22. South Africa's Cross-Dressing Killers

The monsters aren't always hiding in the shadows... sometimes they are standing right next to you under the neon lights.

​In the mid-1990s, the underground clubs of Hillbrow, Johannesburg, served as a rare sanctuary for the LGBTQ+ community. 

But for Samuel Jacques Coetzee and John Frank Brown, that vibrant sanctuary was a hunting ground.

​This week on Homocidal Tendency, Matt breaks down a deeply unsettling case of folie à deux a shared psychosis fueled by jealousy, control, and a thirst for blood. 

We explore how Coetzee used his glamorous drag persona as the ultimate predatory camouflage, exploiting the very community that offered him a safe space. 

From the terrifying "Ghost Period" where the killers hid in plain sight, to the frustrating legal loophole that denied families total justice, this episode explores the devastating vulnerability that comes with marginalization.

​The scariest call is the one coming from inside the house.

A Brief Note on Terminology:

Throughout this episode, we refer to the historical moniker attached to this case: "The Cross-Dressing Killers." We recognize that in 2026, this term is outdated and can be offensive. We are using it strictly for historical accuracy and case identification, as it remains the primary way this tragically underreported story is documented in legal and public records.

​In this episode, we discuss:

• ​The 90s Hillbrow queer underground scene and the importance of safe spaces.
• ​The psychology of folie à deux and toxic, enmeshed relationships.
• ​How a drag persona was weaponized as a "Trojan Horse" to lure victims.
• ​The historical erasure of marginalized victims in police reporting.
• ​The dramatic takedown, a jailhouse confession, and a killer's ultimate cowardly exit.

​In Memoriam:

This episode is dedicated to the victims whose lives were stolen during this tragic spree: Chris Anderson, the unidentified 30-year-old man, the unidentified 15-year-old boy, Avhewngi Robert Bele, and Richter. You are not forgotten.

​⚠️ Content Warning:

