On May 17, 2010, police in Tholeni, a village near Butterworth in the Eastern Cape, tested and fingerprinted every local man over sixteen. Bulelani Mabhayi could not be fingerprinted because he had no identification with him, but a saliva sample was taken. He went on killing. He was caught only after he left a shoe at the scene of one of the murders, and the saliva sample taken in 2010 proved crucial to identifying him.
Mabhayi was born in 1974. Between May 2007 and August 11, 2012, he killed ten women and nine children in the village, and a woman from another town. He broke into houses at night where there were no men, raped some of the women and girls, and killed his victims with an axe or a panga as they slept. His youngest victim was fourteen months old and his oldest seventy-nine. The press called him the Monster of Tholeni.
He was convicted of twenty counts of murder, six of rape and ten of burglary, and on September 3, 2013, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.