On Sunday, October 9, 2022, Michael Damian went to a building in the south of Johannesburg's central business district to wash his car, as he usually did on Sundays. He was the caretaker for the property company that managed the building, and he had his four-year-old son with him. It was cold that day, so instead of washing the car outside with cold water, he went upstairs to fetch warm water. Upstairs he noticed a strong smell. He checked the offices one by one. The third office had no electricity, so he switched on his phone's torch. There was a body on the floor.
Damian ran to a security guard and asked him to check whether the person was dead. By that night police had found the bodies of six women on the premises, which housed a panel-beating business owned by a man named Mark Khumalo. Khumalo's son, Sifiso Mkhwanazi, was arrested the same day.
Mkhwanazi was 20 years old. Within days the case was being described in the South African press as the work of a serial killer, but for most of the following year he was charged with only one murder. It took 17 months, DNA comparisons against the families of missing women, a confession made to his own father in a police station, and a five-week trial before a court found that he had raped and killed all six women. The women were Zimbabwean, they were sex workers in the Johannesburg city center, and three of them still had not been identified when he was sentenced.
Little is on the public record about Mkhwanazi's life before 2022, and most of what is known comes from the psychiatric and social-work reports read into the record before sentencing in 2024. He was the son of Mark Khumalo, who ran the panel-beating business where the bodies were found. The published reports do not explain the difference in surnames. His mother died in 2017. In the trial-within-a-trial in February 2024, Mkhwanazi described his father as his only living parent and his legal guardian.
According to EWN's account of the psychiatric report, he began paying sex workers for sex in 2017, when he was 15, the same year his mother died. The report said he had never had a healthy romantic relationship, and it listed drug use, past abuse, rejection and a lack of ambition among the things that had affected his state of mind. EWN reported that he had left school with a Grade 7 education. A separate EWN report said he had begun soliciting sex workers at 15 and paid some of the women R50 before killing them.
His father told the court that, as a father, he sometimes used "physical means" to correct his son, and that he may have slapped him in the days before the arrest.
Before the killings, Mkhwanazi had been in prison. In 2021, a Zimbabwean sex worker opened a rape case against him, and he spent about 10 months in custody. The woman later withdrew the case, according to Mkhwanazi's own admissions and Sunday World's report; the investigating officer described the outcome as an acquittal. Police later tried to find her and could not. Her phone number had changed and she was no longer at the address she had given. Investigators searched the areas where sex workers work, but, as the lead investigator told the court, women there often go by street names. "It wouldn't be their birth name," he said.
That case became the center of the state's argument about motive. The indictment said, as quoted by TimesLIVE: "The accused's motive was revenge for a rape incident which led to his incarceration for 10 months." The Star reported that after his release he had allegedly vowed to deal with sex workers. Mkhwanazi denied that the killings were planned revenge. His father, testifying in February 2024, said otherwise: "What he told me is that he was taking a revenge, it was revenge."
Three of the six women were identified by name before the trial. What follows is what their families, the police and the court record have made public.
Nyarai Chihota (named in some reports as Chihota Nyarai) was the first woman Mkhwanazi killed, according to EWN's reporting on her family at the sentencing. She was from Zimbabwe and was the mother of five children. One of them had died the previous December, Sunday World reported in March 2024; the other four were living in South Africa with guardians by the time of the trial. She was the family's breadwinner. She told her family she was going to work in Johannesburg, and they did not know what that work was.
Her daughter, then 16, told Sunday World that the family first searched a workshop and then a government mortuary before DNA testing confirmed that she was among the six. "She only came home when she was dead," she said.
Her eldest daughter, Pauline Chihota, attended the sentencing in September 2024 and broke down in court. Afterward she told EWN that she welcomed the sentence but still had no closure because she did not know why he had killed her mother. She said she was not ashamed of what her mother had done for a living, because of who she herself had become. The next day she told EWN that the family had been left destitute: she was raising her siblings, a younger sister was not in school, the family struggled to feed the children, and they were all living in one room.
Mkhwanazi confessed to shooting Nyarai Chihota in the head at close range with his father's pistol and hiding her body in a black trolley bin at the workshop, according to EWN. Her phone became central evidence. Police found it in a school bag used by Mkhwanazi, and her daughter told them her mother's phone was missing. Officers compared the IMEI number on the phone's box at the family home with the phone, and the numbers matched. A DNA comparison between teeth taken from the body and her child's DNA gave a 99.98 percent probability of maternity.
