“What we are going to do, I have no idea,” sobs Nokwanda Matshikiza, reflecting on the murder of her niece Dineo Motapane. “But something must give.”
“For us, for all the other women. How many other bodies will be found before something happens?”
Nokwanda is speaking from the family home near Johannesburg, South Africa’s main city, just two days after relatives identified Dineo’s body.
The 38-year-old mother-of-two was last seen alive last Sunday. Her battered body, partly burned, was found later in the residential region of Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg.
Nokwanda weeps as she describes how the family will have to face, at some point, the grim task of telling Dineo’s daughter of her death.
“How do you explain that your parent was brutally murdered, dumped in a field, and just left there, discarded like a piece of rubbish.
“There’s no coming to peace with it,” she adds. “It’s something that you can never reconcile yourself with, that you can never get over.”
Nine bodies since July
Dineo’s body was one of three discovered in Ekurhuleni this week. In total, nine bodies of murdered women have been found in similar circumstances in the region since July.
Most of the victims were young, in their 20s or 30s, and almost all had suffered extreme violence before their deaths. Police have confirmed the women were sexually abused.
Five of the nine bodies were found in Kempton Park, a district of Ekurhuleni. Others were discovered in areas including Clayville, Olifantsfontein and KwaThema, while a ninth body was found further south in Dawn Park.
Only one arrest has been made in connection with the murders – and that was two days after the first body was discovered on 15 July. The first woman was allegedly killed by a boyfriend.
Nobody has been detained following the murders of the other eight Ekurhuleni women.
Police have said they are not sure if they are hunting a serial killer, and it is possible the cases are not linked. The police’s investigative psychology unit has been called in to work on the cases.
“No family should have to deal with this”
Themba Kekana is also living in shock at the death of a loved one.
His sister, Itumeleng, was one of the first to disappear in Ekurhuleni. The 32-year-old shopkeeper’s body was found in July, 17 days after she was last seen alive. Her body was badly bruised, partially clothed and dumped on a bridge.
“We are devastated with grief,” says Themba, wet eyes shining.
“I look at my sister’s young daughter and my eyes fill with tears, I know there is no way that I can ever take this pain away from her.
“No family should have to deal with what we are faced with.”
Thembi Mabena, 60, lived in the same neighbourhood as Dineo Motapane.
“She was laughing every day, with everybody,” she remembers. “Now I’m worried.
“I know many children, girls, who tell me they are afraid to go to the shop alone. There is no safety, even for me too. I am old, but there is no safety.”
Fear on the streets
The spate of grim discoveries has once again sparked a national outcry about the scale of violence against women in South Africa, which has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world.
Police issue detailed crime statistics every quarter. During the last quarter – between April and June this year – 5,427 people were murdered.
The official data does not distinguish between the genders of the victims, but this week the country’s Human Rights Commission released figures showing that 569 women had been killed in that period – six a day on average – with another 1,052 who faced attempted murder.
Many women, already feeling unsafe, have been left reeling by recent events.
“I feel uncomfortable,” says Thulisile Sibande, 32. “When I go to a shop, I have to look around. I’m shocked and scared. So scared, it’s a trauma.”
“In South Africa,” says Lerato Mzizi, 20, simply, “women are not safe any more.”
In Kempton Park, Lumka Maqhubela is part of the Girl2Woman Foundation group, which has held protests to raise awareness of the crimes.
“We are grieved, we are scared,” she says. “If the police cannot protect us any more the government should step in and do something.
“It’s clear that we are not safe, we cannot be told by the police to be more vigilant. They should be doing more to make our communities safe – what else are we expected to do? We are not safe anywhere, not in our homes, not in the streets, it needs to stop.”
Pressure on government
The killings have put pressure on the government, less than a year after ministers acknowledged the scale of the issue and declared gender-based violence a national disaster.
Announcing the move last November, Minister of Social Development Nokuzola Sisisi Tolashe said treating the issue as a national disaster would help the government tackle the crisis.
It followed weeks of protests, culminating in a “Women’s Shut Down” march as South Africa hosted the G20 summit in Johannesburg. Women dressed in black took to the streets, some carrying placards reading: “Our townships are unsafe for women.”
President Cyril Ramaphosa this week pledged to leave “no stone unturned” in investigating the crimes in Ekurhuleni, adding: “As a nation, we must stand up for the rights, safety and dignity of women and girls.”
This week has seen a chorus of calls for things to go further.
Rights group Amnesty International said an important first step towards protecting South Africa’s women was to recognise femicide as a separate crime.
“Every day that femicide remains unrecognised as a crime is a failure to confront the targeted killing of women,” said Amnesty’s country director Shenilla Mohamed in a statement. “It is time to call it what it is: Femicide.
“Femicide is a gender-motivated crime. It is the killing of a woman because she is a woman.”
Amnesty says femicide is criminalised as a specific crime in 33 countries, including Gabon and Morocco in Africa, and argues that making the change in South Africa could help focus on the scale of the issue.
