On the night of June 24, 1995, a man broke into a home near Donnybrook, a small town in the Natal midlands, and raped a woman and her nine-year-old daughter on the same bed. By then Christopher Mhlengwa Zikode had been breaking into houses around Donnybrook at night for months. His usual method, as the case was later reconstructed, was to force the door, shoot the men of the household, and take the women into the nearby fields and timber plantations, where he raped them, sometimes for more than five hours, and often killed them. He also ambushed women and girls walking alone on rural footpaths.
He was arrested for the first time in July 1995, for the attempted murder of a woman named Beauty Zulu, and released on bail. While he was out he committed at least five more offenses, among them a murder, a rape, two attempted murders and a housebreaking with intent to rape. He was arrested again on September 29, 1995, and held this time without bail.
His trial ran in 1996 and drew on the work of the police profiler Micki Pistorius. The conviction covered twenty-one counts committed between April and September 1995: eight murders, five rapes, five attempted murders and two indecent assaults, along with housebreaking with intent to rape or murder. Several of the killings were carried out execution-style, and the court heard that he mutilated and violated the bodies of women he had killed. On January 7, 1997, he was sentenced to 140 years, made up of five life terms.
The figure usually attached to him, eighteen killings and eleven attempted, comes from reference works and police accounts that reach back to 1994; the court convicted him of eight. South African law made him eligible to be considered for parole after twenty-five years. By March 2023, when he was forty-eight, the Department of Correctional Services said his profile had been put before the parole board three times and rejected each time.
April to September 1995: the period of the twenty-one counts of which Christopher Mhlengwa Zikode is later convicted.
June 24, 1995: a man breaks into a home near Donnybrook and rapes a woman and her nine-year-old daughter.
July 1995: Zikode is arrested for the attempted murder of Beauty Zulu and released on bail.
September 29, 1995: he is arrested again and held without bail.
1996: his trial is held, drawing on the work of the police profiler Micki Pistorius.
January 7, 1997: convicted on twenty-one counts, among them eight murders, five rapes and five attempted murders, he is sentenced to 140 years, made up of five life terms.
March 2023: the Department of Correctional Services says the parole board has rejected his profile three times.