Sipho Agmatir Thwala was born in 1968 and worked as a labourer 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.