Kershaw Chantel

On the morning of Wednesday, September 30, 2020, forty-four-year-old Chantel Kershaw was brutally attacked and murdered during a coordinated home invasion at her family's property, the Rietkol farm holdings, situated in Sundra near Delmas in the Mpumalanga province. At approximately 10:45 AM, she arrived back at the property from town and prepared to resume her daily chores. She instructed an employee on the farm, forty-year-old Themba Moses Masuku, to assist her in loading a lawnmower onto a bakkie. As they were working, two armed men suddenly ambushed them inside the yard. The gunmen ordered the worker to strip off his clothes and tied him up. They then forcefully subdued Chantel Kershaw as she screamed for help, dragging her into a garage where they brutally assaulted her. The attackers stripped off her underwear and strangled her to death.Following the murder, the perpetrators entered the primary residence where they assaulted her elderly mother with a firearm and plundered the household. The robbers fled the scene in the family's white Chevrolet bakkie. Her mother successfully managed to alert the local community and a nearby neighborhood watch group. A high-speed pursuit ensued between the fleeing criminals and the farm watch members, causing the suspects to lose control and overturn the stolen vehicle on the R50 road towards Delmas. The suspects crawled out of the wreckage to escape but were swiftly cornered and detained by the community watch before being handed over to responding officers. Inside the overturned bakkie, the South African Police Service recovered a firearm, ammunition, a bloodstained jacket, and plundered items.Subsequent police investigations uncovered a deep betrayal, revealing that the farmhand, Themba Moses Masuku, had completely staged being a victim. Investigators discovered the direct cell phone numbers of the two gunmen stored inside his phone, proving he had acted in cahoots with the raiders to plan the entire robbery. Official media notifications released by Mpumalanga Police spokesperson Colonel Donald Mdhluli tracked the subsequent trial through the high court. On Wednesday, September 13, 2023, the Mpumalanga Division of the High Court, sitting in Delmas, handed down the final convictions and sentences. The two primary hitmen, identified as fifty-year-old Thomas Reuben Tivane and fifty-year-old Kenneth Mashego—both originally from Etwatwa in Gauteng—were found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, alongside fifteen years for house robbery.