This episode contains detailed discussions of graphic violence, domestic abuse dynamics, homophobia, and suicide. Listener discretion is strongly advised.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Picture the classic setup of a 90s horror movie. You know the trouble. The call's coming from inside the house. The killer isn't a stranger in the woods. They've already crossed the threshold. But the most terrifying part of that setup isn't the jump scare. It's the creeping realization that the danger was sitting in the living room with you the entire time. It's the mid-90s. The queer clubs of Johannesburg were a sanctuary and a neon lit escape where you could finally drop your guard. But for five people, that sanctuary was actually a hunting ground. The bait? The bait wasn't a man lurking in a dark alley. It was glamour. It was a drag queen offering a smile, a drink, and a place to go. You don't run from the monster when the monster looks like, acts like, and lives exactly like you do. I'm your host, Matt. But before we dive into the dark details of today's case, let's go through a little bit of standard housekeeping. First off, if you're new here, make sure you hit that subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening right now. And just so you know, we have a pretty good backlog waiting for you to tear through, including 21 highly bingeable episodes that we've already dropped. And if you're a longtime listener and you've really been enjoying the show, please take two seconds to leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the absolute best way to help the podcast grow and to reach a new audience. You can also come along and hang out and talk about the cases with us over on social media. Um follow the show on Instagram, TikTok, Blue Sky, and X slash Twitter at homocidal tendency. Homocettle Pod on X slash Twitter. It'll give you um visual aids from today's episode, behind the scenes looks, and all the tea you can ask for. Alright, enough housekeeping. The doors are locked, the lights are low, grab a drink, and let's get into it. Before we can talk about the murders, we have to talk about the hunting route. To understand exactly how our killers operated, we have to transport ourselves back to a very specific, highly volatile era. It's 1993 in South Africa. The country is in the chaotic thrilling throes of dismantling apartheid. Nelson Mandela has just been released, and the nation is barreling towards its first democratic elections. For the LGBTQ community, this felt like a massive turning point. Historically, the apartheid government was fiercely conservative and strictly enforced moral laws. Police raids on gay bars had been a regular terrifying occurrence, but as the old regime crumbled and a new wave of liberation swept through the underground, it began to lighten up a little bit and it began to become a little more tolerable. The laws were shifting, but societal attitudes on the street were still deeply homophobic and saturated with toxic masculinity. Freedom was on the horizon, but you still had to watch your back. If there was a beating heart of queer Johannesburg, at the time, it was the neighborhood of Hillboro. Picture a dense concrete jungle of high-rise apartments and neon lit streets. It was the cosmopolitan center of the city. Gritty, bohemian, and integrating. It was integrating faster than anywhere in the country. This is where the underground thrived. The nightlife here was heavy. It was drenched in thumping synthpop music, chief hairspray, and cigarette smoke. Subcultures, they absolutely collided here. You had drag queens, leathermen, closeted suburbanites, and runaways, they all share the same subterranean dance floors at the legendary and anonymous safe havens like the Skybar. Because the community had spent decades being prosecuted by law enforcement, there was a deep-seated distrust of the police. If a gay man was assaulted or went missing, going to the cops was the absolute last thing anyone wanted to do, out of fear for being outed, mocked, or arrested themselves. Because the community could not rely on the authorities, the community relied entirely on each other. They policed their own spaces. If you were inside the club, you were considered one of us. You were family. These clubs felt like an impenetrable force against a harsh, conservative outside world. But when you're forced to build your own safe spaces because the rest of the world has shut you out, you develop a dangerous blind spot. You start to believe that anyone sharing that space with you is inherently safe. You share the same secrets, the same fears, the same marginalized identity, but why would they ever hurt you? This is the psychological blind spot that Samuel Jacques Cotes and John Frank Brown exploited with terrifying precision. Cotes and Brown weren't just partners in crime, they were a romantic couple. In the realm of true crime, that's already a massive statistical anomaly. Serial killer couples are incredibly rare. Same-sex serial killer couples are practically a ghost in the criminology record. But it was their relationship and their genuine everyday immersion in the local LGBTQ ⁇ community that made them perfect predators. They didn't have to stake out the local underground clubs in Hillboro from the shadows. They didn't have to break