Eish, That's Dark

In July 1906, at St Michael's, a remote Catholic mission in the hills of colonial Natal, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl named Germana Cele handed her priest a note promising herself to the devil. Within weeks the sisters were guarding her during Mass, and the priests were writing to the Bishop of Natal for permission to perform an exorcism. In Part One of this two-part story, Jess takes Liz back to...

Exorcism isn't mostly demons. It's mostly rules. From ancient Mesopotamia to the Vatican, we trace the history of exorcism and the long list of rules written to restrain it. Who's allowed to perform one, which churches and countries still practise it, and what went wrong when nobody checked. Content note: religion, mental illness and a death during a ritual.

Three verdicts. Two and a half years. One murder. In Part Two of our story on Reeva Steenkamp and Oscar Pistorius, we cover the trial that played out live on television, the evidence that didn't add up, the appeal that changed everything, and where Oscar Pistorius is now. We also look at the human cost that never made the headlines: Reeva's family, still fighting for an answer they never got. If y...

Reeva Steenkamp was a law graduate, a model, and an anti-rape campaigner who had a talk to give at a Johannesburg school the morning she died. Instead, in the early hours of Valentine's Day 2013, she was shot four times through a locked bathroom door by her boyfriend, Paralympic and Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius. Over two episodes, we go past the headlines everyone half remembers, the cricket b...

Between 1990 and 1997, ten people were killed in Port Elizabeth by the same man. Nobody joined the dots. Not for seven years. We tell the stories of the victims of Stewart “Boetie Boer” Wilken. Ten arrivals in one city, in the order he reached them. Seven of them a court could name. Three of them nobody ever could. Content warning: murder, violence, cannibalism, sodomy

Leigh Matthews was kidnapped the day after her twenty-first birthday in Johannesburg, in July 2004. Her family paid the ransom. She was never returned. Twelve days later, her body was found in an open field outside the city. Her killer pleaded guilty and got life. But the judge who sentenced him found that he'd lied and had help, the pathologist's own evidence didn't match his confession, and more...

He wasn't a stranger who jumped out of the dark. He was the taxi driver who took them to work every morning, for weeks, sometimes months, until the afternoon he turned off the route. Between 1995 and 1998, fourteen women and girls and two men were found in the veld and along the highways around Nasrec, Johannesburg. Lazarus Tshidiso Mazingane was eventually convicted of 74 charges: 16 murders, 22...

⚠️ This episode contains descriptions of the rape and murder of a minor, and crime scene detail. Please take care while listening. She was seventeen, home sick with an ear infection, alone in the house for a few hours on an ordinary Wednesday. By the time her father got home that evening, everything about that day had changed. This week we're covering the unsolved murder of Anika Smit: a locked ga...

Just after two in the morning on 18 December 1994, a car came round a bend on Marine Drive outside Port Elizabeth stopped for something lying across the road. Alison Botha was 27 years old. She had been abducted outside her own front door, and brutally attacked in the dunes near Noordhoek by two men who were out on bail for attacks on two other women, and left for dead. She crawled roughly a kilom...

The murders that started this story led somewhere nobody expected: a government slush fund scandal that ended a prime minister's career, an alleged security police assassination unit, and a Cuban exile hitman later convicted over a car bombing in Washington DC. This episode we go all the way in, including a first-person account from one of the accused describing exactly how he believes it was done...

In 1977, days before he was expected to walk into a cabinet position, National Party rising star Robert Smit and his wife Jean-Cora were shot dead in their Springs home. No forced entry. No robbery. Just two words sprayed in red across the kitchen wall that nobody has ever explained. This week we open South Africa's most notorious unsolved political murder: who Robert Smit really was, the mysterio...

By 2015, Electus per Deus was broke, and the skills they'd built murdering for the Lord transferred seamlessly to murdering for cash. In part two of The Krugersdorp murders, Liz takes Jess and follows the money: A fictional orphanage, a faked death, a R3.57 million insurance claim, and the appointment murders that gripped the West Rand in fear. Then comes the detective nicknamed Bliksem, an ATM ca...

Krugersdorp, 2012. A woman claiming to be a high-ranking witch fleeing the satanic church walks into a West Rand ministry, and instead of doubt, she finds devotion. Within five years she's assembled her own chosen people, bound by tattoos, terror and murder. She will never touch a weapon, but people will die. In part one of this two-part series, Liz takes Jess and traces how a country primed by de...

