South Africa's Cedric Maake is a rather unique killer. Maake seemed to have almost no victim or weapon preferance. He killed people of virtually any race and took victims of both sexes. He attacked both the young and the old, from tazi drivers to shop owners. He killed with a gun or a knife, though he seemed to prefer certain weapons in certain situations. Maake seemed to adhere to only a single rule. To hurt and to kill. Before he was finished he had murdered at least 27 poeple in about one and a half years.

Maake began his crime spree in April of 1996 as far as anybody knows, raping and killing a still unidentified woman. By April of 1997 he had amassed nearly a dozen attacks on innocent store owners and had coldly murdered a young couple. In May and June of 1997 he accelerated his pursuit of couples while beginning to lure taxi drivers to remote areas for the purpose of gunning them down. Nobody was certainly safe from this crazed slayer who was showing as insatiable a bloodlust as any serial killer in history.

Maake's differing tools of the trade confused detectives for quite some time. In the case of the male shop owners he attacked them mostly with some sort of blunt object, usually a rock. However, when he went after taxi drivers, who were also males, he used a gun, as he did when attacking male/female couples. Lastly, he favored the use of a knife when he was isolated with a single female victim. Authorities believed they were looking for at least two different slayers, one they credited with the taxi-driver and store owner crimes, and another they felt was resonsible for the attacks and murders of the couples and women. When evidence from the two investigations began to overlap into one another, police realized the two mysterious killers were the same. Authorities eventually targeted Maake, a married father of four who earned a living as a house painter.

Arrested in December of 1997 Maake initially was helpful but he soon reversed his stance and denied all of the numerous charges against him and plead not guilty at his trial, which lasted eleven months and did not end until September of 2000. Gruesome details emerged in court. Surviving female victims testified against him, recalling how he would kick and scream obsceneties at them while they were on the ground near death and experts offered graphic explanations of how Maake used large rocks to crush the skulls of some of the male victims. Maake's courtroom behavior was equally horrific, highlighted by his frequent verbal outbursts, his habit of weeping at the sight or mention of his mother, and frequent fits during which he at least once began slamming his head against the court dock. During a recess he even went so far as to threaten the female state prosecutor with the same treatment some of his female victims endured.

Maake was eventually convicted of mountainous amount of charges on September 6, 2000. By the time the judge was through the deranged killer had racked up convictions for 27 murders, 26 attempted murders, 14 rapes, 41 aggravated robberies, and many more minor offenses. His prison time included life for the murders in addition to twenty years for each rape, 15 years for each attempted murder except two, for which he recieved 10 years. In total Maake was sent to prison for 1159 years and three months and convicted of more than 100 seperate crimes.