Moses Sithole

Victims

38 murder convictions - plus 40 rapes and 6 robberies

Years active

1994 - 1995

Location

Pretoria/Gauteng, South Africa

Method

Ligature strangulation

Status

Arrested on October 18, 1995. Convicted in 1997 on thirty-eight counts of murder, forty of rape and six of robbery, and sentenced on December 5, 1997 to fifty years for each murder, twelve for each rape and five for each robbery - 2,410 years in total, to run consecutively, with a direction that he serve at least 930 before parole. The judge chose that number deliberately over life imprisonment. A life sentence in South Africa carries parole eligibility after twenty-five years, which would have fallen in 2020; Judge Curlewis said he did not have sufficient confidence in the prison authorities or the parole boards to impose one. He was held at C-Max, the maximum security section of Pretoria Central Prison, and is now held at Mangaung Correctional center in Bloemfontein. He is 61. He was reported HIV positive at the time of his arrest in 1995 and receives treatment in prison. No release is in prospect.

Moses Sithole was born in Vosloorus, on the East Rand, in 1964. He had served time for rape, and after his release he set up an organization called Youth Against Human Abuse, which purported to campaign against child abuse and which gave him standing and an office.

Between July 1994 and October 1995, in the first two years after the end of apartheid, he killed thirty-eight women in the Atteridgeville, Boksburg and Cleveland areas around Pretoria and Johannesburg. He approached them with the offer of a job, which in that period and place was an offer very few unemployed women could refuse, took them to open veld on the pretext of an interview or a site visit, raped them, strangled them with their own underwear and left them tied. South African reporting called him the ABC Murderer, after Atteridgeville, Boksburg and Cleveland where the bodies were found, and the Gauteng Killer.

The police faced three apparently separate series in three areas before they were linked. Sithole telephoned a newspaper journalist during the manhunt and gave an interview claiming to be the killer and describing his motive as revenge on women for a false rape accusation.

He was arrested on October 18, 1995, after a struggle in which he was shot in the stomach. He was convicted in 1997 on thirty-eight counts of murder, forty of rape and six of robbery, and sentenced to fifty years for each murder, making 2,410 years in total, with the judge specifying he serve at least 930. He is at Mangaung. He is South Africa's most prolific convicted killer.