On August 5, 2000, a security guard at the pump station at Cottondale, in the bush country around Bushbuckridge in northeastern South Africa, was shot dead along with his girlfriend. The killing fit a pattern that had been building in the area since February. Two men would approach a woman on the street, rape her, and shoot whoever was with her. By September ten rapes and six killings had been laid at their door, and the newspapers had a name for the man at the center of it, the Mpumalanga Serial Rapist, though the case is also filed under Limpopo, the province that Bushbuckridge and Acornhoek then belonged to.
Fanuel Makamu was born in 1977 and lived at Acornhoek. His partner in the attacks was a man named in court reporting as Henry Maile; some accounts spell the surname Maela. What ended it was a family decision. Makamu's mother, Joyce Makhubela, went to the police about her son.
The arrests came on September 14, 2000, and they were violent. Maile was shot dead by police. Makamu ran, was shot in the leg, and was taken to Tintswalo hospital under guard. A few days later he tried to escape from custody, an attempt that added one more charge to a sheet that already ran to thirty-three.
He stood trial alone on thirty-four counts: ten of rape, six of murder, five of armed robbery, two of attempted murder, three of housebreaking and one of attempted housebreaking, one of attempted robbery, two each of illegal possession of firearms and of ammunition, one of malicious damage to property, and the escape attempt. He pleaded not guilty to all of them. Semen recovered from three of the women matched his DNA.
The case was heard in the Nelspruit circuit of the Pretoria High Court, more than a hundred kilometres from where the crimes took place, and a hundred and four witnesses made the trip to testify. In May 2004 Judge Willie Seriti said he wanted to hand down judgment in the Bushbuckridge area itself, where the victims could attend without spending more money on travel, and adjourned the case while a venue was found.
In July 2004 Seriti convicted Makamu on thirty-two of the thirty-four counts and sentenced him to eight life terms and a further one hundred and sixty-five years. Reporters in court described him as soft-spoken. The women he raped and the people killed beside them are not named in the reporting on the case.