Elifasi Msomi worked as a domestic servant and labourer in the Natal midlands in South Africa. He is known in South Africa as the Axe Killer, and as the Tokoloshe Killer after the demon he said had ordered him to kill.
Between 1953 and 1955 he killed fifteen people, men, women and children, striking them with an axe. Several of the victims were children he took from their homes.
He was arrested, escaped from custody and killed again before being recaptured, which is part of why the case is remembered in KwaZulu-Natal.
His defence was that a tokoloshe, a malevolent spirit of Zulu belief, had taken possession of him and directed the killings. The court rejected it and he was convicted and sentenced to death.
He was hanged at Pretoria Central Prison on February 10, 1956. The prison authorities permitted a group of Zulu men to view the body afterwards, so that word could be taken back that the tokoloshe had not saved him, an episode that says as much about the period as about the case.