Pod Insights Crime, Conspiracy, Cults and Murder Ep. 115 | The Brutal Sugarcane Serial Killer About this episode Get 50% off and free daily greens per box with a new subscription at https://factormeals.com/cccm50off using code CCCM50OFF (offer ends 09/27/2026, while supplies last).
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What started as promises of jobs and a better future ended in one of South Africa's most disturbing serial murder cases. Buried deep within the sugarcane fields lay a chilling secret that took years to fully unravel.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 He promised them work, good jobs, steady pay, and a future on the south coast of KwaZulu-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. He was polite, warm even. The kind of man you'd trust to help you start a new life. But one by one, they vanished. His name was Tozamile Taki, a man called "a real jackal in a sheepskin." This is the sugarcane killer. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder, all things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually-minded freak. Today, we are talking about a little-known case,
0:44 Speaker 00 but an extremely infamous serial killer. So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go Mach 5 down the highway, slam on the brakes, and bust through the windshield into the serial killer case together.
1:08 Speaker 01 At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is,
1:51 Speaker 01 every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
2:08 Speaker 00 Tozamile Taki. was born in 1971 in a rural area called Kwamajola, near the town of Port St. John's. And it sits along the wild coast of South Africa's Eastern Cape province. And today, it's one of the most beautiful and one of the poorest places in the country. But in 1971, Port St. John's wasn't part of South Africa at all, at least not really. It belonged to the Trans-Skai, one of the apartheid government's so-called homelands or banditstands. And these were territories carved out by the white minority regime and designated for black South Africans, separated along ethnic and tribal lines.
2:49 Speaker 00 And the idea was essentially forced removal disguised as self-government. But before any banditstand, the Trans-Skai was designated as a pipeline feeding cheap workers to the mines. And Cecil Joan Rhodes, the prime minister of the Cape Colony, set the template in the 1890s. And hut taxes bled families dry, and anti-squatter laws made it illegal for black farmers to work productive land. And labor taxes did the rest. The message was simple: go to the mines or starve. So by the time Taki was born, the system had been grinding for nearly a century. And the land was basically barren, and the infrastructure was almost nonexistent.
3:33 Speaker 00 And the men were gone. And Port St. John's fell within what's now called the Or Tambo district. So by every poverty measure available, Or Tambo sits at the bottom of the Eastern Cape. And the Eastern Cape sits at the bottom of the country. And nearly 65% of the people there live in poverty. 65%. That's crazy. And unemployment runs at about the same number. 18% of the population made it through school, and only 6% went any further than that. And nearly 60% of households have a woman at the head. And in a lot of cases, it's a grandmother living on a government pension.
4:14 Speaker 00 And census data from 2001 shows that Isikosa was the first language of over 98% ...percent of residents in Port St. John's. So this was a tight-knit, deeply rural, overwhelmingly Kosa community. And even after the apartheid ended in 1994 and the Trans-Guy was folded back into the new South Africa, the poverty remained. And if you pull up a modern poverty map of South Africa and then pull up a map of the old Bantustans, you're looking at the same picture. The damage was structural and it outlasted the regime that built it. This is the world Taki was born into. So there isn't too much known about Taki's childhood, but what we do know is that Taki
4:58 Speaker 00 was the eldest of four children, and his father left for Johannesburg to find work when Taki was only nine years old, and he would never come back. And his mother couldn't work due to an illness, so the family basically had no income. So at only 13 years old, Taki was done with childhood because he needed a paycheck. So Taki's formal education ended before he finished grade four, and that's roughly the equivalent of third or fourth grade in the US. So functionally, he had almost no schooling at all. And by 19 years old, both his parents were gone, with his father leaving and his mother now passing away.
5:38 Speaker 00 And his father's disappearance wasn't super unusual, because men from Trans-Guy had been leaving for Johannesburg and the mines for generations, pulled by the same system that had hollowed out the land in the first place. And some did come back, but many didn't. And the children and wives left behind formed the backbone of those communities. So a nine-year-old boy becoming the man of the house was not exceptional in a place like KwaMajola. It was just an everyday occurrence. Now, while the specific details of his childhood may be debatable, the poverty Taki grew up in was very real, and the abandonment was real, and the system that created those conditions was deliberate and documented.
6:22 Speaker 00 So by 19, Taki was on his own: no parents, almost no education, and no obvious path forward. So, he went looking for work. And between 1989 and 1992, he did find some. At a place called Hamburdale Farm, down on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal, near the town of Umsantow. And the Shaya Moya sugarcane plantation was practically on Hamburdale's doorstep. Close enough to walk to. And close enough to learn every path, clearing and stretch of cane like the back of his hand. And he spent three years working that specific land. And after leaving Hamburdale, Taki landed himself a front row seat in front of a judge.
