John Phuko Kgabi

John Phuko Kgabi (1944 – 6 February 1980), known as The Ritual Killer, was a South African serial killer and a former police officer who murdered between six and at least eleven young girls in Atteridgeville and Limpopo. A sexually motivated killer, he would cut his victims' throats and then masturbate on their corpses. Convicted and sentenced to death, he was hanged in 1980.

Life prior to murders Little is known about Kgabi's early life, aside from the fact that he was born circa 1944. As a young man, he was married and had a young daughter, but suffered from issues with impotency. By the early 1970s, he was an officer in the South African Police and was tasked with dissecting corpses at a mortuary and providing help to the pathologist there. At one such shift, Kgabi had to cut up the body of a young teenage girl - when he made an incision on her throat, he suddenly got an erection. Surprised by this, Kgabi completed the work shift as usual but then proceeded to masturbate to the idea of cutting the girl's throat. Notably, he pointed out that some of participating officers were black like him, as police brutality was believed to be primarily committed by white officers on black citizens during the Apartheid era.