Rat-poison mom slept next to murdered kids
Four life sentences for mother who killed kids to spite partner
● For five days, Witbank murder mom Zinhle Maditla slept in the same room as her four dead children — whom she’d poisoned after a lovers’ quarrel — before their decomposed bodies were discovered.
Maditla had slept on the floor at the foot of the bed where her children lay, coming and going from her home as if nothing was amiss.
Drawn by the stench of death and a cloud of flies gathered on the curtains of her single room in Klarinet, it was the 24-year-old’s neighbours who made the grim find on December 30 last year.
But on Friday, when she was sentenced to four life terms for the deaths of Minenhle, 8, Blessing, 7, Shaniqua, 4, and Ethen, who was 11 months old, her cold demeanour dissipated as she mewled and clung to the cell door when she was marched from the dock of the Middelburg high court.
Judge Sheila Mphahlele, in delivering her sentence, called the murders a callous betrayal of children a mother should have loved and protected, in a place where they should have been safe.
After handing herself over to police once her neighbours and relatives found the bodies, Maditla pleaded guilty and begged for leniency.
Relying on the extent to which Maditla had planned the murders — feeding her children rat poison-laced bread and yoghurt, and even smearing the toxic liquid on her breast before nursing her infant — the judge imposed the harshest sentence possible.
“We could see the flies in the window,” Zodwa Sithole, a neighbour, told the Sunday Times.
“Even if we guessed she’d left something out of the fridge, it’s not possible that there would be so many flies, even on the other side of the curtain. “Some days before she killed the children she came to my house and told me she had a rat that had been bothering her, and asked if she could borrow some poison to kill it. I know that stuff is very dangerous and even if I had it, I wouldn’t have given it to her,” Sithole said.
Now Maditla’s room is shuttered and empty, with light bleeding through the dust-covered window.
Her landlady, Matilda Mahlanga, said that the murders had split the community, with some taking pity on the woman and others regarding her with scorn.
“Some people feel sorry for her and others think that she was possessed … like there was a demon on this street in Klarinet.”
She hoped that the spirits of the children were at rest, Mahlanga said. “The fathers came to the yard with the coffins and used the branches [in uMlahlankosi — a cultural practice of spiritual homecoming] to take the children away.”
And while her neighbours are divided, Maditla’s relatives insist they have forgiven her.
Alice Nkosi, her aunt, said she is reduced to tears whenever she thinks of her nieces and nephews.
“I cry whenever I think of them smiling because they were such happy children. It hurts to know how they must have suffered before they died,” she said.
“But Zinhle was troubled and she made a mistake. All we can do now is forgive her and try and support her, but there are still days when I am angry.”
Kevin Balance, a spokesperson for Maditla and her family, said she had been spurred to kill her children out of vengeance, after discovering that the father of Blessing and Ethen had been unfaithful.