For a year, in 1996 and 1997, women disappeared from the townships north of Durban and turned up, if they turned up at all, in the sugarcane of Mount Edgecombe near Phoenix. They had been tied with their own underwear, raped and strangled. The fields around them were burned each season before cutting, as cane fields always are, and the fires destroyed most of what investigators might have used. The case the press called the Phoenix Strangler stalled until police found a body the fires had not yet reached.
The man convicted of the killings, Sipho Mandla Agmatir Thwala, was born in 1968 and grew up in KwaMashu, the township north of Durban. His approach was the same each time. He offered a young woman, usually unemployed and usually in her twenties, a job as a domestic worker in one of the hotels nearby, and walked her through the cane to get there. Deep in the field he attacked her, bound her with her own undergarments, raped her and strangled her. A police profile at the time described him as intelligent and charming to women and extremely dangerous.
The identification came from a sample taken three years before the killings began. In 1994 Thwala had been arrested for rape and acquitted, and the DNA taken from him then was still on file. When forensic scientists matched it to material recovered from the victims, he was arrested on August 14, 1997. Feeling in the area was such that a crowd, acting on a false tip that he was hiding there, set fire to his family's house; his mother and sister were locked inside and got out with the help of a friend.
He was tried in the Durban High Court before Judge Vivienne Niles-Dunér, who in March 1999 found him guilty of sixteen murders and ten rapes. Most accounts date the verdict and sentence to March 31, 1999; others give March 29. The sentence was 506 years, one of the longest ever imposed in South Africa. He was sent to the C-Max maximum-security prison in Pretoria. Most of the women he was convicted of killing have not been named in the published reporting.
A term of 506 years is a figure rather than a release date. Under South African law, an offender serving very long or cumulative determinate sentences becomes eligible to be considered for parole after twenty-five years, which in Thwala's case fell in the early 2020s. Consideration does not mean release, and no parole decision in his case has been made public.
1968: Sipho Mandla Agmatir Thwala is born.
1994: he is arrested for rape and acquitted; the DNA sample taken from him stays on file.
1996 to 1997: women are raped and strangled in the sugarcane fields of Mount Edgecombe, near Phoenix.
August 14, 1997: after a DNA match, Thwala is arrested.
March 1999: the Durban High Court finds him guilty of sixteen murders and ten rapes and sentences him to 506 years; most accounts date it March 31, others March 29.
Early 2020s: he becomes eligible to be considered for parole; no parole decision has been made public.