Moses Sithole is a South African serial killer and rapist responsible for most of the ABC Murders, so-called because they largely took place in the Atteridgeville and Cleveland suburbs of Johannesburg, as well as in Boksburg, Gauteng province.
Sithole was born in 1964 in Vosloorus, a poor township near Boksburg, Transvaal Province. When he was five, his father died, and his mother abandoned the family. Sithole and his siblings spent the next three years in an orphanage, where he later said they were mistreated. By his own account, he was arrested for rape in his teens and spent seven years in prison. He later blamed his stay in prison for turning him into a murderer. He explained his crimes by saying that the women he murdered all reminded him of the women who had falsely accused him of rape many years before.
In July 1994, while Martha was five months pregnant with Sithole's daughter, Sithole lured eighteen-year-old Maria Monama to Cleveland. His bait, like in all the following murders, was a desk job in a foundation named ""Youth Against Human Abuse"", which didn't actually exist. After raping and strangling Monama with his own hands, Sithole wrote three messages on her skin: ""She a beach [sic]"", ""I am no fighting with you please [sic]"", and ""We must stay here for as long as you don't understand."" It is believed that these messages were directed to law enforcement and that for each time he killed, Sithole imagined that he was taking his revenge on Swakamisa for reporting him. By the fall, four women had been found strangled in Cleveland, a fifth in Pretoria, and a sixth in Boksburg. One of them was Sithole's mistress, Amanda Thete, whose funeral was attended by Sithole. However, the police arrested a different man, David Selepe, after he was recorded by an ATM machine's video withdrawing money using Thete's credit card. Selepe was later shot by police while purportedly leading officers to the site of Thete's murder, and the case was considered closed.
Sithole's daughter was born on December 5, 1994. Later, months after the birth of their child, Sithole and Martha separated. Sithole became homeless and slept in train stations. From then on, more women were found murdered at an increasing pace in Pretoria (mostly in the Atteridgeville area) and Boksburg, always not far from a railway. The police stated that they still believed Selepe was the Cleveland killer, but that they couldn't rule out a connection to the new murders. The press dubbed the spree the ""ABC Murders"" after the initials of Atteridgeville, Boksburg, and Cleveland, and wondered if they were committed by the same killer, rendering Selepe innocent. South Africa's first profiler, Micki Pistorius, was assigned to the case. She determined that the Cleveland murders were perpetrated by two different killers, one of whom was also the one responsible for the more recent Pretoria and Boksburg murders.
