On February 10, 1906, police officers began digging up the fowl house behind a farmhouse called The Arums, in Claremont, outside Cape Town. A Khoekhoe woman named Caroline had told them she overheard its owner ordering someone to help him bury a body there. The owner, Pierre Basson, twenty-six, was inside, watching. About half an hour into the dig he began apologizing to his mother, went into another room and took down his brother's Bergmann pistol. He said he was guilty, named his best friend as an accomplice, and shot himself in the mouth. Under the floor of the fowl house the police found Wilhelm Schaefer, an elderly German farmer, naked and covered in quicklime, with signs that he had been drugged and strangled.
Basson was born in Paarl on January 3, 1880, the eldest of four children of Johannes and Anna Basson, farmers from a respected family of Huguenot settlers. As a boy he was cruel to animals; one story has him roasting a cat alive over a slow fire. He later gained a name as a petty thief, but he was bright at school and graduated from one of the colony's best colleges. When his father died after a short illness on October 15, 1900, Pierre received about 2,500 pounds in life insurance, and rumors that the death was murder were never substantiated. A couple of years later he won 5,000 pounds in a lottery, bought The Arums and ran the family business from it.
He worked as an insurance agent and rent collector and talked acquaintances into insuring their lives in his name. Around 1903 he went fishing at Gordon's Bay with his younger brother, Jasper, and came back alone, saying Jasper had fallen from a cliff and drowned. The insurers suspected him and refused to pay; he took them to court and won. Not long afterward he went traveling with a friend named Bosman and again came back alone, reporting an accident. A search party found Bosman's body with gunshot wounds to the head. A farmer, Adolf Beck, on whose life Basson also held a policy, was found drowned in a shallow pool at Paarden Eiland, his body marked by strangling.
Other cases clung to him. A business partner was drugged and forced to hand over money. Another, a Mr. Haupt, vanished after collecting money and delivering it to Basson and was never found. An English carpenter was found dead on a beach near Woodstock in July 1905 and was at once called Basson's victim, but there was never enough evidence to charge him. A traveling companion named Retief said Basson took him walking on the veld and tried to put a chloroform-soaked handkerchief to his face, and that he ran. By one estimate Basson's crimes brought him 16,500 pounds, most of it from insurance, the rest from investments, fraud and swindles. Where it went was never settled; some said he spent it on drugs at a seedy house on Signal Hill, others that he simply hoarded it.
Schaefer had set out from his farm on the Cape Flats on January 22, 1906, to complete the sale of the farm to Basson for 1,020 pounds, leaving his cart and horses with a blacksmith and saying he was going to the Basson house. That night Basson was seen lighting a fire with paraffin near his home. Asked where Schaefer was, he said he had gone to Kimberley. Anonymous letters, in what looked like a woman's handwriting, told the police that a body lay in the fowl house, but there was not enough to charge him. The Scottish detective Willie Walker let a newspaper print a statement from Basson's mother that she had never given him money; Basson threatened to shoot the editor, then made his mother publicly say she had. Family members later said they had seen him digging in the fowl house the week before the police came, to put in a drain, he told them.
After his death he was implicated in at least nine killings over three years. Three men were arrested as accomplices in burying Schaefer: his best friend, Tobias "Toby" Louw, Hendrik Christian van Holdt and a Malay servant named Abdulla. The charges against Van Holdt and Abdulla were dropped, and Louw was tried and acquitted. None of the killings was ever tried against Basson himself.