Joshua Amupadhi
Accused serial killer Moses Sithole had set up an organisation to campaign against the abuse of women and children, the Pretoria Supreme Court was told this week
The man alleged to have slain 37 women and a toddler set himself up as a champion of the oppressed, using “official-looking” letters typed by a former work colleague.
Between May and August last year, only months before his arrest, Sithole asked Melody Stern, a typist at Afrox in Pretoria West, where he was a casual worker washing trucks, to type the documents.
Stern told the court that Sithole said he was starting the organisation in Atteridgeville. “He asked me to type forms which people could fill out at schools … teachers or any person who knew about people who were abused,” she said. She also typed membership recruitment forms and minutes of meetings.
Stern said the organisation’s name resembled that of the police’s child protection unit. When she pointed this out Sithole changed it.
The husband of one of the murdered women said that a few days after her body was discovered he found an envelope in her belongings with the name “Child Protection Community Organisation”.
A street address in Pretoria as well as the time and date of an appointment were written on the envelope.
Jimmy Lepule, a taxi driver, said Mildred, his wife of eight years and mother of their two children, was promised a clerical job with promotion to a social worker in three years by a man she called Pheri. She was to be interviewed on June 1 last year by a “Professor Williams”. Three days before this she received a call from Pheri who was “setting up the interview” with Williams.
A jubilant Mildred told her husband that the interview had been brought forward by a day. Lepule next saw his wife a month later – in a mortuary.
The state spent this week seeking to prove that the murders were committed by the same person – in similar circumstances with the promise of a job, rape and then strangling them with their underwear or an item of their clothing.
Their bodies were found in open fields with identification documents destroyed or hidden.
One witness after the other told how their loved ones left home one morning – to get a job they had been promised – never to be seen alive again.
A half-full court of relatives and friends of the victims occasionally murmured or shouted at Sithole who seldom raised his head.
But he sat up and stared at witnesses during the testimony about the organisation against women and child abuse.
A witness who reported one of the murders said he saw a man, whom he could not identify, and a woman trespassing in a field in Boksburg North. Absalom Sangweni said he warned the couple not to walk in the field but they ignored him. Some minutes later the man returned – looking in different directions and putting a “shiny object” into his trousers.
When Sangweni went to investigate he found the woman, Josephine Mlangeni (25), strangled with a piece of her clothing and without underwear.
Transvaal deputy attorney general Retha Meintjies is leading the prosecution which has gathered 350 witnesses in the bloodiest serial killing trial in South Africa’s history.