Beauty and the beast
Murder in a post office that touched the entire country
● At age 19, Uyinene Mrwetyana had left the embrace of her family.
She had spent her early years at Hudson Park Primary, a diverse and close-knit school community in Berea, East London, not far from Beacon Bay, where the family lived. For high school, she attended Kingswood College in the university town of Makhanda (Grahamstown) almost two hours away.
Her mother, Nomangwane Mrwetyana, is the director of student affairs at Rhodes University and knew which school in the town was best for her youngest daughter.
At Kingswood, established in the mid1890s, Mrwetyana applied herself diligently to her studies, becoming a top achiever.
Like many young women her age, the “showreel” of her life was captured and shared — selfies in the mirror, tagged mugshots and video clips on others’ phones. Slender, with velvet skin, Mrwetyana was the picture of youth. Even those who claim they don’t notice a person’s looks would have been stopped in their tracks by hers.
What stands out in each image is a twinkling set of eyes, full of humour and ambition. The whole world lay ahead of her as she headed off in its direction.
An image on her Instagram account, captured in May 2018 during her matric year, was taken on the beach showing a golden seascape with people silhouetted in the shallows.
She wrote: “Note to self: You’re riding your own wave, you’ll get to where you need to be when you get there. You don’t have to explain shit to anyone.”
Her own “wave”, it turned out, would take her to the ivy-covered buildings at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
There she would study film and media. Early this year Mrwetyana said goodbye to her family and the shores of East London, arrived in Cape Town, and put her bags down on the bed at Roscommon House on Main Road in Claremont, just a few kilometres from the campus.
She was the first person to occupy that room of the new student residence, which opened in January. The res offered just what a first-year student would need: a clean room, accessible transport, a one-stop shopping mall just across the road and, most important, watertight security.
For all its postmodern architecture of slanted walls and industrial-size windows, the residence is impenetrable from the outside, unless you have the correct access card.
In the first few months of her new life, Mrwetyana threw herself into her studies once again, and adapted to independence from her family.
She soon made friends at Roscommon House and on campus. Life, it seemed, could not get any better.
One of the new friends at the res, Jenna Unsworth, took an instant liking to Mrwetyana.
In one of Unsworth’s phone calls home, she spoke of her new circle of friends, among them a “truly magical human being called Uyinene” who had “an infectious energy” and a “soul like nobody else”.
Mrwetyana also enjoyed being a go-to person for those struggling academically.
But, despite the peachiness of those first few months, Mrwetyana was no fool when it came to personal safety.
She knew all too well that Cape Town’s beauty belied crime statistics that would make anyone shudder.
So she stuck to the safer, concentric circles at the foot of the mountain, a curved line of middle-class suburbs that stretch out on either side of the busy main artery near the campus.
On Saturday August 24 2019, Mrwetyana tackled her admin for the week. It could not have been a more boring task.
It included a trip to the post office in Harfield Village, 1.3km from the residence.
One of the days before the boring tasks, she had asked a friend to walk her to the Woolworths, diagonally across from the residence, because she felt it would be safer.
On the Saturday morning she went to another friend’s room to borrow a charger. This time she made no mention of where she was going, and did not ask anyone to accompany her.
Perhaps, her friends thought, she knew everyone was tired of her anxiety that anything could happen at any moment.
She headed off alone, stepping out of the residence onto Main Road.
The day was warm and mild, and as she got into the taxi she had called online, the sounds of the busy street were soon shut out.
A left turn at the traffic lights, a short drive down Imam Haron Road and boom, there it was. The most unspectacular building in the world.
Bricks and mortar, linoleum tiles, and a thick wooden counter … your everyday timewarped government building from the days of apartheid.
It was here where Mrwetyana had come to collect a parcel — perhaps a gift from home — and walked up to the nearest teller with her ID in hand.
The man was softly spoken, charming, neat as a pin — and seemingly very helpful too.
