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South African police have recovered the body of a tenth woman found dead near Johannesburg since mid-July, in what investigators have acknowledged may amount to a series of connected killings in a single metropolitan area east of the country's commercial capital.
The discovery was made in Thembisa, a township within the Ekurhuleni municipality, and was confirmed by police on Saturday. According to the daily newspaper The Sowetan, the body was found in the morning. Officials have not released further details about the victim, including her identity, and say a post-mortem examination will be carried out.
Gauteng police commissioner Tommy Mthombeni, who attended the scene, said the woman appeared to have been killed by being stoned. That account remains provisional, with the cause of death to be confirmed through the planned post-mortem. Mthombeni pledged that the case had been handed to experienced detectives, saying investigators had been assigned to track down those responsible.
The discovery brings the number of women's bodies recovered in and around Johannesburg in the past ten weeks to 10, a tally that has unsettled residents and renewed pressure on the authorities to explain whether a single serial killer, or a group of offenders, is responsible. Community members and campaigners have repeatedly raised the possibility that the murders are linked, though police maintain that the evidence so far is not conclusive.
Mthombeni said some of the killings share similarities, but cautioned that investigators have found no definitive proof pointing to one person or one group being behind all of the deaths. Speaking to the state broadcaster SABC, he said detectives believe the murder of the ninth woman was an isolated case, while acknowledging that a connection between some of the other killings cannot be ruled out.
The tempo of the discoveries has been striking. Police found three bodies in July and August within roughly six kilometres of one another in Ekurhuleni. Earlier this month, six more bodies were recovered over a ten-day period, again in Ekurhuleni. Geographic concentration in one municipality south-east of Johannesburg has intensified scrutiny of how the cases are being handled, and whether links between them are being drawn early enough.
President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged the latest find while campaigning for the upcoming local elections, according to the broadcaster eNCA. He said the discovery of a tenth body in Thembisa left him deeply saddened, and described the continuing killing of women as a disgrace that should shame men across the country. His comments underline the political weight the case has taken on ahead of the vote.
The killings have arrived against the backdrop of a national crisis in gender-based violence. South Africa is repeatedly cited as having one of the highest femicide rates in the world, with an average of roughly 15 women killed every day, according to figures cited in the report. The statistic frames the Johannesburg-area deaths as part of a far broader, entrenched pattern rather than an isolated outbreak of violence.
Police have made progress in at least one case. Two women have been charged with the murder of the woman whose body was the ninth to be discovered, and police said that killing may have arisen from a relationship-related dispute. It is the only prosecution arising so far from the string of discoveries.
Before Saturday's find, all of the women whose bodies were recovered were in their twenties or thirties. Several were found wholly or partly unclothed, a detail that has fuelled public anxiety and demands for a clearer picture of the victims' identities. Police have not yet confirmed the age of the tenth woman or whether she was clothed.
The first body, found in mid-July, was discovered naked and had been restrained with cable ties. Her boyfriend was arrested shortly afterwards, but no charges were ultimately filed, leaving that case — the earliest in the sequence — officially unresolved.
Images released by police and covered by the AFP and EPA show members of the South African Police Service and state pathologists examining one of the women's bodies where it was dumped beside a road in Boksburg, Johannesburg, on 17 September 2026, as officers searched for evidence linking the cases.
Investigators continue to work through the backlog, and the central question — whether these ten deaths constitute a single, linked series — remains unresolved. With each new discovery resetting the timeline, authorities face growing pressure to answer a question that has proved elusive for more than two months.
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