Just when South Africans thought the spate of serial killings had come to an end, another killer’s graveyard is uncovered. Jan Taljaard reports
WHEN David Selepe was arrested in December last year for the brutal slaying of 15 young women in and around Cleveland, Johannesburg, it was thought that one of South Africa’s worst spates of serial killings had come to an end.
But more bodies were found, in Pretoria’s Atteridgeville. This time, it was said, it could not have been the same killer. The “Cleveland Strangler” had been killed by a policeman who alleged that Selepe had attempted to attack him while visiting a murder
This week, police made their most gruesome discovery yet when the bodies of 10 young women were found in a field outside Boksburg.
This brought the total number of victims attributed to Selepe and what could have been a copycat killer or killers to 40.
The killer who ostensibly took over where Selepe left off became known as the “Atteridgeville Strangler”. Fifteen victims were eventually connected to the Atteridgeville slayer.
The bodies found this week, like the Atteridgeville and Cleveland victims, were of young females, many of them from rural areas, with the exception of a two-year-old boy who was killed with his mother.
The common denominator between the victims introduces a new element into the investigation. In a society emerging from the bondage of a racist, sexist and class-conscious past, it is accepted that black, rural females are close to the bottom rung of society.
The new South African Police Service is desperate to prove that it is there for all the country’s citizens. However, the cases that could help detectives to do just that are proving to be shrouded in mystery. Detectives are stymied by what are obvious connections between the incidents and factors that, simultaneously, tend to disprove such links.
Police are, for instance, adamant that Selepe was responsible for the so-called Cleveland killings. Forensic evidence links him to the crimes beyond any dispute, they say.
While the police are officially keeping silent on new developments with the purported aim of not letting the killer in on any progress, it may also be a silence brought on by differences among investigators.
Perhaps reflecting the debate within the police, speculation on the street revolves around whether, rather than three unconnected killers, the Cleveland, Atteridgeville and Boksburg cases may be linked; whether later murders were the work of a so-called copycat killer; and even whether there could have been an association between any of the killers.
There are numerous examples of copycat killings where an arrested killer professed an admiration of a previous killer in whose bloody footsteps he tried to follow.
Although the lust-driven serial killer usually operates alone (well-known examples are Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Yorkshire Ripper), there have also been well-publicised cases of killer couples, like Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. There have been partnerships, such as cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, and even a case where two brothers, Ralph and Tommy Searl, committed their murders quite independently of each other, but at the same time and in the same area.
In a race-conscious country like South Africa, other possibilities also come to mind. The so-called “Zebra” killings that took place in the early Seventies in San Francisco were completely racially motivated. Five former prisoners, all of them black, racked up a tally of 15 white men, women and children, but it is speculated that they may have been responsible for the murder of almost 200 other people.
These were not sexually motivated killings — which is the one thing that investigators seem to agree motivated the Cleveland, Atteridgeville and Boksburg murders. And in the case of sex killings, the victim and the murderer almost always, without exception belong to the same race group.
Understandably, the police would not be drawn to comment on the race issue. When young, black boys in Atlanta became the victims of a serial killer, the community reacted by expressing fears that a white racist may be the murderer. Public outrage reached such intensity that almost R1-million was eventually sucked up by the investigation.
Perhaps more valid was their fear that the police were not very enthusiastic in trying to solve the murders of children who were not white and middle class. Eventually a black man, Wayne Williams, was arrested and convicted for the murders.
Williams never confessed and although the forensic evidence was overwhelming it was not enough to put paid to rumours and speculation that, for example, linked the killings to the activities of the Ku Klux Klan.
And perhaps this should be the lesson the police must apply to the current investigation. Apart from stopping the horror and making the country safe, it will not do to have serial-killer suspects shot dead before their cases can be tried in court.