I mean that Moses Sithole should stay in jail for the rest of his life.”

  Sithole listened to the sentence without emotion. He was taken to C-Max, the maximum security section of Pretoria Central Prison and the highest security cellblock in South Africa which each prisoner is allowed one hour a day outside his cell and three visits a month. One of the other 93 prisoners there is Eugene de Kock of the apartheid government’s Counterinsurgency Unit, who was sentenced to 212 years for crimes against humanity.

  Sithole has AIDS but, in prison, he has access to excellent medical care and his life expectancy is now longer than if he had remained outside.

  The problem here is that there were more murders than Moses Sithole and David Selepe can account for. Sithole, in his video account, which there is no reason to doubt, denied nine of the murders he was charged with, and Selepe, presumably, was innocent of the four murders that Sithole was jailed for. And the police have never been able to link Sithole to Selepe, even though there is a strange overlap between the two cases.

  There is the odd coincidence around Amanda Thethe. If the police are to be believed, David Selepe had taken them to her murder site and was revealing fresh details about the crime when he was shot. But it is undoubtedly true that Sithole knew Amanda. One or other of them used her cash card and Sithole was linked to her by DNA evidence.

  A man phoned murder victim Dorah Mokoena’s employer three days after she went missing, giving his name as “Martin”. Although Sithole regularly used the alias Martin, he was not charged with Dorah Mokoena’s murder.

  Five days after Joyce Mashabela disappeared on 9 August 1994, a man phoned her employer, giving his name as “Moses Sima” and saying that he had found her identity papers. DNA linked Sithole to her body and he was charged with her murder. But Peggy Bodile’s body was found in the same patch of veldt two months later. Sithole was not charged with her murder. It was attributed to Selepe. Then there is the name “Mandla”, fingered by Selepe an accomplice but also used by Sithole the third time he called Monica Vilakazi’s grandmother.