On January 12, 1998, a prisoner took Superintendent Piet Byleveld of the Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit to a pawnshop in La Rochelle, in the south of Johannesburg, where he had sold a bicycle for R120. The bicycle had belonged to Gerhard Lavoo, one of the people killed around Wemmer Pan, a lake south of the city. The name on the receipt was Patrick Mokwena. It was the same alias the man had used to check in a shirt at a tailor's shop before he killed the tailor. Until then the unit had been hunting two serial killers, with two separate criminal profiles, one for the Wemmer Pan murders and one for the Hammer murders of inner-city shopkeepers. The receipt showed they were one man: Maoupa Cedric Maake.
Maake was born in 1965. His father died while he was in Standard 8, and he left school to help support the family, went to Johannesburg to look for work and set up for himself as a plumber. He had a wife and four children in Limpopo and a girlfriend in Johannesburg, and he was living in La Rochelle when, seemingly without a trigger, he began a life of violent crime in 1996.
The Wemmer Pan killings, starting in April 1996, took two forms. He beat men and women walking alone to death with rocks, and he attacked couples in parked cars, shooting the men and raping the women. In April 1997 near Wemmer Pan he shot Muntu Hlatshwayo dead in his car, robbed him of his belongings, a car radio and a firearm that was later linked to other crimes in the series, and raped and killed Hlatshwayo's companion. In June 1997 he killed Ralph Ngwenya, taking his shoes, and raped and killed Ngwenya's companion. In mid-1997 he killed Jerry Khanya Naidoo and raped the woman with him.
The other series was aimed at small businesses. On December 28, 1996, he walked into the Hill Gardens Café on High Street in Rosettenville and hit Antonio Alfonso with a hammer without warning, taking R400 from the till; Alfonso survived, and Maake spent the money celebrating the new year. On January 6, 1997, he knocked Magan Khanjee unconscious with a shifting spanner and stole five pairs of trousers from his shop. Two days later he beat Kenny Chan with a hammer and took the till money. He struck Khantilal Lutchman with a hammer in a tailor's shop and took his wallet, did the same to Abdul Bulbulia in Newtown, and killed Dhansuklal Patel, who died in hospital after a hammer attack.
He was arrested in December 1997 as a suspect in the Wemmer Pan murders and at first acknowledged responsibility, and a month later he confessed to the Hammer murders as well. He went out with detectives several times and pointed out the scenes, and the data was used with geographic information systems and crime mapping to chart the extent of the killings, one of the earliest uses of the technique in a South African prosecution. The mapping showed that most of the murders were centered on his two homes, his workplace, and the homes of his brother and his girlfriend.
He was charged with thirty-six murders, twenty-eight attempted murders, fifteen rapes, forty-six aggravated robberies and firearms offenses, and pleaded not guilty to all of them. On September 6, 2000, in the Johannesburg High Court, he was convicted of twenty-seven murders, twenty-six attempted murders, fourteen rapes, forty-one aggravated robberies and lesser offenses, 114 of the 134 charges in all, and was sentenced to twenty-seven life terms, one for each murder, plus 1,159 years and three months, some 1,340 years in total. He was suspected of killing many more. His case was featured in the M-Net series Criminal Minds.