Speaker
Judge King Ndlovu
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
A dog wandered through Chayamoya Township with a woman's decomposing head in its jaws. Residents followed the trail to the cane fields. Within three days, five bodies had been recovered from the same stretch of plantation.
Taki's father left for Johannesburg when he was 9 and never came back. His mother died when he was 19. He never finished Grade 4. His trajectory wasn't exceptional in Kwamajola — it was the norm.
Taki posed as a job broker for companies like Nestlé and Toyota. He charged women R300–R3,000 in fake fees — money some families borrowed from loan sharks. Then he rode the minibus with them and walked them into the cane.
Investigators traced a victim's still-active phone through Taki's sister-in-law to Taki himself. The signal gave them an address. At 2am on September 24, 2007, they moved in and found a house full of dead women's belongings.
Inside Taki's home, investigators found a catalog of the missing women's lives: cell phones, clothing, bank cards, store cards, child support grant cards. Nothing was hidden. It was just woven into the household like it belonged.
Most of Taki's victims have no biography in the public record — just a name and maybe a hometown. They were mothers, sisters, daughters who packed a bag and told their families they'd found the promise of more. That was the last thing many of them ever said.
After arrest, Taki confessed to all 13 killings, made a handwritten list of victims' names, and personally walked officers to every crime scene. Then, the moment the trial started, he denied all of it — claiming he was just a job placement middleman.
On December 23, 2010, Judge King Ndlovu found Taki guilty on 13 murder charges and 13 robbery charges. Taki walked out of the dock smirking. The judge called his testimony evasive and untrue and his alibi weightless.
On January 19, 2011, Taki received 13 life sentences, one for each murder, plus 208 additional years for the robbery convictions. The judge wrote explicitly that Taki should die in prison, and personally urged the parole board never to release him.
On February 21, 2010, Taki and eight other inmates knotted their bedsheets and went over the side of Westville Prison. He slipped, shattered his leg, and was the only one left behind while eight others escaped into the night.
On May 4, 2011, a crowd gathered near the Chayamoya sugarcane fields for the Umzinto Wall of Remembrance. Thirteen names etched into stone. A prosecutor received an unexpected title from the community: hero.
The poverty map of modern South Africa and the map of the old Bantustans are the same image. Deliberate dispossession — hut taxes, forced removals, land laws — hollowed out the Eastern Cape for a century before Taki was even born.
Taki was no innovator. At least 12 other South African serial predators used the exact same fake-job playbook. He found women who had no safety net, promised them the one thing they couldn't refuse, and took them somewhere no one could help them.
Analysis
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- True Crime 100%
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