The psychopath in the dead of night is mostly a myth in South Africa, according to research.

I felt a shiver down my spine as I walked in, bowing quickly to the judge and avoiding the eyes of the four men to my right. Knowing the harrowing facts of what the men were alleged to have done, I avoided looking at them out of fear. I was sure that if I turned to look at them, four Hannibal Lector-esque monsters would stare back at me.

Ten years ago, I was a young reporter filling in for my senior on a case she had been covering at the time: the trial of the four men who butchered 25-year-old Letty Wapad, in a cemetery in Kimberley, in 2009. I was ready, I thought, to pick up where my senior had left off and report on four shackled thugs.

After all, these were the men who had followed Letty home one night, dragged her into an empty graveyard, and brutalised and tortured her with an unfathomable viciousness before leaving her for dead. It was a death so brutal, that the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Letty told the court that it was the most savage attack she had ever seen. She had performed autopsies on over 10 000 bodies, the doctor told the court.

But as I turned to looked at those killers, it struck me, with no less horror than if they'd been wearing muzzles over sharpened teeth: they were not monsters. At ages 26, 21, 20 and 15, they were barely men at all. They were boys, all dangly limbs and underdeveloped muscles; looking like too much bear and too little exercise, in the way young adults often do.

The eldest, Archibald Chweu, stared meanly at the evidence table ahead, which displayed one of the weapons of torture, a large rock, and some All Stars left behind at the crime scene.

He tried to put on a brave face, but his posture gave him away. He slouched in the dock in the purposeful way a schoolboy slouches in defiance outside the principal's office. It's the slouch of someone trying to rebel against whatever authority demands that they sit up straight and pay attention. It screams immaturity.

One of his co-accused, either his brother Moleko or their co-conspirator Thabiso Majama, I cannot recall which, had a scar on his cheek, and the petrified look of a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The youngest, the minor, spoke regularly to his lawyer, who argued, in vain, that the child could be rehabilitated if given a lenient sentence.

To this day, it is not the knowledge that men like Letty's killer, or even Tshegofatso Pule's killer might be monsters that scares me the most. It is the idea that they might be ordinary that really terrifies me.

If only men like them were extraordinary. If only they behaved like psychopaths seen in the movies, only attacking strangers in the dead of night, with their tortured backstories and their twisted minds. If only the cliched teacher inevitably interviewed in the hours after their arrests would say that there was always something a little off about them.

Against my better judgement, I have called Tshegofatso's killer a monster under my breath. I know better than to make monsters of ordinary men who kill, but the impulse to do so still remains. As a mother, I ache to protect my daughter from men like him, and I wish it was as easy as knowing how to spot the bad guys.

But othering rapists and killers robs us of our ability to hold them to the same standards to which we hold ourselves.

They do not rape and kill because they are evil. They rape and kill because they are rapists and killers. We must not let them be special, evil, other, or not like us.

It is true that many of them display psychopathic tendencies, but some research shows that deeper, dangerous myths about masculinity tie these criminals together.

A 2009 paper by the Centre for the Study for Violence and Reconciliation, titled, "Anyone can be a rapist" sets out the complexities that belie sexual violence. Central to the problem is the way that masculinity is defined, and in many cases, it is defined in terms of men's control over women, the paper notes. Often, men don't see rape as a crime at all, but believe it is their right to take sex from women.

A distinction between rape and "forced sex" is also used to legitimise sexual violence, the paper found. Even rapists buy into the trope that rape is a violent act committed only by psychopaths who prowl the streets at night.

"Forced sex", on the other hand, lives somewhere on a continuum between force, persuasion, seduction, and even the coy manner in which women are expected to say "no" even if they want sex to protect their reputations. "Forced sex" is not rape, many men would have the researchers believe.

But the psychopath in the dead of night is mostly a myth in South Africa, according to more research.

One 2012 study of 22 South African serial rapists found that the vast majority of attackers approached their victims in the daytime, in a public place, on a weekday. The attack itself also usually took place in a public place, like a patch of veld.

The manner in which the rapes occurred reflected trends seen also in consensual sexual relationships, according to the researchers: sex is often about power, and involves little emotional intimacy or reciprocity on the part of men. It is about the exertion of masculinity over women both sexually and in the community.

In most cases, a variety of cons were used by the serial rapists to lure the victims. Often, this involved promises of employment for the victim, or pleas for help from the attacker, reflecting how poverty and unemployment can intersect with violence.

In short, understanding why ordinary men commit extraordinary crimes is incredibly complex.

Which brings me back to Letty Wapad.

I don't know much about Letty, except that she came to Kimberley for the funeral of a relative, and left in a body bag. I only stepped into that courtroom a handful of times; only entered her world for a brief moment to learn the horror of her final hours on earth. That brief moment seeped into the marrow of my bones and every time another attack hits the headlines, I hold Letty's memory close, and I grieve for her.

Sometimes I think about the weather on the night of her murder. It was 2009, in March, when Letty died. Was it usually warm that night or was she cold in those final hours? I think about her two children, probably teenagers now. Do they know? When they ask how their mother died, will anyone tell them the truth?

If they are girls, will they walk home alone at night and will they be safe? If they are boys, will they see a woman walking home alone at night and, will she be safe?

What draws me to Letty's killers over and over again is not only their savagery. It is their ordinariness. Four young killers, slumped over on that hard, cold bench, staring ahead at a rock and a pair of All Stars from a crime scene.

- Sarah Evans is a News24 investigative journalist.