Patricia Magaiza was identified by comparing DNA from her remains with DNA from her mother, which gave a 99.98 percent probability of maternity. Sunday World reported that the three identified women were all from Zimbabwe. Of her life, her family and her last known movements, nothing further was reported.
Joyce Moyo was 35. She came to South Africa from Zimbabwe looking for work so that she could give her three children a better future, according to the Sunday Times. Her children were 7, 14 and 19 when the case came to trial. Her family did not know she was a sex worker. "To us, as a family, she was selling Herbal Life products," her younger sister, Grace Moyo, told Sunday World. Grace had last seen her about a week before she disappeared.
Grace had to identify her sister's remains. Police took DNA samples from Joyce's children, and the family waited three months for the results; the comparison gave a 99.97 percent probability of maternity. Fingerprints in her passport also matched. Relatives in Zimbabwe were still grieving and asking for justice, Grace said, and she updated them every day. "If I were given a chance to meet with Mkhwanazi, I would ask him why he killed my sister," she said. After the guilty verdict she told News24: "She is gone. I will never see her again."
In court, a sex worker who testified under the name Miss A described the last time she saw Joyce Moyo. She was wearing a short skirt and a denim jacket, and Miss A believed the driver of a van picked her up. On one day of testimony Miss A confirmed that a van shown to her was the van in question; the next day she said she was not sure, a contradiction the defense pointed out. EWN reported that Joyce Moyo's body was found at the building seven days after she disappeared. EWN also described her as his last victim.
Three of the six women have no names in the public record. Some of the remains had decomposed to a skeletal state. Families who reported missing relatives gave DNA samples, but those comparisons came back negative, and fingerprint comparisons failed. Sunday World reported that three bodies were too decomposed for DNA testing. As of July 2024, EWN reported, these three women were still untraceable. Their families, wherever they are, may not know what happened to them.
The state's case was that Mkhwanazi picked the women up in the Johannesburg city center, where they worked, and took them to his father's building. Sex workers who testified or spoke to reporters described how he approached them.
A sex worker identified as Mary told eNCA that she saw him on July 24 in the afternoon. He offered her friend more money to go to a place he described as safe: "he say we go to a safe place where you're going to not pay R10, I'll give you R50." Before leaving, her friend asked Mary for a condom. She never came back. Another woman, Tracy, said he asked whether she was from Lesotho or was Shona, and told her, "I'm looking for Shonas." The state argued that he targeted Zimbabwean women. A woman named Lerato told eNCA she had once been taken to the same workshop and was not harmed. A sex worker who escaped him unharmed and testified was a South African citizen, the investigating officer said.
Five sex workers identified Mkhwanazi as the man who took the six women away, according to IOL.
The bodies were found at different places on the premises. The first, found by the caretaker, was in an unused office upstairs. According to the investigating officer and eNCA's account of his evidence, one body was inside a van, one was wrapped in a plastic bag, and others had been dragged and scattered around the workshop. Mark Khumalo told the court the bodies were found in places including dustbins and chimneys. The investigating officer said the bodies had been kept on the premises for about three to six months and had gone missing "one by one" from the bins before they were found.
Khumalo described the weeks before the discovery. Trolley bins went missing, and windows were left open for hours. "That's when we started smelling something strange," he testified. His son told him the smell came from a dead cat: "there was a cat that died but he has cleaned it up."
After the caretaker found the first body, he alerted Khumalo and the head of security. According to The Star's account of the caretaker's evidence, the three of them confronted Mkhwanazi, who tried to run. When his father asked why he was running, he said he had "forgot something in the house." Damian testified that Mkhwanazi was the last person to enter the premises with a woman before the bodies were found. Police later reviewed CCTV footage showing Mkhwanazi and a woman believed to be his last victim entering the building. The father, according to the National Prosecuting Authority, called the police.
The day after the arrest, Khumalo spoke to the SABC. "We went to check the CCTV and we obviously saw it was him," he said. "He was the one making all the rounds for cover-up." He said, "I feel like I want to disown him."
Every report that names the business, from the arrest in October 2022 to the sentencing in September 2024, describes a panel-beating (auto body) business or workshop run by the father, Mark Khumalo, in a building he rented. TimesLIVE described Khumalo as a tenant of the building; the building itself was managed by a property company, named as InterCity Real Estate in one report and New City Estate in another, which employed the caretaker. Some reports call the premises a warehouse or a factory.
