At dusk on May 17, 1929, an Indian storekeeper named Suliman Ismail Kharva was shot dead at the door of his store on the farm Moorburg, in the Ntabamhlope area of the Estcourt district of Natal. The store stood alone, and only cash was taken. The police treated it as a single crime; a European man was arrested and then found, on further inquiry, to have had nothing to do with it, and with so little to work from the investigation went nowhere.
Almost four years passed. On January 29, 1933, Hassan Mia Armoordeen was shot and killed at his store on the farm Cornfields, a few miles from Moorburg and in the same district. Mohamed Ebrahim Motala was killed in the same way. Then, on the farm Heartsease in the Loskop district, between Cornfields and Ntabamhlope, a storekeeper named Ismail Hajat, his assistant Hassan Mayet and their servant, Nkunzana Mazibuko, a boy of about fourteen, were all shot dead during the night. Heartsease was as isolated as the others, ringed by hills and some seventeen miles of bad road from Loskop itself. The police account of the case concluded that the killer had come to the back of the building where the boy slept, and that the younger shopman had been induced, perhaps through the frightened boy, to draw the bar and open the back door.
At Heartsease the police found wads from twelve-bore cartridges, and the boldness of the attack, the accuracy of the shooting and the robbery tied it to the earlier killings. By then the murders had a name, after the district, and the hunt for the man responsible had become one of the longest in the province. The victims had in common the work they did: they ran small trading stores far from any town, kept cash on the premises, and were alone at closing time.
The arrest, when it came on August 10, 1936, was for another killing, at Bergville. Mtimane Msundwana was taken to the charge office at Estcourt and formally charged with that murder, and before the magistrate he confessed to two more crimes: an attempted murder at Ntabamhlope on November 4, 1935, and a murder at Hlatikulu on November 23, 1935. He was tried, convicted and hanged in 1937.
How many people he killed is less certain than the usual figure of six suggests. That count covers the dead at Moorburg, Cornfields and Heartsease and the killing of Motala, the cases the police history of the investigation names; the Bergville and Hlatikulu killings named in his arrest and confession would add to it, and the published record does not show which of the murders he was tried for, or what the court heard.
May 17, 1929: Suliman Ismail Kharva is shot dead at the door of his store on the farm Moorburg, in the Estcourt district of Natal.
January 29, 1933: Hassan Mia Armoordeen is shot and killed at his store on the farm Cornfields.
November 4, 1935: an attempted murder at Ntabamhlope, which he later confesses.
November 23, 1935: a murder at Hlatikulu, which he later confesses.
August 10, 1936: arrested for a killing at Bergville and charged at Estcourt.
1937: tried, convicted and hanged.