Imagine you are a member of a Neanderthal tribe, but for some reason, you have been ostracised – you no longer have access to shared resources such as shelter, – you have to sleep outside, exposed to the elements, you have no access to food – hunters do not share their meat with you and […]
If a talented team of scriptwriters had stretched their imagination and came up with the plot for a top-of-the-list crime tv series, they may have conjured up the incredible story of Thabo Bester and his girlfriend Dr Nandipha Magudumana, who pulled off a daring prison break. This con-artist and convicted rapist and murderer got […]
The series Baby Reindeer spotlights the predicament of thousands of victims of stalkers, who find themselves helpless against an unsolicited onslaught of a stalker. Stalking is a global phenomenon. It was only in the late 1990’s in California that formal stalking laws were first promulgated, but it took years to catch on in other countries, […]
Detectives can be commended for investigating and arresting serial killers, but in some cases, communities were being dismally failed by the system and innocent people were brutally killed. These deaths could have been prevented, had the killers not been considered too young! The case of Jeffrey Dahmer poses a good example on how the system […]
The aphorism that a criminal always ‘returns to a crime scene’ features in literature in Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment of 1866, Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet 1887 and in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Links 1923. Do serial killers return to their crime scenes? Yes, in my experience they do, for various different […]
The rustic peaceful ambience of Wynberg in Cape Town was brutalised in the 1940’s by Salie Lingevelt, a serial killer who randomly bludgeoned women to death in their homes (Public Domain)
Revisiting historical South African serial killer cases, it seems as if someone discovered the script of an old case and re-enacted it out 50 – 60 years later. Episode 6 of the television series Catch me a Killer, depicts the Cape Town Prostitute whom I profiled in 1996 and it is uncanny how many similarities […]
There is a misconception that serial killers are possessed by demons. A probable reason for this conception is that normal people cannot conceptualize that other normal people are capable of the atrocities that serial killers commit. When asked what the most despicable act of a serial killer could be, (besides the obvious of killing, raping […]
Open Breakwater Prison Door in Cape Town. (Lennon Fletcher/ CC BY-SA 3.0)
To any Police Department, the cost of launching a serial killer investigation is excessive and often not budgeted for. It comprises extra manpower, overtime, setting up an operational room, vehicles, helicopters and gasoline, processing multiple crime scenes, deployment of alternative resources such as profilers, artists for reconstructing faces of unidentified victims, expensive DNA tests and […]