The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (12 page)

Following a lengthy trial, Pichushkin was found guilty of 49 murders and was sentenced to life in prison with the first 15 years to be spent in solitary confinement. When asked by the judge if he understood his sentence, Pichushkin replied ‘I’m not deaf. I understood.’ To this day, the other series of murders committed in 2003 remain unsolved.

As with many serial killers, the absence of a father figure in childhood coupled with rejection by his mother perhaps led Moses Sithole (b. 1964) to form a hatred for women that, in later years, would turn him into one of South Africa’s most notorious serial killers.

His notoriety began on 4 January 1995, when the body of a semi-naked woman was found in a field. She was severely decomposed and was never identified. A second body was found on 9 February. She was completely naked, with her clothes placed on top of her chest and weighted down with rocks. Her fingerprints were later used to confirm her identity as 20-
year-old
Nuku Soko, who had been missing since January.

On the morning of 6 March, construction workers digging a ditch in Atteridgeville arrived to find a woman’s breast protruding from the soil. They uncovered the body of Sara Matlakala Mokono. She was 25, and had disappeared three days earlier on her way to meet someone who had offered her work.

On 12 April, another body was discovered in Atteridgeville. This woman’s hands had been tied behind her back with her bra. She had been strangled with a ligature. Although her clothes were
recovered in the surrounding area, her knickers were missing. She was later identified as Letta Nomthandazo Ndlangamandla, aged 25.

On 13 May, 29-year-old Esther Mainetja’s body was found in a cornfield near Hercules in Pretoria West. She was naked from the waist down and she had been strangled. She had last been seen the previous evening as she left a café for home.

On 13 June, Francina Nomsa Sithebe, aged 25, was found propped up against a tree. Although she was wearing a dress, closer examination revealed that her knickers and handbag strap had been tied around her neck and then around the tree.

On 16 June, Elizabeth Granny Mathetsa’s naked body was discovered in Rosslyn, an industrial area about nine miles to the northwest of Pretoria. She was 19 years old, and had last been seen alive on 25 May.

On 22 June, a body was found in Rosherville. The victim had been raped and strangled and her identity documents were found nearby. She was 32-year-old Ernestina Mohadi Mosebo.

On 24 June, Nikiwe Diko’s body was found in Atteridgeville. She had been missing since 7 April, when she went for a job interview. Wild dogs had eaten most of her body. Her hands had been tied together with her knickers. Police only managed to find her skull the following day, 40yd from her torso. Her tights had been tied around her neck and wound so tightly with a stick that bone fragments were embedded in the material. A stick had also been rammed into her vagina. Her husband identified her by the wedding ring on her finger.

On 17 July 1995, police got the break they had been searching for. A man who lived in a caravan in Beyers Park, Boksburg, had watched a man and a woman walk into the grassland some distance from his caravan. He had spoken to them, telling them that they could not go too far because of a fence around the land. The man stated that he knew the area. After a while, they disappeared from view. However, he kept on watching. Sometime later, the man re-emerged by himself and ran off. The resident
went into the field, where he found the body of Josephine Mantsali Mlangeni. She was 25 years old and a mother of four, and had gone to meet someone about possible employment. The following day, Granny Dimakatso Ramela, 20, was found in Pretoria West. Lying face down, she was fully clothed and had been strangled. She had disappeared on 23 May.

On 30 May, Mildred Ntiya Lepule, 28, was taken to Pretoria by her husband to meet a man about a job offer, and was not seen alive again. Her body was found on 26 July in a canal near the Bon Accord Dam near Onderstepoort, nine miles north of Pretoria. In the coming weeks, detectives would come to know this area well. Lepule’s tights had been used to strangle her and her knickers had been pulled up over her face. Between 8 and 30 August, the bodies of five more victims were discovered, three of whom had been killed in similar fashion.

Between 15 and 17 September 1995, in a field at the Van Dyk Mine near Boksburg, South African police discovered 10 more bodies in various stages of decomposition within a 300yd radius. A crime scene investigation and forensic tests showed that the murders had all the hallmarks of the serial killer who had been responsible for raping and murdering women over the past year.

