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 He said that they had originally made audio recordings of Sithole’s story, but he was so disturbed by what he had heard he had contacted the police.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
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 horrible… 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.
The police have never revealed whether any of the four murders initially attributed to Selepe which Sithole was charged with were among the six “positively” linked to David Selepe. FBI profiler Robert Ressler and Micki Pistorius concluded that the evidence indicated that Selepe had been involved in the Cleveland murders in some way; that it was likely that the Atteridgeville killer was working with an accomplice; and that it was possible that Selepe and the Atteridgeville killer may have known each other and may even have worked together. But if Selepe was telling the truth about “Mandla”, why would he have lied about “Tito”? He may well be responsible for the murders not attributed to either Selepe and Sithole. And he is still at large.
While the trial of Moses Sithole was still underway, another serial killer was on the loose three hundred miles to the south in Transkei. Local people blame a
Official sources say that seven human victims, along with several goats, were attributed to the creature in 1997 alone. But freelance journalist Andite Nomabhunga, says that nine human deaths have been blamed on the
Copyright
Constable & Robinson Ltd
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First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2007
Copyright © Nigel Cawthorne, 2007
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