Imibuzo S1 finale recap: Child killer Sibusiso Mpungose

In episode 10 of Imibuzo, the season finale, we hear the story of how Xolisile Dladla-Mpungose served her husband Sibusiso Mpungose divorce papers in August 2019. Just a few days later, on 3 September 2019, 41-year-old Sibusiso picked up their children, Kuhlekonke (aged four), Khwezi (aged six) and Siphesihle (aged 10) from school early. At home in Wyebank, he sent Siphesihle to the shops to run errands. And while he was away, Sibusiso tied Khewzi and Kuhlekonke’s hands and covered their mouths with tape. When Siphesihle returned, Sibusiso did the same to him, before strangling and hanging him from the burglar bars in Xolisile’s room. He hung Khewzi from the burglar bars in the children’s bedroom, and hung Kuhlekonke in their wardrobe.

Then he got in a taxi to fetch his step-daughter Ayakha Jiyane (aged 17) from Pinetown Girls High School, telling her they were going to meet her mother at work. Instead he took her to a field in Padfield Park, where he strangled her to death.  

Alarmed, Xolisile went straight to the police after she received a cellphone notification about Sibusiso fetching the children from school early. Later at home, police had to break into the family home because Sibusiso had changed the locks. They were too late, and Xolisile walked into a nightmare.  

After police chased down Sibusiso in a night-to-day manhunt, judge Sharmaine Balton sentenced him to four counts of life in prison on 6 November 2019, concluding that he had murdered all four children out of spite.  

Now Imibuzo gets the inside story from reporters Sharika Regchand, Keveel Singh, and Sakhiseni Nxumalo, along with SAPS officers Colonel McGray (eThekwini Detective Coordinator), Sergeant Sithole (KwaDabeka SAPS and the eThekwini Task Team), and Lieutenant Colonel Sanjeev Singh (eThekwini district Trio Task Team). And clinical psychologist Dr Gérard Labuschagne offers a glimpse into parents who kill their children.  

Watch Imibuzo episode 10 now 

Recap: What happened in Imibuzo episode 1 

Recap: What happened in Imibuzo episode 2 

Recap: What happened in Imibuzo episode 3 

Recap: What happened in Imibuzo episode 4 

Recap: What happened in Imibuzo episode 5 

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Recap: What happened in Imibuzo episode 7 

Recap: What happened in Imibuzo episode 8 

Recap: What happened in Imibuzo episode 9 

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Secrets of a “happy” home 

According to to friends and neighbours, 39-year-old school teacher Xolisile Dladla-Mpungose and her 41-year-old husband, factory worker Sibusiso Mpungose, were affectionate, attentive parents to their three young children, Kuhlekonke, Khwezi, and Siphesihle, along with Xolisile’s daughter Ayakha Jiyane from her marriage with her previous husband, Vusi Jiyane. Sibusiso had helped Xolisile to raise Ayakha since she was just six years old.   

Reporter Sakhiseni Nxumalo says that in the eyes of the community, “Xolisile was a loving mother. She was a teacher, so she preferred to spend most of her time with her children.” As for Sibusiso, “He loved all his children, including the step-child, and he always spent time with them as a family. In the pictures that they took, they were such a loving family.” 

But some had noticed that all was not well in the house, and that Sibusiso had begun to change. Reporter Keveel Singh adds, “While the Mpungoses did seem like a perfect family, there was a lot of abuse that was reported from Sibusiso onto his wife. So she had handed him divorce papers. It was a day or two before the incident. Before the kids were murdered.” 

The darkest day 

The Mpungose children followed a set routine going to and returning from school. It had seemed like a normal day for the family. But Xolisile didn’t know that Sibusiso hadn’t left home just after she and the children had, as he normally would have. Instead, Sakhiseni reveals, “He woke up, went to the hardware store, bought new locks and changed all the locks at the house. From there, he requested a cab using an e-hailing service. He went to the school to collect the younger three children. When they got home, he sent the 10-year-old to the store; he stayed behind with the six- and four-year-old children. From there, he tied up the baby using a rope and taped his mouth. He did the same thing to the six-year-old. He did the same thing to the 10-year-old when he returned from the store. After that he took (dressing) gown ropes and then he started to strangle each of them in different rooms.”  

