Norman Afzal Simons was a primary school teacher in Mitchells Plain, one of the townships built on the Cape Flats outside Cape Town under apartheid's forced removals.
Between 1986 and 1994 twenty-two boys aged between nine and thirteen were taken from railway stations and streets around Mitchells Plain, sexually assaulted, and strangled with pieces of their own clothing. Their bodies were left in the bush at Mitchells Plain and in the dunes, often with the hands tied behind the back. The press called the unknown offender the Station Strangler, and the case ran for eight years through the last years of apartheid and the transition, in an area where police resources were minimal and community trust was lower still.
Simons was arrested in 1994 after the last victim, Elroy van Rooyen, was found. He was convicted in 1995 of that one murder and of kidnapping and sentenced to twenty-five years, extended to life.
He was convicted of one. He was never tried for the other twenty-one, and the evidence connecting him to them was never tested in court. Some investigators and a good deal of the local community have never accepted that the series was one man.
He was granted parole and released in 2023 after twenty-eight years, which caused substantial public objection in Cape Town. The twenty-one other killings remain formally unsolved.