Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
WHEN Thandolwenkosi Ndhlovu’s charge sheet was read by the police last week, it felt as if the country’s law enforcement officers had ripped a page off R-rated Hollywood horror script.
Over a few weeks, the 20-year-old Ndhlovu had brought a level of bloodlust to Harare’s vagrant community that had never been seen before. On August 28, Ndhlovu had approached a sleeping Emmanuel Godfrey (25), on the pavement near Chinengundu Building at Corner George Silundika Avenue and Simon Muzenda Street, crushing his head and killing him instantly. Three days later, Ndhlovu would, this time at the corner of Innez Terrace and Robert Mugabe Road, give the same bloody treatment to a victim that is yet to be identified. Armed with a big stone, Ndhlovu would crash the skull of another man that he found sleeping on the corner of Nelson Mandela Avenue and Seventh Street on September 3.
A day later, a lightning-quick Ndhlovu would strike twice, killing two men he found sleeping near a bushy area at the corner of Cripps Road and Remembrance Drive in Mbare, crushing their heads with concrete blocks.
In all these killings, Ndhlovu’s modus operandi was spine-chillingly familiar. After crushing their heads, he would rip open their stomachs with broken glass, take their intestines, boil and braai them in an open fireplace. He would then consume them.
According to the police, the killing spree in Harare, looked eerily similar to a spate of murders in Bulawayo in 2020. In Makokoba, Bellevue and Nkulumane, three men had been murdered in a fashion that was similar to the killings in Harare. The three victims had been stoned and their intestines ripped out sometime between January and December. It was after this that Ndhlovu fled to Harare.
The scale and nature of Ndhlovu’s alleged actions, when revealed, were disturbing and stomach turning. It is hard to imagine that people capable of that level of violence, walk and sleep on the pavements of such big cities like Harare.
As gruesome as Ndhlovu’s crimes are, he is not the first serial killer that has stalked the streets of Zimbabwe. In fact, killers come in all shapes and sizes, with some even hidden in highly respected fields that few could suspect them of harbouring vampiric levels of bloodlust that would make even Count Dracula himself green with envy.
Dr Richard McGown
Nicknamed Dr Death, Dr McGown came dangerously close to igniting a racial conflict in the country after the scale of his crimes was revealed. McGown is alleged to have used a method of administering anaesthetic drugs to patients undergoing operations at Parirenyatwa Hospital and Avenues Clinic in Harare that had not been approved by the Drugs Control Council. It had allegedly led to the death of five patients.
Going beyond his professional call of duty, his motives were thought to be even more sinister. Under parliamentary privilege, MPs likened Dr McGown to a Nazi doctor and accused him of experimenting on black people “as if they were cats and baboons.”
When he was finally struck off the medical register in the UK in 2002, Dr McGown was convicted of injecting his patients with excessive doses of morphine. While he initially faced five counts, McGown was only jailed for the killings of a 19-month-old Asian boy and a nine-year-old black girl, amid claims he was carrying out Nazi-style experiments to test their tolerance to the narcotic.
“Both these children received doses of what is described by experts as the upper limit of what was acceptable,’’ said Joanna Glynn for the GMC. “Neither of these two healthy children should have died. Both deaths were preventable. This was caused by culpable failures.’’
Bright Zhantali
To those that spoke to him, Brian Zhantali gave the impression that he was an intelligent man. He spoke in fluent English, using the Queen’s language to describe some of the most gruesome crimes that have been committed by an individual in independent Zimbabwe.
After allegedly killing and raping over 20 women, Zhantali said he had felt it in his blood the day that he was going to be arrested.
“On that day, my body was cold, and I said to myself, it has come to an end,” he said of March 20, the day the handcuffs were finally slapped on his wrists.
Zhantali claimed that he was spurred on to rape and kill by the spirit of his first victim, a woman whose life he ended near the tranquil waters of the Lake Chivero on the outskirts of Harare.
“The woman appeared to me after the murder and told me that I was going to kill others the same way I killed her,” he said.
One particular victim stood out in particular for Zhantali. As she was a pastor in the AFM, Zhantali had found her reading a Bible in the bush, then proceeded to rape and axe her to death.
“She had strength and wrestled me. I had to use an axe to kill her,” he recalled.
After his dastardly act, Zhantali wrote a note and placed it inside her Bible.
Rodney Jindu
To this day, Bulawayo’s Rodney Jindu’s motives for the murder of his friends, Mboneli Joko Ncube and Cyprian Kudzurunga remain shrouded in mystery. What is clear is that Jindu shot dead Kudzurunga (28) of Queens Park East, buried him in a shallow grave in Burnside suburb, and sent a message to the deceased’s mother pretending to be her son who had suddenly decided to leave the country. He also shot Ncube, dismembered the body and set the parts on fire before burying them in four shallow graves in Burnside.
Beyond that, his motivations are hazy. In court, Jindu claimed that he was sent by the devil to kill two of his victims and threatened to unleash the evil spirit on prosecutors.
He also said that when he committed the two murders, he was under the influence of heroin and methamphetamine (crystal meth) which created an urge for him to kill, while also confessing that he ate the pair’s raw livers and cooked the brains before consuming them.
Some, however, speculated that Jindu had killed his friends for ritual purposes, harvesting their organs for sale. His crime once again, proved that even “normal” looking people are capable of acts that make a mockery of human decency or morality.