Piet byleveld murder cases in court

Byleveld retired from the police in after 38 years of service, starting a private-eye business. He told the Sunday Times in an interview he never wanted to be placed on a pedestal. You must accept there's no regular working hours, no time for holidays. You have to be totally dedicated. When I put my mind to tracking down a killer, I don't easily give up, even if the investigation lasts for years.

I hate losing. His first wife, Esmie Byleveld, whom he married in , told the Saturday Star: "The first 10 years of my marriage were bliss. We were head over heels in love," she said. He changed. He saw some gruesome things. He also led me to the scene of the crime where her body was found. In June he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Moodley subsequently confessed to the abduction and the murder and lead us to the abandoned body. In Sipho Dube was found guilty and handed ten life sentences. After three months of intensive investigation I apprehended the husband of the deceased. The accused was eventually acquitted as a result of insufficient testimony. Bongani Mfeka was found guilty of eight murders and sentenced to a year term of imprisonment.

He shook their hands, laughed and shared his braai with them. He drove them hundreds of kilometres to see their mothers. But he never forgot that they were monsters. The cruellest of the lot, he said, was the Wemmer Pan Killer, Cedric Maake, a slightly built, innocuous-looking suburban gardener and handyman. He had murdered and raped 15 women in the last year when Byleveld was assigned the case in June Byleveld would hang around a murder scene for days, sometimes camping there.

He was obsessed with detail. Such as the scrap of tissue he found which had the DNA that six months into his investigation sealed Maake's fate. He was convicted of at least 23 murders and 15 rapes. At the same time Byleveld was investigating the murders of Indian tailors in the Jeppe area of Johannesburg, all killed with a hammer blow to the head.

He found a receipt in one of their shops with a name Maake used as an alias. After confronting him with this, Maake confessed. They sit there with their degrees, and then this ordinary old cop thrashes them in the witness box. In , while tracking down serial child killer Sipho Dube, Byleveld was asked to solve the Leigh Matthews killing, a couple of months after she'd been kidnapped and 35 days after her body was found next to the highway in Walkerville.

The investigation was going nowhere. Within three weeks Byleveld had enough detailed evidence to convict Donovan Moodley. When he arrested him, Moodley said he thought he'd got away with it until he heard that Byleveld was on the case. He'd been expecting him ever since, he said. Byleveld's obsession with hunting down serial killers was both a refuge from, and the death of, a grossly unhappy, childless marriage.

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Piet byleveld murder cases in court

Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package. Subscribe now. Ongoing investigation [ edit ]. Television documentary [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Retrieved 17 March Retrieved 19 March Retrieved 18 March Retrieved 16 March Archived from the original on 28 August The hunt begins. Love blooms".

The Sowetan. Retrieved 21 March Eyewitness News. City Press. South Africa.