Zola Jackson Mqomboyi was born in 1962 and was forty-one when he was sentenced. He had three previous convictions: four years for robbery in 1992, two years for serious assault in 1993, and, in 1988, an undisclosed prison term together with corporal punishment for culpable homicide.
Between September 2000 and January 2002 he killed five people with an axe in the Eerste River and Mfuleni area on the edge of Cape Town: two men and three women. He buried them in shallow graves. The hands and feet had been cut from some of the bodies.
He also raped a girl of thirteen, twice. The investigating officer told the court that she was suicidal and suffering flashbacks and trauma.
The five bodies were dug up in January 2002 by three investigators from the Western Cape serious violent crimes unit, Jonathan Morris, Deon de Villiers and Reynold Talmakkies. The graves were near Rotterdam Road, on the boundary between Mfuleni and Eerste River, and it was Mqomboyi who pointed them out.
Judge Wilf Thring sentenced him on October 27, 2003 to twenty years on each of the six counts, the five murders and the rape, which is where the figure of a hundred and twenty years comes from. He told him the crimes were chilling, especially the five murders, that the community should be protected against him, that he was a mental and physical threat to the well-being of others, and that he had shown no remorse.
The judge declared him a dangerous criminal under section 286A of the Criminal Procedure Act, and ordered that he be brought back before the Cape High Court after serving an effective twenty years, which is what that provision allows.
He agreed with the evidence of Dr Sean Kaliski, head of forensic psychiatry at Valkenberg Hospital, who told the court that Mqomboyi was a disorganised serial killer and a psychopath, a high risk person, and could not be rehabilitated.
Two points on the numbers. The figure of six is the five murders proved in 2003 together with the culpable homicide he was convicted of in 1988, which is a lesser offence than murder and about which nothing more is recorded. And an earlier version of this entry gave the killings as running to 2003; the court found that they ended in January 2002, which is when the graves were opened.