The ABC Killer: Moses Sithole

A Difficult Beginning in Apartheid South Africa

In 1964, Moses Sithole was born in Vosloorus: a town near Boksburg Transvaal Province in apartheid South Africa. His mother and father, Sophie and Simon Sithole, had very little and with five children to feed, there was often not enough to go around. The Sitholes, like many struggling South African families at the time, lived in poverty, a poverty that only deepened when Simon Sithole suddenly died.

Moses was five when his father passed away and the family was left with no income to support themselves with. Desperate and out of options, Sophie gathered her children together one day and took them to a local police station, where she abandoned them.

Troubled Youth and Early Hardships

Moses and his siblings were then carted off to an orphanage in Kwazulu Natal, where life took another drastic turn. Moses and his siblings later claimed that they’d been subjected to abuse while living in the South African childcare services and when Moses became a teenager, he just couldn’t take it anymore.

He preferred risking a life on the streets rather than staying at the orphanage and he took off one day never to return. He reached out to his older brother, Patrick, who was able to give Moses a place to stay for a short while, but Patrick was also barely standing on his own two feet and couldn’t offer Moses very much.

Moses turned to working in the Johannesburg gold mines to support himself, which kept food in his belly and a roof over his head, but it also gave him the opportunity to stretch his wings a little bit. 

First Signs of Darkness

It was in his early teenage years that Moses’ interest in sex began. At first, he satiated his urges with his girlfriends, but he found that he couldn’t keep one for long. Maybe he was just an ordinary teenager. Or maybe the feeling of abandonment he felt after being left at the police station by his mother had coloured his opinion of women and his ability to maintain long term relationships with them.

In those crucial, formative years a step in any direction can lead to almost anything, but one day Moses would do something that would make it perfectly clear that he was no ordinary teenager.

In February, 1989, Buyiswa Doris Swakamisa walked into her local police station to report that she’d been attacked and raped. She was able to give a detailed report of the incident and her attacker and the police were able to find and arrest him. The still teenaged Moses Sithole was then sent to court for sexual assault.

All through his hearings, Moses claimed that he was innocent, but the prosecution was able to provide enough evidence for Moses to be found guilty of all charges. He was sent to jail, still claiming that he was innocent but otherwise a model inmate, and after only seven years, he was released for good behavior.

Murder, Manipulation, and Taunts

Moses later claimed that it was his time behind bars that had led to the escalation of his crimes and perhaps he was right. Maybe while in jail he’d learned a lesson that would have chilling and horrifying consequences for the people who’d cross paths with him as soon as he was let back out on the streets.

On the surface, his punishment seemed to have done its job rehabilitating the young man. Moses played the part of a reformed, model citizen. He got a job, and not just one that he had to keep a roof over his head, but one that would help him to change the world around him for the better. Moses started running a charity called Youth Against Human Abuse- and their mission was to end child abuse. This was a cause close to the heart for Moses after his time in the orphanage, and he seemed truly dedicated to making a difference for children who were going through the same thing he had.

Moses was warm and charismatic. He drew people towards him and strengthened their own beliefs in his cause. He would often approach people on the street and bring them into the fold, offering protection, a job, a way to change the world.

But what Moses was really doing was hunting for his next victims. Many of those people Moses approached were women. He’d wave a job in their face and promise to get them an interview and for so many people trying to get by in a difficult period of South African history, a job was a hard thing to come by.

Women would come in and Moses would get to know them a little better. Maybe he’d offer them that job or maybe he wouldn’t, but for so many of those women, their fates had been unknowingly sealed as soon as they’d walked into Moses’ office.

Moses’ experience with the South African judicial system and his time behind bars had taught him that victims could very easily be turned into witnesses, and witnesses could get you into a lot of trouble.

He said he targeted women who reminded him of Buyiswa Doris Swakamisa, the woman who he still alleged had falsely accused him of rape almost a decade before. Other people, however, claim that Moses targeted women who reminded him of his mother.

Whichever version is true, Moses would entice potential victims with the promise of a job. The women would leave his office and go about their daily lives, but Moses would be following. He’d then lure them to somewhere secluded, usually a field, attack them, sexually assault them, and then strangle them, most of the time with their own underwear. 

When one of his victims, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Letta Nomthandazo Ndlangamandla, had her two-year-old son, Sibusiso, with her, Moses was still undeterred. For a man who was managing a charity aiming to end child abuse, Moses chose to show no compassion. He hit Sibusiso across the head with a blunt object, injuring but not killing the toddler. While Moses was dragging Letta away to assault and later strangle her, Sibusiso was left to the mercy of the elements and would die a slow death of exposure.

The ABC Killer’s Final Capture

As if his treatment of these women, and in Sibusiso’s case a child, wasn’t enough, Moses would often phone his victim’s surviving families and taunt them. He usually gathered this kind of contact information from his initial interviews with the women, or he would at least get enough information from them that he could find their relatives all on his own afterward.

With Moses’ reign of terror, the nation was thrown into panic. Its women were being targeted by a killer known only as the ABC Killer, who seemed to attack at random and at will. In an attempt to end the long string of assaults and murders, Nelson Mandela made a public appeal for anyone with any information to come forward, but it was like trying to catch smoke with bare hands.

It was in August 1995, around thirty victims in and only two years after Moses’ release for good behavior, that a witness spotted Moses with his latest victim. He’d almost been caught once before when another witness had seen Moses acting unusually around another woman who’d later turn up dead, but that witness hadn’t been able to get a clear view of Moses’ face. This time, however, a witness clearly identified Moses as being the last person that one of his victims had been seen alive with and the investigators inched closer to finding the elusive ABC Killer, named so because his crimes had ranged from Atteridgeville, Boksburg and Cleveland.

They uncovered Moses’ previous conviction for rape and the investigation tightened, but Moses managed to escape before the police could arrest him. By then, he’d already set up house with another woman, had a daughter and separated with the mother, choosing instead to become homeless and then go on the run in order to continue his crime spree. 

A Chilling Confession and Sentencing

Strangely, Moses then contacted a journalist named Tamsen de Beer and made a startling confession. He claimed to be the ABC Killer and said that he’d actually killed around 76 women, not the thirty that he was wanted for. He said he’d done all of this as revenge for his false imprisonment and to prove that he was telling the truth, Moses gave Tamsen directions to one of his victim’s bodies that had yet to be discovered.

Tamsen found the remains and the police found Moses in Johannesburg. Instead of coming quietly, Moses violently attacked the police with a hatchet, injuring one of them. Moses was shot, but survived and was taken to a hospital, where it was discovered that Moses was both HIV positive and had TB.

Again, even after he’d already confessed to Tamsen de Beer, Moses claimed that he was innocent, but the combination of witness testimonies, like those from Tamsen and the other witnesses who’d spotted him with his victims, helped put Moses behind bars yet again, only this time for good.

Moses was charged with thirty-eight murders, forty rapes and six robberies, all of which he was found guilty of, and he received consecutive sentences for all of them, giving him a grand total of 2410 years. If he’s hoping that history will repeat itself yet again, and he’ll get out on good behavior, a judge ruled that he’d have to serve at least 930 years of his sentence before he’d be eligible for parole, meaning he’ll have to live to the ripe old age of 963 before he could stalk the streets again.