On Monday, September 18, 2000, a circuit court judge sitting in Piet Retief, Mpumalanga, sentenced Velaphi Ndlangamandla to a total of 137 years in prison. He was thirty-four. The court had convicted him of 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, and of indecent assault, illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition, and pointing a firearm. The murders had been committed in about five months in 1998, in the villages and homes of a farming district on the borders of KwaZulu-Natal and Swaziland, with a single stolen rifle.
The name the police and the press gave him has nothing to do with bars. In South African usage a saloon is a .22 rifle, and the weapon he carried through the whole series was a .22 Anschutz. The confusion is easy to make, because some of the shootings took place in shebeens. One later account gives the name of the man the rifle was taken from, along with other guns and valuables, in April 1998, as Jacobus Christoffel van Schalkwyk; that detail has not been traced to a court record.
He was born in about 1966, and next to nothing about the rest of his early life has been published. Piet Retief, in the far south-east of the province, is a district of small towns, townships and scattered villages, and it was in those villages, at night, that he shot people in their homes and then went through the house. What he took was the kind of thing a household there would have: ammunition, radios, jewelry, clothing, cash and food. Nineteen people died. Nine more were shot and lived, a high proportion that says something about the small caliber of the rifle and the range at which he used it.
The charges cover April to September 1998. The account given by Micki Pistorius, the South African Police Service's forensic psychologist, who worked on most of the country's serial cases of that decade and on this one, starts earlier. She dates the first shootings to Phoswa Village on June 13, 1997, when 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 around Piet Retief by April 1998. The two versions cannot both describe the same stretch of time. Nineteen is the number of murders that were charged and proved.
A police task team was set up under Superintendent Izak van Zyl, with Captain Danie Hall leading the investigation, and Pistorius drew a profile. On September 10, 1998, the team arrested Ndlangamandla at Phoswa village near Piet Retief, the same village where she places the earliest shootings. He confessed, and Pistorius has written that his confession matched the profile.
The sentence was the individual terms added together. In South Africa sentences of that kind run concurrently in practice up to the statutory maximum, and the total is not a measure of the time he will actually spend inside. When it was announced, the provincial police commissioner, Eric Nkabinde, praised the investigators for putting the Mpumalanga police "on the map," and Van Zyl said the members of the task team would be honored at a special function.
The coverage stopped there, and it is almost all there is. No list of the nineteen dead has been published, nor any account of who they were, and no motive beyond robbery has ever been set out. For a case with nineteen murder convictions the silence is striking, and it is typical of South African serial cases of the 1990s in which the victims were poor and black and the killings happened in villages rather than cities. The case reached a wider audience in February 2024, when episodes ten and eleven of the Showmax drama series Catch Me a Killer, based on Pistorius's work, dramatized it.