The man who had been killing white residents around Atteridgeville with a panga was caught through a wristwatch. It had belonged to one of his victims, and Elias Xitavhudzi was arrested when he tried to sell it. In custody he confessed to all of the killings. He was tried quickly, convicted of sixteen murders and sentenced to death, and on November 14, 1960, he was hanged at Pretoria Central Prison.
Atteridgeville is a township west of Pretoria, founded in 1939 for Black residents, and in the 1950s the color line around it was rigidly enforced. Xitavhudzi was Black, and every one of his victims was white. That fact, as much as the number of dead, made the case a sensation in the Pretoria area in the years when apartheid was hardening into law. The victims were mutilated with the panga, the heavy bush knife of southern Africa, and before his capture the press had already named the unknown killer the Pangaman.
Most accounts describe all sixteen victims as women, some adding that he tortured them before killing them; one chronology of the year of his execution records the dead as white men and women. The victims' names and the dates of the attacks do not appear in any published account. Several popular summaries place the killings in the 1960s, which cannot be right: he was hanged in November 1960, and the killings belong to the 1950s.
South African writers have come back to him mainly as the start of a pattern. He appears in the profiler Micki Pistorius's account of her work on South African serial murder, and the reference literature describes him as the second of at least half a dozen serial killers to operate in Atteridgeville. After him came John Phuko Kgabi, a former policeman who cut the throats of young girls there in the 1970s, and Johannes Mashiane, who strangled boys in the area into the late 1980s.
1950s: white residents around Atteridgeville are killed with a panga; Elias Xitavhudzi is later convicted of sixteen murders and sentenced to death.
November 14, 1960: he is hanged at Pretoria Central Prison.