7:07 Speaker 00 And on January 23rd, 1997, he was convicted of housebreaking with intent to steal, along with theft. And the sentence was a three-year prison sentence. And he served his time and then got out, and within two years, was back again. And on February 25th, 1999, he was found guilty of robbery. And this time, his sentence was five years. And the first conviction was about property, and the second involved violence. He was starting to escalate now. And at some point after his release, Taki made his way to Veldelbach, a neighborhood of low-cost housing in Chatsworth, near Durban. And that's where he met a woman named Hlangue Nene, because a mutual friend had introduced them. And Taki would ask for her phone number,
7:52 Speaker 00 and she said no, and told him she didn't even have a cellphone. But he would persist. And eventually, they began a relationship that lasted about six months long. And in Nene's telling, he was warm and just really easy to be around. And she used the word "loving", and he cracked jokes, he talked about marriage, about having children together at one point. But there was another side to him. He was deeply, deeply jealous. Possessive in a way she couldn't live with. And when the jealousy would boil over, she would walk out. But then she would always come back. But unbeknownst to Nene, at this point, Taki already had a wife. And her name was Fusile Daniso.
8:36 Speaker 00 And she lived back in Port St. John's in the eastern Cape. So, two women in two different provinces, neither aware of the other. So a double life held together by distance and silence. And on the surface, nothing about Taki screamed danger, because he was charming enough to draw women in and persuasive enough to keep them, and controlled enough to manage separate lives hundreds of kilometers apart without either one collapsing. But in early 2007, none of that had been truly tested yet. Because he was just a man in a township, living with his girlfriend, offering to help young women find work, and they believed him. So the first body turned up in June 2007.
9:20 Speaker 00 A woman's remains found in the sugarcane fields outside Shumoya Township, near Umzinto. But this wouldn't trigger a manhunt, and it wouldn't even make national news. But it shook the people who lived there. And a community leader, Gugu Letu Mayende, organized a protest after the discovery, and residents demanded answers from police. But sadly, nothing came of it. And three months later, the answers arrived on their own. Now, September 9, 2007, was a typical Sunday morning in Shaya Moya. But then, a dog appeared in the streets of the township. And it wasn't the dog that was odd, that was pretty normal, but it was what was in his mouth.
10:04 Speaker 00 And it was a woman's decomposing head in its jaws. And residents who saw it followed the trail back toward the sugarcane fields. And there, they found the rest of her body, just discarded among the cane. Now, word moved fast, and a crowd gathered. And by nightfall, a second set of remains had turned up in the same stretch of cane. And Shaya Moya went from uneasy to terrified in a matter of hours. And over the next three days, the count kept climbing. And workers harvesting sugarcane kept finding bodies as they moved through the roads. And detectives combed the fields and turned up more still. And by Wednesday, September 12, a fifth body had been recovered. And the remains all lay within
10:50 Speaker 00 A single stretch of a private plantation, just bodies left where they fell. And the sugarcane fields that surrounded Shalayamoya had always been part of daily life. Kids would play in them, families worked them, but now they had become something else entirely. And the condition of the bodies made everything harder because decomposition had ravaged every set of remains. And several showed signs of burning, and not a single victim could be identified by sight. And by September 14th, five days after the dog changed everything, only one victim had been positively identified, Nombali Ningobo, who was 35 years old, from Inunda.
11:32 Speaker 00 And weeks later, by late October, her body was still the only one with a confirmed name attached to it. But relatives would show up, hoping to match what a daughter or sister had been wearing the same day she left home and then disappeared. But formal identification required DNA testing, and those results took a lot of time. But near one of the bodies, detectives found someone's identity document and a handful of handwritten CVs, essentially resumes, left in the dirt a few feet from the remains. So the killer had taken what he had wanted and just discarded the rest. A police spokesperson, Zandra Hector, confirmed the emerging picture publicly.
12:13 Speaker 00 Quote, "All the victims were females between the age of 18 and 35, and we suspect the cause of death was strangulation." By the time the fifth body was pulled from the cane, the investigation had already escalated. And the national office in Pretoria sent Gerhard La Bouscanyé, one of the country's top serial crime investigators, to join the case. And his presence told the community what the police hadn't yet said out loud: Someone was hunting in those fields. And the community leader, who'd organized the first protest back in June, spoke again, saying, quote, "We came together as community leaders and the police to end this nonsense. We want this nonsense to stop."
