When Judge David Curlewis sentenced Moses Sithole in the Pretoria High Court in December 1997, he reached a total of 2,410 years. He then ruled that Sithole could not be considered for parole for 930 years. No prison system can administer such a sentence. It was a statement, addressed to a country that had spent two years frightened and had watched its new police service struggle to read a pattern in a scatter of crimes.
The cases that follow come from Morocco, South Africa, Egypt and Kenya, and they span 1906 to 2021. They were handled by an imperial court under foreign pressure, by hangmen in Pretoria, by a profiler working with a task force, by an Egyptian criminal court and by a Kenyan police service whose prisoner walked out of a cell. In several of them the public learned about the accused from a newspaper before it learned anything from a judge.
The oldest case here survives almost entirely as a cable. In the spring of 1906, women had gone missing in Marrakesh, and the authorities arrested Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi, an older man who mended shoes and also worked as a public letter-writer. An older woman said to have worked with him was said to have named him. He was reported to have confessed. According to a cable from Tangier, printed in an American newspaper that June and retold by the Moroccan news site Yabiladi in 2020, he was held responsible for the deaths of 36 young women. No court record, judge or description of a trial survives in the reports. None of the women is named, and no cause of death is given.
Morocco was then an independent sultanate under Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz, and an international conference at Algeciras, Spain, was deciding its future that year. Foreign governments kept representatives in the country, and the United States had raised its consulate at Tangier to a legation in March 1905, the State Department’s Office of the Historian records. The sentence was the point at which that presence mattered. By the 1906 cable, the sultan’s own signature was on an order of crucifixion, set for May 2. Foreign officials in Morocco objected to it as cruel and inhumane and intervened with the sultan, and it was not carried out. The authorities then announced that he would be beheaded, and that was not carried out either. Instead, from May 15, he was taken to the market each day and flogged in public. On Monday, June 11, 1906, a market day, he was walled up alive before a crowd that Yabiladi, relaying the cable, puts in the thousands. He was dead within about two days; Arabic Post gives June 13.
The writer Saeida Rouass, who spent years on the case and made it the basis of a novel, told Yabiladi that she searched for the women and came across only the number. The record contains a total, a sentence that was changed twice under outside pressure, and a date.
Daisy Louisa de Melker was hanged at Pretoria Central Prison, now Kgosi Mampuru II, on the morning of December 30, 1932. She was convicted in November of the murder of her son, Rhodes Cecil Cowle, 20, by arsenic poisoning. She was acquitted, at the same trial, of the murders of her first and second husbands, William Alfred Cowle and Robert Sproat, who had died in 1923 and 1927. The court held the evidence on those two counts insufficient. She never confessed.
The sequence matters more than the verdict. Ted Botha, whose 2023 biography is excerpted in the Mail & Guardian, reconstructs the first husband’s death from the records: two doctors attended him, one of whom asked that a bottle be given to the police before any death certificate was signed, and the doctor who performed the post-mortem named a brain hemorrhage and chronic kidney disease, either of which could have caused death. Botha writes that the bottle is not mentioned again in the record. The court that tried his widow in 1932 did not find that he had been poisoned. According to the World Rugby Museum, which has written about the case because her third husband had played for the Springboks, her second husband’s brother grew suspicious and went to the police after her son died; investigators re-examined all three deaths, and she was charged with all three.
The trial opened in Johannesburg in October 1932 and lasted about a month. The Dictionary of Women Worldwide and the World Rugby Museum agree on the timing. The Crown was led by Cyril Jarvis. She was defended by Harry Morris, with Isie Maisels as his junior; Sydney Kentridge, writing about Maisels in 1993, named it Maisels’s first famous case. Morris later wrote a book about it. She was held in 1932 at the Women’s Jail on Constitution Hill. Her third husband, the Cape Argus reported, maintained her innocence throughout the trial.
Later writing has raised other deaths in her life, among them an earlier fiancé and two or more of her infant children. None was charged and none is proven. That wider arithmetic belongs to retellings, not to a court.
Elifasi Msomi was convicted of murdering 15 people in the rural districts of southern Natal, now KwaZulu-Natal, over about 18 months in the 1950s, and he was hanged in a Pretoria prison in February 1956. That is nearly all the record offers. Time’s report of February 20, 1956, the principal contemporary source, did not give the dates of the first killing, the verdict or the hanging, and it did not name the court, the judge or any of the dead. The magazine reported that he was caught on a petty theft charge and then identified as the man wanted for the killings, that he admitted them, and that nine witnesses, chiefs among them, attended the hanging at their own request. Drum magazine, in a 1968 retrospective quoted by the Dictionary of South African English, wrote that at his trial he confessed to all the murders and claimed he had been forced to commit them. The court did not accept that, and he was sentenced to death.
