The Pretoria Railway Killer: Satan, DNA & Serial Murder
Profiler: True Crime AfricaPlay episode
Show notes
This week on Profiler Africa, South Africa's leading forensic psychologist Gerard Labuschagne unpacks one of Pretoria’s most disturbing serial murder cases — the case of Themba Vilakazi, known as the Railway Killer.
Between July and November 2005, three males — including an 11-year-old schoolboy — were brutally murdered along Pretoria’s railway lines and near the zoo. Victims were stabbed in the chest or neck, often left partially unclothed, and abandoned near the rail corridor. Years later, a 2012 rape case finally linked Vilakazi to the murders through DNA.
In this episode:
• The Crimes: How three murders in just months terrorised Pretoria.
• The Modus Operandi: Vilakazi’s pattern of targeting strangers and leaving bodies exposed.
• The Satanist Defence: Why he claimed voices from the “underworld” ordered the killings, and how the court exposed it as malingering.
• The DNA Link: How a later rape arrest cracked open the cold cases.
• Sentencing: Why experts testified he was a serial murderer who could never be rehabilitated.
This is a chilling story of delusion, manipulation, and cold-blooded violence — and a reminder of how DNA and persistence finally caught the Railway Killer.
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