12:56 Speaker 00 Because fear had settled over Shalayamoya, like Something physical. And the cane fields weren't a backdrop anymore. They were a crime scene that just kept expanding. And the worst part is that no one knew if it was over, because no suspects had been named at this point, and no arrests had been made. The only thing anyone knew for certain was that someone in this community, or near it, had been killing women and leaving their bodies in the same stretch of sugarcane for months. So the Port Shepstone Organized Crime Unit took the lead in the investigation. And the Kozulu-Natal Provincial Office backed the effort. And together, they built a full-time task team focused on nothing but these murders.
13:39 Speaker 00 And Lieutenant Colonel Campbell Niuswa ran the operation. And Captain Nico Kraus served as the investigating officer on the ground. And beneath them, a core team of detectives formed the backbone of the investigation. Warrant Officer Bridget Kraus, Warrant Officer Ernest Nkabane, Warrant Officer Dumisani Nizama, Captain Samuel Niowose, and Captain Francois Moller. And the search effort put 30 cops and a team of sniffer dogs into the field at the same time. And Pretoria sent its own forensic unit to help process what the local team couldn't handle alone. And that paperwork that the killer had discarded as useless or worthless turned out to be the thread that connected everything. Investigators started contacting the families
14:23 Speaker 00 whose names appeared on the abandoned ID books and CVs. And every single one had already filed a missing persons 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. And at first, police resisted putting the word "serial" on record. But the remains kept surfacing, and the victim profiles kept matching. And eventually, the denial became untenable. And then came the break. And Dudu Nateta walked into a police station and told detectives she'd nearly become a victim herself. Because she sat beside Taki on a minibus bound for Shaya Moya
15:07 Speaker 00 and decided at the last moment... Not to follow him. And now she worked with investigators to produce a composite sketch of the man. And for the first time, the task team had a face. But the evidence that ultimately broke the case open wasn't a face, it was a phone. And cellphone analysis, working with the task team, began tracing the devices that had belonged to the missing women. And one of the phones registered to victim Nocisa Nozozo was still active. And the signal led them to a woman named Duniswa Daniso, living in the town of Stranger, north of Durban. And she said the phone had come from her brother-in-law, and his name was Tozumile Taki.
15:50 Speaker 00 And from there, the trail moved south and east. And from Stranger, the chain led to her sister, Vusile, Taki's wife. Remember, he has a wife and a girlfriend, and that's his actual wife, in Port St. John's. And through Vusile, detectives got Taki's location. So that phone trail gave them an address, and that was Taki's home in Wellboduct. And now, it was a matter of timing. So on September 24th, 2007, at 2 o'clock in the morning, officers moved in on the house in the dark. And inside, they found Taki and his girlfriend Nene together. And both would be taken into custody on the spot. And then detectives tore the place apart.
16:30 Speaker 00 And they found essentially a catalog of the missing cellphones, clothing, blankets, bank cards, store cards from clothing shops. All of it belonged to the missing women. And the items weren't hidden either. They were just there, woven into the household like they belonged to anyone. And among the haul were child support grant cards, meaning these women were mothers trying to feed their children. And one find stood out. A cellphone recovered from Nene's possession turned out to belong to charity Kumalo, who would be one of the victims. And when confronted, Nene told the police that she'd purchased it herself at a jet store, but no proof of the purchase ever materialized.
17:14 Speaker 00 And she was accused of being an accessory after the fact. And police picked up three more people in the aftermath. And all three were eventually released without being charged. And in the end, only two people faced charges. For the people closest to Taki, the arrest made no sense. And Nene's sister, Non Kululeko, knew Taki personally. She spent time around him before the police showed up. And she told reporters afterward what she remembered, saying, quote, "He was a wonderful person. When I heard about the arrest, I could not believe he had been implicated. I thought the people that arrested him were lying. It was unlike him," unquote. And that disbelief wasn't naivety. It was instead a measure of how thoroughly Taki controlled what people saw.
17:59 Speaker 00 Because the man Nene's sister described was warm and present. And the man found that night at 2:00 a.m. was sitting in a house full of dead women's belongings. So now with Taki in custody, investigators moved quickly. And identity parades were organized at two separate locations along the coast. Hibernine and Brighton Beach. And witnesses were brought in individually and asked to pick Taki out of a lineup. And every witness picked Taki out of that lineup immediately. And on November 9, 2007, Taki appeared at the Umm Zinto Magistrates Court for a bail hearing. And the proceeding was adjourned until the end of the month. And by then, the investigation had widened far beyond what anyone initially expected.
