Velaphi Ndlangamandla was born in about 1966 and was thirty-four when he was sentenced. Almost nothing of his early life is on the public record. He operated in and around Piet Retief, in the far south-east of Mpumalanga on the KwaZulu-Natal and Swaziland borders, a farming district of small towns, townships and scattered villages.
The name he is known by has nothing to do with bars. A saloon, in South African usage, is a .22 rifle, and the weapon he used through the whole series was a stolen .22 Anschutz. That is where the Saloon Killer comes from, and it is worth saying plainly because the alias is routinely misread, not least because some of the shootings happened in shebeens.
He shot people in their homes and in rural villages, at night, and took what was in the house: ammunition, radios, jewellery, clothing, cash and food. The killings were done with a small-calibre rifle at close quarters and the robberies attached to them were petty. Nineteen people died and nine more were shot and survived, which is an unusually high survival rate and reflects the calibre of the weapon.
The span in this roster, April to September 1998, is the span of the charges. The account given by the police profiler who worked the case dates the shootings earlier, to a series in Phoswa Village on June 13, 1997 in which several people were killed, among them a woman named Khonzapi Qwabe, shot in her own shebeen, and puts the toll at sixteen killed and ten wounded in the Piet Retief area by April 1998. The two figures cannot both describe the same period, and the entry records the disagreement rather than choosing: nineteen is the number of murders charged and proved.
A police task team was formed under Superintendent Izak van Zyl, with Captain Danie Hall leading the investigation, and Micki Pistorius, then the South African Police Service's forensic psychologist and the profiler on most of the country's serial cases of that decade, worked the case and drew a profile. The team arrested Ndlangamandla at Phoswa village near Piet Retief on September 10, 1998, the same village where the earliest shootings had been reported. He confessed, and Pistorius has written that the confession matched the profile she had drawn.
He was tried before a circuit court sitting at Piet Retief and convicted on every count: nineteen murders, nine attempted murders, six robberies, one attempted robbery, five counts of housebreaking, three with intent to steal and two with intent to rob, indecent assault, illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition, and pointing a firearm. On September 18, 2000 he was sentenced to a total of 137 years' imprisonment. South African sentences of that kind are arithmetic, the individual terms added together, and they are served concurrently in practice up to the statutory maximum; the figure is not a projection of time actually to be spent inside.
The provincial commissioner praised the investigating team publicly and the officers were honoured at a function, which is the note most of the contemporary coverage ends on. That coverage is also the whole of the accessible record. There is no published victim list, no account of who the nineteen were, and no established motive beyond robbery. For a case with nineteen convictions for murder that is a striking absence, and it is characteristic of South African serial cases of the 1990s in which the victims were poor and black and the killings took place in villages rather than cities.