Just six weeks before two elderly Port Elizabeth women were found dead – gagged and tied up – in their rooms at a retirement centre in the city, a matron’s rings were ripped off her fingers in a robbery.

As traumatised residents and relatives gathered at the St John Stella Londt Retirement Centre, where the bodies of Elaine Burns, 91, and Rosemary Langton, 87, were found on their beds in separate rooms on Thursday morning, questions were being raised about the security at the facility in Sunridge Park...