18:42 Speaker 00 And even after his arrest, remains continued to surface because the sugarcane fields near Shaya Moya hadn't given up all of their dead. So by October, detectives had already pulled eight bodies from the fields. And the count hit 11 on November 14, all from the same stretch of sugarcane near Shaya Moya. And then, two more victims were found far from the south coast. And police recovered them from tea fields near Port St. John's, deep in the eastern Cape. And this is the place where Taki grew up. And investigators tied both killings to Taki. So at this point, it's now 13 victims in two provinces. And the South African government released a statement, saying, quote, "Had the police not arrested in September 2007,
19:27 Speaker 00 he probably would have continued his evil deeds." Seven months of killing. And the only thing that stopped it was a stolen cellphone that Taki handed off to a relative, assuming it would never circle back.
19:40 Speaker 01 At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet, like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone, and including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage, HMO, and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.
20:10 Speaker 00 So once Taki was in custody, investigators sat him down. And at first, he gave them something small. He acknowledged the cellphone, admitting that he had it and that he'd passed it along to his sister-in-law. And soon after, Taki confessed to the killings. All of them. And his confession covered both killing grounds: the sugarcane fields outside of Umzinto and the tea plantations back near Port St. John's. But he did something else, too. He made a handwritten list of the names of the women that he killed. And he went with the officers to the crime scenes, walking them through the places where he had left the bodies. And multiple officers accompanied him on each visit.
20:54 Speaker 00 And the pointing out, as it's called in South African law, was witnessed and documented. And for a brief window, it looked like the case might be pretty straightforward: a confession, a handwritten list of victims, and a suspect who led police to the scenes himself. But then Taki changed his story. But before anything else, there were 13 women who deserved to be known and remembered. They were young, between 18 and 35, and they came from small towns and townships scattered across two of South Africa's poorest provinces. And some of those places are hundreds of kilometers apart. But the women who came from them had almost everything in common: they were looking for work. Some already had jobs and wanted better.
21:40 Speaker 00 ...ones, and some had never been employed at all. And they'd grown up in communities where steady income was rare, where opportunity was something you chased across provincial lines if it ever showed up at all. And every one of them left home telling their families the same thing. They'd met a man who could get them work at factories or companies. And there was a pattern in who Taki chose. Most of his victims spoke Isizulu, even in areas where Isizulu was more common. So he targeted women from his own language group. Women who'd feel comfortable with him, who'd trust a stranger a little faster because he sounded like home. And he introduced himself as someone who could place people in real companies with familiar names.
22:24 Speaker 00 And he would say he could get them hired at places like Hewlett's, Nestle, Ellovo, Sazella, and Toyota. And these promises were specific enough to sound legitimate, especially to someone who'd never been through a formal hiring process. And once a woman was interested, the next step was always money. He told some they'd need to cover their first month's rent at company housing near the job site. And he told others the money was a bribe, a payment to make sure the position actually went to them. And the amounts ranged from 300 rand to 3,000 rand. And that's roughly $40 to $430 US dollars at the time.
23:04 Speaker 00 So for women earning almost nothing, or earning nothing at all, that was a sizable amount of money. So some had to borrow it from relatives. And some families went as far as borrowing from loan sharks just to fund what they believed was a fresh start. And then came the trip. Taki would travel with the women by minibus taxi, heading toward the area where the supposed job was waiting. And Taki even convinced some of these women to cover his taxi fare as they traveled together. Just a, just a utter scumbag piece of shit. And to anyone else on the bus, they looked completely normal, nothing worthy of alarm. So 13 women followed him off the bus and into the sugarcane fields or the tea plantations.
23:50 Speaker 00 Believing they were walking toward a paycheck, toward a future, but they were actually walking toward their death. And then, when Taki had them alone, he would methodically strangle them. And then he would take the clothes off of their bodies. And whether that happened before or after they passed away, no one could say for certain. And then he would take their cash, their cellphones, their bank cards, and their store cards. And there were reasons to believe the women had been assayed as well. But decomposition and burning had destroyed too much. Because after the killings, he burned some of those women's bodies. So between the fire and the subtropical climate of the south coast, decomposition was extremely quick.
24:35 Speaker 00 And by the time the remains were recovered, they had deteriorated to the point where forensic experts struggled to confirm how each individual woman had actually been killed. And he also didn't scatter the remains across a wide area. And in some cases, the distance between one set of remains and the next was barely 15 meters. So he had a dumping ground, and he returned to it again, and again, and again. And what he left behind was just as telling as what he took. ID books, welfare cards, CVs the women had written out by hand, because he had no use for those. But those discarded papers were the only way to put names to what was left.
