Most of the women Jack Mogale killed were never identified. Their bodies were found in open veld around Westonaria, on Gauteng's West Rand, and in Lenasia, southwest of Johannesburg, in an advanced state of decomposition, and it was the pattern rather than any name that tied them together: the same kind of place, the same approach, the same injuries. Before anyone knew who he was, the police called the man they were hunting the West End serial killer, after the West End brick and clay factory near his home in the Waterworks section of Westonaria, where many of the attacks took place.
Madumetsa Jack Mogale was born in September 1968, according to later reporting, and had twice been convicted of rape before the killings began. Between about March 2008 and March 2009 he approached black women and lured them to open ground, in some cases by presenting himself as a minister of the Zion Christian Church. There he raped and robbed them and then killed them, most by strangling and others with blows to the skull from a blunt object.
Only two women are reported to have got away from him. One was raped and beaten so badly that she lay unconscious for twenty-four hours. She lost her front teeth, suffered severe head injuries and injuries to her neck and genitals, and needed facial reconstruction surgery at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital.
The hunt ended in March 2009, when police were given the number plate of his car after a teenager disappeared. At the time of his arrest he told investigators: "I want you to help me. When I am with a woman I lose control and do not know what to do. I kill all of them when they do not give me what I want."
He was indicted in the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg on sixty-one counts, among them eighteen of kidnapping, nineteen of rape and sixteen of murder, and he pleaded not guilty to all of them. On the stand he maintained that the police, the witnesses and his common-law wife had conspired against him, a claim Judge Frans Kgomo called far-fetched and fallacious. Because so many of the dead had no name, much of the case linking the killings rested on Professor Gérard Labuschagne, the police investigative psychologist. He testified that nearly all the crimes shared a method, circumstances, type of victim and location, that fourteen had a sexual element, and that they were undoubtedly the work of one offender. One count arose from an escape from lawful custody.
On March 16, 2011, Kgomo convicted him on fifty-two of the sixty-one counts: sixteen murders, nineteen rapes, nine kidnappings, an attempted murder, three robberies with aggravating circumstances, fraud or theft, assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, a sexual assault and the escape. Shortly before judgment Mogale protested, "I didn't do anything," adding, "I don't even know those women." The court papers gave his age as forty-two; one newspaper reported it as forty-four.
At sentencing he chose not to testify, call witnesses or put in a pre-sentence report. The state asked that he be removed from society for good, and his defense asked for mercy. Kgomo imposed a life term on each of the sixteen murder counts, four more life terms for women he had raped more than once, twenty years on each of fifteen further rape counts and shorter terms on the rest, all to run concurrently. He called Mogale an "evil and perverted murderer and rapist" and "a terrible terror who went around the streets searching for women to rape," and told him: "Sir, there is no way you can be allowed to be out of prison to come into contact with women. I am removing you permanently from society." The published judgment is dated March 18, 2011; one contemporary report put the sentencing on March 17.
Accounts of the total differ. Most reports give sixteen life terms and twenty-three years; others, counting the four extra life terms for repeated rape, give twenty. Some later accounts also say the court declared him unfit for parole, which the contemporary report of the sentencing does not mention. Under South African law a life sentence imposed after October 1, 2004 brings consideration for parole at twenty-five years however many life terms are stacked, and consideration is not release. No parole decision in his case has been reported.