Azwitheli Lactor Mugwebu, an official of the Northern Province agriculture department, was shot at least fourteen times in October 1997 near Thohoyandou, in the former Venda homeland in the far north of South Africa. He was one of seven people killed in the area between May 1996 and January 1998 by the man the press came to call the lover's lane killer. Many of his victims were couples he found making love in parked cars.
The others were Constance Khosa, thirty-four; Inspector Thomas Gundula, thirty-six, of the Vhuwani police; Sergeant Bernard Nevhuthalu, forty-six, of the Pietersburg police; Lawrence Muofhe, thirty-three; Doris Kenyaletso Ravutho; and Johannes Mukhawana. Two of the seven were policemen. The killer took cars, money and guns.
He was Mbulaheni David Mmbengwa, born in the area, one of seven children, who had left school at standard five. His birth is given as October 1966 in one reference work, while the Mail and Guardian gave his age as thirty-seven at sentencing in 2001. He had been arrested once already, on November 14, 1996, at Silverton, outside Pretoria, and linked to a string of offenses, but escaped from the Silverton police station the same day. Commentators on the case have noted that his early killings looked like ordinary robberies and that only later did the pattern of attacks on couples emerge, which delayed the police in seeing a series.
The hunt that followed drew in Elmarie Myburgh, one of the South African Police Service's leading investigative psychologists, who helped track him. He was run to ground in a rented shack in Kagiso, on the West Rand, far from Venda. When he was rearrested, twenty-three charges were laid against him, many of them murder.
In late July 2001, before a packed Thohoyandou High Court, Judge Gibson Makhanya sentenced him to seven terms of life imprisonment and said he did not deserve to return to the community. The further forty-five years were made up of twenty for two robberies, fifteen for robbery with aggravating circumstances, five for assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, three for escape, and three for illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition.