Constable Luyanda Ngcizela was twenty-one and a serving policewoman. Her body was found at a bus stop at Empa, near Mthatha, on May 28, 1997. She had been strangled with electrical wire. Four days later, on June 1, Nompumelelo Mpushe, twenty-six, a secretary at the Eastern Cape provincial legislature, was killed; her body was found near Fort Jackson, outside East London.
The killings went on through the winter and spring. Cynthia Ndlaku was the wife of a Methodist minister in Port Elizabeth. Prasella Dayal, forty-one, and her daughter Rishmi, five, were from East London. Several of the victims had family connections to well-known people in the province.
The last was a girl in his own household. Sonia, his stepdaughter, was fifteen. In October 1997 she was raped and strangled and left half-dressed in an empty room in KwaZakhele, the township outside Port Elizabeth where he lived. Her surname appears as Zanto in some accounts and Zinto in others.
Nicholas Lungisa Ncama was about twenty-eight, a martial arts enthusiast known locally as Ponky; the press called him the East Cape Killer. He was arrested in November 1997 and appeared in court in December. On April 3, 1998, while he was taking detectives around a house to point out exhibits, he got away from them. He was recaptured before trial.
He was tried in the High Court at Grahamstown and sentenced on December 17, 1998 to life imprisonment and an effective forty-two years. The convictions, as the Daily Dispatch reported them, covered three murders, those of Luyanda Ngcizela, Nompumelelo Mpushe and his stepdaughter, together with one count of rape, one of indecent assault on the girl, and one of attempted rape. The deaths of Cynthia Ndlaku and of Prasella and Rishmi Dayal are attributed to him but were not among the murders he was convicted of, and the available sources do not say why.
Some summaries give the date of the conviction as 1997; the sentence was passed in December 1998, and no source places the trial earlier.
Because he was sentenced before October 1, 2004, he falls under the transitional rules for South African life prisoners, who become eligible to be considered for parole after twenty years however many sentences they carry. For a sentence passed in December 1998, that point came in 2018, or earlier if time held before trial was credited. Eligibility is not release, and no parole decision in his case has been published.