Paul Kirk Police are hunting for two serial killers in Durban who are believed to be responsible for the murder of four young women and the abduction and rape of at least eight girls. Durban police confirmed this week that in Greenwood Park – a suburb of central Durban – a killer has murdered at least four women and possibly more. Detectives from the Durban murder and robbery unit said the bodies of four women had been exhumed last month from a cemetery. The bodies had been found separately in the same spot over the past five months, but the police returned to the cemetery to exhume them on realising they were dealing with a serial killer.
According to the commander of the Durban murder and robbery unit, Senior Superintendent Daan Malan, the murder victims were all women between the ages of 20 and 30. A special team of hand-picked detectives under the command of Superintendent Alan Alford, a leading expert on serial killers, has been established to investigate the case. Police say the faces of the deceased are being reconstructed and a psychological profile of the killer is being made. His victims are also being profiled to establish who his likely victims are. Although police confirmed all the women had been killed in the same way, they declined to give any details as they fear this may hamper their investigations or encourage copycat killers. Meanwhile, in Newlands, a suburb west of Durban, detectives are tracking another serial killer whom they believe could be responsible for the abduction and rape of several young girls. The decomposing body of one girl, 12-year-old Cindy Mchunu, was found nine days after her disappearance on June 20. At least 30 murder and robbery unit detectives have been sent to the area to knock on doors asking residents if any of their children have been raped or abducted.
“We have sent a vehicle to the area and every day we hand out flyers asking the community to report crimes to us, to the murder and robbery unit. The vehicle is acting like a reporting station,” said Malan. He said his unit has a likely suspect for Mchunu’s murder but as yet does not have enough evidence to arrest him. Malan said that as yet he could not conclusively say that all the abductions were the work of one man. Most murders in South Africa are not handled by the elite murder and robbery units. The sheer number of killings dictate that police detective branches attached to local police stations must investigate most cases. Because of the burden of the number of cases, and the number of detectives handling murder cases, police say it is quite possible that serial killers operate undetected.
They point to the case of the Phoenix serial killer, Sipho Twala, who operated for a year and killed more than a dozen people before local police realised they were dealing with a serial killer and called in the murder and robbery unit. Twala is serving a sentence of 506 years after Alford, acknowledged as one of the world’s top serial-killer hunters, caught him in record time. The Twala investigation brought unprecedented, and as yet unacknowledged, praise for Alford’s detective work from the FBI, which wrote to Alford congratulating him on the arrest that was made faster than the bureau had ever managed. Twala, who murdered his victims in sugar-cane fields, was brought to book when Alford’s team collected samples of chewed-up sugar cane from the crime scenes.
These samples were found to contain Twala’s DNA, which was on file after he was accused of a rape case where the victim vanished. After swooping on Twala’s home Alford arrested the man, who was found to be in possession of property taken from the dead victims.