On March 6, 1995, Margaret Mollo was robbed, raped and murdered in a field by the corner of Nasrec Road and Aerodrome Road, in the south of Johannesburg. She was one of sixteen women killed around Nasrec and the Southgate shopping mall between April 1993 and June 1998, and the man convicted of those killings, Lazarus Tshidiso Mazingane, was a taxi driver whose route ran past the place where many of them died. Several of his victims had simply climbed into his taxi.
He was born in 1973 in Kroonstad Prison in the Free State, where his mother, Meisie, was serving five years for dealing in dagga; she kept him with her in prison until her release. He grew up in Diepkloof, in Soweto. His early victims, the court heard, were grabbed by the throat, throttled into submission and raped in the bushes near the mall. From 1996 the women were raped and then strangled, and some who survived described having their underwear forced into their mouths and their hands tied behind their backs. One was a schoolgirl on her way to write a matric exam; she never got there, and failed the year. At least four women who were raped lived to testify, and several of the dead were never identified.
The victims named in the record are Margaret Mollo Dineo, Lindileni Paulina Mahlangu, Kedibone Catherine Maepe, Prudence Miller, Gladys Mabaso, Queen Mnguni, Glen-Rose Vilakazi, Minah Msimanga, Prudence Mohomane and Maria Tshabalala.
He was caught through a different crime. Late in 1998 he kidnapped, raped and robbed an attorney's wife and attacked a motorist who stopped to help; she escaped and helped police identify him, and he was sentenced to thirty-five years. That case led Superintendent Piet Byleveld, the police service's specialist in serial murder, back to the unsolved Nasrec killings, and DNA tied Mazingane to them. The trial in the Johannesburg High Court ran nine months and heard 270 witnesses. Defended by advocate Evelyn Magoloane, Mazingane sat through the judgment with his eyes on his seTswana interpreter, glancing only once at Byleveld. Judge Joop Labuschagne convicted him on seventy-four counts: sixteen murders, twenty-two rapes, twenty robberies, five attempted murders, three kidnappings and firearms and assault charges. He acquitted him on a seventy-fifth, the April 1993 murder of Busisiwe Rosetta Tshabalala, who had died when her home was doused with petrol and set alight, for lack of evidence.
On December 3, 2002, the judge sentenced him to seventeen life terms and 781 years, to run concurrently. "With inner vice he stalked defenceless women whom he robbed and raped before he killed them," Labuschagne said. He rejected as false beyond reasonable doubt the defense claim that police torture had left Mazingane in poor health, and called him a cruel and inhuman person who showed no remorse. Some later accounts give a different determinate term; the Johannesburg reports of the sentencing all give 781 years.
He appealed. The Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein dismissed the appeal on March 20, 2009 and left the convictions and sentences standing. In November 2013, speaking at a Department of Correctional Services event during the sixteen days of activism against violence toward women and children, he said he regretted what he had done; the Sowetan quoted him as saying, "I killed and destroyed innocent lives." A 2019 report placed him at Kgosi Mampuru II in Pretoria, and a journalist who interviewed him in a maximum-security prison was still taking weekly calls from him in early 2020. Nothing more recent about him has been published.