Convicted child killer Norman Afzal Simons pointed out several supposed murder sites to police after five days in custody without appearing in court, but no bodies were found there, an inquest at the Mitchells Plain Magistrate's Court has heard.
The inquest is into the deaths of six boys thought to be victims of a serial killer.
The six were among 20 boys and an adult man murdered between 1986 and 1994, in what many feared was the work of a serial killer dubbed the Station Strangler because most victims went missing near railway stations. Simons has so far served 14 years of a life sentence for the murder of one of the boys, Elroy van Rooyen.
On Monday he appeared before an inquest into the deaths of six of the boys: Fabian Willmore, Owen Hofmeester, Marcelino Cupido, Donovan Swartz, Elliot Spinkle and an unknown boy.
Michael Barkhuizen of the police's murder and robbery branch, testified that on April 18, 1994, he interviewed Simon before he accompanied police to various places in Mitchells Plain and Kleinvlei in the middle of the night.
Barkhuizen said that between 2.36am and and 4.55am Simons pointed out sites in Mitchells Plain and Kleinvlei where he (Simons) claimed he had sodomised and strangled a number of young boys.
"We drove to the corner of Wespoort and Weltevreden Avenue where he said 'Here I brutally murdered four to seven children. It's children I met in this road or in the area.' We got out and went in the bush where he said: 'This was the place I sodomised and killed children.''"
But when Natasha Simons, for the state, put it to Barkhuizen that bodies had not been found at the sites Simons had pointed out and that if they had he would have been charged with more murders, Barkhuizen said he could not respond. About why Simons would have made more than one statement, Barkhuizen said Simons told him "evil spirits" made him do it.
Asked by Natasha Simons why the visits were carried out late at night, Barkhuizen said there was hysteria in the community and that the timing was out of concern for Simons's safety.
In a sitting of the inquest in March, Don Engelbrecht, the officer who first probed the murders, told magistrate Merelise Boller that blood, semen and hair found at crime scenes did not match Simons's DNA and notes discovered at some scenes did not match his handwriting.
aziz.hartley.inl.co.za