down the doors. They were already on the guest list. The invasion of this community wasn't aggressive. It was entirely covert, relying heavily on Koze's ability to completely disarm his targets before the track was even strung. Kote frequently utilized his drag persona, actively masquerading as a female prostitute to entice the men he hunted. Imagine that it's a scene. It's leak. The club is loud, the air is thick with smoke and adrenaline, and the world outside is hostile. But inside, you're somewhat glamorous. When we look at infamous killer couples, we usually think of Bonnie and Clyde. There's usually a massive paper trail detailing exactly how their dark paths crossed. But when you look at the origin story of Samuel Jacques Kose and John Frank Brown, you run into a very specific kind of wall. Also, let me just stop here. Like um Samuel Jacques Cosse, his last name, I looked it up and there's a couple different pronunciations. I think I'm just gonna go with Kose. I may say it a couple different ways. My apology. It's just um it's one of those words. It's like I don't know if I'm saying it right. But anyways, here we go. It's the wall of historic erasure. Because these men were queer, and because they existed in an underground space in South Africa during a time of immense political upheaval, their early lives weren't meticulously documented in mainstream press clippings. Much of the beginning is lost in the shadows, but what we do know paints a very clear picture of a toxic, symbiotic relationship. John Frank Brown was born in Johannesburg in 1963. Samuel Jacques Coset was born eight years later in 1971, also in Johannesburg. When the killing's crew began in 1993, Brown was around 30 years old and Koset was just 22. The eight-year age gap is significant in the dynamics of full they do or shared psychosis. There's almost always a dominant figure and a submissive figure. The older, often more established partner usually sets the emotional baseline, while the younger partner acts like the spark. When we try to answer the question of why someone became a monster, we usually look for an inciting incident, the trauma that broke the machinery in their brain. For Samuel Jacques Jose, the cracks in the Foundation started incredibly early. Jose, like we said, was born in 1971. He was born into a middle-class family in Johannesburg, but the stability of his life shattered when he was just three years old, following the sudden death of his father. By the time he was six, Kose was already showing signs of deep internal conflict. He refused to play with the other boys, gravitating entirely towards his sister's dolls. His mother, she was so concerned she actually took him to a psychiatrist who brushed it off as a trauma response to losing his father. But it was much deeper than that. Kotse was wrestling with intense gender dysphoria. In a society that offered zero support or the vocabulary for what it was. He secretly wished to become a woman and eventually began talking about growth hormones in an attempt to transition. He was a deeply fractured kid looking for an escape. At 17, he dropped out of school and ran away from home, only to return and be conscripted into the South African Army. By the time he aged out and reentered the civilian world, he was surviving an underground scene through sex work and drag. He was a wounded person looking for a tether. And in early 1993, he found one. Kose frequently brought strangers back to his apartment for sex. One night he brought home a 30-year-old man named John Frank Brown. Brown was a Johannesburg native who had recently lost his job at a local bank. He was older, aimless, and looking for control. They clicked immediately. Brown moved in shortly after the first night, and then the trap, it was completely shut. Then the relationship devolved almost instantly into a severe domestic abuse. Brown became fiercely physical abusive towards Kose, but instead of fleeing, Kose stayed. This toxic codependency is exactly the spark that ignited murder spray. Because Kose was still engaging in sex work, the couple often brought other men into their bed, and this is where the dynamic turned lethal. The violence wasn't initially just about hunting for the thrill of it, it was heavily fueled by Brown's intense, unhinged jealousy. The pattern was kind of horrifying. Kose would lure a man home often with the enticement of money or the promise of sex, but Kose, when he engaged with a man, Brown would watch. But they didn't just wake up the next day and decide to become serial killers. It was the perfect swarm of pathology. Kose was desperate for love invalidation, willing to endure the abuse and keep it up. Brown was violent, possessive, and an abuser, who murdered as a way of asserting dominance over his partner and their shared environment. They were two deeply broken people who found the exact same wrong puzzle pieces in each other, and five innocent people paid for their collision. In the timeline of any serial killer, there is a critical threshold. It's the line between violent ideation and the actual physical act of taking human life. Once that threshold is crossed, the psychological dam, it breaks. The taboo is gone. For Samuel Jacques Cosset and John Frank Brown, that dam broke in 1993. What started as a deeply toxic, abusive domestic situation