The plight of women in South Africa continues and this time, the latest instance of gender-based violence (GBV) came from Daveyton, Ekurhuleni, where two women were found dead on the same day.
As reported by Sowetan, two unrelated cases of homicide were registered on Saturday 13 June in Daveyton, a township in the Ekurhuleni metropolitan municipality.
Daveyton horror: These women were found dead on the same day
Silindile Ndlovu
The first case was reported in Mogoba Extension, an informal settlement near Daveyton, where Silindile Ndlovu’s body was found wrapped in a blanket and shoved underneath the bed she slept in with her boyfriend.
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Michael Mathebula, the landlord of the property where Ndlovu and her boyfriend resided told the cited publication that he was forced to douse the fires of an argument that had broken out between the couple in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
“I reprimanded them and they were fine. We then chilled together and the woman was there as well. In the early hours of the morning, we decided to go to sleep,” he said.
Mathebula claims he went to go check on the couple at around 07:00 but noticed the boyfriend displaying odd behaviour when he tried to open the door to the granny flay they stayed in.
“It was like he was blocking me from entering his room and he looked very scared but I didn’t make much of it until later in the day,” he added.
While Mathebula was away, the suspect’s friends came around and also noticed the same bizarre behaviour.
Aroused by the suspicious behaviour displayed by the boyfriend, and the sudden disappearance of Ndlovu, Mathebula and the suspect’s friends plotted to enter the granny flat in search of the victim.
“They said he was acting weird. He would not let any of us in and when he went in, he would lock the door and same when he came out. We decided we were gonna wait for him to get drunk and then go to his room to see what he was hiding,” the landlord said.
Sure enough, their plan worked to perfection and once the suspect had left the property, Mathebula and friends broke into the room and found Ndlovu’s body wrapped in a blanket underneath the bed.
The suspect caught wind of the commotion on the property and attempted to flee to Gabon, an informal settlement located 20-or-so minutes from Mogoba Extension. However, Daveyton police were quick to pounce on him and place him in custody.
The motive behind the murder has yet to be confirmed but Mathebula suspects Ndlovu died in the wee hours of Saturday after he had broken up the argument.
“I don’t know how he ended up strangling her to death,” he claimed.
Zandile Mbatha
About 5.3km away in the same community and on the same day, the decomposing body of a woman was found in a house where a couple lived.
25-year-old Zandile Mbatha was from Emabovini in Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN) but stayed with her boyfriend at the Daveyton township.
She had not been seen for three weeks and after the smell of decomposing flesh started permeating from her residence, the community approached the boyfriend looking for answers.
Community leader Simon Mkhwebane described how a mob of residents forced the boyfriend to reveal what had really happened to the 25-year-old.
“He said it was a smell of rotten meat. I then called the community members and we forced him to open the house. The mob manhandled him. One person went inside to the smelly bedroom where the decomposed body of the woman was found wrapped in plastic and a blanket,” he told Sowetan.
Unlike Ndlovu, there is no indication of what could have driven Mbatha’s boyfriend to kill her. She had seemingly fallen off the face of the earth three weeks prior to the discovery of her body.
“We saw him during the day almost every day not knowing that he had hidden a dead body in the house,” a neighbour told reporters.
Both suspects are expected to appear in court on their respective murder charges soon.