Nigel Cawthorne: The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

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.