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Pretoria Railway Killer Themba Vilakazi Jailed for Life for Three 2005 Murders

Linked by DNA after a 2012 rape arrest, the self-described Satanist pleaded guilty to killing three men found along Pretoria's railway tracks.

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People in jackets and beanies wait on a low concrete wall outside a 1970s face-brick building under bare winter trees and a hard blue sky. Not the actual court.

For ten years nobody knew who had killed the three men found along the railway lines of Pretoria in 2005. On Wednesday, August 5, 2015, Themba Vilakazi, a 33-year-old from Soshanguve, was sentenced to life imprisonment for all three, two days after pleading guilty to their murders. The sentence was handed down by the High Court sitting as the Pretoria North Circuit Court.

The bodies had been found months apart: one in July, one in August and one in November 2005. All three were black men. The first two were naked, with several stab wounds to the chest, and their clothes lay at the scene. At the third, police recovered the knife. According to court papers reported by the Pretoria News, the first man was killed on July 23, 2005, and died of multiple stab wounds to the chest. Michael Mokaba was stabbed to death that August, with wounds to his neck and chest. Aaron Fortune Rapela Masango was stabbed in the neck on November 11.

The case broke years later, in a different crime. In 2012 Vilakazi was arrested for raping an 18-year-old man, and the DNA taken in that case matched all three killings.

When he pleaded guilty on Monday, August 3, Vilakazi told the court he was a Satanist and that he had received instructions from the underworld to kill the three men. He has the numbers 666 tattooed across his forehead. The prosecution did not accept that account. Arguing for a heavy sentence, State Advocate Bakedi Maoke said he had pleaded guilty only because the evidence against him was overwhelming, that he had killed all three in a brutal manner, and that he showed regret, not remorse. He had not been driven by his religion or his circumstances, she said, and that greatly reduced his chances of rehabilitation; he deserved to be removed from society permanently. Because two of the men were found naked, the court considered that the killings were sexually motivated.

Brigadier Gerard Labuschagne, commander of the South African Police Service's Investigative Psychology Section, prepared a pre-sentencing report. He classified Vilakazi as a serial murderer, having killed more than two people on separate occasions. "Experts concur that irrespective of how or why a person became a serial murderer, it is ultimately their choice to set out and commit murder," he wrote. "The current viewpoint is that serial murderers cannot be rehabilitated." The National Prosecuting Authority said it welcomed the sentence.

What this story covers. The sentence, court, dates, the DNA link and the prosecutor's arguments come from the National Prosecuting Authority's media statement of August 6, 2015, which says "life imprisonment" and does not list any additional terms. The victims' names, the dates of the killings, the plea day and Labuschagne's report come from the Pretoria News report of August 5, 2015, published on IOL. One later local report described one of the victims as a boy; the court papers quoted at sentencing call all three men, and no ages are given here. The image is an illustration of a South African government building, not the real Pretoria court.

Sources