Maoupa Cedric Maake was born in 1965. His father died while he was in Standard 8 and he left school to help support the family, moving to Johannesburg to look for work and setting up on his own as a plumber. He had a wife and four children in Limpopo and a girlfriend in Johannesburg.
Between April 1996 and December 1997 he killed people in and around Wemmer Pan, a lake in the south of Johannesburg, and in the inner-city industrial areas. There was no single method. He beat men and women walking alone to death with rocks. He attacked couples parked at the lake at night, shooting the men and raping the women. He killed tailors and shop owners in their workshops with hammers, and he robbed and beat shopkeepers and taxi drivers. He kept possessions from his victims. South African reporting called him the Hammer Killer, and at the time of the trial the Deranged Killer.
That variety is why the case took so long. The Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit, the South African Police Service unit responsible for serial murder in the Johannesburg area, did not believe the killings were the work of one man, and built two separate offender profiles: one for the Wemmer Pan murderer and one for the Hammer murderer. They were investigated as two series for more than a year.
What joined them was a piece of paper. Maake had signed a lay-by slip at one of the shops he attacked, and the signature placed the same man in both sets of crimes.
He was arrested on December 23, 1997 as a suspect in the Wemmer Pan killings and initially acknowledged responsibility. A month later he also admitted the Hammer murders. He cooperated with detectives on several occasions, driving with them around the area and pointing out where the crimes had happened.
That exercise produced something unusual. The locations he identified were fed into Geographic Information Systems and crime-mapping software to produce diagrams of the geographic spread of the series, and the Wemmer Pan trial became one of the earliest South African prosecutions to use GIS evidence in court. The resulting geographic profile showed the killings clustered around his two homes, his place of work, and the houses of his brother and his girlfriend.
He was convicted on September 6, 2000 on 114 of the 134 charges against him: twenty-seven murders, twenty-six attempted murders, fourteen rapes, forty-one aggravated robberies and a long list of lesser offences. He received twenty-seven life sentences, one for each murder, plus 1,159 years and three months, a total usually reported as 1,340 years and among the longest ever imposed in South Africa.
He was charged with thirty-five murders and convicted of twenty-seven. He is often described as an atypical case because he had no fixed victim type and no fixed weapon, and no motive was ever established. Having admitted responsibility at the outset, he has since maintained his innocence.