These victims were Makoba Tryphina Mogotsi, 26, who went missing on 15 August. Nelisiwe Nontobeko Zulu, also 26, last seen on 4 September on her way to search for a job. Amelia Dikamakatso Rapodile, 43, disappeared on 7 September after she left her place of work, Johannesburg International Airport, in the company of a man who had promised her a better job. She was found with her hands tied behind her back to her neck with her tights. Her bank card had been used to withdraw money three times later on the night of her disappearance in Germiston.

Monica Gabisile Vilakazi, 31, left her grandmother’s house on 12 September to look for work. Hazel Nozipho Madikizela, 21, was found with her hands tied to her neck with her underwear. She had last been seen by her parents in Germiston. Tsidi Malekoae Matela was identified more than a year later, in
November 1996. Originally from neighbouring Lesotho, she was 45 years old when she died. The other four women could not be traced and identified.

The police now offered a reward equivalent to £50,000 for information leading to the arrest of the killer. They even used an FBI profiler in an attempt to gain more information. They had now established that they had three separate crime scenes all used by the same killer of the 27 known victims, and that his MO was to lure his victims to go with him on the pretext of helping them find employment. They believed that he must have been confident in his manner and dressed in a smart fashion.

From the Boksburg crime scene, police recovered a handbag belonging to one of the victims, Amelia Rapodile. Tracing her last known movements, they learnt from her friends that she had made an appointment with a man named Moses Sithole on 7 September, the day on which she had disappeared. Detectives also found an application form for Sithole’s Youth against Human Abuse organisation, in which he had offered Amelia a position. A telephone number on the form led them to Wattville, an area southeast of Boksburg. There they interviewed Moses’ sister, who told them he did not live there and that she did not know where he was. When they went back and spoke to friends of the other victims, Sithole’s name kept cropping up. He was now becoming of great interest to police.

Despite all the media coverage, the killings continued.
Twenty-year
-old Agnes Sibongile Mbuli disappeared on her way to meet a friend. Her body was found on 3 October at Kleinfontein train station near Benoni.

On 13 October, the police decided to take a positive step. They published the name and photograph of Moses Sithole in all the newspapers, hoping that someone would come forward with information about him. However, the next day, a woman’s body was found at the Village Main Reef Mine near Johannesburg. Her shoelaces had been used to bind her neck to a tree. She has never been identified.

Following Sithole’s picture appearing in the papers, he contacted his sister’s husband Maxwell and said that he needed a gun. He arranged to meet Maxwell at the Mintex factory in Benoni, where Maxwell worked. Maxwell informed the police of Sithole’s request. The police decided that one officer would act as a security guard at the factory and that when Sithole arrived an attempt would be made to arrest him, with other officers secreted nearby. Sithole arrived at the factory and asked for Maxwell. The other guards, who knew nothing of the plan, told the police officer to go and fetch Maxwell, but he refused because he didn’t want to leave Sithole. This made Sithole suspicious and he ran off. The police officer followed him into a dark alley. He identified himself as a police officer, yelling at Sithole to stop, and finally fired two warning shots. But Sithole would not heed the warnings. It is alleged that Sithole turned and came at the police officer with an axe in his hand, forcing the officer to shoot him in the stomach and the leg. He was taken to hospital and survived.

When interviewed, Sithole initially refused to answer any questions until a female detective entered the room. Then he began describing some of his crimes and masturbated while he did so. He then said that he chose the murder locations before he chose the victims and that he only killed the pretty ones. He caught them with his hands around the neck and strangled them. He placed stockings around their necks and did not like the sight of blood. He forced the women to look down while he raped and killed them and masturbated as he watched them die. However, he would later go on to retract these confessions, stating that the police had forced them out of him by giving him details of the murders. He had, according to the police, declined legal assistance during the initial interviews. However, he did take the police to the locations where he had murdered and buried the bodies. He was later charged with 38 murders.

Following psychiatric evaluation, Sithole was deemed sane and fit to stand trial on 21 October 1996. He stood trial for 38
murders and the rapes of 40 women. He had already been convicted of a previous rape in 1989 and had served part of a six-year sentence. Despite the evidence against him, he pleaded not guilty and a lengthy trial ensued.