What survived him was his name. Arnold Benjamin, a staff writer for The Star in Johannesburg, wrote in Africa South of the gangs of Alexandra township, which had taken the name of the hanged Natal man. His article followed a preparatory examination at which 66 men faced more than 100 counts, among them murder, robbery, arson and extortion, and one witness told the court that robbers had warned her they were the Msomi, the kings of Alexandra. The name of a hanged man had become a brand of fear.
Moses Sithole was convicted in December 1997 of 38 murders, with other charges. The dead were 37 women and a two-year-old boy who was killed with his mother. The killings took place in 1994 and 1995, around Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria, around Boksburg on the East Rand and in Cleveland, in Johannesburg. The initials of those places gave the press its name for the man: the ABC Killer. He told the press that he had killed 76 people. That figure is his own claim. He was convicted of 38.
For most of that period the police were not looking for one man. Jan Taljaard wrote in the Mail & Guardian on September 22, 1995, that they appeared to be dealing with three separate series. The first was in Cleveland. In December 1994 police arrested a man, identified in the paper only by initials, for the killings of 15 young women in and around Cleveland. He was then shot dead by a police officer who said he had resisted while in custody. He was never tried, and police went on saying in 1995 that forensic evidence linked him conclusively to the Cleveland deaths. South African History Online, citing Keesing’s, gives a different chronology, in which the first of the crimes came to light in June 1994. The second series was near Atteridgeville, where, by September 1995, fifteen victims had been connected to a single man the press had already named. The third was near Boksburg, where, in the week before September 22, the deaths of 10 more young women were reported. The paper recorded that police were officially silent on new developments, perhaps so as not to alert the suspect, perhaps because investigators disagreed among themselves, and that rumor held the cases might be linked or the later ones copied. Most of the women were young, and many had come to the cities from rural areas. The paper wrote that rural Black women were widely regarded as near the bottom of South African society, and that the new South African Police Service, which wanted to show that it served every citizen, was finding the cases hard.
The police response was a new unit and a new method. The psychologist Micki Pistorius had set up the SAPS investigative psychology unit a year earlier. The Mail & Guardian reported in 2019 that she met the FBI profiler Robert Ressler in 1995, and that over six years leading the unit she trained more than 100 detectives in investigating serial murder. Her profile predicted that the man would contact the media, the paper reported. He did. At his trial in 1996 the court heard that the caller had spoken to two reporters at The Star, that he had given information on three murders, and that it was checked against the cases. A voice expert, Dr Leendert Jansen, testified there was "no doubt whatsoever" that the voice on the tapes was Sithole’s. The defense counsel, Eben Jordaan, said he would ask the Legal Aid Board to pay for an expert from overseas to examine the tapes. The reporter Diane de Beer, according to the Sunday Tribune’s account of a 2025 documentary, built a rapport with the caller and encouraged him to give himself up.
He was arrested at a factory in Benoni, on the East Rand, on October 18, 1995, and police announced the arrest in Pretoria the next day. Keesing’s, as summarized by South African History Online, records that police linked him to the murders of at least 37 women and a child over the previous 18 months. The Mail & Guardian reported his wife’s testimony in 1996: she had begun a relationship with him by letter while he was in prison in 1993, he was released on parole that November, they married in March 1995 and had a daughter, and he was holding meetings for an organization of his own that said it campaigned against the abuse of women and children. She was never accused of any crime.
The sentence of December 1997, as SA People and IOL report it, was 2,410 years, with no parole consideration for 930. The Mail & Guardian’s editorial of December 12, 1997, was headed "Judge Curlewis is his own." By 2012 he had been transferred to a private prison in Mangaung, in the Free State, and on November 8, 2012, The Star reported that he had lost a court challenge to the move. SA People reported in November 2025 that he was held in C-Max at Kgoši Mampuru II prison, Pretoria.
Two later South African cases show the other side of the 1990s machinery: guilty pleas, and a trial whose outcome the press stopped reporting.
For most of 2005 farm workers in Philippi, a farming area on the Cape Flats outside Cape Town, lived with a run of killings that police could not stop. Jimmy Maketta, a laborer from Grabouw who had drifted to Cape Town without finding steady work, was arrested in December 2005 in Constantia, where he was working as a painter. Captain Jonathon Morris of the police organised crime unit told the Cape High Court that the case reached him only after an initial investigation, which he called sloppy, led to the arrest of the wrong person. That person has not been named, and how long he was held has not been reported. Morris needed about two weeks. Maketta had written to two newspapers, the Son and the Voice, claiming responsibility, and Sapa reported that he had twice telephoned the police to give information. Faced with a cellphone and with letters he had written, he confessed and told police about killings they had not connected to him.
