On a Saturday in August 2006, hundreds of people gathered in the City of Tshwane, the municipality that takes in Pretoria, to bury five women whom no one had come forward to claim. They had been found dead since January in open fields near Centurion, south of Pretoria. Nine bodies had been found by then, and only four had been identified by friends or family. The day before, residents of the townships nearby had gathered beside a main road, some holding placards that read "Don't kill us." The mayor, Gwen Ramokgopa, told the mourners that the dead women "will expect us to double and triple our efforts to ensure that women are respected, women are safe."
At that point the police were still not saying publicly that one man was responsible. Superintendent Morne van Wyk told Reuters that police psychologists were trying to work out "if these are all the work of one person, but at this stage there is no evidence pointing in that direction."
Within weeks the police had a suspect. He was Richard Jabulani Nyauza, a man who lived in the Olievenhoutbosch informal settlement, close to where the bodies were being found. In November 2007 a judge in the Pretoria High Court would find him guilty of murdering sixteen women, the eleven found in 2006 and five more found in the same area in 2002, and would sentence him to sixteen terms of life imprisonment.
The case is known mainly for two things. The first is the gap: the killings stopped at the end of 2002 when Nyauza was jailed on an unrelated rape charge, and began again within weeks of his release at the end of 2005. The second is the way the case was proved. For eight of the sixteen murders there was no direct evidence against him. The court convicted him of those killings largely on the testimony of a police psychologist who told the court that all sixteen had been committed by one man.
Very little about Nyauza's early life appears in the press record. Reports during the trial gave his age as 36 in October 2007; Sapa, writing on the day of sentencing, gave it as 37 and described him as a father of two. The reports do not give his place or date of birth, his family background, his schooling or where he came from before Olievenhoutbosch.
What the court heard about his adult life came mostly from Nyauza himself. He was employed, and in August 2006 he was driving a bakkie, a light pickup truck, delivering animal feed to farms west of Pretoria. He was HIV positive. He described himself as a member of the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) and told the court he wore its badge at all times. He also described himself, in his own testimony, as a man who loved women, who paid many of them for sex and who had sex with "maybe more than 100" women in 2006 alone. The prosecutor said he painted himself as a Casanova.
The Sapa reports describe him as living in the Olievenhoutbosch informal settlement. One Pretoria News report from the sentencing describes the 2002 bodies as dumped "a stone's throw from his home in Diepsloot," a township north of Johannesburg. The other reports, and the judgment as Sapa summarized it, place his home in Olievenhoutbosch, about 2.5 kilometers from where the bodies were found.
The first series began in January 2002, the start of the period named in the charge sheet. Over that year the bodies of five women were found in the Rooihuiskraal and Olievenhoutbosch area of Centurion. The Pretoria News reported the State's case that they had been left along the Krugersdorp highway; a later TimesLIVE account described them as found in a quarry in the Pretoria area.
None of the five was ever identified. The court heard that they had been left naked or partly undressed, posed in sexual positions. In most of the 2002 cases the cause of death was blunt force trauma. The Pretoria News reported at sentencing that police at the time recognized the deaths as the work of a serial killer. Then the killings stopped.
At the end of 2002 Nyauza was arrested on a charge of raping a woman. That charge was not part of the later case, and he was acquitted of it. But the trial took a long time to come. He spent about three years in custody awaiting trial, according to Sapa, and was released at the end of 2005. No bodies with the same pattern were found while he was inside.
Early in January 2006, a few weeks after Nyauza's release, bodies began to turn up again in the same area, this time concentrated near the Rossway Quarry in Centurion. Eleven women were found dead in 2006. The pattern was the same as in 2002: the women were adult and Black, they were left in the open veld, and in nearly every case they were naked or partly undressed, some with their underwear lying beside them. This time most of them had been strangled. Others had died of blunt injuries to the head, liver or chest, and one had been drowned. Many had lain out long enough that a cause of death could not be found at all.
By the middle of August 2006, nine bodies had been found, and four of those women had been identified. The other five were buried together at the mass funeral that Saturday. The names of the four who were identified were not reported.
One of the last women killed was raped, robbed and murdered near the Rossway Quarry in August 2006. Her cellphone would be found in Nyauza's possession when he was arrested.
On August 17, 2006, Jane Seremane was standing outside the police station in Magaliesburg, a town west of Johannesburg. She was on her way home to Botswana, and she was pregnant. A man driving a bakkie offered her a lift.
