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 Mandla 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
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
“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.