rapidly mutilated into shared a shared lethal compulsion. They didn't just cross a line, they obliterated it, plunging into a two-year active killing period that terrorized the Johannesburg Underground. The most terrifying aspect of their escalation was how quickly the murders became a routine. There wasn't a single isolated crime of passion that they panicked over. It became a ritual. The pattern was almost always the same. Kobse, utilizing his glamorous, disarming persona, would successfully lure a man back to their shared apartment or a secluded location. The bait was set, the victim was isolated, and the door was locked. Then came the trigger. As we discussed, Brown was driven by an unhinged, possessive jealousy. He would watch Koze interact with the mark, letting his rage build until it boiled over into absolute carnage. The violence, it wasn't clinical. It wasn't quick. It was highly personal and chaotic. The victims were subjected to vicious beatings, but as the months ticked by from 1993 into 1994 and eventually into 95, the chaotic nature of the kills began to harden into a terrifying system. They learned how to manage the aftermath. They figured out how to clean the blood, how to move the bodies, and how to scrub the evidence from the floors. This is the phase where the true horror of the fully do sets in. In a shared psychosis, the killers normalize their violence for each other, but there was no one in that apartment to tell them to stop. There was no reality check. They validated each other's own dark impulses, creating a closed loop of reality where murder was simply a part of their relationship. Between 1993 and 1995, Kotze and Brown exploited that apathy, leaving a trail of five known victims. Let's break down exactly how their escalation played out. The spree officially begins on August 30th, 1993. The first known victim was a 35-year-old drifter named Chris Anderson. Kotze and Brown crossed paths with Anderson and successfully lured him back to their shared apartment. This is where the lethal dynamic we talked about earlier first snapped into place. Kotse initiated sexual contact with Anderson while Brown watched, but when Anderson engaged in acts that Brown felt were exclusively reserved for him, Brown flew into a blind, possessive rage. He grabbed a heavy piece of drilling equipment they kept in the room and stabbed Anderson in the neck. To ensure the kill, Brown then grabbed a necktie and strangled him to death. Under the cover of darkness, they dumped Anderson's body on a desolate gravel road. They had crossed the threshold, and they had gotten away with it. Just over two months later, on November 4th, 1993, the violence escalated from a single target to a double homicide. The details of this encounter are particularly grim because they they highlight the absolute lack of discrimination in their hunting. Goatse and Brown were at a cafe in Johannesburg when they crossed the path of two individuals. So we don't have all the details. We definitely don't have the names, but it was a 30-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy. From what I read, um, it was a setup for sex. They offered them money for sex, the two agreed, then they went to a remote location, and the 30-year-old man and the 15-year-old boy were murdered. Some accounts say it was there was some kind of like debate over money or an argue over money, but needless to say, the end result is the 30-year-old and the 15-year-old were both murdered by Kotay and Brown. After the double murder in 1993, there's a terrifying gap in the official record. For nearly two years, the known body count stops entirely. Whether they managed to temporarily suppress their urges or rather they simply found victims in that period who were never found or connected to them, that remains a haunted question. But what we do know is by late 1995, the Urshakil returned with a sickening level of depravity. On September 1st, 1995, the couple was at a house in Runport. This kill deviates slightly from their usual club hunting methods, their motto apparently we'll say. While engaging in sexual acts with each other, they realized someone was spying on them through a window. It was a 27-year-old local gardener. His name was Avagende Robert Bele. Instead of chasing him off, they invited Bele inside. Bele accepted the invitation and began engaging with Kose. The violent switch flipped. Brown attacked Bele and strangled him to death. But this time, the violence didn't stop the murder. In a horrifying display of postmortem rage, Brown mutilated the body, completely severing Belet's genitals. They discarded Belet's body and the severed remains in a remote belt. Following the horrific murder and mutilation of Belet in September, the couple claimed their fifth and final known victim, a man known to the public by his last name, Richter. And this is where the true tragedy of the case involving Marjorie's communities really hits home. If you're digging into Richter's story, his age, what he did for a living, or exactly the other details of how he crossed paths with Kotse and Brown, you'll kind of find nothing. His life has been reduced to a single surname on a court record. This erasure wasn't just a gap in a timeline. It's the exact reason Kotse and Brown were so successful. They hunted in a society that didn't