He waited at the taxi rank at Kranskop, in KwaZulu-Natal, where women passed through on their way to and from work. He told them he could find them a job. Then he walked them into a plantation and strangled them, and sometimes raped them.
Asked later why, he said he had strangled them because he had lied to them about the work. He was unemployed himself.
The first killing was in 1993.
One of the women fought him and bit a piece off his hand. That is the whole of how the case was solved. The officer who had taken it over, Piet Byleveld, sent word to clinics and hospitals to watch for a man with that injury, and Mfeka was arrested on September 8, 1996. The last body was found the same day, badly decomposed.
Byleveld had been appointed by the office of the national commissioner to take the investigation over. Mfeka said in the case docket that Byleveld had been on him a short time and already knew everything about him, while other policemen had been investigating for months and still knew nothing.
He confessed and took officers to the places he had left the bodies, with an independent officer and an interpreter present throughout, which Byleveld insisted on so that nobody could say the confession had been led. Six bodies were recovered on his directions. Police said four of the bodies were found between his home and other places around KwaZulu-Natal. He was also questioned about the bodies left by the Nasrec strangler, though he was never accused of those killings.
He was convicted, and what he was convicted of is reported two ways. Byleveld's own record of his cases says Mfeka was found guilty of eight murders and sentenced to 112 years. A South African newspaper summary says he pleaded guilty to four murders, an attempted murder, rape and theft, and received four life sentences, and a general reference account also records a life sentence. The attempted murder in that account is presumably the woman who bit him. Nothing published reconciles the two.
Then he asked Byleveld never to let him out of prison. Byleveld, who had worked the Nasrec and Wemmer Pan cases and was the best known detective in the country, told his biographer he had never seen anything like it, and that he thought a very hard childhood was the whole of the explanation: Mfeka had all the potential, but none of the opportunities.