Mukosi Mulaudzi came from Mandala Village in the Venda area of Limpopo province, South Africa, and was forty-six at his sentencing in 2008. He left school in standard two in 1980, lived on odd jobs, and his first conviction was for theft in 1985, for which he was fined a hundred and twenty rand.
In 1991 he was convicted on twenty serious counts, two of them murder, and was given two life sentences and many years besides. He was sent to Baviaanspoort Prison in Gauteng. In 1996 he escaped. South African reporting called him the Limpopo serial killer.
From June 2004 he began again, and over about two years committed more than twenty serious offences in Venda: housebreaking, robbery, assault, rape, attempted murder and murder. He was charged on twenty-eight counts, of which two were withdrawn before the trial began.
He was convicted of eleven murders. The court named every one of them: Jeanet Dama and Marvel Dama in June 2005; Maria Munyai on August 20 or 21, 2005; Phophi Radzilani, Moses Mushiana and Shumani Mushiana on August 4, 2006; Lavhelesani, Shumani and Nyadzani Sivhugwana on August 16 or 17, 2006; Winnietjie Tshilimandila, whom he also raped; and Shonisani Thinandavha on July 8 or 9, 2006, also preceded by a rape. Three of the eleven were members of one family, killed on the same night, and two more were another family.
He also attempted the murder of Margareth Nembudani in June 2004 and of Dakalo Munyai on the same night that Maria Munyai was killed, and robbed a policeman, Joseph Magonono, of his service firearm, which was never recovered.
The methods are recorded by the judge. Some victims were burnt alive, some were hacked with an axe, and some had body parts removed which were never found. The prosecutor said all the offences were committed in the dark, which made them very hard to investigate, and that almost every victim was a woman or a child. He said that in some instances Mulaudzi had wiped out an entire family in order to avoid detection, and that his willingness to kill a heavily pregnant woman spoke for itself.
His counsel asked for leniency, citing a broken family, a father who could not provide for him, leaving school early, subsistence on odd jobs and an unemployed wife, and argued that he had pleaded guilty to most of the charges, had cooperated with the police, was remorseful and could be rehabilitated. The state replied that his record showed he repeated the same crimes and was not rehabilitation material, and denied that he had cooperated at all, pointing out that the missing body parts and the stolen firearm were never found.
Judge Godfrey Hetisani adjourned before passing sentence, saying that he lacked the wisdom of Solomon and needed time to pray. On August 28, 2008 he imposed eleven life sentences and terms amounting to about two hundred years.
The sentence was received with mixed feelings in the packed courtroom. Some family and community members said it would serve no purpose because he might escape again and carry on as before. Others celebrated outside the court long after it was over.
The figure of thirteen in this archive is the eleven murders proved in 2008 together with the two he was convicted of in 1991. They are separate cases, seventeen years apart, and the second series happened only because he got out of prison.