He drove first to a nearby farm, where he had animal feed to drop off from the back of the vehicle. Then he turned off onto a dirt road and stopped. He attacked her with a screwdriver, stabbing her again and again in the face, neck and body. He tried to strangle her, took off her underwear and used it to throttle her. Then he dumped her in a ditch and left her there for dead. He took everything she had with her.
She survived. She lost the baby she was carrying. She lost the sight of her left eye and, according to Sapa, much of the use of one hand. Fourteen months later she was the State's only surviving witness to what the man had done, and in court she identified him as Richard Nyauza.
By the time the toll in Centurion reached double figures, the South African Police Service had asked its Investigative Psychology Unit to help find the killer. The unit, a small team of psychologists and detectives that the police had set up in 1994, was then led by Senior Superintendent Dr. Gerard Labuschagne. He also headed what was called the 2006 Quarry Serial Murder task team, according to a September 2026 Daily Maverick profile, and the task team's work led to Nyauza's arrest.
The press record of how the task team found Nyauza is thin. What is known comes from the evidence later led at trial, which tied him to the murders in four ways.
The first was DNA. Nyauza's DNA was found inside the bodies of four of the dead women: the last body found in the 2002 series and three of the bodies found in 2006. Two of those four women have never been identified, according to News24.
The second was cellphones. When he was arrested, the police found the cellphone and SIM card of one of the dead women at his home. That was the woman killed near the Rossway Quarry in August 2006. A SIM card from a phone in his possession had also been used in another victim's cellphone for about a month.
The third was Jane Seremane, who survived to describe the lift, the bakkie, the screwdriver and the ditch, and who picked him out.
The fourth was Nyauza himself. After his arrest he took police to seven of the murder scenes and pointed them out, and the pointing-out was photographed. He also made a statement to police. According to the prosecution, he told them his attacks were driven by a woman who had infected him with HIV, and that because a woman had given him AIDS, he felt women did not deserve to live.
The date of the arrest varies by a few weeks between sources. The Pretoria News, summarizing the State's case in November 2007, said the killings stopped when police arrested Nyauza in August 2006. The American website CrimeLibrary, reporting from Pretoria in November 2006, said investigators from the Wierda Bridge police station in Centurion arrested him in September and charged him at first with a single count of murder. He was then suspected of killing at least fifteen women in Olievenhoutbosch and Centurion. Over the following weeks prosecutors added fourteen more murder counts and further counts of attempted murder, rape and robbery. At a short court appearance on November 9, 2006, Nyauza told the court he would represent himself.
By the time of trial the indictment had grown to twenty-four counts. They alleged that between January 2002 and August 2006 he had murdered sixteen women, raped four of them, robbed three, and tried to murder Jane Seremane.
The trial opened in the Pretoria High Court on Tuesday, October 23, 2007, before Judge John Murphy. The prosecutor was JP Marais. Nyauza, now represented by counsel, came to court neatly dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and, in a raspy voice, pleaded not guilty to all twenty-four counts. He chose not to explain his pleas. When the rape count was put to him he said only: "When I love a woman, I give her money and we go together, but I deny the rape."
Jane Seremane testified that week. She told Judge Murphy that Nyauza was "the man who did it to me." Asked how she felt about what had happened to her, she said: "I relive this incident every day. When I look at him I wish I can immediately take away his life." Nyauza laughed out loud in the dock as she said it.
The center of the State's case was Labuschagne. The DNA, the cellphones and the pointing-out connected Nyauza directly to some of the murders. For eight of them there was no direct evidence at all. To reach those eight, the prosecution had to show that all sixteen women had been killed by the same man.
Labuschagne's evidence was a linkage analysis, a structured comparison of the crimes themselves: who the victims were, how they were approached, how they were killed, where and how they were left. He told the court that the sixteen murders, in 2002 and 2006, near Olievenhoutbosch and the Rossway Quarry, were in his opinion the work of one offender with a particular mindset. The victims shared a common profile: all were adult Black women. In fourteen of the sixteen scenes, according to the State, there was a sexual theme, with the bodies left naked or with underwear beside them. Marais argued that the same method had been used throughout and that the women had been left in similar sexual poses.
Labuschagne was careful about the limit of what he was saying. "These crimes were the work of one individual," he told the court. "It's for the court to determine who is responsible."
Asked about Nyauza's laughter during Seremane's testimony, he said it would not surprise him, because people who committed crimes of this kind often lacked empathy or sympathy for others.
