On the night of Valentine's Day 2004 a couple, both drunk, were being intimate in Trim Park, in Newcastle in northern KwaZulu-Natal, when a man came up behind them and hit the man on the head with a rock. He struck him again and killed him, and then raped the woman.
Over the next eleven months the same thing happened again in Trim Park. The attacker crept up on couples, bludgeoned the men with rocks and raped the women; later he attacked men alone. Four men were killed. Themba Anton Sukude, a Zulu speaker who had left school in the third grade and had convictions going back to 1990, was arrested on March 8, 2005, after he confessed to a stranger.
He was tried in the Pietermaritzburg High Court before Judge Vivienne Niles-Duner. The two women who had been raped testified against him and identified him, and he was convicted on that evidence of two murders and two rapes. For the other two murders and an aggravated robbery there was no direct evidence. A police psychologist, Dr. Gerard Labuschagne, gave evidence of linkage analysis, the comparison of the pattern of behavior across a series of crimes, and described the approach to copulating couples and the blows to the men's heads as the attacker's signature. The press reported that the court had for the first time in South Africa convicted a serial offender on the strength of linkage analysis. The judge later corrected that: the convictions on the third and fourth murders rested on their striking similarity to the first two, in which he had been identified, from which the only reasonable inference was that he had committed them.
On April 24, 2006 she sentenced him to five life terms plus forty years and said he should never be released. Under South African law a life sentence imposed after October 1, 2004 carries parole consideration only after twenty-five years, however many are imposed, which puts the earliest possible consideration in 2031.
The men he killed are not named in the published reporting.