AS SOON AS THE INVESTIGATORS ARRESTED DAVID, or perhaps even before they had their man, they suspected he was killing for body parts to be sold and used for muti.

Several of the skeletons were missing bones when they were found. But more prominent in the detectives’ minds than physical evidence was motive: Why would David have gone to such lengths to kill if not to be paid, and where did he get the money to lure his victims in the first place?

The bodies were found in four distinct areas: Mankayane, Malkerns, Macetjeni, and Sidvokodvo. These areas are as little as fifteen miles apart and as much as fifty. David had led the cops to the top of a remote mountain to retrieve some of the final bodies. The cops walked through thick, pathless bush and climbed intimidating boulders to get there. There was no way David was bringing women there simply on foot. So he must have had income.

And yet it seems he did not have a job. In Swaziland, even the fare for a kombi (collective taxi, the main form of public transport) is a serious matter for those in the subsistence class. If you earn less than a dollar a day, or don’t participate in the formal economy at all, it is a very big deal to buy groceries or to pay for kombi rides for yourself, much less others.

That is why the senior investigators, Jomo Mavuso and Khethokwakhe Ndlangamandla, appear certain, in a video taken on June 6, 2001 — nearly a month after David had given his written confessions — that he was doing this with money and for money. At the time, the police clearly did not believe in the “revenge” motive David was claiming. Below is a sample of what they said to him, in very calm siSwati:

You want all these people, including police officers, to believe that you would give someone bus fare knowing that you would kill them? First and foremost, you are not employed. You struggle to get the money to give people for bus fares. Then they board the buses only for you to kill them and you get nothing in return? You struggled through thorns, over trees, climbing rocks and valleys when killing these people, and you say you got nothing? You will never be trusted, there is something you gained by killing these people… You were working; you knew that when you spent money on bus fare for a person, your refund was coming somehow. You knew very well that even if you went through thorns, even if you fell from the rocks, that you would get paid tomorrow. You were used. You were getting paid by killing these people. There is someone or someones who were using you, paying you. Simelane, do not let anyone disturb your going to heaven. There was a witch doctor behind this. There was a witch doctor who made promises to them if they got the body parts. When we face the facts, Simelane, these people were killed by your hands, but realistically your hands would not have killed them if it were not for the people that were using you. They should also be arrested like you have also been arrested. So many people should not die because of them.

David says very little as the police pour on the questions and accusations about his secret partners. In one of the few answers he gives during that day’s interrogation, David agrees with the incredulous officer who asks how he expects them to buy his story: “If I hadn’t done it,” he says, “I wouldn’t believe it.”

The police accuse David Simelane of working with partners

IN THE 1970S, RITUAL MURDERS IN SWAZILAND “reached epidemic proportions,” according to Booth. “To many, they were indicative of a widespread sense of desperation among those who saw archaic institutions as no defense against the new and bewildering forces confronting them.” When the former prime minister, Prince Makhosini Dlamini, died in 1978, human parts were found in his refrigerator. The last executions in Swaziland, in 1983, were for ritual murder. And these crimes continue to occur today.

But no known killer in Swazi history has ever been more prolific than David. If he was acting on behalf of a body parts syndicate, murdering for others who desired greater power, then what prompted a need for such an unprecedented number of victims?

Traditional treatment for everyday ills may include eating mixtures of natural powders or even certain parts of an animal. But according to the social anthropologist Harriet Ngubane, ritual murder of a human would be prescribed in extreme cases. “To put it more bluntly,” Ngubane wrote, “the popularity among the ambitious of ritual homicide is due primarily neither to the wickedness of inyangas nor to the overweening greed of those who employ such means to attain their goals, but rather to the sickness of the society which induces them to believe that there is no effective alternative.” The South African criminologist Gérard Labuschagne also noted that “times of political unrest, periods of competition for resources, and conditions of a power vacuum have all been associated with increased incidence of muti murder.”

And there were few times more debilitating, confusing, and deleterious to Swazi society than when the 20th and 21st centuries collided. Swaziland was sick and its people, rich and poor, were dying. Doctors told Swazis there was no cure for HIV, and Christian leaders told them that they shouldn’t procreate. Healers told them they could fix the problem with herbs, but Swazis still died in numbers never before seen. Old ways and new ways alike were failing them. Many believed that God was punishing Africa.

If ever there was a time and place for extreme measures, this was it.

SIX DAYS AFTER THE POLICE DEMANDED that David tell them whom he was working for, they turned on the camera again. Rumors of what he said that day have persisted ever since. Who did he name? Are the police covering up a conspiracy, are powerful people protecting David, or is David protecting them?

