In Pietermaritzburg a minibus taxi is how most people get home. Sibusiso Duma owned one, and over six and a half weeks in the spring of 2007 he used it to reach seven people and kill them. Once he used it as the weapon itself.
He was twenty-three. Sibusiso Derrick Duma was born on May 6, 1984 and drove in Pietermaritzburg, in KwaZulu-Natal. The deaths ran from September 9 to October 25, 2007, in what the courts treated as five separate incidents, and he did not act alone: a man named Simphiwe Khesi was convicted and sentenced alongside him for two of them.
Mqeku Zondi was a security guard with the Department of Education. On September 9, 2007 he hired Duma's taxi to take him home for an agreed fare and, on the evidence of Duma's own conductor, Mlungisi Bhengu, refused to pay for part of the journey. Bhengu testified that Duma drove into the old man, ran over him and then reversed over his body. Duma took his remaining money and his service pistol, a nine-millimeter Norinco.
That pistol matters. Ballistics later tied it to another death.
On the evening of October 14 Duma and Khesi had been drinking at a shebeen and left a little after seven o'clock to find no taxis running. They decided to hijack a car to get home. Duma shot the driver of the first suitable vehicle: Patricia Kippen, thirty-nine, who worked for First National Bank. The shots brought residents out and the two men abandoned the car. The same night they found another and killed its driver, Elaine Anderson, fifty-nine, a former crime reporter at The Witness, the Pietermaritzburg paper.
Two women shot in their own cars, hours apart, because a taxi owner could not get a lift home.
On October 19 Hlengiwe Shangase was killed at Georgetown, in Pietermaritzburg. The state's case was that Duma waited for her near her home, dragged her to a secluded pathway, raped her and shot her in the head at point-blank range. She was found half-naked, which is what first raised the suspicion of rape. The pistol stolen from Zondi was matched to her murder.
The next day, about five hundred feet from where Shangase had been found, Masizane Mtshatsha and Thamsanqa Mbindwane were hijacked and shot dead. Duma left in their maroon Volkswagen Polo. His fingerprints were on it.
Within about an hour, driving that Polo, the two men accosted Tsepo Mhlongo, Linda Jali and a teenage girl at Imbali and forced them inside at gunpoint. Mhlongo and Jali were robbed, ordered out, shot and left for dead. The girl was taken to Azalea Cemetery and raped, by both men according to the reporting.
Mhlongo and Jali lived. So did the girl, on the charges as they were brought: the later indictment carried three counts of attempted murder and no murder count for her. One account says Duma drove the stolen car over her several times meaning to kill her. Either way, the survivors are the reason there was living testimony at all.
The last was Noxolo Dlamini, a schoolteacher from Pinetown, who boarded Duma's taxi on the evening of October 25 on her way home. Reports place her at Hillcrest and at Pinetown. She was robbed and raped before she was killed, and the sentencing judge found as a fact that Duma had driven to Durban that night looking for victims.
He was arrested on October 26, the day after.
The case then split in two and the halves were nineteen months apart. On November 14, 2007 Judge President Vuka Tshabalala sentenced Duma and Khesi for the murders of Kippen and Anderson: life each for the murders, fifteen years each for the attempted robbery of Anderson, and for robbing Kippen fifteen years for Duma and twenty for Khesi. Both men laughed as sentence was passed. One of them said of the two dead women, "They're dead now. What are they worrying about?"
The remaining five deaths were formally charged on August 4, 2009 and came to trial that month before Acting Judge Kobus Booyens, sitting with two assessors in the Pietermaritzburg High Court. Duma faced nineteen charges arising from five incidents: five counts of murder, four of rape, three of attempted murder, four of robbery with aggravating circumstances and three of kidnapping. He pleaded not guilty to all of them and declined to give evidence in his own defense.
He was convicted and given six further life sentences and prison terms totaling a hundred and four years. For Zondi he received life plus five years. Booyens said he intended that Duma should be permanently removed from society.
Accounts of the date of that sentencing differ by a day, between August 16 and 17, 2009. The totals are eight life sentences and a hundred and thirty-nine years.
When he can ask to be let out turns on a change in South African law. A life sentence imposed after October 1, 2004 carries parole consideration at twenty-five years. Prisoners already serving life before that date fall under transitional provisions and are considered at twenty. Both of Duma's sentences came after the cut-off, so consideration arises at twenty-five years: 2032 for the first set, 2034 for the second.
Consideration is not release. Those years are what the statute produces; the Department of Correctional Services has made no decision on either public.
Neither trial produced a judgment that appears in the South African law reports; the reported decisions under the name Duma concern other men. What the two judges found and said is known from the reporting of the sentencings.