Methodology
About this tracker
The Kempton Killer is a tracker for the Kempton Park killer — a public record of where the killings of women in Kempton Park and the wider Ekurhuleni area have happened, and what named news outlets have reported about them. It gathers what those outlets have already published, puts it on a map and on a timeline, and keeps a link back to every original report.
It exists because the coverage is scattered. The same case is reported by SABC, News24, EWN, IOL, TimesLIVE, SowetanLIVE and the local Caxton titles, and nobody keeps the geography and the chronology in one place. Families, residents and journalists rebuild that picture by hand every time they need it.
The site answers three questions: where has this happened, what is known and who said it, and when did each of these things happen.
What this is not
- Not an investigation. The site publishes and organises what credible outlets have already reported. It does not run original investigation, does not host tips as fact, and does not attempt to identify anyone.
- Not a true-crime entertainment product. No dramatised copy, no gore, no speculative reconstruction, and no advertising on a victim’s page.
- Not a police or prosecution channel. The site is independent and claims no official status. Every page carries the SAPS Crime Stop and GBV Command Centre numbers because they are the right numbers to call, not because we speak for either.
- Not a suspect database. There is no record type for a suspect anywhere in this system. No uncharged person is named, no media nickname for any perpetrator is carried, and no adjective is applied to one.
How sources work
Nothing appears on this site without a published source behind it. If a fact cannot be attributed to a named outlet or an official statement, it does not go up — a gap is shown as a gap, and a field nobody has published reads “Not publicly confirmed” rather than being left blank.
How strong the evidence is varies, and that variation is shown rather than averaged away. Every record and every article carries one of three states:
| Badge | Shown when | What the badge says |
|---|---|---|
| Verified | Confirmed by a police or NPA statement, or carried by two or more major outlets. | Confirmed by police or by two or more major news outlets. |
| Reported | Carried by one credible outlet, not independently confirmed. | Reported by one news outlet. Not independently confirmed. |
| Unconfirmed | Low-confidence or community-sourced. | Not confirmed. Shown for completeness — treat with caution. |
A second, separate question is whether a death belongs to this series at all. That is not the same as whether it was reported accurately, so it is shown separately: a record police have not connected says “Possibly linked — police have not confirmed a connection”, in those words, on every surface it appears.
Where the law or a family withholds a name, the record is shown anonymised — an age and a suburb, nothing more — and there is no other field from which a name could be recovered.
Locations are published at neighbourhood precision by default, never at a street address, and the circle drawn on the map is the published uncertainty rather than a false-precision point.
How the automated research works
The corpus is not assembled by hand. An automated research agent runs three times a day, finds newly published coverage of this case, and proposes what it thinks has changed: a new article, a date, a place, a link between a person and a report.
The agent never publishes. Every proposed change is reviewed by a person before it appears on this site, and anything the agent cannot attribute to a published report is discarded rather than guessed at.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know, and the record keeps a dated history of what changed so a reader can see what it said before. Every person, place and article on the site carries a “Report an error” link.
There is one address for all of it: [email protected]. Say which page and what is wrong; every message is read. Requests to correct, remove or object to personal information go to the same address and are handled under the privacy notice.