Labuschagne said that muti murder is a very sensitive topic among law enforcement officers in South Africa because traditional practices are a large part of some officers’ lives. As a result, they may be “unwilling to define a murder as being a muti murder for fear of retribution from the traditional healer involved. Also, since it is a rumor that certain high-ranking politicians, business people, and other civil servants have participated in such dealings, some police officers may be cautious about their involvement in such cases.” Perhaps the police in Swaziland were believers themselves, or didn’t want to get on the bad side of someone with access to strong muti.

Everyone I spoke to had a theory. But they all agreed on two things: David couldn’t have done this on his own, and someone was getting away with murder. The family of victim Samantha Kgasi-Ngobese was among the most doubtful. “There are not enough questions asked,” Samantha’s sister, Charmaine Kgasi-Munro, told me. “The people he killed didn’t have much money. These were people looking for jobs. We never heard of him housebreaking. So where was he getting his money from? Where was he getting his transport from? Who knew him? Who were his friends?”

“He brought them to some syndicate,” said Samantha’s mother, Mable. “To some people to do the job. He was bringing them, getting paid, and throwing them away.”

ACCORDING TO JUDGE ANNANDALE, Vusi Dlamini was the best witness in the trial of David Simelane. “Civil, reliable, credible, and persuasive are all suitable adjectives which adequately qualify him as a single witness in this count who carries the day,” wrote the judge. Yet when I spoke to Vusi, his recollection of his last phone call with Sindi still confused him.

The conversation had happened more than ten years earlier, but Vusi remembered thinking Sindi was traveling with more than one person. He also thought that they were going by car, two factors that could re-shape the story of the David Simelane murders.

“She did not say, ‘I am taking a coach or I am taking a bus to Bhunya.’ If she said that, it would have been clear,” Vusi told me. “The way I interpreted it, I thought they were driving a car…She came from a well-off family. I don’t think she would fall for a business partner who did not have resources like a car.”

In the written confession, David said that he promised to lend Sindi money. Then he said he strangled her to death. He misremembered the location, saying he took Sindi to Malkerns, when in fact her clothes were found in Sidvokodvo. There were so many victims, he must have mixed her up with another.

More generally, Vusi wondered how his wife could ever have been led to her death by somebody like David. Sindi’s father had lived all around the world and written, with Sindi’s help, textbooks for the Swazi curriculum. Her brother had a medical practice in town. She was intelligent and driven. It seemed impossible that she could fall for the lies of a simple man from the rural areas living in a shack the size of a closet. “Sindi wouldn’t be convinced by that man,” Vusi said. “He is way low of her class. Somebody who could convince Sindi that he could be her partner would be in designer suits maybe, driving a nice car, looking decent and literate. When you look at that man [David], maybe you can say he is literate, but you can see that he cannot be a good businessman. I don’t think she would fall for that trick.”

One theory Vusi came up with, that he kept returning to, was that David was just a middleman. “If you want to open a business, and then I claim I can connect you with people who are good in this particular field, you will be looking beyond me as a poor man in jeans and tackies. You will be anxious to meet the real business partner, not me. I’m just here to show you the next person.”

Vusi was quick to qualify his statements: “I trust the work done by the officers, by my colleagues. After everything had been revealed, nothing concrete could be proven that he was working with other people.” Throughout our talks, Vusi always showed nothing but the utmost respect for the officers who worked the case.

ON JUNE 12, 2001, seven weeks after his arrest and a month after the confession in which he listed his victims, David gave three additional names. All three were famous men in Swaziland: Peace Mfana “Boy” Motsa, a wealthy businessman who died in May 2014; Majahebutimba Dlamini, a member of Parliament who died in 2003; and a third man, still alive, a former member of Parliament.

These were the people, David said on camera, who hired him to kill.

David Simelane admits to killing with partners

In 2001, all three had been influential people in Swaziland, often in the newspaper headlines for their business dealings and work in government. Each of them has since been involved in multimillion-dollar personal or government investments. To say the least, they were part of the Swazi economic elite, wealthy by world standards. As Ngubane says, it is believed by Swazis that those who turn to ritual murder are primarily “well-placed people seeking promotion, power, etc., who engage in these acts — not ‘ordinary, poor people.’” These were well-placed people.

