Sukude was born in 1975 and operated in the Newcastle and Pietermaritzburg areas of KwaZulu-Natal. Between 2004 and 2005 he attacked men, robbing them and beating them to death with rocks, and rapes were also charged. South African reporting calls him the Newcastle serial murderer.
He was arrested and on April 24, 2006 was sentenced to five life sentences with a minimum of twenty-five years.
The South African reporting of the case credited a police psychologist's profile with narrowing the investigation, which is the detail the coverage led on. Profiling had been built into the South African Police Service in the 1990s specifically because of the volume of serial cases in that decade, and this was one of the cases used to justify it.
The accessible sourcing is press coverage of the sentencing. No judgment is published, the victims are unnamed, and there is no account of the evidence.