Nine women found dead in Ekurhuleni as CCTV footage analysed for vehicles

A ninth woman’s body was found in Dawn Park, Boksburg, on Thursday, naked and covered with a sheet, bringing to nine the number of women found dead across Ekurhuleni over two months.

Investigators are working through camera footage from the roads around the sites where the bodies were discovered. The Gauteng Premier has praised the province’s spending on technology and cameras as a tool against crime, and that footage is now central to the search for whoever is responsible.

Prof Dee Khosa, of the University of South Africa’s School of Criminal Justice, told eNCA that the material has a specific use in a case like this one.

“While most of the women appear to have been killed somewhere and dumped elsewhere, the footage will likely show vehicles and movements,” she said.

That points investigators towards a combination of records. Licence plate recognition, footage from the roads leading to each site, cross-checked against cellphone records, is the work that could carry these cases forward.

What the cameras can and cannot do

Khosa is careful about what surveillance achieves on its own. Cameras deter, she said, only where people believe someone is actually watching.

That distinction matters for how the province’s investment is judged. A camera that records is evidence. A camera that is known to be monitored is deterrence. The two are not the same thing, and only one of them stops a crime before it happens.

Police have increased their visibility across the East Rand in response to the discoveries. Khosa said that visibility will deter offenders in the particular area where officers are seen, and cannot serve as the main strategy for crimes committed in isolated places away from patrolled roads.

Her answer to that gap sits partly with municipalities. Street lights need to be fixed, overgrown fields cut back, and abandoned sites, including construction sites, secured. Those are the conditions that let a crime happen unwitnessed, and they are the responsibility of local government rather than the police alone.

The first hour

Khosa also called on the police to treat reports of missing women as urgent within the first hour. That is the window in which a person who has disappeared can still be found, and it is the point at which a missing person report is most often treated as routine.

The case has drawn public attention to how such reports are handled, and to the records that follow from them.

What happens next

The analysis of footage and cellphone records continues, and the police presence on East Rand roads remains in place. Families of the women found have been coming forward to identify the bodies, and the police have warned the public against a fake social media post circulating about the case.

Source: eNCA, Ekurhuleni murders | Technology a welcomed ally in search for perpetrators - Analyst