It’s a story that sounds straight out of a thriller novel—people connected to the brutal killing of a father of five are mysteriously dying off, one after another. Police are now digging into whether there’s a deadly syndicate at work, systematically taking out those involved.
Emmanuel Mbense, a 51-year-old dad from Brakpan in Gauteng, was murdered back on April 15, 2022. His body turned up the next day in Duduza Dam near Nigel, still with his car keys and driver’s license in his pocket. The official cause? Blunt force trauma to the head.
For over three years, his family begged authorities for answers about what really happened. They believe he was tortured and killed by a mix of law enforcement and private security folks before being dumped in the dam. Eventually, they turned to a private prosecution group to push for justice.
Details started emerging during a commission inquiry, where a key witness—known only as “Witness D”—spilled shocking info. He claimed he was told to get rid of Mbense’s body after the murder, on orders from people linked to law enforcement. This testimony finally helped the family make sense of the nightmare they’d been living.
But then things got even darker. Witness D himself was gunned down outside his home in Brakpan. And now, just days after investigators wrapped up their file on Mbense’s case, another suspect, former police reservist Wiandre Pretorius, has died.
On a recent Sunday, police spokespeople explained that out of 12 people flagged as persons of interest in Mbense’s death, only eight are still alive. Pretorius was one of them, along with Witness D. What’s raising alarms is how the others went: three were killed in cold-blooded, execution-style hits. The first in March 2023 at a filling station, the second in October 2025 at home, and the third being Witness D, shot down outside his place.
Pretorius, 41, apparently took his own life late one night at an Astron Energy filling station in Brakpan, using a 9mm handgun. He’d just survived what looked like an assassination attempt outside his Boksburg home the week before. By morning, station workers were hosing down the bloodied scene, sweeping it away like nothing happened, while people walked by casually.
Cops are probing hard: Is this a group turning on itself, wiping out anyone who knows too much about Mbense’s murder? That’s the big question hanging over everything right now.