value their prey. They knew that if a man from the underground scene went missing, there wouldn't be a massive search. There wouldn't be a front page headline. There would just be a quiet disappearance. When a killer finishes a spree, the world doesn't automatically stop turning. There's no immediate siren. There's no cinematic cut to black. The sun comes up the next day, the blood dries, and the killer has to figure out how to just go get the groceries, how to grab a drink, how to exist in a world that doesn't know what they've done. After the murder of Richter in 1995, Samuel Jacques Gossey and John Frank Brown entered in what we're gonna call the ghost period. The transition from 1995 into early 1986 is a terrifying blank space in their timeline. By this point, they had successfully murdered five people. They had strangled Ludgeon and immediately their victims, dumping their bodies out into the remote belt, and Noahman was knocking down the doors. But imagine the psychological weight of that era. Kose was still living his life. He was still putting on his makeup and walking back into the very same clubs in Hillro where he had actually hunted his victims. He was dancing right next to people who were just like his victims, who he was sharing drinks with. They were probably wondering where Chris Anderson was and why he hadn't been in the neighborhood lately. Less than a month after taking Richter's life, the Invincibility Complex shattered. But not for the murders. John M. Brown was arrested for breaking into an acquaintance's house and stealing a pistol. It was a sloppy, impulsive crime, but it was exactly the threat the universe needed to start unraveling the sweater. Brown's arrest for the burglary put him directly into the police system. It meant his fingerprints were taken. It meant his name was on the ledger. And he was sentenced for the crime and was sitting in a jail cell for the robbery. Let's rewind for a second, because this is where the House of Cards actually collapses. How do you go from getting busted for a stolen gun to getting pegged for five brutal murders? The answer is you don't, unless you open your own mouth. In October 1995, less than a month after taking the life of their final victim, Richter, John Frank Brown made a sloppy and false mistake. He broke into the home of an acquaintance, a woman named Cheryl von Strauten, who actually housed both of them in the past. Like we said, Brown stole a pistol, he got caught, and was quickly arrested and convicted for the robbery. Suddenly, Brown wasn't just wandering the underground clubs of Johannesburg anymore. He was sitting in a concrete cell, serving time. Remember what we discussed about the Foley Du dynamic? Brown was the older dominant partner who used violence and control to dictate the relationship, but in prison he had zero control. Sitting in that cell, separated from Kotse and stripped from his power, something inside of Brown cracked. It wasn't brilliant detective work that initially linked the gun charge to the bodies out in the vault. And like I said, it was Brown himself. While serving his sentence for the burglary, Brown inexplicably reached out to a police inspector named Ronald Spanders. And in a stunning, spontaneous move, Brown just confessed. He laid out the murders he and Kotse had committed over the last two years. But why did he do it? Why hand the police a license on a silver platter when they had absolutely no idea you were a serial killer? Psychological profilers suggest there was a desperate, twisted attempt to regain control. If Brown couldn't control Kotse on the outside, he could orchestrate his downfall from the inside. If they were going down, Brown was going to be the one pulling the strings. The police, though, they didn't just take him at his word. They spent the next couple of months meticulously verifying his claims, matching the confession to the brutalized bodies they had found. Once the timeline locked in, the South African authorities issued a warrant for Samuel Jacques Coset, who ironically had just been paroled on a completely different charge related to car theft. Kose was now a wanted fugitive. His photograph was splashed across the breast, effectively ending his ability to hide in his glamorous persona. Which brings us right back to April 13th, 1996. Because of the absolute depravity of their crimes and their bizarre, deeply enmeshed nature of their relationship, a judge ordered both men to undergo a mandatory 30-day psychiatric observation. They were stripped of their clothes, their weapons, and most importantly, of each other. Let's talk about the psychology of that 30-day hole, because it's crucial to understanding how this whole case ends. When you're dealing with a fully do, a shared psychosis, the madness, it requires proximity. It requires an echo chamber. For the last three years, Kote and Brown had been validating each other, each other's darkness, their sickest impulsions. But suddenly they were sitting in isolated cells. And the echo chamber, it's gone. For John Frank Brown, the older dominant partner, the 30-hold-I mean, it was the ultimate loss of control, but he was already in prison. He could already not control Kotay. He couldn't act on his violent jealousy. He was just a man trapped in a cage, staring down the barrel of a life sentence. But