David rocked back and forth in his chair and stared at the ceiling as he told the cops his story. This is what he said happened:

Toward the end of the Swazi winter of 1999, he ran into Boy Motsa, who was already an acquaintance. Motsa told David that he had a job for him. David asked what the job was. Motsa then lowered his voice, and told David that he was looking for someone to kill people and take their body parts.

“He begged me to say yes,” David said, “because this was their way of making money. I then accepted the job offer so that I could also have money.” That evening, he met two of Motsa’s partners, both of whom worked in Parliament. They agreed that David would get E3,000 (about $370 US) a month, less than the salaries he’d promised to some of his victims. He would also get two kombis (communal taxis) and a Sprinter MiniBus worth a total of E300,000 ($37,000 US), an enormous amount of money in Swaziland. Motsa and his partners, David said, “are the ones who got me into this line of work.”

They set the routes he would take to find victims, chose a meeting place in Mahlanya — the area that Majahebutimba Dlamini represented in Parliament — and appointed Motsa as point man in case something went wrong. “Once we have reached a fifty target figure, none of us will be lacking money,” David said he was told. He was given E1,500 (about $200 US) from the start, and this man, whose rent in 2001 was the equivalent of seven dollars a month, took a taxi home.

In order to ensure that nobody betrayed the syndicate, “it was agreed that should anyone get arrested, that person should never expose the others,” he said. Those who had not been caught would then finance the arrested’s legal defense. Parts of the victims would be sold, including cuts from thighs, the liver, and the heart; brain tissue from children; and the unborn babies of pregnant women. David would get paid regardless of the body count.

The killing began in September 1999, and David claims he was not always alone on the job. He said his employers had personally participated in seven murders and that they used a Nissan one-ton pickup belonging to one of the partners to transport the victims to secluded places.

In Annandale’s judgment, based on witness testimony, he described the disappearance of Rose Nunn and her child Nothando as follows:

Rose Nunn and her thirteen-month-old baby Nothando Khumalo left home for the Social Welfare offices on the 20th February 2001. Later that day, her live-in lover, Mbongeni Mlotsa…again saw them, this time not at home but at the welfare offices…Little did he know when [sic] that when they again parted company, that it would be the last time he was ever to see them alive. They did not come home as expected that afternoon. He reported their disappearance at her parental homestead, which was next to their home in Manzini, but nothing happened for a month. He was then contacted by the police at Matsapha police station, his worst suspicions were aroused when he heard the reaction to a photo which he had of Rose Nunn, the deceased person referred to in Count 11.

The judge further pointed out that in David’s confession, he said that, “When we got to the forest, I strangled her to death, with her child, with my own hands.” What was not in the judgment, nor ever presented in court, were the additional details that David gave in the video from June 12, 2001.

When he first met Nunn in February 2001, David said to his police interrogators, he asked her to meet him several days later at the park in Manzini. At 4:30 p.m. on a Saturday, they took a kombi together to Mahlanya, where the partners showed up to offer them both a friendly lift. They drove to the woods at the Usutu forest in Malkerns. They held Nunn down while David pierced her in the neck with an undisclosed weapon. The child was also killed, and they took his brain tissue. From Nunn, the liver, heart, and cuts from the thighs were taken. They rolled the parts up in a plastic bag and got rid of the clothes so it would be more difficult to identify the victims.

“Are you telling the truth, David, when you say you were killing these people and taking parts from them?” asked Senior Superintendent Ndlangamandla.

“Yes, sir,” said David.

All three men David named in the video had been prominently featured in the newspapers that same month, so it is possible that he simply picked them because they were fresh in his mind. Boy Motsa had publicly offered to pay for the coffins of David’s victims. This gesture of apparent goodwill somehow prompted rumors that he was involved with the killings, and could have given David the idea of naming him as an accomplice.

And the police claim to have thoroughly investigated these men and found their connection to be a figment of David’s imagination. “If there was anything linking them with the offense, we would have charged them,” one of the few remaining officers involved told me. “But at the end of the day, there was nothing concrete that we got from the suspect.” The police concluded that he was working alone, with a motive of revenge for a rape conviction. In response to my detailed questions on the David Simelane investigation, a letter sent to me in June 2014 by a representative of the National Commissioner of Police stated: “We can with absolute certainty say that the accused acted alone, and this version remains uncontroverted.”

I spoke with Boy Motsa over the phone a few months before he died. It wasn’t the clearest conversation due to language difficulties on my part, but when I asked if the police had ever spoken with him about the David Simelane murders, he laughed and said that his only connection was the rumors brought on by his generous offer to purchase coffins. I’ve also spoken to, and emailed with, the only remaining man named by David that is still alive, the former member of Parliament: When I first asked him over email if he’d ever been questioned about the murders, his response came in thirteen minutes and consisted of an expression of complete surprise. If David was working with these powerful people, he never once mentioned them in court, and nor did the police.

