Body dug up from back yard

22 July 2014 - 02:02 By Sipho Masombuka
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REMOVAL: Police forensic specialists remove the badly decomposed body of a woman whose boyfriend has allegedly confessed to killing her with an axe
REMOVAL: Police forensic specialists remove the badly decomposed body of a woman whose boyfriend has allegedly confessed to killing her with an axe
Image: ALON SKUY

For more than three months a woman's body lay decomposing in her back yard while her children thought she was at work.

That was until Elsie Maditsi's boyfriend yesterday allegedly confessed to striking her on the head with an axe as she knelt for her regular midnight prayer on April 13 in Mmakaunyane, north of Pretoria.

Neighbours watched in horror and recoiled from the stench as police forensic specialists exhumed the 31-year-old woman's badly decomposed body.

Maditsi's uncle, Oupa Chauke, said he came to the house several times looking for his niece but her boyfriend always said she was at work.

He said Maditsi worked as a cashier in Thabazimbi, Limpopo, and returned home once a month.

"We never suspected anything until I got a call from my sister on Saturday saying [the boyfriend] was at her house and had told her that he had killed my niece and buried her behind the house."

Neighbours said the man, 32, had behaved as if nothing had happened and had cooked for his children by Maditsi - aged three, five and eight - on a fire on top of the makeshift grave.

A detective said the police were following up an allegation that the man killed another girlfriend in Cullinan, east of Pretoria, in 2009.

The detective said Maditsi was believed to have known about that murder.

He said it was possible that the man killed Maditsi to silence her.

Police spokesman Sergeant Thembi Nowathe said the arrested man had confessed only to Maditsi's murder.

Nowathe said the suspect told the police that he suspected his girlfriend of infidelity.

"He said he found suspicious messages on her phone."

The man is due to appear in the Garankuwa Magistrate's Court today.

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