Nineteen people were victims in the case that came to court at Modimolle. One was an adult woman. Every one of the others was a girl. Ten of them were killed.
They are not named here. They were children, and the South African reporting does not name them either.
Between 2004 and 2008 David Randitsheni abducted children around Modimolle in Limpopo province, raped them, and killed ten of them. What stopped him was elimination: police took and tested more than five hundred and fifty DNA samples before a forensic analyst matched one to the evidence. Local detectives had been working the case with the investigative psychology unit from national headquarters. He was arrested on May 16, 2008.
He went to trial at the Modimolle Circuit High Court before Judge Roger Claassen on forty-six counts, ten of murder, seventeen of rape, eighteen of kidnapping and one of indecent assault. He had made admissions during the investigation. At trial he elected to remain silent and offered nothing at all in answer to the state's case. Claassen found every charge proved beyond reasonable doubt and described the manner in which the crimes had been committed as horrific.
He was convicted on every count.
Sentence was passed on August 18, 2009. The court imposed life terms on the murder counts and on sixteen of the rape counts, twenty years each on the remaining rape count and the indecent assault, and ten years on each of the eighteen kidnappings. The figure reported everywhere afterward was sixteen life sentences and two hundred and twenty years. Claassen directed that he was not to be considered for parole for thirty-five years, by which time he would be eighty.
Twelve days later, on August 30, he was found hanging from a window frame by a sheet at Thohoyandou prison, in the far north of the province, roughly two hundred kilometers from the court that had sentenced him. He was forty-five. Police announced it as suicide and an inquest docket was opened.
Because he died before any appeal, there is no appellate record. What exists is the sentencing, the police statements around it, and the government's own account of the counts and the terms imposed. No judgment setting out the evidence was ever published.
And one thing in that record does not add up. The South African government's own statement lists ten life sentences for the murders and a further sixteen for the rapes, which is twenty-six, while the same statement and every subsequent report give the total as sixteen. The years reconcile exactly at two hundred and twenty. The life sentences do not, and nothing in the available material resolves it.