At about half past eight on the morning of October 4, 1940, a farm worker in the Lansdowne district of Cape Town noticed a woman lying in the Port Jackson scrub a few feet outside a fence, off Brockhurst Road. She was alive, badly hurt about the head, and could not speak. Her name was Ethel Marais, she was forty, and she had last been seen the evening before boarding a train out of the city to change for a bus home. She was taken to Groote Schuur Hospital and died there without saying who had attacked her.
Over the next seven weeks three more women were beaten to death in the southern suburbs. On October 22 Dorothy Marie Tarling, forty-nine, was attacked in her own house on Prince George Drive in Wynberg; her domestic worker found her lying dead on the floor the next morning. On November 11 Evangeline Bird, twenty-eight, known as Eva, was doing the washing in front of her house on Wetton Road in Lansdowne in daylight when a man dragged her into the bushes nearby. A deliveryman came on the attack almost at once, and the whole thing had lasted perhaps five minutes, but she died in the hospital the following afternoon. On November 25 May Overton Hoets, forty-four, was killed with an axe in her house on Thornhill Road, Rondebosch, and found dead on her bed.
By then the peninsula was in a panic. "Police finely comb Cape Peninsula," the Afrikaans daily Die Transvaler reported on November 13, two days after the Bird attack. The killer had struck in homes and yards as well as open ground, by day and by night, and nobody had a usable description. Some accounts note that the man who was finally arrested did not match any of the descriptions police had been given.
He was caught in 1941, after he molested another woman and a witness was able to identify him. The records disagree on the date of the arrest: one account gives March 14, another March 16. He was Gamal Salie Lineveldt, also recorded as Gamat Salie Lineveldt and Salie Lingevelt, a laborer of about twenty-one from Wynberg, whom the Afrikaans press described as a young Cape Malay.
He did not contest the case. On June 10, 1941, Die Transvaler reported that he had admitted in court that he was the murderer who had spread terror through the southern suburbs the previous October and November, and had pleaded guilty to the murders of all four women. The assistant state pathologist, Dr. I. Gordon, testified that each had died of repeated blows to the head with a blunt instrument. He found evidence that Hoets had been raped. He found none on Marais or Bird, and allowed that an assault might have left no trace or that the evidence might have been lost in the course of their hospital treatment; in Tarling's case the signs were inconclusive. By the usual account of the case, the first three women were struck with a piece of hard piping and the fourth with the axe. Lineveldt was sentenced to death, and the next day's paper carried the headline "Young Malay sentenced to death."
That headline, and the one before it, which called the victims "four white women," tell the reader how the case was framed in 1941: as a crime by a man of color against white women, in a country where that combination carried particular weight in court and in the press. The victims were ordinary suburban women, two of them married and one unmarried, attacked at home or close to it. What else they did with their lives, the surviving record does not say.
Lineveldt was hanged at Pretoria Central Prison in 1942. He was about twenty-three. A South African true-crime podcast repeated the story, never confirmed, that he smiled on his way to the gallows. The case is usually counted among the first recorded serial murders in South Africa, and it is discussed as such in Micki Pistorius's history of serial homicide in the country, Strangers on the Street.