David Thabo Simelane was born in Swaziland, now Eswatini, in 1956, and also went by the name David Albert Mhlanga. He was working around Malkerns, the agricultural area between Mbabane and Manzini.
He had previously served six years for the robbery and rape of a woman, an offence he maintained he had not committed. He was released in 1998, and the account he gave in court was that the killings were revenge for that conviction.
From about 1999 until April 2001 he approached women, most of them poor and looking for work, and offered them a job on a farm or in a factory. Several of them left home having told their families they had found employment through him. He took them into the SAPPI Usuthu forest at Malkerns, assaulted them and killed them, and buried them in shallow graves. His own confession described strangulation. The bodies were too badly decomposed by the time they were found for rape to be established.
He cooperated after his arrest on April 25, 2001, and led police from site to site. Forty-five bodies were recovered in all: forty-one women and four children, among them a nine-month-old baby and toddlers of two, three and four. Several of the women were pregnant. In a country of about a million people this was without precedent.
He was charged with thirty-four counts of murder. The prosecution case rested on two statements he had made to magistrates, the second admitted in evidence after a trial-within-a-trial established that it had been given voluntarily, in which he described thirty-five killings in the Usuthu forest, together with skeletal remains and the victims' clothing and sandals recovered from the graves.
The delay was extraordinary even by the standards of a small jurisdiction. He was arrested in 2001; the trial did not open in the High Court at Mbabane until May 29, 2006, partly because forensic work had to be done in South Africa; and it then ran across 157 court days until January 31, 2011, interrupted by faulty recording equipment, absent counsel and defence applications to postpone.
The verdict came on March 23, 2011: guilty on twenty-eight counts, acquitted on six. On April 1 Judge Jacobus Annandale, who had been expected only to hear mitigation that day, sentenced him to death by hanging, nine days after conviction. Women's rights groups gathered outside the court; one representative said the speed of the sentence had been a surprise in a case that had taken more than a decade. His court-appointed lawyer said he would appeal both conviction and sentence and that his client had been ready for anything.
The Supreme Court heard the appeal in November 2011. It held that the trial had taken an inadmissibly long time, and confirmed the death sentence.
Eswatini has carried out no execution since 1983, so he remains under sentence rather than executed. In recent years reporting of a possible recommendation of parole to the King produced a public outcry, and the correctional service stated that he would not be released.
The numbers here are unusually well separated by the record: forty-five bodies recovered, thirty-four charged, twenty-eight convicted, six acquittals. It remains the largest murder case in the country's history.