In October 1989 police were chasing Johannes Mashiane through Marabastad, on the edge of central Pretoria, when he threw himself under a bus. By one account he was running from the scene of an attack on a thirteenth child. He died there, and the case of the Beast of Atteridgeville never came to court.
Atteridgeville is a township west of Pretoria, and in 1988 and 1989 boys from it and the open veld around it began to disappear. At least twelve were found dead. They had been sexually assaulted, and they had been strangled or killed with stones. One boy is known to have survived an attack by him.
Mashiane had killed before. His first victim was his girlfriend. Most accounts date that killing to 1977 and his release, after a five-year sentence, to 1982; others place the killing itself in 1982. Either way, he was a man with a murder conviction living among the families whose sons were taken. The psychologist Micki Pistorius, in her book on serial homicide in South Africa, recorded two things about how he looked: a drooping eye, and a tattoo of a cross and dagger on his left forearm.
The boys he killed are not named in the accessible accounts of the case, and with no trial there is no court record of their deaths. Thirteen killings, the girlfriend and twelve boys, are what is laid to him. Atteridgeville would see another series less than a decade later, when Moses Sithole's killings began there.