When the police finally cornered Mukosi Freddy Mulaudzi at Mulodi in 2006, he was folded up inside a refrigerator that no longer worked. The detail came out in the Thohoyandou High Court on August 18, 2008, the day Judge Godfrey Hetisani began delivering judgment on twenty-six counts of murder, attempted murder, rape, robbery and theft. The police had been looking for him a long time. "We have been hunting this guy for about 10 years," Senior Superintendent Motlafela Mojapelo told reporters after the arrest.
He had been in their hands before. In 1991 he was convicted on twenty serious counts, two of them murder, and given two life sentences and many years besides. He was sent to Baviaanspoort Prison, outside Pretoria, and he got out. The police said at the time of his arrest that the escape was in 1996, which fits the superintendent's ten years; the Sowetan's reports of the 2008 trial put it in 1999. The record available does not say how he escaped.
Mulaudzi came from Mandala Village in the Venda area of Limpopo; English-language Wikipedia gives his birthplace as Maelula. He left school in standard two in 1980 and lived on odd jobs. The account of his record put before the court began with a conviction for theft in 1985, for which he was fined a hundred and twenty rand. The Sowetan, reporting the sentence, said his first crimes that year, when he was twenty-one, were rapes and murders in Makhado. The two accounts cannot both describe the same beginning, and neither is supported by a published judgment.
From 2004 he was active again in the Siloam and Levubu areas, in the hills north of Thohoyandou: attempted murders, housebreakings, armed robberies and assaults. One of the attempted murders, of Margareth Nembudani in June 2004, was among the counts that went to trial. He robbed a policeman, Joseph Magonono, of his service pistol, which was never found.
The killings began in June 2005 with Jeanet Dama and Marvel Dama. On the night of August 20 or 21 that year he killed Maria Munyai and tried to kill Dakalo Munyai in the same attack.
Shonisani Thinandavha was raped and killed on the night of July 8 or 9, 2006. Parts of her body were cut away and taken, and they were never recovered. Less than a month later, on August 4, he went into the home of Phophi Tracy Radzilani, thirty, in Tshedza village. She was killed with a sharp object. Her two small children were burned alive in their bedroom, and household goods were carried out of the house. Wikipedia names the children as Rotondwa, seven, and Moses Mushiana, five; other accounts of the convictions name them Moses and Shumani Mushiana.
On the night of August 16 or 17 he reached a house in Thohoyandou where Ndivhuwo Winnity Tshilimandila, nineteen, lived with her cousins. He raped her and killed her. The three cousins, Nyadzeni Sivhugwana, fourteen, Shumani, ten, and Levhalesani Maxwell, seven, were hacked to death.
The Tshilimandila killings were what he first appeared in court for. A report by IOL on October 11, 2006 says he had been arrested that Monday, was brought briefly before the court on seven new counts of murder, rape, and housebreaking and theft, and was held over to November for further investigation. Some later accounts place his capture in July 2006, which cannot be reconciled with the August killings he was convicted of.
At the trial Mulaudzi pleaded guilty to some charges and not guilty to others, and then said nothing. He did not take the stand, and the witnesses' evidence went unchallenged. The prosecutor, Manyuha, told the judge that his silence was no proof of innocence. His advocate, James Manwadu, replied that silence could not make him liable for every charge in the indictment, and asked the court to decide each count on what the witnesses had actually said. The judge noted with concern that much of what had been taken from the victims had never been recovered.
The state's case on sentence was that every offense had been committed in the dark, which made them very hard to investigate, and that almost every victim was a woman or a child. In some instances, the prosecutor said, Mulaudzi had wiped out an entire family so that no one would be left to identify him, and his readiness to kill a heavily pregnant woman spoke for itself.
Manwadu asked for leniency. He described a broken home and a polygamist father who could not provide for his son, the early end of schooling, a life of odd jobs and an unemployed wife, and he argued that his client had pleaded guilty to most of the charges, had cooperated with the police, was remorseful and could be rehabilitated. The state said his record showed a man who repeated the same crimes, and denied that he had cooperated at all: the missing body parts and the policeman's pistol had never been handed over.
Hetisani adjourned before passing sentence, saying that he lacked the wisdom of Solomon and needed time to pray. When he returned he rejected the plea. "I doubt that rehabilitation is possible and not all people are correctable," he said, and he agreed with the state that Mulaudzi was merciless and ruthless and did not want to change. He found that the man had made a habit of attacking women and children, hardly ever a man, and that he had robbed them for their property. "It is the duty of the justice system to protect those who cannot defend themselves from merciless people like you," he told him.
The sentence was eleven life terms. The Sowetan reported it on August 22, 2008 as handed down the day before, with 146 years on top; other accounts give the date as August 28 and the added terms as about two hundred years. Mulaudzi's own response, according to the Sowetan, was two words: "It's nothing."
The packed courtroom took the sentence with mixed feelings. Some relatives and neighbors of the dead said it would change nothing, because he might escape again and carry on as before. Others stayed outside the court celebrating long after it was over.
The figure of thirteen joins the eleven murders proved in 2008 to the two in the 1991 case. The two series are separate prosecutions, many years apart, and the second happened only because he was out of prison.