Bulelani Mabhayi was born in 1974 and lived at Tholeni, a village near Butterworth in the former Transkei region of the Eastern Cape. He was well known and well liked there, and he worked for some of the households in the village.
Between May 2007 and August 2012 he killed twenty people. Nineteen were from Tholeni and one from another village. Ten or eleven were women and nine were children. He broke into houses at night, choosing homes where there was no man present, raped some of the women and girls, and killed everyone inside with an axe or a panga while they slept. His youngest victim was fourteen months old and his oldest was seventy-nine. South African reporting called him the Monster of Tholeni.
The judge who sentenced him returned to the point that he had worked in some of those houses and had used what he knew of them. Tholeni came to be called the village of death.
One family's account gives the shape of a single attack. Mabhayi raped and killed Nomandla Mxhunyelwa and her thirteen-year-old granddaughter Lukhanyo, then hacked to death Liyema, a fifteen-month-old baby. A twelve-year-old boy in the house survived with brain damage. Nomandla's daughter Noxolo lost her mother, her sister and her son in the one night and gave up her studies afterwards.
The investigation was slow, and the reason it eventually worked is worth setting out. On May 17, 2010 the police tested and fingerprinted every local man over sixteen. Mabhayi could not be fingerprinted because he had no identity document with him, but a saliva sample was taken. He killed five more people after that day. He was finally caught because he left a shoe at the scene of one of the murders; it matched the shoe he was wearing, and the DNA from the 2010 saliva sample tied him to the killings. He was arrested on August 11, 2012.
He pleaded guilty in late August 2013 to twenty counts of murder, six of rape and ten of housebreaking. On September 3, 2013, acting Judge Noluthando Conjwa, sitting for the Mthatha High Court at Butterworth, imposed twenty-five life sentences to run concurrently, a total reported in the press as 625 years, with parole possible only after twenty-five years. The investigating officer was Captain Aaron Hanise, who described it as the hardest case he had worked.
The judge noted that he had apologised but had not explained himself, and said she remained in the dark as to what had driven him. Villagers said afterwards that they still lived in fear, and many of them believed he had not been acting alone.
It is among the largest cases ever tried in the Eastern Cape. Twenty murders were charged, pleaded to and convicted; the roster figure and the court figure are the same.