On 3 December 1996, the prosecution produced a video that had been recorded in prison shortly after his arrest and contained his confession to murders he had committed. Fellow inmates in Boksburg Prison had made the video; these were Charles Schoeman, Jacques Rogge and Mark Halligan – former police officers who had been involved in a £315,000 diamond robbery in Amanzimtoti in 1995. They had also murdered an accomplice.

Rogge met Sithole in the infirmary, where the former slept because of his diabetes. Sithole asked Rogge if he could steal some pills so that he could commit suicide, but first he wanted to tell his story. Schoeman, Rogge, Halligan and Sithole all signed a contract, agreeing to share the profits from the sale of the story. Sithole’s share was to go to his daughter. He is heard disputing the number of murders he was charged with, saying that he killed only 29 women.

On 4 December 1997, almost 12 months after the trial began, Mr Justice David Curlewis found Moses Sithole guilty on 40 charges of rape, 38 charges of murder and six charges of robbery. It took three hours to read the verdict and judgment was deferred until the following day. Then Judge Curlewis sentenced Sithole to a total of 2,410 years in prison. He received 12 years for each of the 40 rapes, 50 years for each of the 38 murders and another five years for each of the six robberies. These sentences would not run concurrently and the judge recommended no possibility of parole for at least 930 years. The judge said ‘I do not take leniency into account. What you did was horrible.’ The judge also stated that he would have had no trouble imposing the death penalty, had it still been a viable option. He did not have the necessary faith in the prison authorities nor the parole boards to hand down life sentences. That would have meant that Sithole would be eligible for parole in 25 years. The judge said ‘I want
to make it clear that Moses Sithole should stay in jail for the rest of his life.’

Like many other sexual predators and serial killers, Stewart Wilken (b. 1966), when finally apprehended, revealed a life of torment in which he was sexually abused and buggered as a young boy. He began smoking drugs at the age of eight and was forced to eat his food out of a dog bowl. As with all serial killers, there was a deep psychological motive underlying his choice of victims. He had two failed marriages and could not hold down a relationship with a woman, so he turned to prostitutes for more than sexual gratification.

Normally, a serial killer will target a specific type of person or a group of people. Wilken was different. He killed two different types of victims: adult female prostitutes and young adolescent boys, in and around the town of Port Elizabeth. By the beginning of 1997, at least eight people had already been murdered, the police believed by one person. These murders went back to 1990. The police had no clues as to the identity of the killer, but this was soon to change.

On Wednesday, 22 January 1997, a 12-year-old boy disappeared. His mother was initially not concerned, as the boy frequently stayed over at his grandmother’s house in nearby Missionvale, walking distance from their home in Algoa Park. However, when he did not arrive home by Thursday evening, she became uneasy. On the Friday morning, she went to the grandmother’s house, only to hear that her son had left for home on Wednesday.

The police investigation showed that the boy had been at his mother’s house on Wednesday afternoon, after which he had played with a friend at a nearby park. The friend said that he had to go and buy milk for his parents and later saw the boy with a man called Stewart Wilken in Dyke Way. Wilken asked the boy where he was going and the boy said that it was none of his
business. Both the boy and his mother knew Wilken, and Wilken had even lived at his mother’s for a while after he had had some marital problems. The police then started to enquire about Wilken. They found that Wilken’s daughter had also gone missing in 1995 and that there were two charges of buggery being investigated against him. Like the missing boy, Wilken’s daughter was last seen in his company. The buggery charges had been filed by his parents-in-law in connection with the two sons of his second wife, Victoria.

Wilken was traced and arrested on 28 January 1997 and when questioned appeared genuinely concerned about the missing boy and eager to help. He admitted that he had indeed been with the missing boy on that Wednesday, but that he knew nothing about his disappearance. Wilken stated that he had spent the night at a female friend’s house. Strangely, he was released from custody before they checked out his alibi, which soon turned out to be false. He was re-arrested on 31 January 1997.