David Thabo Simelane was convicted in March 2011 of murdering 28 people in Swaziland, the small southern African kingdom now called Eswatini. Most of those he was convicted of killing were women, and young children were among them. He had been arrested in April 2001, weeks after remains began to be found near Malkerns, a farming area outside Manzini, the country's main city. Police said he drew women away from their homes and towns with the promise of a job. About 45 bodies were recovered in all, and he was charged with 34 murders.
His trial in the High Court lasted more than five years. When Judge Jacobus Annandale delivered his verdict on March 23, 2011, Sowetan, the South African daily, called Simelane the deadliest serial killer known to have operated in the kingdom. Days later Annandale sentenced him to hang. No one had been hanged in Swaziland since King Mswati III was crowned in 1986, and as of 2015 the sentence had not been carried out.
Little is known of Simelane's early life. His date and place of birth are not known. At his arrest in April 2001 he was described as 43; at his conviction in March 2011 he was 53. According to the journalist Shaun Raviv, writing in ZAM Magazine in 2015, he had not finished high school and did not own a car, and he lived in a single room with one light bulb, no running water and no electrical sockets. He had a police record for assault and robbery.
The prosecution gave the court a fuller picture of his record at the sentencing hearing in 2011. Mumcy Dlamini, the public prosecutor, said he had 18 previous convictions, for housebreaking, robbery and other offenses, the latest of them in 1993. Court records showed his criminal history going back to 1977, Sowetan reported. "Shortly after his release Simelane started committing crimes again. This time murders," Dlamini told the court.
One of those earlier cases mattered to him more than the others. He said he had spent years in prison for a crime he did not commit, and in his statements to police, and later in court, he presented the killings as revenge for that conviction. "I killed the people out of revenge," he told Swazi police, according to Sowetan.
The killings, as described in court and in the press, took place over several years before 2001. Sowetan put them between 1998 and 2001; at the time of the verdict, the paper reported that they were believed to have begun in the late 1990s. In 2001 families began reporting missing relatives to the police.
Raviv described most of the victims as rural, poor and without much schooling. Only a few of the dead were named in the press.
Fikile Motsa, 37, was a pre-school teacher. On the night of March 10, 2001, after a quarrel with her husband, she set out on foot with their one-year-old daughter, Lindokuhle, for the home of her husband's parents. Both disappeared. Her husband reported them missing to the police at Matsapha, called the hospitals, and sought help from diviners, who told him they could not see her. He identified his wife and daughter when their remains were later recovered.
Sindi Ntiwane came from a well-off and educated family and was married to a police constable. She had gone to meet people she hoped would invest in a small business she was planning. At about 8 a.m. she telephoned her husband to say she was heading to Bhunya. He did not see her again. Her remains and clothing were identified in part through her quartz watch, which had a small crack in it; police found the watch in Simelane's room. A 2001 police video, which Raviv later obtained, shows her husband identifying her clothing at a police station while seated near Simelane. In one of his written confessions Simelane admitted that he had strangled her.
A woman, Rose Nunn, and her child, Nothando, were also among those listed in the court's judgment, Raviv reported.
The first remains were found near Malkerns on April 2, 2001, by a farm worker. More were found in the following days. Within days police warned people living in the area to stay indoors at night. On April 10 further remains were recovered. On April 12 more than 200 police officers and soldiers searched the area, led by two senior officers, Jomo Mavuso and Khethokwakhe Ndlangamandla, and found 13 more sets of remains, according to Raviv.
Sowetan wrote in 2011 that the case had gripped Swaziland and raised fears for women's safety, along with worries about ritual killing. Religious leaders spoke out. Simanga Mthalane, a Zionist prophet, vowed to find the people responsible, declared "This is war," and asked for police protection. The Indlovukazi, the king's mother, called on Christians to pray, saying "the demons of the devil" had taken a toll.
In the end about 45 bodies were recovered. Most of the bodies were found in the Malkerns area, Sowetan reported, and Simelane later led police to burial sites in other parts of the country as well.
Simelane was arrested on April 25, 2001, in Nhlangano, a town in the south of the country. The husband of one of the missing women recognized him there. Sowetan, reporting in 2011, said the arrest followed a tip-off.
He was described at the time as calm and collected. He confessed almost at once, in written statements and on camera, and he took police to the places where remains lay.
Over the following weeks the police recorded a series of interviews with him on video. Raviv, who found what he called secret videotapes about ten years after the trial, described three of them. One was the video of Sindi Ntiwane's husband identifying her clothing. In another, dated June 6, 2001, Mavuso and Ndlangamandla questioned Simelane in siSwati about whether someone had paid him; the officers told him, "You were getting paid for killing these people," and suggested that a traditional healer was behind the killings. In a third, dated June 12, 2001, Simelane named three men as the people who had hired him.
His written confessions gave a different motive: revenge. In them he said he had killed women because a false charge had sent him to prison for years.
Police said he had lured the women with promises of work. Sowetan, in its report on the sentence, described his approach as an offer of a job or a reference to a job opportunity. Judge Annandale later found it hard to accept that the women had followed him without suspicion. "Even the most trusting, the most eager person would have had to suspect something," he said in his judgment.
Simelane was charged in 2001. The number of counts was reported differently. Sowetan, at the time of the verdict, said he had been charged with 34 murders, and Raviv also gave 34. In its report on the sentence, Sowetan said he had been charged in 2001 with 43 counts of murder involving 34 women and infants. Of about 45 bodies recovered, 34 were charged to him, according to Raviv, and the convictions rested on 28 of them.
Simelane spent a decade in custody before his trial ended. The trial itself lasted more than five years, Sowetan reported, and ended in 2011.
