Eish, That's Dark

Jess Bawden and Liz De Lange
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South Africa has stories. Strange ones. Dark ones. The kind where the facts are stranger than anything you'd make up. Every episode, one of us researches and narrates a tale of true crime, conspiracy, or mystery, while the other hears it for the very first time. Then next episode, we switch. No sugar-coating. No victim-blaming. Just the full story, told honestly, with the occasional South African "eish."

  1. 3d ago

    The Murder of Reeva Steenkamp - Part 2

    Three verdicts. Two and a half years. One murder. In Part Two of our story on Reeva Steenkamp and Oscar Pistorius, we cover the trial that played out live on television, the evidence that didn't add up, the appeal that changed everything, and where Oscar Pistorius is now. We also look at the human cost that never made the headlines: Reeva's family, still fighting for an answer they never got. If you or someone you know is affected by gender-based violence, help is available 24/7 in South Africa: GBV Command Centre: 0800 428 428 Please Call Me: 1207867# SMS "HELP" to 31531 Lifeline National Counselling Line: 0861 322 322 gbv.org.za | lifeline.co.za Stay safe and stay skeptical.

  2. Sep 28

    The Murder of Reeva Steenkamp - Part 1

    Reeva Steenkamp was a law graduate, a model, and an anti-rape campaigner who had a talk to give at a Johannesburg school the morning she died. Instead, in the early hours of Valentine's Day 2013, she was shot four times through a locked bathroom door by her boyfriend, Paralympic and Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius. Over two episodes, we go past the headlines everyone half remembers, the cricket bat, the "intruder," the trial on live TV, to who Reeva actually was, what the evidence really showed, and how three separate court verdicts landed on very different answers. Part One covers the two of them and the night itself. Part Two covers the trial, the appeals, and where Oscar Pistorius is now. Stay safe and stay skeptical.

  3. Sep 21

    Stewart Wilken: Boetie Boer

    Between 1990 and 1997, ten people were killed in Port Elizabeth by the same man. Nobody joined the dots. Not for seven years. We tell the stories of the victims of Stewart “Boetie Boer” Wilken. Ten arrivals in one city, in the order he reached them. Seven of them a court could name. Three of them nobody ever could. Content warning: murder, violence, cannibalism, sodomy

  4. Sep 14

    Leigh Matthews: The Ransom That Wasn't Enough

    Leigh Matthews was kidnapped the day after her twenty-first birthday in Johannesburg, in July 2004. Her family paid the ransom. She was never returned. Twelve days later, her body was found in an open field outside the city. Her killer pleaded guilty and got life. But the judge who sentenced him found that he'd lied and had help, the pathologist's own evidence didn't match his confession, and more than twenty years later, the case is still working its way through South African courts. This episode gets into the kidnapping, the ransom drop, the detective who cracked it in five weeks, and the fight over who this man really is that's still playing out today. Stay safe and stay skeptical.

  5. Sep 7

    The Nasrec Serial Killer

    He wasn't a stranger who jumped out of the dark. He was the taxi driver who took them to work every morning, for weeks, sometimes months, until the afternoon he turned off the route. Between 1995 and 1998, fourteen women and girls and two men were found in the veld and along the highways around Nasrec, Johannesburg. Lazarus Tshidiso Mazingane was eventually convicted of 74 charges: 16 murders, 22 rapes, 20 aggravated robberies, and sentenced to 17 life terms plus 781 years. Most South Africans have never heard of him. We get into the method, the profile that described him before anyone could name him, Piet Byleveld's interrogation, and a parole system that keeps having to consider him. We say all sixteen names, including the one nobody has ever known. ⚠️ Listener discretion advised: This episode deals with rape, murder, domestic violence

  6. Aug 31

    The Unsolved Murder of Anika Smit

    ⚠️ This episode contains descriptions of the rape and murder of a minor, and crime scene detail. Please take care while listening. She was seventeen, home sick with an ear infection, alone in the house for a few hours on an ordinary Wednesday. By the time her father got home that evening, everything about that day had changed. This week we're covering the unsolved murder of Anika Smit: a locked gate that came open, a scream nobody could place until it was too late, a school desk with a confession carved into it three years before anyone confessed to anything, a satanism rumour that took over a courtroom, and an investigation that stalled when its own lead detective got pulled onto the Oscar Pistorius case. Five people have been named persons of interest over the years, including both of Anika's parents. Fifteen years on, nobody has ever been convicted.

  7. Aug 24

    Alison Botha: Survival Against All Odds

    Just after two in the morning on 18 December 1994, a car came round a bend on Marine Drive outside Port Elizabeth stopped for something lying across the road. Alison Botha was 27 years old. She had been abducted outside her own front door, and brutally attacked in the dunes near Noordhoek by two men who were out on bail for attacks on two other women, and left for dead. She crawled roughly a kilometre to that road, but before she started moving, she scratched her attackers' first names into the sand, in case she didn't survive to say them out loud. She survived, testified in open court, and turned the worst night of her life into thirty years of awe-inspiring work. This week Liz talks about the attack, the trial that changed how this country talks about survivors, the thirty years in between, and a parole system that keeps on failing. ⚠️ Content warning: sexual violence, grievous injury, attempted murder.

  8. Aug 17

    The Smit Murders Part 2: The Conspiracy

    The murders that started this story led somewhere nobody expected: a government slush fund scandal that ended a prime minister's career, an alleged security police assassination unit, and a Cuban exile hitman later convicted over a car bombing in Washington DC. This episode we go all the way in, including a first-person account from one of the accused describing exactly how he believes it was done, the official government commission findings, and the fight of the daughter who's never stopped looking for the truth. Nearly fifty years on, nobody has ever been arrested.

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About

South Africa has stories. Strange ones. Dark ones. The kind where the facts are stranger than anything you'd make up. Every episode, one of us researches and narrates a tale of true crime, conspiracy, or mystery, while the other hears it for the very first time. Then next episode, we switch. No sugar-coating. No victim-blaming. Just the full story, told honestly, with the occasional South African "eish."

Information

  • Creator
    Jess Bawden and Liz De Lange
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    25
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Jess Bawden and Liz De Lange
  • Show Website
    Eish, That's Dark