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 a mission nobody wanted, run by silent Trappist monks in a colony torn apart by the Bhambatha Rebellion. We cover the girl at the centre of it all, the priest who wrote her story down, a public exorcism that's still told as one of the best documented in Catholic history, and the voice coming out of Germana that started naming names.

Everything is told as the witnesses told it. Whether you believe them is up to you.

Stay safe and stay skeptical.

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 you or someone you know is affected by gender-based violence, help is available 24/7 in South Africa:

GBV Command Centre: 0800 428 428

Please Call Me: 1207867#

SMS "HELP" to 31531

Lifeline National Counselling Line: 0861 322 322

gbv.org.za | lifeline.co.za

Stay safe and stay skeptical.

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 bat, the "intruder," the trial on live TV, to who Reeva actually was, what the evidence really showed, and how three separate court verdicts landed on very different answers. Part One covers the two of them and the night itself. Part Two covers the trial, the appeals, and where Oscar Pistorius is now.

Stay safe and stay skeptical.

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 than twenty years later, the case is still working its way through South African courts. This episode gets into the kidnapping, the ransom drop, the detective who cracked it in five weeks, and the fight over who this man really is that's still playing out today.

Stay safe and stay skeptical.

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 rapes, 20 aggravated robberies, and sentenced to 17 life terms plus 781 years. Most South Africans have never heard of him.

We get into the method, the profile that described him before anyone could name him, Piet Byleveld's interrogation, and a parole system that keeps having to consider him. We say all sixteen names, including the one nobody has ever known.

⚠️ Listener discretion advised: This episode deals with rape, murder, domestic violence

⚠️ 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 gate that came open, a scream nobody could place until it was too late, a school desk with a confession carved into it three years before anyone confessed to anything, a satanism rumour that took over a courtroom, and an investigation that stalled when its own lead detective got pulled onto the Oscar Pistorius case.

Five people have been named persons of interest over the years, including both of Anika's parents. Fifteen years on, nobody has ever been convicted.

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 kilometre to that road, but before she started moving, she scratched her attackers' first names into the sand, in case she didn't survive to say them out loud.

She survived, testified in open court, and turned the worst night of her life into thirty years of awe-inspiring work.

This week Liz talks about the attack, the trial that changed how this country talks about survivors, the thirty years in between, and a parole system that keeps on failing.

⚠️ Content warning: sexual violence, grievous injury, attempted murder.

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, the official government commission findings, and the fight of the daughter who's never stopped looking for the truth. Nearly fifty years on, nobody has ever been arrested.