Bulelani Mabhayi pleaded guilty in 2013 to 20 counts of murder, with other charges, for killings in and around Tholeni, a village near Butterworth in South Africa's Eastern Cape, between May 2007 and August 2012. Nineteen of the dead were Tholeni villagers, according to the Daily Dispatch, and nine of them were young children. The youngest was about 14 months old; the oldest was 79. He went into homes headed by women at night and killed the people inside as they slept.
He was 39 when he was charged, a builder and plasterer who lived in the village. Police had taken a saliva sample from him in a sweep of Tholeni in May 2010, but he was not arrested until August 2012, after officers found a shoe at the scene of a killing that matched one he wore. In 2013 Acting Judge Noluthando Conjwa, sitting for the Mthatha High Court in Butterworth, sentenced him to 25 life terms, with no parole for at least 25 years.
Tholeni, also spelled Toleni in some reports, lies beside the N2 highway between East London and Mthatha, about 15 kilometers from Butterworth, according to The Star. Most residents kept livestock or did odd jobs, and paid work was scarce. By the time of his sentencing, The Star reported, some houses in the village stood empty; they had belonged to victims or their relatives. A local activist opened her home as a support center for victims during the years of the killings.
Little is known about his early years. The Star reported that his mother died when he was 12 and his father the following year. He later served three years in Pollsmoor Prison for dealing in dagga (cannabis), and a brother of his, who had since died, received a life sentence for murder, the newspaper said. His date and place of birth were not reported.
In Tholeni he worked as a builder and plasterer. A cousin told The Star that he did good work and charged fair prices, and that people liked him for it. He worked alone. He stayed away from shebeens, skipped family ceremonies and did not eat meat, the cousin said. At home he was withdrawn, though he liked to watch the news. Villagers called him "Dlayedwa", which the newspaper translated as "a lonely man".
The first known victim, according to the Daily Dispatch, was Nofinish Eslina Mayekiso, killed in May 2007. Over the next five years he went into homes at night where no grown man lived, the Dispatch and Sapa reported. All the victims were women and children, according to Sapa's report from the plea hearing, and he mostly chose homes headed by women.
The Star described a pattern that investigators and residents came to recognize. He would strike and then go quiet for as long as two months. At his most active he killed eight people in three months. He chose people least able to resist, the newspaper said: children and elderly women in homes without men.
In June 2010, according to The Star, Sinazo Mbeki and her two grandchildren were killed. Those three deaths raised the number of killings police then believed were linked to eight, and the authorities said in public that they were looking for a serial killer.
The officer put in charge of the search was Captain Aaron Hanise, a detective with a long record of serious cases in the Eastern Cape. He told The Star it was the hardest case of his career. "This was a very difficult case," he said. "People had no clue who was terrorising the community."
His team offered a R250,000 reward, but no useful information came in. Investigators asked psychologists whether they were dealing with one offender, and the psychologists confirmed that they were, Hanise said. Police took DNA samples from village residents who had earlier convictions for sexual offenses, and none of them matched.
The provincial police then launched what they called Operation Good Hope, drawing officers from the organized crime unit, the dog unit and the forensic divisions. Early on the morning of May 17, 2010, according to The Star, police rounded up hundreds of males older than 16 and took them to a local church, where they collected DNA samples and fingerprints. Mabhayi was among them. His fingerprints could not be taken, the newspaper reported, because he did not have an identity document with him, but he gave a saliva sample. The Star reported that he killed five more people over the following 13 months.
Some months before his arrest, The Star reported, he moved into a rondavel beside the home of a woman who had hired him to do plastering. By then, the newspaper said, the count of victims stood at 16.
The woman described him to The Star as "quiet, humble and respectful". He plastered two large houses for her by himself. He knocked so softly at her door, she said, that she could not hear him. She also said he gave her "the creeps" and that his face was "scary". One midnight a tree branch fell on the roof of his hut, and when she asked about it the next day he said he had not heard a thing. She later wondered whether he had been out that night.
On May 28, according to The Star, he killed Nomandla Mxhunyelwa, her 13-year-old daughter and her 15-month-old grandson. Sapa, reporting from the plea hearing, said a family of three was killed in May 2012. The Star and the Daily Dispatch both named the children as Liyema and Lukhanyo, though the two papers attached the names to different children. Nomandla Mxhunyelwa's daughter, the mother of the baby, told The Star that she was bathing when the calls came telling her of the deaths, and that she cried at the scene. More than a year later she was still struggling.
The last killing in the series was of a woman in her fifties, surnamed Lubambo. Sapa gave her name as Boniswa Lubambo, 55, and reported that she was killed in her sleep at her home in Tholeni on a Saturday and that Mabhayi was arrested the next day. The Star gave her name as Nophumzile Florence Lubambo and dated the killing to August 11.
At the scene, police found a shoe. The Star reported that officers were looking for one of his brothers when they came upon it, and that it matched the shoe Mabhayi was wearing. They found him asleep in his bed. The saliva sample he had given during Operation Good Hope then linked him through DNA to the murders, the newspaper said. The Daily Dispatch put his arrest in August 2012.
"It was a huge relief when he was arrested," Hanise told The Star. "I can gladly go on pension now."
