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 certainly 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
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 fiance 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