And what about Ayakha? When Ayakha saw Sibusiso looking for her in the assembly area at her school, she picked up that something wasn’t right, and she alerted her friends. Keveel explains, “She was old enough to know what was happening in her house. She knew the divorce papers had been handed to him. She knew about the years of abuse that her mom had endured. Before he could spot her, she informed them, ‘If he spots me and I have to go, inform my mom. Inform people that this is what happened. He came and picked me up,’ because she was already worried.” 

Sadly, Ayakha felt she had no option but to go with her father. “He told her that they were going to fetch her mother from her school. They got off at some bush in New Germany, outside Pinetown. He went there, pulling Ayakha. After realising that Ayakha was much bigger so he couldn’t just strangle and hang her like he did with her younger siblings, he decided to strangle her right on the spot,” says Sakhiseni. “He said she tried by all means to get him off her and push him away, but he pinned her down until she took her last breath.” Sibusiso left Ayakha dead in the bushes, then wandered off to get drunk.  

In news footage, Xolisile revealed that she was instantly wary on 3 September 2019, when she received a notification on her cellphone from rideshare app Taxify (aka Bolt) that Sibusiso had requested a ride to fetch the children from school ahead of schedule. And after finding out that Sibusiso had also taken Ayakha out of school early, Xolisile reached out to the police urgently. “She, with the police, went to her home and found that the locks had been changed. Once they got into the house, she described horrible scenes of the kids hanging off the burglar guards by their bathrobes. And she broke down,” says Sakhiseni. 

Hide and seek 

The call went out to find not just Sibusiso, but Ayakha, who was still missing. SAPS officers Colonel McGray, Sergeant Sithole, and Lieutenant Colonel Sanjeev Singh were on the hunt.  

It was the end of the working day when Colonel McGray sent Lieutenant Colonel Singh in pursuit of Sibusiso. At that stage the news was out on social media and the community and news stations were in an uproar over the dead children. News of sightings were pouring in, and police scattered in all directions chasing the leads while also trying to locate the Taxify driver who’d dropped off Sibusiso and Ayakha.  

Meanwhile Sibusiso himself was sending messages to family members, and police were trying to use those to pinpoint his location. The first solid sighting came from near Dumisani Makhaya Bridge in Pinetown, and in the episode Lieutenant Colonel Singh, who had one of Sibusiso’s friends in his vehicle with him to confirm Sibusiso’s identity, describes a chase through densely packed houses that seems like something out of a Hong Kong action thriller. “As I’m driving, it’s still. Everything is quiet. I spot something in the corner of my eye, and then I stopped my vehicle, and I alight with his friend. It’s only homes, and it leads to one house. I draw my weapon, and I go towards the door of that house. As I approach the door, somebody comes from the corner of the wall. He steps out in front of me, and his friend says, ‘There he is.’ And he comes towards me, wanting to assault me with a brick in his hand,” he says.  

With Sibusiso less than two metres away, Lieutenant Colonel Singh had a split second decision to make about whether to shoot and risk killing him. He stepped back, and watched, astounded as Sibusiso lunged to attack his friend. “He left me, and ran towards his friend with the brick. I continued to chase after him, and then he left his friend and jumped over some fences and ran into some homes.” Sibusiso had given the police the slip. But they ran him to ground the next morning, drunk at a tavern in KwaDabeka, and took him to the station. 

“I could immediately see it was him,” says Colonel Gray. “He was very drunk. He couldn’t talk. We warned him of his rights, and then I removed his clothing and gave him a set of PPE. We took his clothing away and I called for the expert to come out to the cells so we could take swabs of his nails to obtain any DNA from him, and take photographs of his body because he had scratches on himself. We could see that he’d had a fight.”  

Once Sibusiso sobered up, he announced that he wanted to explain the truth about what had happened. 

Courtroom confessions 

In court, Sibusiso Mpungose claimed, via his attorney, that the sole reason he killed the kids was because he believed that Xolisile was having an affair with her oldest child’s father. Instead his claims exposed him as a man who’d grown pathologically possessive to the point that he twisted normal exchanges on Xolisile’s phone.  