Mabhayi first appeared in the Butterworth Magistrate's Court on 33 charges, including murder, Sapa reported; the crimes were believed to have begun in 2007. The case was postponed for further investigation.
The case was heard at a special sitting of the Mthatha High Court in the Butterworth Magistrate's Court, before Acting Judge Noluthando Conjwa. At the plea hearing, according to Sapa, each charge was read to him in turn and he was asked how he pleaded. To each one he answered "ndinetyala", which Sapa translated as "I am guilty". Sapa gave the total as 36 charges. The Daily Dispatch reported the plea as 20 counts of murder, with other charges, including 10 counts of housebreaking.
His defense counsel then read a statement in which Mabhayi described how he had committed the crimes. Relatives and friends of the victims wept in the courtroom, and some had to be helped out, Sapa reported. Nomandla Mxhunyelwa's daughter, who attended the whole trial, broke down after the guilty plea and had to be helped from the court, according to the Daily Dispatch.
The court then heard argument in mitigation of sentence. Mabhayi told the court he was sorry, addressing his apology to the people of Tholeni and of South Africa, the Dispatch reported.
The courtroom was packed for the sentence, with families and friends of the victims filling the room and the corridors outside; officials had to quiet whispering so that the judge could go on reading, according to the Daily Dispatch. Conjwa sentenced him to 25 life terms. The Star reported that the terms would run concurrently. The government news service SAnews put the total at 625 years. He would be eligible for parole only after 25 years, the Dispatch reported.
The judge said no one had been spared, and she pointed out that the youngest victim was 14 months old. The villagers had lived in fear of a predator among them, she said. She did not accept his apology as genuine: witness testimony and his own conduct in court, she said, showed that he did not seem to understand how serious his crimes were. Because he had admitted that he would have gone on killing if he had not been caught, she doubted that he could be rehabilitated. She told him directly that he was a threat to society. She also questioned how he had escaped detection for five years, saying the evidence before the court did not make that clear, and she said she hoped the people of Tholeni could move on once the case was over. The Star reported that she said he had not explained what drove him.
"I'm tired of coming to court and seeing that man every day. Now it's finally over," the daughter of Nomandla Mxhunyelwa told the Daily Dispatch.
The National Prosecuting Authority's spokeswoman, Bulelwa Makeke, called the sentence "stunning" and said prosecutors were very happy with it. Crimes against women and children had been made a government priority, she told the Dispatch, and the sentence sent a message that they would not be tolerated.
The Eastern Cape MEC for social development, Pemmy Majodina, said justice had been served, according to The Star. The acting chief executive of the Government Communication and Information System, Phumla Williams, praised the police and the judiciary. "The wheels of justice have turned," she said in a statement carried by SAnews, and she urged communities to report crime.
The end of the case did not end the fear in Tholeni, The Star reported in the week of the sentence. The activist who had opened her home to victims told the newspaper that Mabhayi had kept saying "we" when he answered questions in court. "Who else was he referring to?" she asked. Many residents believed he had not acted alone.
In June 2017, reporting on a new killing in the village, the Daily Dispatch described Mabhayi as a convicted serial killer who had been sentenced to life imprisonment just under four years earlier.
Whether he acted alone. Some residents told The Star in 2013 that they believed others were involved, pointing to his use of "we" in court. The court convicted him alone, and no one else is known to have been charged in the series.
Names and ages. The Star and the Daily Dispatch disagree over which of Nomandla Mxhunyelwa's two young relatives was the 13-year-old and which was the baby, and they give the baby's age as 15 months, while the Dispatch quotes the judge giving the youngest victim's age as 14 months. Sapa and The Star give different first names for the last victim, Lubambo.
The investigation's timeline. The Star dated the village sweep to May 17, 2010, and also said Hanise was assigned after the June 2010 killing of Sinazo Mbeki and her grandchildren. It also reported that he killed five more people in the 13 months after the sweep, while the Dispatch's account has the killings continuing until August 2012. Why the saliva sample taken in 2010 did not lead to him sooner has never been explained.
May 2007: Nofinish Eslina Mayekiso is killed in Tholeni, the first known victim (Daily Dispatch).
May 17, 2010: Police in Operation Good Hope gather hundreds of males older than 16 in Tholeni and take DNA samples and fingerprints; Mabhayi gives a saliva sample (The Star).
June 2010: Sinazo Mbeki and her two grandchildren are killed; authorities say publicly they are looking for a serial killer (The Star).
May 2012: Nomandla Mxhunyelwa, her daughter and her grandson are killed (Sapa; The Star).
August 2012: Mabhayi is arrested after a shoe is found at the scene of the killing of a woman surnamed Lubambo; he later appears in the Butterworth Magistrate's Court on 33 charges, including murder (Daily Dispatch; Sapa; The Star).
2013: At a special sitting of the Mthatha High Court in Butterworth he pleads guilty to 36 counts, including 20 of murder (Sapa; Daily Dispatch).
September 4, 2013: The Daily Dispatch and SAnews report his sentence of 25 life terms, with parole possible only after 25 years.
June 2017: The Daily Dispatch describes him as serving a life sentence.