When Elifasi Msomi was hanged at Pretoria Central Prison on February 10, 1956, nine Zulu chiefs and elders stood among the witnesses. They had asked to be there, and the judge had allowed it, so that they could carry word home to the valleys of Natal that the tokoloshe, the malevolent spirit Msomi said had commanded fifteen killings and twice freed him from custody, had not saved him at the end. Even then, one of the chiefs was reported to fear that Msomi would come back after death as a tokoloshe himself.
Msomi, born around 1910, was a Zulu sangoma, a traditional healer, who had not managed to make a living at it. By his own account he went to a more experienced sangoma for help, and during that meeting the tokoloshe entered his life. One later retelling has him say the other man introduced him to the spirit and told him to bring back the blood of fifteen people. The killings began in August 1953 and ran for about eighteen months in the Umkomaas and Umzimkulu valleys of southern Natal.
His victims were poor rural people, many of them isolated and far from any police post. Some came to him willingly, looking for healing or advice from a man who presented himself as a doctor, and he led them to lonely paths and open country and attacked them without warning, with an axe or a hatchet, a knife or a knobkerrie. Several were children, and he raped some of his victims and robbed others.
The first known killing was of a young woman whom he raped and murdered in front of his mistress, keeping her blood in a bottle. The mistress was not impressed by his new powers and went to the police, who arrested him. He escaped soon afterward and credited the tokoloshe. Free again, he killed five children before he was rearrested, reportedly in April 1955, and he escaped a second time.
About a month later he was picked up for petty theft. The stolen property turned out to belong to his victims, and he was identified as the man the valleys had been afraid of. He then helped the police find remains, including a missing skull. According to one account, he said the tokoloshe had thanked him once the fifteenth victim's blood was collected, and had bathed with him in the river before they parted.
At his trial in 1955 he said he had been only the instrument of the tokoloshe. Two psychologists told the court that he was of well above average intelligence and took sexual pleasure in inflicting pain. He was convicted of fifteen murders and sentenced to death, and the talk of the spirit and his repeated escapes had so unsettled parts of the Zulu community that the chiefs asked to see the sentence carried out. Time magazine reported the hanging that month.