The 35-year-old serial rapist Letela Makhetha will be spending over a hundred years in prison for sexually violating innocent young girls and women.
On Wednesday 19 April 2023, Bloemfontein High Court sentenced Makhetha to 117 years imprisonment for rape, assault and housebreaking with the intent to rape.
Captain Bez Bezuidenhout from the Free State Provincial Serial and Electronic Crime Investigation (SECI) under the Mangaung Family Violence Child Protection and Sexual Offices Unit (FSC) investigated Makhathe’s case until he successfully got a conviction.
According to the records, Makhetha raped his victims, aged between 12 and 45, dating back fifteen years.
It is alleged that he would break into the victims’ house while they were asleep and rape them. In other cases, he would follow his victims on their way to work, overpower them and rape them.
For quite some time, he managed to hide from the law until he was arrested in the vicinity of Mangaung in February last year, following the DNA results that linked him to a number of about twelve cases all registered at Bloemspruit police station.
His sentence was done in accordance with the old Sexual Offences Act 2016 amendment, where the maximum sentencing for rape was 10 to 15 years’ imprisonment.
Not only will Letela Makheta be serving such a hefty sentence, but his name will also be placed on the Sexual Offences Register and he will never be allowed to work with children in the future.
