Asande Baninzi was born in 1983 in South Africa. Very little is publicly known about his early childhood or upbringing. However, records and media accounts describe Baninzi as a young man heavily addicted to drugs by the age of 18. This addiction, according to his own confession, drove him to commit a string of violent crimes—including hijackings, sexual assaults, and murders—in a short but deadly spree.

Baninzi operated mostly in the Cape Flats, an area of Cape Town known for high levels of poverty, gang activity, and violence. It is presumed he had prior run-ins with the law, though no official documentation of earlier criminal activity is publicly available. His descent into extreme criminality seems to have been fueled by the need to fund his drug use, which escalated his behavior from petty crimes to mass murder within a few months.

Between May and August 2001, Asande Baninzi committed a series of heinous crimes across the Cape Flats region of South Africa. Desperate for money to support his drug habit, he began hijacking vehicles and sexually assaulting his victims, often resorting to brutal violence. His spree escalated rapidly, culminating in the deaths of 18 people—14 of which he was later convicted for.

Baninzi’s killing pattern was indiscriminate and chaotic, targeting random civilians in carjackings and home invasions. One of the most horrifying crimes attributed to him was the cold-blooded execution of an entire family of four in Delft, a township in the Cape Flats. He shot all four family members and was later convicted and sentenced to four life terms for that incident alone.

Baninzi committed the crimes alongside his accomplice, Mtutuzeli Nombewu, known as “Wox.” When police finally cornered Nombewu in a home in Gugulethu, he took his own life rather than face arrest, leaving Baninzi to answer alone for their joint reign of terror.

After his arrest in late 2001, Baninzi eventually pleaded guilty to all charges. In 2002, he was sentenced to 19 life sentences for murder, rape, and hijacking, along with an additional 189 years for related crimes. His guilty plea spared the court a lengthy trial but did not lessen the outrage and horror his crimes provoked. He is currently serving his sentence in a South African correctional facility.