25:16 Speaker 00 And 11 of the 13 victims were found in the sugarcane fields near Shaya Moya, outside the town of Umzinto on Kwazulu-Natal's south coast. And the other two women turned up far from the south coast. Their remains were in the tea plantations at Kwamejola, near Port St. John's in the eastern Cape. And that geographic split tells a story of its own. Because Umzinto was where Taki lived with Nene, and Port St. John's was where he'd been born, where he'd grown up, and where his wife, Vusile, still lived. So he was killing in both of the places that he called home. And these killings took place over the span of seven months. So from February to September 2007,
26:00 Speaker 00 would take 13 women's lives in roughly 30 weeks. And allegedly, a sangoma, or a traditional healer, received body parts taken from some of the women Taki killed. And the claim is that certain remains were used for muti, which refers to traditional medicine, though this was never proven. But the core of what Taki did required no dark ritual. It required poverty, and isolation, and trust. And 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. And the Sawatan newspaper made a broader observation, that the trick of luring vulnerable,
26:41 Speaker 00 unemployed women with fake employment offers was far from original. And they noted that at least 12 other serial predators in the country had relied on the same playbook to isolate and kill. So Taki was no innovator. He was a predator operating inside a system that kept producing easy prey. But luckily, there was one woman who crossed paths with Taki and survived. And her name was Dudu Ntefe, the woman we spoke about briefly before. Luckily, her instinct saved her, because she'd been in the seat right next to him on the minibus headed for Shayamoya, listening to the same pitch about work. But when the ride ended and he stood up to leave, something in her gut just said, "Don't follow him."
27:26 Speaker 00 So she got off. But the names of the victims who were not as fortunate were: Makosi M'Gobosi, Nokolo M'Pande, Nosisa N'ozozo, Charity M'Tethwa, Rose M'Joli, Nozibele, Kanyesile, N'Kayeane, Tadeka M'Tebeni, N'Njobulo M'Panzé, P'leisiwe M'Panza, Tendanzile Bokora, Siziyé Tsishongaye, and Charity Kumalo. And for most of these women, the public records show nothing but a name and maybe a hometown. No biography, no interview, no photograph with a caption, but they were mothers, sisters, and daughters. Women who packed a bag, told their families they'd found
28:10 Speaker 00 The promise of more and walk toward a non-existent future. And that is why this video is structured a little bit differently because as much as I would love to give you all the details on all these beautiful women, we have essentially none, but I can show you their picture and tell you their names. And as always, my heart goes out to these families and to these women, and they deserve to be remembered. So as the trial began in July 2008 at the High Court sitting in Ramsgate, a small town in KwaZulu-Natal's south coast, it wouldn't end for two and a half years. And from the very first day, Taki just denied everything.
28:53 Speaker 00 He said he wasn't a killer at all, just a man who helped people find work at sugarcane plantations. And the reversal was total because in the interrogation room, he'd given investigators a roadmap to every victim, dumbest human being in the world. And in the courtroom, he just acted like he'd never heard their names, the names in which he gave to detectives. But 103 witnesses were called to testify. And because Taki spoke Isikosa, many of his victims and their families spoke Isikosa, and the court operated in English, every piece of testimony had to pass through a chain of translation.
29:33 Speaker 00 So Isikosa to Isizulu to English, three languages with every question and every answer and every objection. So the pace of the proceedings was extremely slow by design. And Taki pleaded not guilty to all charges. And every witness who testified against him was just a liar, according to Taki. And every piece of evidence the state introduced was just fabricated, according to Taki. And he rejected the entire case essentially. And his defense counsel, Tulani Shangue, presented a simple argument. And he would say, "Taki wasn't a killer, he was a middleman, someone who connected job seekers with sugarcane plantations and collected a finder's fee.
30:18 Speaker 00 That was it." Shut up! And on the stand, Taki repeated what he'd said about Hamburdale Farm. He'd worked there between 1989 and 1992, he said, but never once set foot in the surrounding plantations. And he claimed he didn't know where Cheyamoyo was. But the prosecution pointed out the two properties were practically on top of each other. So the court, naturally, didn't believe him at all. And Nay Nay had her own lawyer, a man named Carlo Filion, who handled her defense separately. But it was Taki's case that consumed the courtroom. And the state's case, led by advocate Nokolo Tokwana, rested on layers of circumstantial evidence that,
31:01 Speaker 00 taken together, left no room for doubt. Cell phone records showing Taki used dead women's phones to call Nay Nay and reach out to new targets. Identity parades at Hibernine and Brighton Beach, where every witness picked him out without hesitation. And the handwritten list of victims' names he gave to the police. And the pointing out of all of the crime scenes. And the unmistakable pattern that connected every killing. Two separate trials within a trial interrupted the main proceedings. And both centered on evidence the defense wanted thrown out. And the first one involved the handwritten list of victims' names Taki had produced during interrogation.
