Alibi: Laduma High

Priscilla Mchunu was a 54-year-old acting principal when she was assassinated. She was gunned down with an astonishing 19 bullets while teaching her high school history class.

Alibi is Africa’s first investigative podcast series. It was created in 2017 by Paul McNally.

Season 2 - The Episodes


Episode 1

An entire class of Laduma High students watched her murder and still, more than two years later, no arrests have been made.

This is the story of Priscilla’s assassination. Who would kill an acting principal and why? How do you investigate a case when anyone who gets too close can be assassinated?

By exploring this case over six podcast episodes we discover the workings of the growing industry of assassinations in South Africa. If Priscilla, a highly-praised acting principal at a high school just outside of Pietermaritzburg, can be assassinated then anyone with a little bit of power can become a target. And it seems to take increasingly little for respected members of a community to turn to hired killers to solve their problems.

Season 2 starts when Paul meets Siya Bekwa, a schoolboy from Laduma High, the reality of these hired killings becomes much more than just crime statistics and newspaper articles.

On the 18th of March 2017, Siya saw the assassination of his teacher and acting Principal Priscilla Mchunu, up close. He was one of her history students attending an extra Saturday class on the cold war when it happened. “She was facing us like this. They started to shoot her. From the side,” he says as he gets up to act out the atrocity.

In Episode 1 of this season Paul travels to KwaZulu-Natal to get the lay of the land and meet the people touched by the death of Miss Priscilla. We meet people who knew her growing up, her students who were there when she was shot, and some of her colleagues.

But the question that Paul starts to grapple with early on in this story is why anyone would want to assassinate a high school teacher who, by all accounts, was loved by her students and by the members of her community?

Episode 2

Now Paul gets to meet Sya’s father, Detective Warrant Officer Dumisani Bekwa where he works at Prestbury Police Station. Siya tells his father everything. They share the same cellphone. And they also share the same frustration regarding the case: it has still not been solved, even though there are rumours going around about who was really responsible for the death of Laduma High’s acting principal Priscilla Mchunu.

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While Siya’s father is interested in solving the case - he has not be assigned to it at all. The information that Dumisani had about the case, he told the investigating officer at the time, but they never bothered to come and take a statement from him. So Paul has to get in touch with the investigating officers to find out why nothing is being done? But the police seem nowhere to be found and reluctant to talk to Paul.

As part of his quest to understand this world of hired killings plaguing South African society, Paul joins local activist and writer Vanessa Burger and takes a trip into the area’s most notorious block of apartments: Glebelands. It is this hostel that is the suspected residence of the hitmen that killed Priscilla. It is a dangerous place for Paul to be asking questions.

Episode 3

In episode 3 of Alibi, the case seems to become increasingly dangerous and claustrophobic. There are three teachcers who all seem to have something to do with the murder. However, from the outside it looks like the case is getting cold. Why has no one been arrested? Unlike the police it seems that Siya, his father, and Alibi reporter Paul McNally seem to be on a hot trail.

Paul decides to use his contacts from years of investigative journalism to get in touch with a officer who was assigned to the case in the beginning, but has since been transferred. We find out there are incriminating cellphone records that the police is sitting on: two-minutes before Miss Mchunu was shot she received a phone call from a supposed delivery person who wanted to make sure she was in her classroom.

Episode 4

In Episode 4 of Laduma High Paul starts trying to fill some of the troubling gaps in the Priscilla case. It seems that somewhere, someone, should’ve been able to stop the killing from happening. There were warning signs and a clear cry for help from Priscilla.

Paul talks with then School Governing Body member Dlamini about all of this, and gets pointed in the direction of the local ANC ward councilor Jabu Ngubo who had a meeting with Priscilla shortly before the assassination. Though it becomes increasingly clear which parties were directly involved in the killing, it also seems that there was a whole system that failed to protect Priscilla.

Episode 5

In the penultimate episode of Alibi Season 2, Paul has a difficult conversation with Priscilla’s sister. She is still grieving, unable to move on until the killers are caught. Understandably she is frustrated with and angry about the police’s lack of progress and with growing distrust of the authorities, Paul finds out she has hired a private investigator.


Paul also learns about another similar case in Pietermaritzburg. A local journalist tells Paul that Priscilla wasn’t the first school principal to be assassinated like this. And the parallels in the two cases are striking. Is it a pattern, a coincidence, or just the grim reality of growing violence in the region?

Episode 6

In the season finale of Alibi Season 2: Laduma High, Paul finally comes face-to-face with the one person who has been on the fringes of the investigation throughout: ‘Monika’, the teacher everyone suspects of being behind the assassination of vice-principal Priscilla Mchunu.

Paul talks to an anonymous ex-teacher at Laduma High who gives him unique insights into the inner-workings and politics of the school, before ‘Monika’ reaches out to him, eager to finally tell her side of the story. Is she hiding something? Or is she the victim of a conspiracy that has ruined her reputation for good.

Finally Paul finds out that there is finally some hope for solving the case. A new officer has been appointed to the investigation who aims to finally look at the possibly incriminating phone records of the teachers. He wraps up with Siya and his father, who also seem to be making a breakthrough of their own.