Jimmy Maketta was born around 1964 and was living around Philippi on the Cape Flats outside Cape Town, an area of informal settlements and open bush. South African reporting called him the Jesus Killer.
Between April and December 2005 he killed sixteen people there, men and women, beating them to death with a wooden pole. He raped a number of the women, including several who survived. The bodies were left in the bush between the settlements, on paths that people used daily to get to work and back.
The residents of the area knew there was someone. The pattern was clear to them long before it was a police operation, and the complaint made repeatedly afterwards was that the deaths of people in an informal settlement, most of them migrants from the Eastern Cape, did not generate the response that would have followed elsewhere in Cape Town.
He was arrested on December 20, 2005. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced on May 3, 2007 to life imprisonment on multiple counts of murder and rape.