The sources raise several questions about the premises:
How could six bodies stay hidden in a working business for months? The investigating officer said the bodies were kept there for about three to six months. Khumalo testified that the smell was blamed on a dead cat. A sex worker who said she had nearly been one of his victims told EWN in July 2024 that she did not believe Mkhwanazi could have acted alone: "Bodies were smelling, they were rotten... How can you work inside a factory and not smell anything?" Sex workers interviewed by eNCA during the trial said the same. No one else has been charged, and the court convicted Mkhwanazi alone.
Where exactly was it? Reports place the building in Selby (IOL, October 2022, and TimesLIVE, February 2024), in Rosettenville (IOL, 2024, and Sunday World), and in Village Main near the Faraday taxi rank (TimesLIVE, September 2024). Most simply say the Johannesburg CBD. Selby and Village Main adjoin each other south of the city center; Rosettenville lies farther south.
Whose gun was it? Mkhwanazi admitted taking his father's firearm and ammunition, and he was convicted of possessing an unlicensed firearm and ammunition. EWN reported in February 2024 that the court heard the father's gun had been used in one woman's killing, and Sunday World reported that one of the six died of a gunshot wound to the head. An IOL report of the investigating officer's evidence the same week said a ballistic report had cleared two guns and that there was no evidence the victims were shot. The fuller and later reports, including the post-mortem findings summarized at sentencing, say one woman was shot.
Mkhwanazi first appeared in the Johannesburg Magistrate's Court on Tuesday, October 11, 2022. Police had said the day before that he would face six counts of murder. The National Prosecuting Authority charged him with one. Its spokesperson, Phindi Louw Mjonondwane, said the evidence did not yet link him to the other five women: "the accused is charged with one count of murder although six bodies were discovered." The NPA said it would oppose bail, because the charge was a Schedule 6 offense with the strictest bail conditions. The magistrate noted that a conviction could carry a life sentence. Journalists were told not to photograph him. The case was postponed to October 18 for further investigation, an identity parade and a bail hearing.
Outside court, sex workers and women's groups protested. At the end of October 2022 Mkhwanazi abandoned his bail application; his lawyer, Khanyiswa Mkhabe, gave no reason. Nozzy Nguse, president of the Cstahood Foundation, read the decision as an admission. Katlego Rasebitse of Sisonke, the sex workers' movement, told the Associated Press the group hoped more charges would follow. A sex worker named Cindy said she had been surprised to hear that he was charged with one murder, "not these other five." The NPA said it would add charges "as and when the investigation directs us to a point where we must add charges."
By April 2023 the state said four of the bodies had been identified and that some were "almost skeletal" and beyond recognition. DNA results for two bodies and three months of CCTV footage were still outstanding, and the case was postponed to June 2, 2023.
The most contested piece of evidence was a confession Mkhwanazi made not to the police but to his father. It happened at Johannesburg Central police station after an identity parade in October 2022.
Khumalo testified that his son called him from custody, from a number that was not his own, and said he wanted to tell him something. Khumalo went to the first court appearance but could not speak to him. He called the investigating officer, Detective Sergeant Bongani Mbonambi, to arrange a meeting. Mbonambi took father and son to a room on the third floor of the police station and left them alone, with a guard about 15 meters away. After a silence, Khumalo said, he asked his son what he wanted to tell him, and his son said he had killed the woman whose body was found in Khumalo's offices. Asked about the other five bodies, he gave the same answer. Khumalo came out more than 20 minutes later and told Mbonambi he needed time to process what he had heard. Mbonambi said he advised that the son speak to a lawyer, and took the father's statement on a later day.
At trial the defense challenged the confession, and Judge Cassim Moosa held a trial-within-a-trial to decide whether it could be used. Mkhwanazi testified that he had been coerced. He said Mbonambi told him to confess on the way to meet his father, and that his father, angry, urged him to tell the truth and threatened to stop supporting him. "I don't have a choice. I have to tell the truth," he said he was told. He said his phone had been confiscated at his arrest and that he could not have called his father. He acknowledged that his father had not intimidated him directly. Khumalo denied threatening him, coaching him or recording the conversation. "It is not correct that I coached him on what to say during the proceedings," he said. Mbonambi denied telling him to confess and said the police did not need a confession: "We were never desperate, so we did not need his confession. What we had was enough."
On Friday, February 9, 2024, Judge Moosa ruled the confession admissible. "The conversation that took place between Mkhwanazi and Khumalo was made freely without any influence," he said.