for Samuel Jacques Jose, the isolation was like a terrifying wake-up call. Without Brown, there was no no one to take the reality. Without the drugs, the nightlife, and the glamour of his drag, persona, to hide behind, Jose was left completely alone with his own mind. He had to sit in that serial psychiatric ward for a month and finally look at the horrific, but bloody reality of what he helped orchestrate. During those thirty days, the psychiatrists were tasked with determining if these two men were legally sane enough to understand the charges against them. The conclusion they were they were legally sane. And they were incredibly dangerous. They were declared fit to stand trial, and the dates were set. When the monsters are finally dragged out of the dark and thrown into the Russian lights of the courtroom, we expect a very specific kind of catharsis. We want to see them swarm. We want them to look into the eyes of the families of the victims and finally face the weight of justice system. In April 1997, the trial of Samuel Jacques Coset and John Frank Brown finally officially began. But as any horror fan knows, the villain almost always has one last trick up their sleeves before the credits roll. The legal process dragged on for months, and the prosecution laid out the horrific details of the two-year killing spree. The dynamic between the killers, it fundamentally fractured. The Foledieux, their shared insulated madness, couldn't survive the harsh reality of the courtroom. Brown was already serving his time for the previous burglary and gun charges. He was hard, but Kose, stripped of his glamorous drag persona, his freedom, and his enabler was deteriorating. He was sitting in a cell, forced to confront the fact that he was gonna spend the rest of his life in a concrete box. And Coset decided he wasn't gonna let that happen. And late April 1997, Samuel Jacques Coset secured a massive stash of prescription pills inside the prison. In the quiet darkness of his cell, the 26-year-old ingrested a fatal overdose. He didn't leave a dramatic manifesto, he didn't offer a final apology to the community yelled butcher, he simply took the ultimate coward's exit, dying by suicide and successfully cheating the the final act. He completely robbed the families of the victims, the only chance they held of any kind of vindication, and any chance he had to be held accountable for the slaughter that he orchestrated. With Ko Tsey dead on the prison card, the entire trial had to pivot. The echo chamber was permanent silenced, and John Frank Brown was suddenly sitting at the defense table by himself. The prosecution had to rely heavily on Brown's own initial jailhouse confession, untangling his specific role from Kote's actions. When the gavel finally fell for the last time, John Frank Brown was convicted on a single charge of direct murder for taking the life of the final victim, Brictu. For the final remaining victims, Chris Anderson and the unnamed man and teenage boy and Bellet, Brown was convicted for four counts of accessory to murder. He was handed a life sentence and permanently locked away from the society he had terrorized. Now, if you're wondering how the older dominant abuser, the man who flew into violent rages, managed to walk away with mostly accessory charges, it comes down to the oldest, most frustrating trick in the legal playbook to blame the dead guy. When Kosei took his own life, he didn't just escape from the prison cell, he took the prosecution's star witness with him. In a closed room where only two killers were present, their only ones who knew who struck the final blows. And with Kose dead, Brown became the sole surviving narrative. He could look at a judge and admit, yes, I was there. Yes, I helped me in the blood. Yes, I helped up the bodies. But that makes you necessary. But he could point the finger entirely at his dead partner for the actual killing, because the first four bodies were found long after the fact. The forensic evidence was degraded. The prosecution simply couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Brown's hand committed those specific murders. But they could only definitively pin the final victim, Richter, directly on Brown. But under South African law, one direct murder and four counts of accessory were still enough to ensure John Frank Brown would never see the outside world again. Today, the case of the cross-shifting killers remains a dark, deeply unsettling chapter in South African queer history. In modern criminology, Kodse and Brown are studied as a rare textbook example of how a toxic codependent relationship can mutate into a shared psychotic drive for blood. But for the LGBTQ community that survived in Haroboro in the 90s, the legacy is much more painful. It is a story of an ultimate betrayal. We build safe spaces to protect ourselves from the monsters outside the door. We lower our guard because we believe the shared struggle means shared humanity. But the terrifying truth at the core of this case is that shared identity is not a guarantee of shared safety. Sometimes the call really is coming from outside the house. And sometimes the scarest monsters aren't the ones hiding in the shadows. They're the ones standing right beside you in the spotlight. I'm Matt. And this has been Homicidal Tendency. See you next time.