Nyauza's lawyers argued that it was a case of mistaken identity. Nyauza testified on Tuesday, October 30. He said he knew nothing about the killings. He explained the DNA by saying he had had consensual sex with a great many women, often without condoms even though he knew he was HIV positive, "because some women are opposed to the use of condoms." Asked if he had love relationships with women, he said: "Very much, yes."
"Like someone who was working, it so happened that I would come across a woman," he said. "We would enter into an agreement, I would give her money and we would do what we want to do." It was hard to say how many women he had slept with in 2002, he said, but he "really believed there are many in number." In 2006, he said, it had been "maybe more than 100." "There were many. You know, I loved women so much." The sex was always consensual, he said, because "when you're employed and when you're a smart dresser, naturally women would love you." He denied robbing anyone and denied attacking Jane Seremane.
He denied, too, that he had told the police that women did not deserve to live. When he was shown the photographs of himself pointing out the murder scenes, he said he had been unconscious at the time. The police, he said, had "poisoned" him rather than give him his HIV medication.
In closing argument on Wednesday, October 31, Marais asked the court to convict on all twenty-four counts. He said he was convinced that Nyauza had raped all of his victims, though only four rapes had been charged. "He paints himself as a Casanova who loves women, but I doubt if Casanova paid for sex," Marais said. "The reason why he killed is quite clear from his statement. He believed a woman gave him Aids, and that meant that women did not deserve to live."
Judge Murphy gave judgment on Monday, November 5, 2007. (CrimeLibrary's news summary says the convictions came the week before sentencing; the Sapa and Pretoria News reports place judgment and sentence on the same Monday.) He convicted Nyauza on all twenty-four counts, including all sixteen murders. He found Nyauza arrogant and evasive in the witness box and deceitful, and said his evidence went beyond the realm of reasonable belief. He rejected the claim of innocence and the explanation that Nyauza's DNA was inside four of the women because he was, as Sapa paraphrased it, "a man of exceptional sexual prowess."
The judge relied on the DNA, the cellphone evidence and the seven pointings-out. He also accepted Labuschagne's linkage analysis and its conclusion that one man had murdered all sixteen women, even in the cases where there was no direct evidence against Nyauza. Taken together, the court found that the one man was Nyauza.
Before sentence Nyauza went back into the witness box. He told the court he was a member of the ZCC and wore its badge. "This must surely prove to you that I could not have done what I am accused of," he said. "I am a man of God." It did not matter what he said in mitigation, he added, because the judge had already made up his mind. Marais told him that his own Bible said one should not kill and rape. "Exactly. I agree with you," Nyauza replied. "The Bible also said you must not prejudge."
Marais asked for life. In his opinion, he said, Nyauza was a psychopath, and he pointed to Nyauza's laughter in the dock while Seremane spoke. "He is probably one of the worst criminals I have come across in my life," Marais said.
Murphy imposed sixteen terms of life imprisonment for the sixteen murders and a further 140 years for the rapes, robberies and attempted murder. "Whatever your personal circumstances, there is only one sentence which can be imposed, and that is life," he told Nyauza. "You are an evil, perverted serial murderer who poses an extreme danger to society in general and women in particular." Given the serial nature of the crimes, he said, the court had to impose a sentence that would remove Nyauza from society permanently. Because Nyauza showed no remorse and did not acknowledge what he had done, the judge saw little prospect of rehabilitation, and he recommended that Nyauza stay in prison for the rest of his natural life.
Nyauza did not seem troubled. He smiled, held a packet of cigarettes in his cuffed hands and told reporters as he was led down to the cells: "I feel nothing. They're doing too little. It changes nothing." Before he went, he shook Labuschagne's hand several times.
Sixteen women died, and the record holds almost nothing about who they were. That is the hardest fact in the case and the one most worth stating plainly.
The five women found in 2002 were never identified. Of the eleven found in 2006, four had been identified by family or friends by the middle of August 2006, and the press never printed their names. Two of the four women whose bodies carried Nyauza's DNA were never identified. In January 2022, fifteen years after the trial, TimesLIVE reported that eleven of the sixteen victims were still unidentified, and the True Crime South Africa podcast devoted an episode to asking why.
What can be said about them comes from where and how they were found. All were adult Black women. All were found in open ground on the edge of Olievenhoutbosch, an informal settlement south of Pretoria, or near the Rossway Quarry in Centurion, within a few kilometers of where Nyauza lived. At least two of the dead women had cellphones that were later traced to Nyauza. Some were robbed. The prosecutor believed that all of them were raped. Most lay in the veld long enough that the pathologists could not say how they died. Five of them were buried together in August 2006, at a funeral attended by city officials and hundreds of strangers, because no one who knew them had come forward.