“It would compel the state to confront their failure to protect women and girls from violence,” says Mohamed. “You cannot fix what you are not tracking.”
Legacies of violence
Lebogang Ramofoko, an advocate for gender and social justice, said the levels of violence against women in the country were symptomatic of a much bigger problem – a lack of regard for humanity.
“The bodies of black women have been treated as disposable in this country for time in memorial, passed down from colonisation through to apartheid,” she says, referring to the legalised system of racism that was in place until 1994.
“What we see happening to women is testimony to legacies of violence from those systems whose traumas were never addressed.
“This is not to say black men are inherently violent, but in systems where violence was meted out against them for decades, historically black women were the people that that violence would be taken out on – that cycle has not been broken.”
“It points to a serial killer”
Dr Micki Pistorius, the renowned profiler and author who founded the police’s investigative psychology unit in 1994, believes the Kempton Park cases carry the hallmarks of a single killer.
“It’s unlikely that eight (now nine) women in the same area within 40km of each other had eight (now nine) different killers. That’s highly unlikely. It’s never happened before,” she says.
“It’s also not gang ritual-related. So, in my experience, it points to a serial killer. There’s a victim profile that corresponds. There’s geolocation that corresponds, and there’s a modus operandi.
“Police have also confirmed that the women were sexually abused. So to me, yes, it points to a serial killer.”
She cautions, however, that not every body may belong to the same case.
“At this stage, it is very possible that one or two of these women were killed by somebody they know,” she says. “We know the first woman was allegedly killed by a boyfriend.”
She recalls the Phoenix serial killer case in Natal, where a man killed his wife or girlfriend and dumped her body in the sugarcane fields where other victims had been found, “hoping that we would think this was done by the serial killer”.
“However, any experienced detective and profiler can immediately tell you that this one doesn’t fit.”
Dr Pistorius says a well-trained profiler can link crime scenes by finding a killer’s specific “signature”.
“Killers leave signatures; they leave psychological clues on the crime scene,” she says. “The serial killers act out a fantasy on their crime scenes, and every person has their own particular idiosyncratic fantasies that they do not necessarily share with other people.”
She points to the mid-1990s, when Moses Sithole, Lazarus Mazingane – the Nasrec serial killer – and the Cleveland serial killer were all operating in Gauteng at the same time, with overlapping victim profiles and bodies left near highways.
“Sithole’s signature was sadism. He prolonged the death of the victims, and he tortured them psychologically and physically. And he liked to watch. Mazingane, on the other hand, was consumed by rage, so his crime scenes were violent.”
Telling them apart, she says, is vital. “Otherwise, you’re going to take one serial killer’s bodies and attribute them to the other one, and then that serial killer is going to go free.”
Serial murder versus gender-based violence
Dr Pistorius draws a distinction between the Ekurhuleni killings and the wider femicide crisis.
“In gender-based violence, the perpetrator usually knows the victim. It’s a husband and wife, or it’s a boyfriend and girlfriend,” she says. “In a serial killer case, the serial killer doesn’t know his victims beforehand.
“So, yes, it’s a man killing women, but he’s not going to be charged with gender-based violence. He’s going to be charged with multiple murders. That’s an important difference.”
She adds: “Femicide, sadly, is a scourge. It happens daily, and not just in South Africa, in many other countries. While serial killers are rare, comparatively. So yes, there’s a link. But I don’t think we should just attribute it to gender-based violence. It runs deep, very, very deep.”
She does see a shared thread. “Yes, I think there could be some kind of patriarchal element in it: that a person who kills multiple women and demands sex feels he’s entitled to it, and that women cannot say no to him.”
Why bodies go unnoticed
Asked how nine bodies could lie undiscovered in a busy residential region, Dr Pistorius says South Africa’s open land makes it easy.
“Oh, easily. There can easily be bodies lying around because it’s veld and because the grass is tall, and you’ll only notice them when they start smelling. Or when someone with a dog walks past.”
She recalls training profilers in France, where a student asked why South African crime scene photographs showed such badly decomposed bodies.
“I explained that South Africa is a country with vast open land, and somebody could leave a body in the veld, as in this case in Kempton Park. Now, people wouldn’t notice that body if the grass is tall, unless it begins to smell.”
A proper serial murder investigation, she says, is a multidisciplinary task force led by trained detectives and supported by profilers, forensic pathologists, crime scene analysts, the canine unit, forensic laboratories and geolocation specialists who plot where bodies were found to estimate where the killer lives.
“This is what I think they’ve got at the moment in this case,” she says.
Profiles have led to arrests before. In the Station Strangler case in the Western Cape, a published profile prompted a nurse to recognise a man who regularly booked himself into her clinic. That man, Norman Simons, was arrested as the Station Strangler.
For the families in Ekurhuleni, though, the wait for answers goes on. As Nokwanda Matshikiza puts it: “Something must give.”