SAPS team on eight Ekurhuleni deaths told to test serial-murder links

Eight women have been found dead across Ekurhuleni in two months, and the police team investigating those deaths has been told to test whether they are linked before forensic results settle the question.

Officers found bodies in Kempton Park, Olifantsfontein, Clayville and Kwa-Thema. The police have not established whether one person, several offenders or unrelated circumstances connect the cases.

As The South African reported on 16 September, Professor Gérard Labuschagne, who previously headed the SAPS Investigative Psychology Section, said the geographical concentration of the cases, the timeframe and similarities between some of the victims give investigators enough reason to treat the deaths as potentially connected until evidence points elsewhere.

What the police have and have not said

SAPS has assembled a multidisciplinary team and increased law-enforcement resources in Ekurhuleni as the investigation widens. The service has repeatedly cautioned the public against declaring the killings the work of a serial killer before investigators establish a link, and it has not attributed the eight deaths to one offender.

That caution is not a formality. Under SAPS procedure, a suspected serial-murder case allows the service to bring experienced investigators and specialists together under a dedicated investigation, drawing in the Investigative Psychology Section, forensic specialists, victim-identification experts and detectives who have worked serial-murder cases before. The team already exists. What is still open is what it will find.

Labuschagne has stressed that he has not joined the current investigation and does not have access to all the evidence police have gathered, so he cannot conclude that a serial killer murdered the women. His argument is about method, not about a verdict.

The evidence that would connect the cases

Establishing that the same offender committed two or more of the murders requires evidence, and DNA and other forensic work can supply some of the strongest links. While those results come in, detectives can compare the victims, their injuries, the crime scenes, the locations and the circumstances around each death.

Behavioural similarities can point investigators towards patterns. They cannot formally connect crimes on their own.

Timing is the part that is easy to get wrong. Police may not have found the bodies in the order in which the women died. Investigators need each victim’s likely time of death before an accurate timeline can be built, and until that timeline exists, any pattern drawn from the order of discovery is unreliable.

Labuschagne’s position is that investigators should concentrate on establishing those links rather than on the label. A dedicated team can compare evidence across the cases instead of investigating each death in isolation, and that approach would strengthen the investigation even if police eventually establish that different offenders were responsible.

What this means in Ekurhuleni

The clustering of the cases has fuelled fear across the East Rand, particularly as police added more women’s deaths to the investigation. For residents of Kempton Park, Olifantsfontein, Clayville and Kwa-Thema, the practical questions are the ones the investigation has to answer. How many of these deaths share an offender. What the forensic results show. And whether the women who live in those areas are being told what the police know.

SAPS has not published a link between the cases, and the multidisciplinary team has not announced findings. The service has increased its resources in the area while the work continues.

The investigation is ongoing, with forensic results and the comparison of the eight cases still to come.

Source: The South African, Kempton Park murders: Profiler warns of possible serial killer