In May 2007 he pleaded guilty in the Cape High Court to 47 counts, among them 16 of murder and 19 of rape, after the state withdrew seven. On May 3 Judge Abie Motala declared him a dangerous criminal: he was to be held for 25 years and then brought back before the High Court, where a judge would decide on any release. The finding, in effect, took release away from the prison authorities. His attorney told the court that he was one of 15 children in a dysfunctional family and had left school after Grade 6. More than 50 relatives of victims gathered outside the court, and some shouted that they wanted his blood. After his arrest he told a reporter that he had given his heart to Jesus in a holding cell, and the press called him the Jesus Killer. The Weekend Argus reported in April 2022 that he had died in prison.
In Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, two women, Elaine Anderson, 59, a former crime reporter for the city’s daily, The Witness, and Patricia Kippen, 39, who worked for a bank, were killed on October 14, 2007. Within weeks two men were in court. Sibusiso Derrick Duma, a 24-year-old taxi driver, and Simphiwe Khesi, 33, pleaded guilty and each received two life sentences. Police sources told reporters in 2007 that the men might be responsible for other crimes in Pietermaritzburg and around Hillcrest. A community official said he knew of no link. In August 2009 Duma went on trial in the Pietermaritzburg High Court on 19 further counts arising from five incidents between September 9 and October 25, 2007, among them five murders and three attempted murders, and pleaded not guilty to all of them. In July 2009 Khesi had pleaded guilty to charges from one of those incidents and, according to a report the next month, received life imprisonment plus 40 years. Reports of the trial end on its opening day. The 19 counts remain allegations, and no later outcome has been reported.
Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour, known as al-Tourbini, the Egyptian word for an express train, led a gang that preyed on children who lived around Egypt’s railway stations. On May 23, 2007, the criminal court in Tanta, about 90 kilometers north of Cairo, convicted him and his deputy, Farag Samir Mahmoud, of murdering 20 children, with other charges, and of illegal possession of weapons, and sentenced both to death. Mansour was 27 and Mahmoud 25. The Associated Press, in a dispatch by Nadia Abou El-Magd printed by IOL, reported that the case had shocked Egypt. It also reported that there were no official figures for children without shelter in the country; estimates ran from 200,000 to one million.
The figures in the case never settled. The two men confessed to 20 killings, but police had accounted for only eight by the time of the verdict, the AP reported. Egypt Independent, reporting on the executions in 2010, described the two men as convicted of crimes against eight children. Daily News Egypt reported at the end of 2006 that the charges concerned the deaths of 40 children. Egypt Telegraph, in a retrospective in 2024, gave at least 32 over seven years.
The case surfaced in October 2006 in reports by an independent Egyptian daily, the AP said, and in November, after the death of a child in Shubra al-Khaimah on the edge of Cairo, police arrested seven suspects, Mansour and Mahmoud among them, Egypt Independent later reported. Daily News Egypt reported that the case had puzzled police until two men were arrested and confessed. By the end of December the paper reported that Mansour had told police he had caused a train crash at Kafr al-Dawwar in 1998 in which 58 people died. Prosecutors took the claim seriously enough to review the technical evidence from the accident. A railway official told the paper that the account was not plausible. Families of children who had been missing for years sent photographs to the prosecutor’s office so that investigators could check whether any had been among the victims; shown the picture of a boy who had been missing for three years, Mansour said he had never seen him and that he had committed so many crimes he could not remember their number.
Under Egyptian law the judge referred the death sentences to the Grand Mufti for an advisory opinion, a step required before a sentence becomes final. Five other defendants were later sentenced to terms of between three and 40 years. Mansour and Mahmoud were hanged on the morning of Thursday, December 16, 2010. Mansour’s brother told Egypt Independent that their mother fainted when she was told, and that the family had visited the week before.
On the morning of Friday, October 15, 2021, villagers in Mukhweya, in Bungoma County in western Kenya, recognized a young man walking through the area. Schoolchildren were among the first to know him, the local chief later said, and ran to tell the police. Within a short time a crowd had gathered, and it killed him before officers arrived. He was Masten Milimu Wanjala, 20.