The one woman who lived is named. Jane Seremane was pregnant and on her way home to Botswana when she accepted a lift outside a police station. She lost her child, the sight of one eye and much of the use of one hand. She came to court, identified the man who did it and told him she relived it every day.
The three-year gap was central to the case and to how it has been told since. The murders stopped when Nyauza was taken into custody at the end of 2002 and began again shortly after he was released at the end of 2005. The prosecution put it to the court, and the court and the press repeated it at sentencing.
The gap is circumstantial evidence, and on its own it would prove little. Its weight in the case came from what lay on either side of it: DNA from the last body of 2002 and from three bodies of 2006, the phones, the pointing-out, and the linkage analysis that tied the two series to each other.
No appeal against the conviction or sentence has been reported, and no appeal judgment in Nyauza's name has come to light. That does not rule one out, but none is mentioned in the 2019 Mail & Guardian profile of Labuschagne, the January 2022 TimesLIVE report or the September 2026 Daily Maverick reference to the case, each of which describes the case as ending in sixteen life sentences.
In January 2022, TimesLIVE reported, Nyauza was serving sixteen life terms. The press has not said in which prison he is held, and no parole application has been reported. Judge Murphy's words at sentencing were a recommendation that Nyauza remain in prison for the rest of his natural life.
For Labuschagne and the police unit he led, the case became a reference point. TimesLIVE wrote in 2022 that the investigation ended in a legal precedent being set around linkage analysis evidence: a South African court had convicted a man of murders on which there was no direct evidence, on the strength of a psychologist's analysis that one offender had committed them all alongside murders where there was. Labuschagne, who led the police psychology section for about fourteen years before resigning in 2016, told the Mail & Guardian in 2019 that he had worked on 110 serial murder cases, including that of the "Quarry murderer" Richard Jabulani Nyauza. He said that no case his unit worked had ended in an acquittal. In September 2026, when the Daily Maverick consulted him about a new series of killings of women in Ekurhuleni, it still introduced him as the man who headed the 2006 Quarry Serial Murder task team that led to Nyauza's arrest.
Proven by conviction: sixteen murders in 2002 and 2006, four rapes, three robberies and the attempted murder of Jane Seremane. For eight of the murders the evidence was direct (DNA, the victims' phones, or Nyauza's pointing-out of the scene); for the other eight the conviction rests on the linkage analysis accepted by the court.
Alleged but not charged: the prosecutor said he was convinced that all the victims had been raped. Only four rapes were charged and proved.
Nyauza's account: he denied every charge, said his DNA was there because of consensual paid sex, said he was unconscious when photographed at the scenes, and denied telling police that women did not deserve to live because a woman had infected him. The court rejected his account.
Not established in the public record: the identities of most of the victims; how the task team first identified Nyauza in August or September 2006; his early life; the place of his imprisonment; any appeal.
January 2002: start of the period covered by the charges.
2002: five women found dead in the Rooihuiskraal and Olievenhoutbosch area of Centurion. None is ever identified.
End of 2002: Nyauza arrested on an unrelated rape charge. The killings stop.
End of 2005: after about three years awaiting trial, Nyauza is acquitted and released.
Early January 2006: bodies begin to be found again near Olievenhoutbosch and the Rossway Quarry.
August 17, 2006: Jane Seremane is attacked after accepting a lift in Magaliesburg; she survives.
About August 18 to 19, 2006: residents protest beside a main road; five unidentified victims are buried at a mass funeral attended by Tshwane mayor Gwen Ramokgopa. Nine bodies have been found since January.
August 2006 (Pretoria News) or September 2006 (CrimeLibrary): Nyauza arrested, with a victim's cellphone in his possession, and charged with one murder.
November 9, 2006: in court, with further murder, rape, robbery and attempted murder counts added, he says he will represent himself.
October 23, 2007: trial opens in the Pretoria High Court before Judge John Murphy; Nyauza pleads not guilty to 24 counts.
October 2007: Jane Seremane and Dr. Gerard Labuschagne testify.
October 30, 2007: Nyauza testifies in his own defense.
October 31, 2007: closing argument by prosecutor JP Marais.
November 5, 2007: Nyauza convicted on all 24 counts and sentenced to 16 life terms plus 140 years.
July 5, 2019: Mail & Guardian profile of Labuschagne cites the Nyauza case among his 110 serial murder cases.
January 14, 2022: TimesLIVE reports that 11 of the 16 victims remain unidentified; latest source on his status.