Sipho Agmatir Thwala

Victims

Convicted and sentenced to 506 years - 16 bodies recovered and more attributed

Years active

1996 - 1997

Location

Phoenix, KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa

Method

Strangulation with their underwear

Status

Arrested on August 14, 1997. Convicted and sentenced on March 29, 1999 to 506 years, one of the longest terms handed down in South Africa. The figure is not the term. South African law requires that a prisoner serving a determinate sentence be considered for parole once 25 years of the sentence, or of cumulative sentences, have been served, however long the sentence is. Counting twenty-five years from his sentencing in March 1999, he reached the point of mandatory parole consideration in 2024; counting instead from his arrest in August 1997 it fell in 2022. Whether time spent in custody before sentencing counts toward that period is not established by any source consulted here, so the date above is calculated from the sentence and could fall earlier. The gap here is twenty months. Consideration is not release, and the archive holds no record of any parole decision in this case. The eligibility date below follows from the statute, not from a Department of Correctional Services record, and the entry should be checked before it.

Sipho Agmatir Thwala was born in 1968 and worked as a laborer around Phoenix, a township north of Durban in KwaZulu-Natal. He is known in South Africa as the Phoenix Strangler, and as the Canefield Killer after where the bodies were found.

Between 1996 and 1997 he approached young women, most of them aged between twenty and thirty and most of them unemployed, with the offer of a job. He walked them into the sugar cane fields around the township, raped them, and strangled them with their own underwear. Sixteen bodies were recovered and more were attributed to him.

The cane fields are the reason it went on as long as it did. The crop is dense and over head height, and a body left in it is not found until the cutting season.

He was arrested on August 14, 1997. He was convicted and sentenced on March 29, 1999 to 506 years, one of the longest terms handed down in South Africa. He is one of a cluster of South African cases from the mid to late 1990s, with Sithole, Mazingane and Simons, which arrived together in the first years after the transition.