During those years many of the people connected to the case died. Raviv counted five of the eleven original investigators among them, including both lead detectives, as well as two of Simelane's young girlfriends, the magistrate who had taken his second confession, and many witnesses and victims' relatives. Ndlangamandla, the investigating officer who had ended the killings, retired from the Swaziland police on December 30, 2008. Sowetan reported in April 2011 that he had died in a car accident on May 21 the previous year, at the age of 62.
The deaths fed rumors. Many people believed that witchcraft lay behind them, and some thought Simelane himself was using muti, traditional medicine, to destroy the case against him. A police officer told Raviv that people believed this but that he did not believe in witchcraft himself. Raviv wrote that the rumors about the deaths were wrong.
At trial Simelane said he had confessed under duress, telling the court that the police kill people every day in the country. His lawyer, Mduduzi Mabila, argued that the convictions rested on a confession his client had challenged.
Annandale ruled the confessions admissible. He noted that they had been challenged only near the end of the trial. He also criticized the prosecution: scientific DNA evidence, he said, would have been the best evidence, and the prosecutors had not presented it.
On Wednesday, March 23, 2011, Annandale read out the long list of verdicts in the High Court. He convicted Simelane on 28 counts of murder out of the 34 he faced. Simelane showed no emotion as the verdicts were read. The judgment ran to about 40,000 words, and the Swazi Observer printed it in full, Raviv wrote.
Mabila told the French news agency AFP after the verdict that he intended to appeal. Sentencing was set for April 1, and the death penalty was among the possible sentences.
At the sentencing hearing the only extenuating circumstance Simelane put before the court was that he had acted out of anger and a lasting wish for revenge against women. Mabila told the court that his client believed society had made him suffer, and that by society he meant the courts that acted on its behalf.
Annandale found no extenuating circumstances, and on a Friday he sentenced Simelane to death. "Never before has it been the duty of this court to convict one person for so many counts of premeditated murder," he said. He told Simelane that he had "robbed dozens of children of the natural right of a nurturing and loving hand of a mother." Then he passed sentence: "You shall hang by your neck until you die, may God have mercy on your soul."
People in the courtroom cheered. Annandale called the cheering deplorable, Sowetan reported on April 4, 2011.
Two explanations for the killings have competed since 2001.
The first is the one Simelane gave in his written confessions and repeated at his sentencing: that he killed women out of revenge for a conviction he said was false. The High Court convicted him of 28 murders; Sowetan reported that his only extenuating plea was anger and a wish for revenge against women.
The second is that the killings were connected to muti. Ritual murder, in which killings are carried out to supply traditional healers, was among the fears the case raised. Sowetan reported in 2011 that local media had speculated that Simelane might have sold remains for use in medicine, but that ritual killing as a motive was never raised in court.
Raviv set out this theory in detail in 2015. In the police video dated June 12, 2001, Simelane said that in late 1999, near the end of the Swazi winter, a businessman had offered him work killing people so that their remains could be used by traditional healers. He said he then met two partners who worked in Parliament, and that the three men agreed to pay him about E3,000 a month, then about US$370, and to give him two communal taxis and a minibus. He named a meeting place, and he quoted one of the men as telling him, "Once we have reached a fifty target figure, none of us will be lacking money." He claimed that the three men had taken part in seven of the murders themselves.
None of the three was charged. One, a former member of Parliament, died in 2003; the businessman died in May 2014. The businessman told Raviv that his only link to the case was rumor that grew out of a public offer he had once made of coffins. The third man, also a former member of Parliament, expressed "complete surprise" when Raviv asked him about it. The police did not answer Raviv's questions about the men. Annandale found no connection between the crimes and anyone other than Simelane, and in June 2014 a letter from a representative of the National Commissioner of Police said, "We can with absolute certainty say that the accused acted alone, and this version remains uncontroverted." Some of what Simelane said on the videos was not presented in court.
Raviv quoted the late anthropologist Harriet Ngubane's view that people behind ritual murders are typically wealthy and influential. He wrote that the talk of muti around the case was not paranoid, while also reporting the police position that Simelane acted alone.
The total number of deaths is also uncertain. About 45 bodies were recovered, but Simelane was charged with 34 killings and convicted of 28. Which of the other deaths, if any, were his has not been established in court.
The sentence placed Simelane on Swaziland's death row. As of 2015 King Mswati III, crowned in 1986, had not permitted a hanging, and death row prisoners in Swaziland either stayed there or had their sentences commuted, Raviv wrote. As of June 2015, Raviv wrote, Simelane's fate remained in the king's hands.
1977: Simelane's criminal record begins, according to court records cited in 2011.
1993: Date of the latest of his 18 previous convictions, as given by the prosecution in 2011.
1998 to 2001: Period of the killings, as reported at his sentencing.
Late 1999: The date Simelane later gave, in a police video, for the offer he said he received from a businessman.
March 10, 2001: Fikile Motsa and her one-year-old daughter, Lindokuhle, disappear.
April 2, 2001: A farm worker finds the first remains near Malkerns.
April 10, 2001: Further remains are recovered.
April 12, 2001: More than 200 police officers and soldiers search the area and find 13 more sets of remains.
April 25, 2001: Simelane is arrested in Nhlangano.
June 6 and June 12, 2001: Police record video interviews in which he is questioned about payment and names three men.
2001: He is charged with murder (34 counts, as reported in 2011).
December 30, 2008: Investigating officer Khethokwakhe Ndlangamandla retires from the police.
March 23, 2011: The High Court convicts Simelane on 28 counts of murder.
April 2011: Judge Jacobus Annandale sentences him to death by hanging; his lawyer says he will appeal.
June 2014: A police letter states that Simelane acted alone.
June 2015: The death sentence has not been carried out.