Between 1986 and 1994, the people of Mitchells Plain in Cape Town lived with a terrifying shadow over their lives. A killer was abducting young boys, often close to railway stations, raping and murdering them. By early 1994, 22 bodies had been discovered across an extensive area of sand dunes.
Thirty years later, a Showmax original documentary, The Station Strangler, investigates one of South Africa's most notorious serial killings. It explores the feelings of loss, fear and anger still felt in the affected communities. It also asks whether the man widely thought to be the killer - Norman Afzal Simons - is the Station Strangler at all.
As journalist Crystal Orderson explains in the film, Mitchells Plain was a mengelmoes (mix) of different language groups and classes spread across a number of suburbs. What they had in common was an origin in apartheid racial and spatial segregation. From the 1950s, they were moved away from the city and the green slopes of Table Mountain, reserved for white people. Their new home was the unloved seasonal wetlands and dunes dismissively referred to as the Cape Flats.
This marginalisation of the city's "coloured" people, along with the political violence of the 1980s, provided the perfect cover for a killer to go about his business without concerted police scrutiny. A coordinated investigation only started in the months leading up to the first democratic elections in 1994. It was an opportunity for the ruling National Party to make a play for the "coloured" vote by amplifying police efforts to find the killer.
In a particularly interesting interview, anti-apartheid activist and theologian Allan Boesak relates the horror of the killings to the violence of the apartheid state. He says:
We'd seen murder right through the 1980s but that was on the state's side. A serial murderer like you only read about in the United States of America, that was not really something that we knew.
As a film and TV scholar with a focus on crime procedurals, I am interested in the rise of true crime documentaries on streaming platforms. What makes this film stand out is its focus on the communities affected by the crimes, seen through interviews with journalists, writers, and family members of the victims.
True crime TV
The true crime genre has become increasingly popular on streaming channels over the past few years. Narratives once found on specialist crime and investigation channels are now spread across popular streaming platforms like Netflix and Showmax. They take various forms, from feature-length and series documentaries to drama series.
Serial killers are a staple of the new genre (despite data that suggests that serial killing, globally, is decreasing).
Compared to the US, South African TV did not offer audiences much in the way of crime or police procedural series in the early post-1994 years. There are a number of reasons for this. For a start, the real-life testimonies of trauma and violence during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which sought to bring the violence of apartheid into the light, dominated airtime.
US shows dominated the crime genre on South African TV, while crime as a theme took precedence in local genres other - such as the soap opera (including the likes of the groundbreaking Yizo Yizo) and current affairs shows (like 3rd Degree and Carte Blanche).
From the early 2000s, homegrown South African crime procedural shows began to emerge (Zero Tolerance, Jozi Streets). Many episodes drew explicitly on the uncomfortable truth that, in the 1980s and 1990s, South Africa had one of the highest numbers of active serial killers in the world per capita.
Many serial killer cases involved the work of psychological profiler Micki Pistorius, whose career has produced several books. Earlier this year, Showmax released an 11-part drama series based on her first book, Catch Me A Killer.
The Station Strangler case was the first Pistorius worked on with the South African Police Service, only a few weeks after she joined the force.
The Station Strangler
The Station Strangler is produced by Idea Candy. The company is behind recent true crime streaming successes Devilsdorp, Rosemary's Hitlist and Tracking Thabo Bester. Contrary to the historical fascination with killers and crimes of the distant past, these documentaries examine scarcely believable South African crimes of the past decade - from a Satanic murder spree in Krugersdorp to a cop-turned-serial-killer in a rural province, to the extraordinary case of a rapist and murderer who escaped from prison.
The Station Strangler contains many conventional aspects of the genre, from interviews with police investigators and psychologists, to news reports and commentary from the time. With great skill, director Nadine Angel Cloete also cuts together never-before-seen police footage from the original investigation with environmental shots from the present. She avoids re-enactments, rather evoking a sense of place. The use of slow tracking shots emphasises the idea of a killer quietly prowling the area, hiding in plain sight.
By placing the arrest of Simons very close to the start of the film, Cloete dispenses with the thrill of uncovering the killer. Instead, she pivots to another trope of the genre, the miscarriage of justice. Is Norman Afzal Simons really The Station Strangler? This mood of scepticism is reinforced through an interview with Ruth Jakuja, a retired magistrate who quickly questions the grounds on which Simons was convicted.
Numerous interviews contribute to Cloete's narrative that the extended period of the killings was a product of apartheid spatial planning that pushed whole communities to the margin of the city. The children, some unidentified, were not only victims of the killer, but also of what writer and illustrator Nathan Trantraal calls the state's "legislated indifference".
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Ultimately, Simons was found guilty of only a single murder, that of Elroy van Rooyen. One journalist argues:
All the forensic evidence gathered in the case excludes Norman Simons as the Station Strangler.
What led to his conviction was his muddled confession and eyewitness accounts from a police identity parade strongly criticised by experts.
The film comes in the wake of Simons' release from prison under strict parole conditions in 2023. While some family members express a mixture of anger and fear over his relative freedom, a larger issue remains: what about the other 21 victims? Has his release undermined the closure they may have experienced when he was sentenced in 1995?
Read more: Mother City: a tough, passionate film about the battle for affordable housing in Cape Town
With doubts surrounding Simons' guilt set against the confidence of those involved with the case who remain convinced they got their man, The Station Strangler rather grapples with what is incontrovertible: that a brutal killer preyed on the most vulnerable members of a community that was made even more vulnerable by the legislated indifference of the apartheid state.
Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies, University of Cape Town