Claiming that the card machine had no power, he offered to make a “special plan” for Mrwetyana and suggested she come back, around closing time.
In her baggy brown pants and with a black bag slung over her shoulder, Mrwetyana left with a simple plan to return later as instructed.
She went about her other business — a trip to a hair salon not far away, some claim — and returned to the post office at about closing time, ready to receive her parcel.
Except, that is not what happened.
Once she was inside, the “helpful teller” bolted the door, likely telling her that since it was after hours, no other customers could come in.
Perhaps he kept up the ruse for a few minutes, luring Mrwetyana to a back room where the parcels are kept.
“I can’t find your one but maybe you will find your own name more easily,” he might have told her.
Or perhaps he struck immediately, dragging her behind the counter and out of sight of the glass doors at the front of the office.
Before she knew it, Mrwetyana’s worst nightmare was coming true.
Throwing her to the floor, he lay the weight of his body over her, brutally ripping off her clothes.
He then raped her, all the while pinning her to the ground.
Mrwetyana tried to fight back and overpower her attacker but to no avail.
She screamed as loudly as she could — but the only other person to witness this gruesome moment was the perpetrator himself.
He reached for a post office scale, and smashed her head with it.
The world went black.
Uyinene Mrwetyana went silent.
She had been murdered.
Raped and murdered.
A killer covers his tracks
Her room was untouched. Her phone was off.
For several days after Mrwetyana’s mysterious disappearance, a contagious anxiety spread from her family to her friends, to the university community and the inhabitants of Cape Town.
Then it spread to the whole country too as she became a symbol of a sickness in South African society.
Candlelight vigils, community searches, private detectives working around the clock for her shattered parents and older sister.
But for a few harrowing days, nothing turned up.
Her killer had returned to work for business as usual on the Monday morning.
He peered up from his work every now and then to watch Mrwetyana’s frantic friends handing out flyers to passers-by near the post office.
All the while he kept his murderous secret to himself: he had left Mrwetyana’s lifeless body on the post office floor and returned later under cover of night with his car, possibly backing it into the service section behind the building where the trucks deliver the mail.
Nobody would have noticed a thing on a Saturday night at a lonely post office on an intersection of suburban roads and a business road that all but shuts down after dark. Save for the homeless, that is.
An elderly couple, who regularly sleep on the short staircase and square landing just outside the post office, were questioned by police and said they had seen a light on at an unusual hour.
The killer had then mopped up the blood from the floor and had carried Mrwetyana’s body to his car.
He had driven home with the intention of
burning her remains, but instead he dug a grave in Khayelitsha where he lives, and placed her inside it.
He had worked hard at trying to cover his tracks, but when a cleaner spotted what could only be blood on strands of the mop, the detectives had their breakthrough.
On the Thursday, August 29, after Mrwetyana disappeared, the post office shut its doors for a few hours so that more forensic material could be collected.
That night, two detectives stationed near the crime scene spotted their prime suspect driving past and in the early hours the next morning it finally happened: with more than enough forensic evidence to work with — not the least of which was DNA, and traces of blood in his car, on the mop, on his shoes, and on the post office floor — police closed in on the killer.
A man of 42 from Khayelitsha, known to his colleagues as a snappy dresser with a penchant for beautiful women and for
smooth-talking the customers, was handcuffed and formally arrested.
Since then, his house has been burnt down while flowers have been pinned to every available space on the railings outside the post office.
His name is printed on thousands of post office receipts in the southern suburb of Claremont, but it is the name and fate of Uyinene Mrwetyana that has sparked a nationwide fury — about femicide, about gender-based violence, about the ways in which women experience fear every day of their lives.
At a huge memorial service held on the UCT campus steps where Mrwetyana had so often sat laughing in the sun with her classmates, a friend stepped up to the podium among the thousands of flowers placed by students in her memory.
“Today I want to ask you to do something that could cost you your life,” the friend said, “I ask you to just be yourself.”