Sibusiso claimed that one of his children was playing with his wife’s phone when he happened to spot a picture of Ayakha with her biological father. When he asked Xolisile where it came from, she told him that she’d taken it herself when she took Ayakha to visit her father. A few weeks later when he took Xolisile’s phone from the children as they were playing with it again, he claimed that WhatsApp “just opened”, and he saw a conversation that he also questioned Xolisile about. Sibusiso told the court that Xolisile didn’t have Ayakha’s father under his real name, Vusi Jiyane, he was there as Bizo, and the messages had hearts on it. “She said to him that Ayakha was using her phone, the mother’s phone, to communicate with her father,” says Shakira.  

Still convinced that Xolisile was having an affair, Sibusiso then claimed to have got confirmation. “But he didn’t say what this confirmation was. He didn’t see her do anything. It seemed that he just made it up in his mind. He didn’t tell the court what evidence he had that she was having an affair,” says Shakira. 

Sibusiso’s harassment about Xolisile’s supposed affair seems to have been the last straw and she decided to divorce him. “He didn’t really want a divorce, and I think it was during that time that he says he had a complete mental breakdown. He was so depressed he didn’t know what to do,” says Shakira. 

What he chose to do was to murder her children.  

Sibusiso pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four terms of life imprisonment by Judge Sharmaine Balton, who described him as a brutal person who’d shown no remorse. Keveel says, “Sibusiso Mpungose in court was a quiet, calm, stoic figure. He always kept his head down. He never looked directly into Judge Sharmaine Balton’s eyes. He appeared to be submissive, but I think that was the act that Sibusiso Mpungose put on for the world…for someone to have no emotion at the fact that they killed their own kids, that’s the scariest thing for me.” 

Sharika was in court the day Sibusiso was sentenced and reveals, “One of the things his wife said, which was just terrible, was that she couldn’t bear to be around children anymore, and she couldn’t bear to go to school because seeing kids reminded her of her own children. It just broke your heart, because he killed every single child that she had. It was one of those cases where everybody just goes around wondering, ‘What could have gone through this guy’s mind? Why didn’t he just kill himself instead of killing the children?’” she asks.  

Revenge filicide: a crime of spite 

Crimes like those committed by Sibusiso Mpungose are rare. Clinical psychologist Dr Gérard Labuschagne cites a study on filicide (murdering your own children or step-children) conducted by Dr Melanie Moen and Professor Christiaan Bezuidenhout on cases between 2003 and 2021, which found only 20 such cases in South Africa over the span of the past 20 years.  

“Typically what we find, specifically in revenge filicide cases, is that the person is going to feel justified at that point in time. They might regret it later, but they feel there’s this build-up of motivation, that this is the best way forward. There’s some kind of lead-up to it, and some forethought and planning in the incident. The more lead-up and the more planning, the more the person has spent time considering this. It wasn’t a flash in the pan idea that the person gets up, kills the children and then maybe horribly regrets it five to ten minutes later,” Gérard says.  

Stolen dreams 

Emotions were running high when Ayakha’s school friends held a memorial service for her on 6 September 2019, the same day that Sibusiso appeared in the Magistrate’s Court. They described her as a brilliant, kind-hearted, down-to-earth person with a bright future. Reporter Sakhiseni says, “What we got from the school was heartbreaking because they explained the type of person that she was. She loved school. Even her teachers went on to say that they had high hopes, and they knew she was going to be among the top ten most achieving learners in the province. It was a very emotional service.” 

About Imibuzo 

Imibuzo Season 1 is now available to binge on Showmax. This 10-episode true-crime documentary anthology will answer your lingering questions about some of South Africa’s biggest news stories from the last decade.  

Imibuzo is produced by POP24, part of Media24, who made the reality series This Body Works For Me, which topped the Showmax Top 20 and Twitter trends charts. POP24 also co-produced the SAFTA-nominated true crime anthology Huisgenoot: Ware Lewensdramas. 

Watch Imibuzo now on Showmax.

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