In the end, David pleaded innocent and claimed the confessions had been forced through torture. If he is innocent, though, then that means he somehow acted out the video confessions as well as the footage in which he leads the investigators to several bodies.

But if he is a fall guy for a body-parts syndicate, as many still believe, then why did he not mention the syndicate member names in court, instead putting the blame on a conjured-up “Sipho Dlamini” at the eleventh hour? As in the case of Solinye, where a murder probably took place but not the murder as detailed, this one might be another example of a trial that circumscribed the facts while still bringing partial justice.

In his judgment, Annandale wrote that the police found “that nobody had any association with the accused in any of the crimes he came to be prosecuted for. The police thus concluded that there was no accomplice, and that it was merely a ruse that the accused employed to detract the attention away from himself.” Still, based on the little information the police have provided, it remains a mystery as to how the now-dead officers came to this conclusion.

WHEN VUSI HAD TO STEP OUT OF HIS CAR to cry during our conversation, it wasn’t only from the pain of remembering Sindi. His father, the great traditionalist prince, had died just two weeks earlier, and his second wife a few weeks before that. He had fallen in love again and remarried in 2006. She had a problem with her lungs, Vusi told me, and he had sold two taxis he owned in order to help pay for the medical care. But she died anyway. Now his father and second wife were dead, and here I was asking about his first dead wife, his great love.

“I always had a thing for being a detective,” he told me. When he was a kid, there was a lot of criminal spillage into Swaziland from South Africa and Mozambique. He idolized the Swazi crimebusters who he saw on television news, arresting thieves and murderers. They were tough, no-nonsense police officers. So when he grew up, Vusi decided to join them. By 2009, he had become a detective sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Department of the Royal Swaziland Police Service, and a protégé of the country’s top investigators, including the people who had arrested his wife’s killer.

But back in 2001, Vusi was just a constable with potential. He didn’t have the skills of detection that would later have him going undercover to take down criminal gangs in South Africa, or to take a ricocheted shot to the leg in the line of duty while bringing down murderers himself in Swaziland. Thinking about the case back then, “I needed to know the truth,” he told me. “But at the same time I couldn’t involve myself in the investigation. I’d spoil it.” He respected Mavuso and Ndlangamandla, the top cops, the men he wanted to become. So he had to wait and let them do their job and discover what had happened to Sindi. “After the arrest,” he said, “I waited and waited.”

Still, he has troubling memories. “She said, ‘They are proceeding to Bhunya,’” he told me, remembering that last phone call with his wife. “It meant there were more than one.”

Vusi racked his brain to remember the exact words, and if he had really heard “they,” and what it meant if he had. He told me maybe she had said, “‘I have met the people and now we are proceeding to Bhunya.’” He explained to me that in siSwati, “they” and “we” had several meanings. As in English, “they” could have meant two people or more than two. “I don’t remember how I got the impression that she was proceeding to Bhunya with more than one person,” Vusi said. “In my mind maybe I thought to myself ‘She can’t go to that place with just one person.’”

“I had the feeling it was more than two,” the best witness in the David Simelane trial told me. “In siSwati we are two,” he said, motioning to us as a pair. In siSwati, Siyahamba means “we are going.”

“We are going to Bhunya,” he said. “And we will come back.”

It would be difficult for Vusi to mention his confusion over the phone call to his colleagues. After all, David was convicted as a lone serial killer. At the time we first spoke in 2011, Vusi was sharing an office with a member of the original investigative team, Solomon “Solo” Mavuso, who spent more than a month on the stand testifying against David, and eventually sealed the guilty verdict. A younger version of Solo, then the least senior officer on the team, is handcuffed to David in the 2001 video, when they search the forest for bodies. Solo is Vusi’s friend and mentor, and now one of the top cops in the country. “Solo is a nice guy,” Vusi told me. “He understands that he needs not to talk about certain things that will bring bad memories for me. He always avoids talking about it unless I ask him. But you will see he is not comfortable talking about it.”

In the special commission’s 1960 report on Solinye, the boy who didn’t die, they wrote that as a rule, muti murder “is committed at the instigation of or on behalf of some person in authority…It is somewhat naturally most unusual for the principal benefactor from, or instigator of, the murder to come forward and state that he is ready to give evidence. It is usually one of the lesser fry who gives way and talks to save himself.” In David’s case, regardless of whether he is protecting others, it is hardly clear that he has even saved himself. Theoretically he will be in prison for life or, if the great King Mswati III demands it, David will hang.