Three months earlier, detectives in Nairobi had arrested him in Kitengela, in Kajiado County, over the deaths of two schoolboys, and on July 14, 2021, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) told the country that he had confessed to killing at least 10 children. On July 15 he was brought before Chief Magistrate Heston Nyagah at the Makadara law courts in Nairobi. He was not charged. The DCI instead applied for permission to hold him while it investigated, and the magistrate allowed 30 days, with a mention date of August 16. Police told the court that he had confessed to killing 10 more children in Machakos, Mlolongo, Kitengela, Nairobi and Kakamega, and said they needed time to travel to those places and hold identification parades. They said the killings spanned about five years, that he was 16 at the first, and that all but one of the children were boys. Dr Gathoni Mbugua, a clinical psychologist at Chiromo Hospital, told the Nation that he needed a proper assessment first and that it was unfair to label him a serial killer before that.
By September 2021 the investigation had moved to Bungoma County, where his father lived, and a DCI homicide team spent a day there with him. The visit reopened a case that had divided a village. In February 2019 a schoolboy had been killed in Sosio village in the Kamukuywa area of Kimilili. Residents blamed an elderly neighbor and set fire to his property; he was arrested on suspicion and released on bond, and he died at Webuye County Hospital before any trial. His widow told reporters that he died of the stress of being accused. In 2021 detectives said he could not have been responsible.
On the night of October 12 to 13 Wanjala escaped from a Nairobi police station, hours before he was due in court to take a plea. Two days later he was dead, more than 400 kilometers away. He was never charged with murder, never entered a plea and was never convicted of anything. What is known about the children’s deaths comes from police statements, court filings for his detention and what investigators, families and villagers told reporters, and none of it was tested before a judge. The only criminal case his escape produced was against three police officers who were on duty that night, charged with aiding a prisoner to escape and neglect of duty. They were released on bail of 100,000 shillings. In September 2024, The Standard reported, the court ruled that they had a case to answer.
The first thing they share is that the sentence says more about the state than about the crime. Morocco in 1906 changed a punishment twice because foreign officials asked it to. Pretoria in 1997 issued a term that no one could serve, as a message. Egypt required an advisory opinion from its Grand Mufti before it could carry out a verdict. Kenya, in the only case in this group that never reached a charge, could not hold the man it had announced to the country.
The second is the order of knowledge. Sithole telephoned a newspaper. The Mail & Guardian was describing three separate series of murders before the police would say publicly that they might be linked. The al-Tourbini case first surfaced in an independent Egyptian daily, the AP said. Daily News Egypt carried a claim about a train crash that prosecutors took seriously enough to examine. Wanjala was described as a serial killer in a police announcement in July 2021 and was dead before any court heard from him.
The third is the wrong man. Cleveland in 1994 produced an arrest and a death before trial, with police still saying in 1995 that forensic evidence tied that man to the deaths. Maketta’s first inquiry arrested someone else. A village in Bungoma burned an old man’s property over a child’s death that detectives later said he could not have caused. The count is the fourth: 76 in Sithole’s own telling and 38 in a conviction, 20 in one verdict and eight in a later report, 10 in a police announcement and none in a court. In each case the figure that reached the public first was the one least tested.
• 1906, spring: Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi arrested in Marrakesh; May 2: crucifixion date set; May 15: public flogging begins; June 11: walled up alive; dead by June 13.
• 1923, January 11: William Cowle dies in Johannesburg; 1927: Robert Sproat dies; 1932: Rhodes Cowle dies.
• 1932, October to November: Daisy de Melker tried in Johannesburg; convicted of her son’s murder, acquitted on two counts; December 30: hanged at Pretoria.
• 1956, February: Elifasi Msomi hanged in Pretoria (Time, February 20, 1956).
• 1994, December: man arrested over the Cleveland killings is shot dead before trial.
• 1995, October 18: Moses Sithole arrested in Benoni; October 19: arrest announced in Pretoria.
• 1997, December: Sithole sentenced to 2,410 years.
• 2005, April to December: Philippi killings; December: Jimmy Maketta arrested in Constantia.
• 2006, November: Ramadan Mansour arrested in Egypt.
• 2007, May 3: Maketta declared a dangerous criminal; May 23: Mansour and Farag Samir Mahmoud sentenced to death in Tanta; October 14: Elaine Anderson and Patricia Kippen killed in Pietermaritzburg.
• 2009, August: Sibusiso Duma’s trial on 19 counts opens.
• 2010, December 16: Mansour and Mahmoud hanged.
• 2012, November 8: Sithole loses a court challenge to his transfer to a private prison.
• 2021, July 14: DCI announces Masten Wanjala’s arrest; October 12 to 13: escape; October 15: killed by a crowd in Bungoma County.
• 2024, September: court finds three Kenyan police officers have a case to answer over the escape.