31:43 Speaker 00 But his story was that officers already had a finished list. And they put it in front of him and he said, and told him to reproduce it by hand on a separate sheet of paper. So that, you know, he was coerced in writing this list, he's saying. And he said an investigator, Inspector Nkabimde, read the names to him. Then Judge Nglovu dismantled the claim piece by piece, thankfully. And he pointed to the misspellings. Several names on the list were spelled wrong. And if Taki had been copying from a finished document, the spelling probably would have matched. And also, since Taki claimed the list was sitting right there for him to see, why would anyone need to read the names out loud?
32:26 Speaker 00 It just didn't make sense, because Taki, wasn't that Smart. And the two claims just contradicted each other. So the judge called him out on it. Taki was lying. And the second trial within a trial challenged the pointing out. Because Taki denied he'd ever accompanied officers to the crime scenes and alleged the police had beaten him. But the judge heard testimony from every officer present during those visits. And every single officer said the same thing. No one laid a hand on him. And under cross-examination, not one of them cracked or changed their story. And the judge said he was satisfied, saying, quote, "There were lots of officers that were with accused number one," unquote. And both challenges failed. So the list and the pointing out stayed in evidence.
33:11 Speaker 00 Shocker. And Taki also tried an alibi for at least one of the murders. And he claimed he had been in the Eastern Cape at the time and couldn't have been involved. And a relative even took the stand to back up his story. But the judge saw through it immediately, claiming the alibi was invented. And Taki and the relative who testified for him had cooked it up together. And the judge called the denial, quote unquote, "bare and bold." Just with nothing behind it. No evidence, no logic, and no credibility. He's basically just throwing pasta at the wall and hoping it sticks. You know, or pasta, sorry, I'm Canadian, I say pasta. So come at me for it. But through it all, Taki behaved as though nothing that happened in the courtroom touched him.
33:55 Speaker 00 Because he would just show up looking pretty polished. Navy suit, tie, the whole presentation. Like a man who wanted the room to take him seriously. Just like a worse Ted Bundy, basically. And while witnesses spoke, he wrote things down. He'd lean toward his lawyer, whisper something, and slide a note across. And it happened most often when state witnesses were being cross-examined. But remember, on paper, he'd barely finished grade four. But in the courtroom, he was tracking arguments in real time and feeding his lawyer strategy notes. And the judge observed this closely, yet described Taki's intellect as, quote unquote, "average," if not somewhat above average. And then families took the stand and fell apart.
34:39 Speaker 00 Mothers sobbed, sisters could barely speak. And Taki sat there grinning at them. Oh, he's just a little grinning. And on one occasion, he turned on a photographer who'd been documenting the proceedings, saying, quote, "I will hit this boy if he continues taking pictures of me. He is disturbing me. In Ramsgate, he was doing the same thing," unquote, Taki would say. And the judge just told him to stop looking at the photographer. And he also complained about the food he was being served at the Margate Police Station cells. And officials pulled him out of the Margate Police Station lockup after he wouldn't stop making demands about what he was being fed. This guy's ego is insane.
35:22 Speaker 00 And the families who filled the gallery watched all of this. Every time Taki appeared in the dock, the gallery let him hear it, and they sang. And excuse me for my pronunciation, I am trying my very best. "Wati uyabakasha, kanti uyababula la u Taki, akafele ejele." And in English, it means, "You said you wanted to hire them, but you wanted to kill them." And now, the case drew attention from the highest levels of government. And Police Minister Natim Tethwa showed up after the lunch break and stayed for the rest of the day's testimony. And the Ministry for Women, Children, and Persons with Disabilities sent its Director
36:04 Speaker 00 General, Dr. Nandlanla M'Kize, to sit with the victims' families. And she was there for two full days of testimony. And one small detail buried in the testimony of the landlord, named N'omusa Nzama, opened a door the trial never walked through. $150 a month for an RDP house. That's what Taki and Nene were paying her. But before Nene came into the picture, the landlord said there was someone else, a different woman sharing that house with Taki. Quote, "The other woman left when she was heavily pregnant. I don't know where she went to," unquote. No follow-up, no name, no record of what became of her. Just
36:47 Speaker 00 one more silence in a case full of them. Then, on February 21, 2010, the trial nearly came apart for a different reason, because nine inmates still waiting on trial at Westville Prison in Durban made a break for it because they knotted their bed sheets into a rope and went over the side and Taki, of course, was one of them. But he slipped during the descent and fell and the impact shattered his leg. Womp womp, karma's a bitch. And the noise he made on the way down gave the whole thing away. And warders heard him and realized what was happening. And eight of the nine inmates made it to the ground and disappeared.
