In January 2002 three detectives from the Western Cape serious violent crimes unit, Jonathan Morris, Deon de Villiers and Reynold Talmakkies, went out to open ground near Rotterdam Road, where the township of Mfuleni runs into Eerste River on the eastern edge of Cape Town. Zola Jackson Mqomboyi showed them where to dig. Five bodies came out of shallow graves there, two men and three women, and the hands and feet had been cut from some of them.
All five had been killed with an axe, the court found, between September 2000 and January 2002. The reporting of the case gives no names for the dead, and nothing in the available record says who they were, how he came to meet them, or what connected them to one another or to him.
The sixth count was the rape of a girl of thirteen, whom he attacked twice. She survived. The investigating officer told the court that she was suicidal and still suffering flashbacks and trauma. She was a child, and she is not named.
Mqomboyi was born in 1962 and was forty-one by the time he was sentenced. He came to the trial with three previous convictions. In 1988 he was convicted of culpable homicide, the South African offense of killing another person unlawfully but without the intent that makes it murder, and was given a prison term together with corporal punishment; the length of the term is not recorded, and neither is anything about the person who died. Four years for robbery followed in 1992, and two years for serious assault in 1993.
Dr. Sean Kaliski, head of forensic psychiatry at Valkenberg Hospital, gave evidence for the state. He described Mqomboyi as a disorganized serial killer and a psychopath, a high-risk person who could not be rehabilitated. The judge said he agreed with that assessment.
Judge Wilf Thring passed sentence in the Cape High Court on October 27, 2003: 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 said the community had to be protected against a man who was a mental and physical threat to the well-being of others, and he noted that Mqomboyi had shown no remorse.
He then declared him a dangerous criminal under section 286A of the Criminal Procedure Act. Under that provision the sentence has no fixed release date; the court instead orders the prisoner brought back before it after a set period, and Thring fixed that at an effective twenty years, when the Cape High Court would decide whether he could ever be let out. The available sources do not show whether that hearing has taken place.
The count of six joins the five murders proved in 2003 to the culpable homicide of 1988, a lesser offense, fourteen years earlier, about which nothing more is known. The judgment also fixed the end of the killings at January 2002, the month the graves were opened, and not in 2003 as some listings give it.