Capital punishment was abolished on 6 June 1995 in South Africa. Norman Simons, the Station Strangler was sentenced on 14 June 1995 to 25 years for the murder of Elroy van Rooi. It was converted to a life sentence by an Appeal court in 1998. In December 2008, Magistrate Marelize Rolle found prima facie evidence […]
On 26 June 2024, 26-year-old Josephine Owino, a hairdresser from Mukuru Kwa Njenga, in Nairobi the capital of Kenya, went missing after receiving an unexpected phone call and leaving her home at short notice to meet someone. She was never seen again. In the weeks that followed, Josephine’s younger sister, Peris Keya, visited three different […]
In the previous two articles of this trilogy I explained how serial killers’ fixations in Freud’s psychosexual developmental phases led to the acting out of their fantasies on crime scenes. Yet the serial killers are not unique in developing subconscious sexual and aggressive fantasies, as Melanie Klein theorizes that all children could have them. Childhood […]
During the Middle Ages, the gruesome discovery of sporadic mutilated corpses of villagers, and the telltale footprints of a hound on the scene, raised the spectre of a werewolf at large. No-one in the village would ever have suspected that it could have been the cobbler’s son – an as yet unidentified serial killer – […]
Some old classmates remember serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer as the one who was clowning around at school. Dahmer was referred to as a “goofball”. Children may defend their fragile ego’s by pretending to be the Fool, when they are already cast in the role of the Fool by others, in order to be […]
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 […]