Police find ninth woman's body in Dawn Park as task team hunts Ekurhuleni killer

A woman’s body was found beside a road in Dawn Park, Ekurhuleni, on Thursday morning, the ninth such discovery in the metro in two months. She was wrapped in a sheet and partially undressed, and police are treating the scene as part of the same investigation that has been running since July.

The deaths stretch across Ekurhuleni’s townships and suburbs, from Tsakane to Daveyton, and they have a shape that is now hard to miss. A woman disappears. Days later her body is found in the open, often near a road, often with little left at the scene to identify her quickly. The latest discovery follows eight others, and the pattern itself has become the investigation.

What happened before Thursday

Among the eight earlier victims is Elizabeth Moselakgomo, known to friends and neighbours as Tsontso. The 38-year-old left her home for an afternoon run last week and did not come back. Her body was found on Saturday, 12 September. She was a jogger, visible and known in her area, which is part of why her case travelled so far beyond Ekurhuleni.

The other seven deaths have been reported across the same period, in different parts of the metro, which is what led the South African Police Service to stop treating them as separate local cases.

The team SAPS has put on it

A multidisciplinary team has been assembled to investigate the deaths together. That is the correct call and it is worth saying plainly: a single team holding every docket in one place is how a pattern gets tested rather than assumed, and how a suspect gets linked to more than one scene. It also means the families of all nine women are dealing with one investigation instead of nine unconnected ones.

What the team has not yet done is name a suspect or confirm that the cases are linked. Police have not said whether they are looking for one person or several, and they have not released a description. That absence is information too, and it is the reason the next public update matters more than the last one.

What this costs the women who live here

Ekurhuleni is not a small place. It runs from Germiston and Boksburg out through Katlehong, Vosloorus, Tsakane and Daveyton, and the women who live in those areas move through it every day on foot, on taxis and on the roads where these bodies have been found.

That is the consequence, and it is concrete. A woman who runs in the afternoon now thinks about the route. A family in Dawn Park waits for a name. A community that has counted eight deaths and then a ninth has stopped waiting for the police to tell it what to do, and has started asking which road to avoid after dark.

The law, and who may act on it

Murder is a crime under South African law, and the investigation of it belongs to the South African Police Service and to nobody else. There is no lawful role here for a crowd, a neighbourhood patrol or a self-appointed group to identify, detain or punish anyone in connection with these deaths. Vigilante action would be unlawful, it would destroy evidence in an active investigation, and it would put innocent people in Ekurhuleni at risk.

What residents can lawfully do, and what has worked elsewhere in the province, is feed information to the investigating team through the police or through a community policing forum, and push for the case to stay visible.

The next step

The ninth body was found on Thursday morning, and the multidisciplinary team is working through the scenes. The immediate next step is the post-mortem and the identification of the woman found in Dawn Park, which is what allows her family to be told and what allows her name to enter the investigation properly. Until that happens, she is a case number, and her family does not know.

Anyone with information on any of the nine deaths should take it to the South African Police Service directly, or to their local community policing forum, and not to a group acting outside the law.

Source: eNCA, Ninth woman’s body found in Ekurhuleni’s Dawn Park