37:30 Speaker 00 And Taki was the only one left behind. So by March 2nd, he appeared in court in a wheelchair, but he wasn't there to face his own charges. He was requesting bail for Nene and the injury delayed the proceedings. And at this point, eight witnesses still hadn't testified and proceedings ground to a halt. And the next court date was set for April 30th, 2010. And from that point on, every time the court convened, Taki rolled in on his wheelchair. And one morning, the recording equipment broke and the proceedings had to start late. So just nothing about this trial moved the way it was supposed to. It just stretched across three years, two courthouses, three languages, and more than
38:14 Speaker 00 a hundred witnesses. And at the center of it, the man in the wheelchair, just smiling through it all. But on December 23rd, 2010, Judge King Nadavu delivered his verdict. And it was guilty on every single count. Thirteen murders and thirteen robberies with aggravating circumstances. And the judge told the courtroom, quote, "The person who lured the women, promised them jobs, but killed them and dumped their bodies in sugarcane fields was none other than Tozamile Taki. The state has proven their case beyond reasonable doubt on all 26 counts." And the judge called Taki's testimony evasive and untrue, and his alibi held no weight at all.
38:58 Speaker 00 And when the verdict was read, Taki stood and walked out of the dock, smirking. And Police Minister Nafi was present in the gallery when it happened. And for Nene, the outcome was ...different, and the state had argued Nene was aware of what Taki was doing and had taken the victim's cellphones to help him dodge justice. And the judge said none of that had been proven, and he acquitted her on every count and said she'd been caught up in a situation of her own making, saying, quote, "Accused number two found herself in this trouble for not cooperating with police. Had she done so, she would not be in this mess," unquote. And at that point, her sister wept, quote, "Our mother could not even cry anymore. We are happy that the court was able to prove she is not the
39:41 Speaker 00 person that everybody seems to think she is," unquote. And even some of the victims' families accepted it. And Bongi, who'd lost her sister Makosi, said she held nothing against Nene, quote, "We saw her family and it affected us that she was a mother. She didn't spill any blood, so she can go home and spend time with her kids," unquote. But the anger toward Nene hadn't disappeared. She tried to leave the courthouse, but couldn't. Women from the community had positioned themselves at the courthouse exits, and they weren't there to wish her well. An officer surrounded her and put her in the back of a police vehicle and got her out of there before the crowd could reach her. And Nene said afterward that she was just numb, that she didn't know what she'd say to Taki if she ever spoke
40:26 Speaker 00 to him again, and that dating him had taught her a lesson she'd never asked to learn. And the court adjourned until January for sentencing arguments. And Taki was sent back to Westville Prison, and when proceedings resumed, prosecutor Noxolo Taquana stood up and asked the court for the maximum. And she told the court the state wanted life behind bars on every murder count and 15 years on every robbery count. And she said the man sitting in the dock had exploited the most vulnerable people in the country and deserved nothing from the court but its full weight. Quote, "13 defenseless young women trusted the accused. He took advantage of the high unemployment rate, he promised them jobs, and then robbed them of the little they had and killed them. He showed them
41:10 Speaker 00 no mercy, and he should be given no leniency by the court," unquote. And she reminded the judge that some of the women's families had gone to loan sharks to scrape together the money Taki demanded and that he'd shown zero remorse and that he'd even laughed while families wept behind him in the courtroom. Quote, "It is the duty of this court to protect law-abiding citizens from people like the accused. No sentence can repay the damage. Not seeing him on the streets is enough." Unquote. And the defense counsel argument was pretty short and they pointed to the 39 months his client had already sat in a cell waiting for the trial to end and he argued that that time should count as a compelling reason to step back from a life sentence.
41:53 Speaker 00 And he cited Taki's background, the absent father, the poverty, the lack of education. Quote, "His father, who was supposed to contribute to his well-being, left him. The court can take that into consideration." Unquote. But the judge pointed out that hardship like Taki's was extremely common across the eastern Cape and it didn't turn most people into killers. So it's just an excuse, a poor excuse. And the judge then turned to a question that had hung over the entire trial. Did Taki feel any remorse? And the defense counsel paused and his answer landed like a stone. Taki had never told him that he felt remorse and therefore had nothing to offer. And when the sentencing hearing actually began,
42:37 Speaker 00 Taki got to his feet and objected to the entire process and he told the court his case needed to go through a formal review. And no sentence should come down, he would say, until that happened. And the judge noted the outburst in his remarks. And then on January 19th, 2011, the judge handed down Taki's sentence. Life in prison 13 times over. Every count of murder carried its own life sentence. And on top of that, the judge added 208 years and each of the 13 robbery convictions drew 16 years. And the robbery sentences were ordered to run concurrently with the life terms. So he's spending his entire life in jail until he dies, a hopefully miserable death. But the
43:19 Speaker 00 judge wasn't finished and he made his intent explicit in writing on the record. Quote, "The sentence is to reflect my intention that the accused should remain in prison." ...for the rest of his life, unquote. And then he addressed the parole board directly, and he urged the Department of Correctional Services to, quote, "refrain from ever considering the accused for release on parole," unquote. And the judge called Taki a predator who charmed his victims into trusting him, then killed them the moment they were alone. Quote, "He is a danger to society. He cannot be rehabilitated. His permanent incarceration will prevent him from committing crimes," unquote. And the judge saw nothing in Taki that suggested he was capable of change. And the words he used were "extremely dangerous person."
