The possibility of a serial killer operating in Ekurhuleni remains unproven, but eight dead women have created a fear that cannot be dismissed as social-media hysteria. Until investigators establish what connects these cases, if anything, questions will continue to haunt communities.
By Themba Khumalo
The word serial killer has started travelling through South Africa. It is being discussed in taxis and on social-media platforms. People talk about it in neighbourhoods and in uneasy conversations when something frightening is happening, and nobody yet knows what to call it.
The word is moving faster than the investigation, carried by fear, anger and the growing sense that seven dead women cannot be looked at as eight isolated tragedies forever.
Nobody has established that a serial killer is operating in Ekurhuleni, and I am not going to invent one because a serial killer makes for a better headline. But try telling that to people who have watched the reports of eight women being found dead and are now looking at one another, asking whether these deaths could possibly be unrelated.
They are not asking because they have suddenly developed an appetite for sensational crime stories. They are asking because eight women are dead, because some of the circumstances surrounding those deaths are deeply disturbing, because the bodies have been found in different parts of Ekurhuleni, and because every new report makes the previous ones harder to forget.
The first death can still be filed away as another terrible crime in a country where violent crime has become an unbearable part of everyday life. Then another woman is found dead, and another, and another. The names and circumstances begin to accumulate.
Families are searching, police are investigating, and the public is watching, waiting for somebody to explain what it is looking at.
By the time eight women are dead, people are no longer hearing eight separate crime reports. They are looking at a picture that may or may not be real, and wondering whether somebody else can see what they are seeing.
That uncertainty is frightening in its own right.
A woman walking home at dusk does not experience the street in quite the same way once stories like these begin circulating. A parent waiting for a daughter to come home looks at the clock differently.
A father who cannot get hold of his child starts making calls that he would never have made before. A mother hears the silence on the other end of the phone and begins imagining possibilities she desperately does not want to imagine. A message saying I am on my way can acquire a terrible significance when it is followed by silence.
This is how violent crime spreads beyond the people it directly touches. The person responsible for a murder does not have to be standing behind every woman for fear to follow her home. It settles into ordinary life, into the homes of parents waiting for their children, the families wondering why a phone is not being answered and the friends who begin to fear that something has gone terribly wrong.
An empty stretch of road becomes a place where somebody might have left a body. A river becomes something people look at differently. A patch of veld is no longer just grass, rubbish and discarded bottles. Somewhere in the back of the mind comes the thought that a woman might have been there, alive once, before somebody decided that her life could be taken from her.
That is the ugliness of what is happening in Ekurhuleni. The dead women are not confined to police statements and crime scenes. Their deaths have entered the imagination of people who live there and people watching from elsewhere, because everyone understands that the next woman who disappears could be somebody’s daughter, sister, mother or partner.
People are going to look for a connection. They are going to compare the places, the dates and the circumstances. They are going to talk among themselves and ask questions that may have no answers yet. That is what people do when something frightening begins to unfold in front of them, particularly when the victims are women, and the possibility exists that the deaths may not be entirely separate.
Social media has become part of that process. A detail from one case is placed beside a detail from another, somebody raises a possibility, somebody else remembers something that may or may not be relevant, and the conversation gathers momentum.
That does not make the public foolish, hysterical or wrong. It means people are trying to understand something that is unfolding in their own communities.
The police know things the public does not. Investigators will have evidence that cannot be released without compromising their work, and there may be reasons why certain details are being kept from the public. But police silence is not confirmation that the public’s suspicions are wrong. Nor, for that matter, is public suspicion proof that they are right.
At this point, anything is possible.
The women may have been killed by different people in unrelated circumstances. Some of the cases may be connected. Several may be connected while others are not. There may be a pattern that investigators have already noticed but cannot yet discuss publicly. There may be details known only to the killer and the police that will eventually change the entire picture.
We do not know. And that is not an invitation to stop asking questions. It is precisely why the questions are being asked.
People are looking at eight dead women and wondering whether there is a connection. The question is legitimate.
The answer belongs to the evidence.
But there is a human cost to waiting for that answer, which should not disappear beneath the argument over what the police have or have not established.
Once a story acquires the frightening possibility of a serial killer, the women themselves can become strangely invisible. Attention shifts towards the imagined predator, the possible pattern, the hunt and the question of who might be responsible. The victims risk becoming numbers in somebody else’s theory.
They were never numbers.
Each woman had a life before she became a crime scene. Somebody knew the way she laughed. Somebody knew what irritated her, what made her happy, what she worried about and what she planned to do next. Somebody expected her to answer the phone. Somebody expected her to walk through the door.
For some families, that expectation became a search.
A photograph is circulated. A name is posted. Telephone numbers are shared. People look at the face of a missing woman and hope that somebody, somewhere, has seen her. Her family waits while the rest of the world carries on around them, hoping that the next call will bring good news.
Then sometimes the search ends with a body.
That is a cruelty of its own. The family does not get the woman back. It gets an answer, and sometimes even the answer is unbearable.
South Africa has lived through too many of these stories. We have seen women disappear and families refuse to give up looking for them. We have watched missing-person appeals travel through communities and social media, with strangers joining the search because they understand the terror of somebody not coming home.
We have also become dangerously accustomed to the idea that another woman’s disappearance is just another crime story.
It should never become normal.
That is why the circumstances surrounding these deaths deserve serious attention. Not because we need a spectacular theory, but because eight women have died and the public is asking whether there is something connecting them.
Those questions cannot be answered by rumour. They cannot be answered by placing two frightening details beside each other on social media and declaring that they prove a connection. They cannot be answered by declaring a serial killer before investigators have established one.
But they cannot be answered by pretending that the questions should not be asked either.
The investigation has to go wherever the evidence takes it. If the cases are unrelated, that needs to emerge from the investigation. If some are connected, that connection needs to be found. If investigators already have information that cannot be made public, the public will have to wait for what can eventually be disclosed.
Every new body changes the emotional landscape of the place where it is found, but the fear travels much further than the crime scene. It reaches every man and woman, no matter how far they are from where the crime has occurred.
It is why the word serial killer has travelled so far and so quickly. People are trying to give a name to a fear that has become difficult to contain. They are looking at eight dead women and wondering whether they are witnessing a series of separate horrors or pieces of the same one, and nobody can tell them with certainty yet which of those possibilities they are facing.
Perhaps the investigation will eventually reveal that the cases are unrelated and that the connection people have been searching for was never there. Perhaps it will reveal something far more disturbing. Until then, the public will continue asking questions, because that is what happens when eight women are dead and the circumstances surrounding their deaths leave people wondering whether they are looking at coincidence or something more sinister.
The investigation must now do what the public cannot. It must follow every connection, test every possibility and establish, case by case, what happened to these women.
Until those answers come, the fear will remain, not because anyone has proved that a serial killer is stalking Ekurhuleni, but because eight women are dead and the possibility that their deaths may be connected is too serious to dismiss.