Thozamile Taki was born in 1971. In 2007 he approached young women in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape with the offer of a job, took them to open ground, raped them and strangled them.
Thirteen women died, all of them between eighteen and twenty-five. He killed most of them around Umzinto in KwaZulu-Natal and left their bodies in the sugarcane plantations there, and the rest near Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape, where the bodies were left among the tea. The judge said he had lured eleven women to Umzinto and two to Port St Johns; the encyclopaedia account on the same page divides them ten and three. South African reporting called him the Sugarcane Killer, after the fields the bodies were left in.
The women named in the record are Makhosi Mgobhozi, Noxolo Mpande, Nosisa Nozozo, Charity Mthethwa, Rose Mjoli, Khanyisile Ncayiyana, Thandeka Mthebeni and Nonjabulo Mpanza.
Because the killings crossed the provincial boundary, two separate provincial units investigated before the cases were connected. The offer of work is the recurring method in South African cases of this period, and for the same reason: unemployment among young women in those provinces was such that the offer was very hard to refuse and produced no suspicion at all. The judge remarked that all the dead women had been young and had wanted work or already had it.
The case was proved on identification and on telephone records. Witnesses picked him out without hesitation at identity parades at Hibberdene and at Brighton Beach, which the judge said could not be coincidence, and the evidence showed that he had been using the dead women's mobile telephones. He commended the police team and specifically praised the telephone experts who gave evidence. All the bodies were badly decomposed by the time they were found, and the cause of death was difficult to establish.
During the trial, on February 21, 2010, he and eight other prisoners tried to escape from Westville prison. The others got away. He fell from the roof or ceiling of his fourth-floor cell and was seriously injured, and the trial was adjourned until he recovered. He came back into court in a wheelchair on March 2 and asked that his girlfriend be granted bail. The trial resumed on April 30, with the last eight of the state's hundred and three witnesses still to be heard.
He was convicted on December 23, 2010 on all twenty-six counts. His co-accused and former girlfriend, Hlengiwe Nene, was acquitted of everything. The judge called her a victim of circumstance and said she had got into the position she was in by not cooperating with the police: a mobile telephone belonging to one of the dead women had been found at her house in September 2007, and she had claimed it was hers and bought at a chain store, without any proof of purchase.
He was sentenced on January 19, 2011. The judge said he had watched him through the trial and found him callous and insensitive, that he had smiled while witnesses gave evidence in tears, and that he had been a jackal in a sheepskin to his victims. He said that if Taki had not been caught in 2007 he would have gone on, that he was a danger to society and could not be rehabilitated, and that permanent imprisonment would stop him. The families sang and danced in the public gallery. Leave to appeal was refused that day.
One allegation on the record is not established and is recorded as an allegation: that body parts from some of the victims were supplied to a local traditional healer.