By the time the case reached the High Court, the indictment had grown to six counts of murder, seven counts of rape, six counts of defeating or obstructing the administration of justice, one count of robbery with aggravating circumstances, and unlawful possession of a firearm and ammunition. Plea and sentence negotiations failed, the senior state advocate, Leswikane Mashabela, told the court. The NPA later said it had rejected a plea deal because it would have given Mkhwanazi a lighter sentence, and chose to lead evidence instead.
The trial began in the Gauteng High Court, Johannesburg, sitting at Palm Ridge, at the start of February 2024. Mkhwanazi pleaded not guilty to every charge. At the same time he made formal admissions under section 220 of the Criminal Procedure Act, which allows an accused person to admit facts so that the state does not have to prove them. He admitted killing the women with an arm choke, concealing their bodies at different places on his father's premises, taking one woman's cellphone, and taking his father's firearm and ammunition.
He denied the rapes. He said the sex had been consensual and paid for, and that he had killed the women after they demanded more money, which angered him. He denied planning the killings and said they were not revenge.
The caretaker, Michael Damian, was the state's first witness. Mark Khumalo followed; he was due to testify on the first Monday but needed time to compose himself, and when he did testify he sat a short distance from his son. Sex workers who had known the victims, or who said they had nearly become victims themselves, testified under protection of their identities. After the investigating officer's evidence, Judge Moosa told the remaining sex worker witnesses they were no longer needed, though they could sit in the gallery.
Sergeant Mbonambi, who had 18 years with the Gauteng detective service and began work on the case the day the bodies were found, was the central witness. He said the room upstairs, which was not in use and which Mkhwanazi knew, had been used as a "slaughterhouse," and that blood on the stairs showed the bodies had been dragged down. Bloodstains in the room had been cleaned, but experts recovered them, and the cleaner told police that Mkhwanazi, not she, had cleaned the area. Police found used condoms in the room. Investigators recovered four DNA profiles at the scene, and the condoms and bloodstains matched three of the identified women.
All six women had been tied with rope, Mbonambi said, around their backs, necks and legs, and some had been gagged. He used the binding to answer Mkhwanazi's claim that the killings were unplanned: why tie up a body after strangling someone? "For him to come for another body, day after day, means that thing was planned," he said. Even if the first death had been an accident, he argued, a man who had made a mistake would have stayed away from sex workers afterward. Mkhwanazi instead kept going back, which Mbonambi compared to someone picking fish from a pond. He also said no money was found on the women and suggested it had been taken after their deaths.
The defense applied under section 174 of the Criminal Procedure Act to have Mkhwanazi discharged on the seven rape counts, the robbery count and one concealment count, arguing the state had not made out a case on them.
Judge Moosa gave judgment on Wednesday, March 13, 2024. He accepted the state's witnesses and rejected Mkhwanazi's account. "I accordingly reject the version of the accused as being false beyond reasonable doubt," he said. He found that Mkhwanazi had planned all six killings and that the women "knew nothing of his vindictive plot," and that he had concealed the bodies to avoid arrest.
Mkhwanazi was convicted of six counts of murder, six counts of rape, six counts of defeating the ends of justice, theft (for the cellphone), unlawful possession of a firearm and possession of ammunition. He was acquitted of robbery with aggravating circumstances. The reports consulted do not say what became of the seventh rape count; the convictions were for six. No member of his family sat with him in court. Relatives of two of the women were in the gallery.
The judge ordered him to Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital for observation before sentencing, to help the court decide whether he was a danger to society. Neither side opposed the order. The NPA welcomed the verdict as a sign that the courts were treating gender-based violence seriously.
Sentencing took six months. Mkhwanazi spent about a month at Sterkfontein. The hospital's report was ready by July 2024 but was held back while a probation officer finished a report on his upbringing and background. The prosecutor told the court that victim impact reports had been compiled for two of the women's families, and that a third family had not cooperated with the probation officer.
On August 7, 2024, the psychiatric findings were put before the court. Dr. Indhrin Chetty, who evaluated Mkhwanazi several times, said: "He did not display any emotion that has shown genuine remorse for what he has done." Mkhwanazi had admitted to the doctors that he would probably have kept offending if he had not been caught. Chetty considered him still a danger to society. The social worker, Xolisa Budaza, recommended direct imprisonment and agreed with the psychiatrists that he needed intensive therapy. Victim impact statements told the court that two of the women had been in advanced stages of pregnancy. Further hearings were delayed, once when Mkhwanazi's lawyer fell ill.
