Johannesburg - For four years, he terrorised Gauteng residents – especially women – scaling high walls that earned him the nickname Spiderman, robbing and raping them and repeatedly escaping from custody upon arrest.
Last week, Lucky Murovhi’s reign of terror came to an end for good when he was slapped with eight life sentences and 861 years’ imprisonment.
Murovhi, 29, would target single women. He stalked them, followed them, studied their movements and also checked their lifestyle. When he got into their houses, he would rob and rape them, sometimes in front of their children.
Faced with a mountain of evidence against him, which had been gathered over the past three years by sergeants Itumeleng Phakedi, Christopher Molapo and Thembinkosi Sono, Constable Edwin Lamola and Warrant Officer Ederik Claasen, Murovhi pleaded guilty to 62 charges.
Some of the charges contained in an 80-page indictment included rape, arson, housebreaking and robbery with aggravated circumstances.
According to the prosecutor, advocate Jacob Molwantwa, more than 100 witnesses had been lined up for a trial that had been expected to last 45 days. However, in the end, about 20 were called for mitigation of sentence.
“He owned up to his crimes and pleaded guilty at the beginning of the trial,” Molwantwa said.
Murovhi, originally from Limpopo, lived in Kagiso on the West Rand and attacked people from Hammanskraal to Welbekend in Bronkhorstspruit, Soweto, Mondeor, Jeppe, Honeydew, Booysens and Joburg central.
Police said Murovhi’s crime spree started in 2008 when he hijacked a vehicle.
He was arrested and taken to the Welbekend police cells.
Brigadier Mashadi Selepe of the provincial police said Murovhi and other suspects in the cells broke open the wall, creating a hole through which they escaped.
He was later traced to Hammanskraal and a shootout erupted between him and the police. He was shot in the leg and arrested.
“When he was taken to court, he asked to relieve himself and never returned from the toilet. It was later found that he had escaped through a window,” Selepe said.
“He was re-arrested and taken to Johannesburg Prison in 2009, where he vanished after using a false name.
Murovhi was then re-arrested in 2010, but erroneously released at the Randburg Magistrate’s Court under somebody's (else’s) name,” he said.
While on the run, Murovhi broke into 39 houses and raped eight women. Many of those houses belonged to single women. In one instance, he attacked four houses in one night.
At the last house, he found a woman and her daughter and raped them both. The child was about 14 at the time.
Murovhi then tied them up and deliberately burnt one of the rooms in the house as he left.
A man who drops the child off at school every morning noticed the smoke. He alerted firefighters and the pair were saved.
In another house he broke into, he found a woman in her 60s with her 14-year-old granddaughter. He asked them to choose who between the two of them he should rape.
The old woman offered herself.
Selepe said that when Murovhi was arrested again in October 2012, Phakedi, who was leading the investigating, requested that he be placed in a high-risk facility.
He gave an undertaking that he would be responsible for transportation to and from court to prevent further escapes.
The Star