I visited the village of KaMkhweli in 2013, trying to find Solinye and hear the story of his mystical return from his own lips. But he had died a few years earlier. His elderly sister couldn’t confirm the exact year, but Solinye had lived to be around seventy.

He had seen independence, outlived his king, and died in a very different world than the one in which he had “died” as a boy. He was a good man, his sister said. His brother, the chief who needed strengthening, however, was not well respected in life and died a drinker. KaMkhweli had become notorious in Swaziland for a chieftancy dispute that led to evictions, legal battles, and the burning down of several homes.

ABOUT FORTY-FIVE BODIES WERE FOUND IN ALL; thirty-four were charged to David and twenty-eight were used to convict him. But to this day, only three have been positively identified. Two of them were found by the farm worker at Eagle’s Nest, and were successfully identified as Fikile and Lindokuhle Motsa. Simon Motsa died in 2010 in his early fifties, and his brother Eric told me the wife and child had had a traditional funeral. “Every ritual was performed,” he said.

Until a few years ago, the rest of the bodies sat in a Swaziland police station awaiting identification. Since the DNA evidence never panned out, the police could not be certain which set of bones belonged to which victim. Samantha Kgasi-Ngobese’s bones were returned to her family in late 2011, and a funeral was held, more than a decade after she was killed. “I’m still not happy about the identification because it was just marked ‘Malkerns,’ and I know she was found in Sidvokodvo,” her sister Charmaine told me. “But I have decided to try my utmost best to ignore all that.”

Ten years of delay sowed a distrust in the victims’ families of the Swazi justice system and those who were meant to uphold it. Without real proof that the bodies found are their loved ones, and without solid evidence that the police have told all they know about the killings, it’s difficult to close the book. For the families, there might always be the nagging thought that their daughters and wives and mothers are like Solinye, living respectable lives just a few miles down the road, waiting until they feel like coming home again.

“The case will be over, but it will never be over over,” said Charmaine. “Because we know there’s more to it, and there’s nothing we can do.”

SINDI NTIWANE, OR A SET OF BONES THAT WAS LABELED Sindi Ntiwane, was also buried in 2011 in the mountains of Mdumezulu. In the winter, mountains in Swaziland are the victims of deliberate, if not necessarily controlled, burns by Swazis, who attempt to reset the land for agriculture each year. While the burning season can be dangerous — each year homes are destroyed when fires run out of control — nights in the mountains are filled with mesmerizing orange snakes of flame that slowly rise to the mountain peaks. By the end of winter, much of the country has been scorched, and the green grass pushes up once again from the charred earth. I wondered if the remains of Sindi Ntiwane would rise by smoke or by blade.

Speaking to me in his car, her husband also considered Sindi’s afterlife. “If she is the right person, there will be no problem at all. The people she will find there, the long-dead family members, will accept her,” Vusi told me a few months before her funeral. “But if not, I will not have rest. We have that belief, you know.”

Vusi attributed his string of bad luck — his dead father and second wife — partially to the fact that Sindi had not yet been properly buried. “I heard that if a person gets killed by a whale and the body is not recovered, they will pretend like the body is there, and bury the clothes,” he said. “That means the spirit gets to rest, because you’ve done your best. But if you haven’t done anything, like now, it is affecting me because I’ve got lots of misfortunes. I don’t know where they emanate from.”

When David confessed and Vusi saw with his own eyes the man who had killed Sindi, he felt some sense of relief at finally knowing for certain what had happened to her. But he was anxious for word from Sindi herself. “After discovering that she was killed, I was always wondering why she didn’t give me a sign that she was dead,” he told me. “Because I do believe that her spirit should have spoken to me as somebody who was close to her.” Then one day he had a dream. “I say a dream, but I literally woke up from the bed trying to touch her.”

“I’m literate, I’m educated, I’m an engineer,” Vusi reminded me. “Scientists will say I was psychologically anticipating meeting her. But I did meet her.

“I stood up. I moved around the room trying to touch her,” he said. “I tried to catch her but I couldn’t. She couldn’t talk to me. She was looking at me sadly. This is my belief. It is not motivated by any sangoma. It is my belief.”

This story was originally published at The Big Roundtable.

Applause from you, Michael Shapiro, and

Shaun Raviv

Freelance journalist based in Atlanta.

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