On Wednesday, September 18, 2024, Judge Moosa sentenced Mkhwanazi to life imprisonment on each of the six murder counts, under the minimum-sentence provisions of section 51 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1997. According to the police statement reported by IOL, he also received 90 years for the six rapes, 10 years for defeating the ends of justice, five years for theft, 10 years for the unlicensed firearm and five years for the ammunition, all to run concurrently. Sunday World reported that the court declared him a dangerous criminal and ordered indefinite imprisonment, with an inquiry after 30 years into whether he still posed a danger.
The judge called him "arrogant." "The accused acknowledged that he committed the crimes. However, despite this, he does not seem to have insight into his criminality or the impact the crimes had on the victims," he said. "The accused has proved that he has a very poor prognosis for rehabilitation and will most likely remain a threat to society as long as he is alive." He rejected Mkhwanazi's last attempt to justify what he had done and argue for less. "The accused shall be brought before this court after 30 years for reconsideration of his sentence," he ordered. Parole was not decided, but he told the families their voices would be heard if a parole process ever began.
Family members and members of women's groups screamed and sobbed as the sentence was read. "I find it hard to forgive him for that," one woman's daughter said. A member of Sisonke said: "He will not be out on the street in five years." Gauteng police credited Captain Vincent Saunders and Sergeant Prince Mbonambi of the Provincial Serious Violence Crime Unit with the investigation. The Gauteng MEC for Community Safety, Faith Mazibuko, called the sentence a significant victory against gender-based violence and femicide. The Johannesburg Director of Public Prosecutions thanked the investigators and the prosecutor.
In EWN's year-end review of December 28, 2024, Mkhwanazi was reported to be serving six life sentences, with his sentence due to be reconsidered by the court after 30 years, around 2054, when he will be about 52. By October 2026 the South African press had reported no appeal and no application for leave to appeal, though silence in the press is not proof that none was filed.
Whether he acted alone. The court convicted Mkhwanazi alone. Several sex workers, interviewed by eNCA during the trial and by EWN after it, said they did not believe one person could have hidden six decomposing bodies in a working building for months. No one else has been charged, and no evidence that anyone helped him has been made public.
The motive. The state said, and the court accepted, that the killings were planned revenge for the 2021 rape case. Mkhwanazi said the deaths happened after money disputes and were not planned. His father testified that his son told him it was revenge.
The rapes. Mkhwanazi denied rape throughout and said the sex was consensual and paid for. The court rejected his account and convicted him of six rapes.
How each woman died. Mkhwanazi admitted an arm choke. Sunday World reported that post-mortem findings for five of the women were consistent with strangulation or suffocation and that the sixth died of a gunshot wound to the head; EWN named that woman as Nyarai Chihota. One IOL report of the investigating officer's evidence said there was no evidence the women were shot.
The number identified. In April 2023 IOL and TimesLIVE reported that four of the six bodies had been identified. Every report from the 2024 trial and sentencing says three.
The other figures. Reports give his age at different points as 19, 20, 21 and 22; EWN said he began the killings at 19. The total of the additional prison terms is given as 120 years (the sum of IOL's itemized terms), 170 years (Sunday World) and 190 years (EWN, December 2024). IOL's police statement gives the date the bodies were found as October 15, 2022; the trial evidence and the arrest coverage give October 9. Sunday World called him the "Sunday serial killer" without explaining the name.
2017: Mkhwanazi's mother dies. He is 15 and, according to the psychiatric report, begins paying sex workers for sex.
2021: A Zimbabwean sex worker opens a rape case against him; he spends about 10 months in custody before the case ends.
2022, from April: Nyarai Chihota is killed, the first of the six according to EWN.
April - October 2022: Six women are killed and hidden at his father's panel-beating premises in Johannesburg.
October 9, 2022 (Sunday): The caretaker finds the first body; six bodies are found; Mkhwanazi is arrested.
October 10, 2022: Police say he will face six murder counts; his father tells the SABC he wants to disown him.
October 11, 2022: First court appearance; the NPA charges one count of murder.
Late October 2022: He abandons his bail application; protests outside court.
April 25, 2023: The state says four bodies are identified; case postponed to June 2.
February 2024: Trial opens in the Gauteng High Court, Johannesburg, sitting in Palm Ridge. He pleads not guilty and makes section 220 admissions.
February 9, 2024: Confession to his father ruled admissible.
March 13, 2024: Convicted of six murders, six rapes and other counts; sent to Sterkfontein for observation.
August 7, 2024: Psychiatric report finds no remorse.
September 18, 2024: Six life terms; to return to court after 30 years.
December 28, 2024: EWN reports him serving six life sentences; no appeal reported.