After a sickening moment, when a stray dog carried a woman’s rotting head into a small rural township, a horrifying catalogue of partially-dismembered bodies was discovered on nearby farmland
South Africa’s “Sugarcane” serial killer sold his victims’ body parts to witch doctors(Image: Getty Images)
The sick crimes of a ruthless serial killer who is known to have raped and killed at least 13 women were only discovered after a stray dog wandered into a small village.
“It wasn’t the dog that was odd,” explains true-crime podcaster Kristina Collins. “That was pretty normal. But it was what was in his mouth. The dog had a woman’s decomposing head in its jaws.”
On her KallMeKris podcast, Kristina explains that residents of Shayamoya Township, around 25 miles south-west of Durban, South Africa, followed the dog’s trail back toward nearby sugarcane fields. There they found the rest of the woman’s body discarded among the cane.
“By nightfall, a second set of remains had turned up in among the cane,” she says. “Shayamoya went from uneasy to terrified in a matter of hours. And over the next three days, the body-count kept climbing. And workers harvesting sugarcane kept finding bodies as they moved through the rows.”
The horrified villagers had no idea who all these dead women were. “The condition of the bodies made everything harder because decomposition had ravaged every set of remains,” Kristina says. “Several showed signs of burning. And not a single victim could be identified by sight.”
A few days after the gruesome discoveries, Umzimkhulu police spokesman Superintendent Zandra Hechter announced that one of the victims had been positively identified as Nombali Ngcobo of Inanda, but said that the identities of the other victims remained a mystery, adding that the bodies had been in “an advanced state of decomposition”.
Superintendent Hechter continued: ”All the victims were females between the age of 18 and 35, and we suspect the cause of death was strangulation.”
“We suspect that the murders have been committed by the same person as the modus operandi in all three cases is the same,” she added. “We are following up certain leads that could shed light on the murders.”
To aid in the investigation, a detective from Pretoria was dispatched to Shayamora: “His presence told the community what the police hadn’t yet said out loud,” Kris said. “Someone was hunting in those fields.”
Over the following days and weeks, a succession of families came to Shayamoya, hoping to identify a missing daughter or sister. One notable factor was that, in a number of cases, the victims appeared to have brought their CVs with them to the site of their murder.
Unemployment in the region was running high, and opportunities for the mainly Xhosa-speaking rural community were few and far between. So when Thozamile Taki started placing offers of work, he was inundated with replies.
Kristina explains: “He promised them work, good jobs, steady pay, and a future on the south coast of Quazulu Natal, South Africa. For young women with nothing but a handwritten resume and borrowed bus fare, he must have sounded like an answer to a prayer.”
But Taki was “a jackal in a sheep’s skin,” she added, and everyone of those too-good-to-be-true job offers lured a young woman to her death. Even more disturbingly, Taki was reportedly harvesting body parts from his victims for use in Muti rituals.
This twisted ritual practice involves the sacrifice a human — very often a woman or child—and the removal of their body parts while they are still alive to create magical charms or medicines believed to bring extreme power or wealth.
It was the crumpled CVs and that proved to offer the break in the case, Kristina says: “Investigators started contacting the families whose names appeared on the abandoned ID books and CVs. And every single one had already filed a missing person’s report and every single one told detectives the same thing. Their daughter, or sister, or niece had met a man who promised her a job. Then she vanished.”
For quite some time, the authorities resisted branding the suspect a serial killer, but with the discovery of each new body, the label was becoming harder and harder to avoid.
The break in the case came when a woman who had narrowly avoided becoming one of Taki’s victims came forward. Nombali Ngcobo tearfully told police how her friend Dudu Ntetha was abducted by Taki. Captain Frederic Munro explained: “She said they were at a taxi rank in Umzinto when Taki singled out Ntetha and took her away. They took a taxi and he came back four hours later without her.”
Dudu’s body was later found rotting in the sugar cane fields outside Shayamora. While Nombali didn’t know Taki’s name, she gave a police sketch artist a clear description of the predator. Further evidence emerged when a mobile phone registered to one of the dead women was found to be still active.
When the phone was traced, police found a woman who claimed her brother-in-law had given it to her. And her brother-in-law, Thozamile Taki, bore an uncanny resemblance to the drawing by the police sketch artist.
Police raided Taki’s address, arresting both the killer and his girlfriend: “Then detectives tore the place apart,” Kristina says, “and they found essentially a catalogue of cell phones, clothing, blankets, bank cards, store cards from clothing shops. All of it belonged to the missing women.”
Taki’s girlfriend, Hlengiwe Nene, initially claimed that she had bought several of the items, and as a result was accused of having been his accomplice in the gruesome murders.
But even after his arrest, the story wasn’t over. A month before his trial Taki, along with eight other prisoners, attempted to escape from Westville Prison in KwaZulu-Natal.
The escape was a failure, though with Taki falling from the roof of a fourth-floor cell block, suffering serious injuries.
Taki was still confined to a wheelchair when, in March 2010, Judge King Ndlovu found him guilty on all 26 charges relating to the murder of the 13 women: “The person who lured the woman, promised them jobs but killed them and dumped their bodies in sugarcane fields, was none other than Thozamile Taki. The State has proven their case beyond reasonable doubt on all 26 counts,” he said.
On 19 January 2011, Taki was sentenced to 13 life sentences for the murders and an additional 208 years related to the various items he stole from his victims.