44:04 Speaker 00 And as long as Taki was free, the judge wrote, "Every young woman who encountered him was walking toward potential death." And this is where the full weight of the, quote-unquote, "jackal in a sheepskin" landed. And the judge told the courtroom, quote, "Throughout the trial, I watched the accused's conduct and demeanor. It was callous and insensitive, to say the least. For instance, at times, he just smiled when he saw witnesses crying due to emotional distress," unquote. And the judge also took time to recognize the detectives and the cellphone experts. And without their work, he said, "The case wouldn't have come together." And immediately after sentencing, Taki leaned toward his lawyer, and he wanted to appeal. And the defense counsel stood and told the judge his client believed the conviction was flawed.
44:48 Speaker 00 Quote, "The accused instructed me to tell the court the state relied on circumstantial evidence. There were no facts proved, and nothing linked him to the robbery," unquote. The victim's stuff was in his house. What are we even saying? Just sit down. Sit down. Sorry if you're yelling. I'm, this is infuriating to, to have watched and read, and it's just infuriating. And the defense counsel also pointed out the forensic testing had never turned up any of Taki's DNA on the victims or at the scenes. And the judge didn't deliberate long and said, quote, "There is no reasonable possibility that another court could come to a different conclusion. Leave to appeal is refused," unquote. And the gallery erupted.
45:31 Speaker 00 Some cried, some sang, some danced in the aisles. And the scene outside the courthouse was no quieter. And the crowd carried their relief into the open air. And there were 10 cops in the courtroom, all of them armed, forming a ring around Taki while the judge spoke. Quote, "Rotten hell," unquote, the people shouted. End quote, "Die in prison," unquote. And I'm right. There with them. And for the families who had waited years for this moment, the wait landed differently for each of them. Makosi Umgobosi was last seen alive in May 2007. And her sister, Bongi, said she was relieved that her family finally knew what had happened to her sister and who had done it. But relief doesn't undo what was lost.
46:16 Speaker 00 And one of the victims, Rose's mother, said, quote, "I actually wish he was dead." But it was what came next that cut deepest. Quote, "One of my daughter's children, who was one year old when her mom died, actually told me to ask Taki to bring her mother back." Unquote. It's just a gut-wrenching and heartbreaking realization that at that age, you don't fully understand death. You just want to know where your mom is. And Taki took that away from them. And on May 4th, 2011, a crowd gathered near the Shaya Moya sugarcane fields for the Ummzinto Wall of Remembrance.
46:57 Speaker 00 And Peggy Inkonyeni, the speaker of the Kwasulu Natala Legislature, unveiled it. And the ceremony fell just after Workers' Day. Then they played a video, and seven minutes of faces, and the crowd went quiet. And Bongi spoke after the video ended, and she said the face of the man who murdered her sister, Makosi, was something she couldn't shake. It was still with her. And prosecutor Naksolo Taquanda stood before the crowd as something she hadn't sought out: a hero. And the community of Ummzinto had given her that title. And on this day, she accepted it with restraint. And she touched on what came after the verdict: how not every family was in the same place.
47:39 Speaker 00 Some were managing, and others, she said, hadn't gotten there yet and still needed grief counseling. And Minister Lulu Shingwane spoke about the conditions that had made these women targets, saying, quote, "These young women died because they were trapped in poverty and wanted a way out." And the timing wasn't accidental, she said. And Workers' Day was the right moment to say out loud what this case proved: when women have no income And no options, they become easier targets. And the Casatu General Secretary took the microphone and traced a line from the killings back through decades of deliberate dispossession. And the plaque now stood near the fields where the women were found, and 13 names etched into the stone.
48:22 Speaker 00 A reminder that the women who went looking for a job in Uzinto had been real, and they mattered, and that the place that took them from the world owed them at least this much. So that is it for the sugarcane serial killer case. You guys recommended this case, please feel free to recommend any more cases you want me to deep dive into and tell you guys about. And until next time, I will see your beautiful face, okay? Stay safe out there. Bye.
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