DELMAS, South Africa — Eudy Simelane was a 31-year-old lesbian activist and one of this nation’s best female soccer players, a tall, muscular woman who knew how to defend herself with her fists and her elbows. She could not have been easy to kill.
Before leaving her naked body face down in a drainage ditch, her murderers stabbed her nine times, said the doctor who performed the autopsy. Three of the deep cuts were in the upper inside of her thighs. Those wounds as well as the bruising at the entrance of her vagina led the doctor to conclude that the assailants had tried to rape her.
In February, one of the attackers, Thato Mpithi, 23, pleaded guilty to murder, implicating three other men before denying their involvement almost six months later. On Tuesday, in a courtroom here in Delmas, two of the men he named were acquitted for lack of evidence, though the judge, Ratha Mokgoathleng, warned that they might someday have to answer to God.
The other man on trial, Themba Mvubu, 24, had no reasonable explanation for his trousers’ being stained with Ms. Simelane’s blood. He received a life sentence but walked from the courtroom smiling, showing no contrition and telling a reporter, “Ach, I’m not sorry at all.” He disappeared down a stairway to a holding cell as some of Ms. Simelane’s friends shouted that they would prefer he be sliced into pieces.
Ms. Simelane, who was killed in April 2008, was one of 18,148 murder victims in the 12 months that ended in March. Tuesday was also the day the South African Police Service released its annual crime report. The data showed 339 fewer homicides than in the previous 12-month period, an improvement that still left this country of 49 million people with one of the world’s highest murder rates. At the same time, the number of reported sex crimes jumped to 70,514, up nearly 7,000. Burglaries of homes and businesses also increased sharply.
South Africans are obsessed with the violent crime in their midst, and earlier this month the new police minister, Nathi Mthethwa, tried to reassure them. “We are tired of waving nice documents like the Constitution” at criminals, he said, vowing instead to “meet the thugs head-on, and if it means we kill when we shoot them, so be it.”
The problem with such tough talk, gay and lesbian groups say, is that it often excludes crimes directed at them. They claim they are special targets of violence, and snickering, abusive police officers do little to protect them or pursue their complaints.
The Simelane case has been central to a campaign to bring attention to attacks against lesbians and gay men. But sexual orientation was never established as a motive at the trial. Judge Mokgoathleng was uncomfortable with the term lesbian itself. “Is there another word that you can use instead of that one?” he asked the prosecutor.
Ms. Simelane grew up in Kwa Thema, a township of small, modest homes southeast of Johannesburg. “There were three of us: Eudy, me and Zodwa,” said Pretty Makhalya, her closest friend. “Whatever we did was boyish. We were different, you could tell. We were athletes. We played with the boys but we had feelings for the girls.”
By high school, they better understood their sexuality, she said. They dressed butch, wearing pants and T-shirts, jockeys instead of panties. They dated other girls, preferring their partners “looking beautiful with makeup and everything.”
Kwa Thema was unusual among townships. Lesbians were quite open. Most boys their age were comfortable around them. “But there were also guys who’d say, ‘C’mon, we’ll teach you how to be a girl,’ ” Ms. Makhalya said. “They looked at us like we were crazy people, defying nature. Things would heat up. There’d be fights.
“And it wasn’t just some boys who hated us, we realized. Some churches were no-go areas. They wouldn’t let us in if we were wearing trousers.”
Ms. Simelane was one of the best-known people in Kwa Thema. People were wild about soccer, and she was good enough to make the national team, Banyana Banyana, competing internationally for a few years. She was a bar-hopper, not just hanging out at places like Savey’s and Hlubi’s that welcomed gay men and lesbians, but at other spots, too.
Her killers attacked her in the darkness as Ms. Simelane was walking home near an open field. Mr. Mpithi said that he did not know Ms. Simelane, and that robbery — not her identity as a lesbian — was the only motive for the attack. One of the other three men, Johannes Mahlangu, decided to rape Ms. Simelane because she was carrying no money, Mr. Mpithi said. As the sexual assault went on, Ms. Simelane recognized Mr. Mvubu. To save themselves from arrest, the men decided she had to be killed.
Mr. Mpithi, promising to testify against the others, was given a 32-year prison sentence. But when the trial began in July, he said he had become a born-again Christian and could no longer repeat his earlier lies. He then said that the other three defendants were not involved.
Without Mr. Mpithi’s incriminating testimony, the judge found only Mr. Mvubu, caught in the bloodstained pants, guilty. The other two defendants went free.
Khotso Simelane, Ms. Simelane’s father, watched them go, the shackles removed from their legs. He had observed the trial’s unfolding, a rail-thin retired bricklayer often burying his head in his hands.
“Those two should never come back to Kwa Thema,” he said. “Eudy was loved, and the mob will kill them for stealing the life of my daughter.”
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