Daisy de Melker didn't leave Johannesburg when she died, or so the stories go. In Part Two, Jess and Liz follow her into local legend: the Turffontein house where a curtain is said to move on its own at six o'clock, the old children's hospital ward she's said to haunt, and her cell at Constitution Hill, where her story now sits, strangely, alongside some of the country's most important human right...

Twenty minutes from Johannesburg stands South Africa's most famous haunted building: Kempton Park Hospital, empty for almost thirty years. We get into how a state hospital ended up abandoned with all its equipment left inside, the fake paediatrician who worked there for eight years before anyone checked his credentials, and the ghost hunters, TikTokers and paranormal investigators who keep finding...

Daisy de Melker was a Johannesburg nurse who married three times between 1909 and 1931. Two of her husbands died years apart, and so did her own son, all in circumstances nobody thought to question until it was far too late. The case unravelled over a fake cat, a poison register signed under a dead man's surname, and a Turffontein pharmacist who recognised her face in the newspaper. What followed...

How does crime and punishment actually work in South Africa? This is the episode that decodes it. We walk through the criminal landscape from the ground up: the difference between common-law and statutory crimes, why there are no jury trials, how the death penalty was abolished in 1995, and what "life imprisonment" genuinely means. Then some curveballs, like being convicted of murder without inten...

Every culture has monster stories, but the best ones are never just monster stories. This week we go deep into five of South Africa's most feared mythological creatures: the Tokoloshe, Pinky Pinky, the Grootslang, the Aigamuxa, and the Inkanyamba. We cover the full mythology of each one, what they look like, what they're said to do, and where the legends actually come from. But the real question w...

It is June 1990. A customer browsing in a fabric shop in Midrand finds a slip of paper. On it, in a child's pencilled hand, is a message: she's being held by kidnappers, and her friend tried to phone but was cut off. The girl says her name is Anne-Mari. Anne-Mari Wapenaar vanished in September 1989. And by June 1990, the only two people ever linked to taking her — Gert van Rooyen and Joey Haarhoff...

In January 1990, a sixteen-year-old girl drugged and handcuffed in a Pretoria cupboard got herself out, flagged down a car, and cracked open the biggest child-abduction case in South African history. This is part one of The Missing Six. We meet Gert van Rooyen, the churchgoing builder with a 1979 conviction the state ignored, and his partner Joey Haarhoff, the "motherly" woman who opened the doors...

No courtroom this week. Just four places in South Africa where the dead apparently never got the memo that it was time to leave. We're covering the Uniondale Hitchhiker on the N9 in the Little Karoo, the famously haunted Lord Milner Hotel in Matjiesfontein, the heartbreaking love story behind the ghost at Kronendal in Hout Bay, and Charlotte - who has been tidying guests' rooms and ringing the bel...

In December 1994, a 20-year-old diver disappeared into one of the deepest freshwater caves on Earth. His torch went dark. His body did not come up. For ten years, he lay there. In silence. In the cold. In the dark. In 2004, an Australian airline pilot saw something at the bottom of that cave that he could not unsee. He made a promise to a stranger he had never met. This is the story of that promis...

A burned body. A death certificate. A closed case. And a convicted murderer doing his weekly grocery shop at Woolworths in Sandton City while the state held his death certificate on file. This is Part Two. We cover the murder of Katlego Bereng Mpholo, the year Bester spent living openly in Hyde Park, the GroundUp journalists who cracked it open, the flight through Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania, an...

Thabo Bester was serving a life sentence for murder and rape when, in May 2022, he apparently died in his cell. The body was charred. The prison signed off on it. But Thabo Bester wasn't dead, and someone on the inside knew that. This is Part One of the Thabo Bester story, one of the most audacious prison escapes in South African history, and the case that exposed just how deep the rot could go. H...

There is a ship off the coast of South Africa that has been seen for four hundred years. It never docks. Its sails are full of wind that isn't blowing. And almost everyone who has seen it first has met a terrible end. A future king of England saw it. Naval officers logged it. Warships swerved to avoid it. Ordinary people watched it from a beach on a calm Sunday afternoon. It shouldn't exist. But i...