Johannes Mashiane lived around Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria. He had killed his girlfriend in 1982 and served a sentence for it.
Between 1988 and 1989 he killed twelve young boys in the township and the veld around it, luring them away, sexually assaulting them, and strangling them or crushing their skulls with rocks. The bodies were left in the open ground between the township and the road. South African reporting called him the Beast of Atteridgeville.
The killings of boys from an African township in the last years of apartheid received little official urgency, and Atteridgeville residents said afterwards that they had reported the disappearances repeatedly.
He was identified in October 1989 and, while being pursued by police at Marabastad, jumped in front of a bus and was killed. He was never tried.
Atteridgeville is unusual in having produced three separate serial cases across three decades: Elias Xitavhudzi in the 1960s, Mashiane in the 1980s, and Moses Sithole in the 1990s. The pattern has been the subject of South African criminological writing about the townships and about which deaths were investigated.