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Thabo Bester, a notorious South African killer and rapist who escaped from a maximum-security prison by faking his own death, has been apprehended — after spending nearly a year living in a mansion with his celebrity doctor girlfriend.
The 35-year-old Bester, dubbed “the Facebook rapist,” and Dr. Nandipha Magudumana were caught in Tanzania last Friday and returned to South Africa under heavy police guard Thursday.
South African Police Minister Bheki Cele told reporters that the couple and another person who was caught with them had several passports in their possession and were about to cross the border into Kenya.
Magudumana was expected to be charged with murder as part of a twisted jailbreak plot worthy of a Hollywood movie, which involved smuggling a dead body into Bester’s prison cell and starting a fire to create the illusion that the inmate had died so that he could escape.
Magudumana is a well-known doctor and businesswoman whose Instagram page has more than 146,000 followers. In 2018, the glamorous medic was named one of the Mail & Guardian’s 200 Young South Africans.
Magudumana’s father, 65-year-old father Zolile Cornelius Sekeleni, and a former prison guard, Senohe Ishmael Matsoara, 38, already were charged with murder in connection to the body of a man found burned beyond recognition in Bester’s cell.
Police said the unidentified victim died of blunt force trauma to the head before the arson fire.
The brazen prison escape was only discovered in late March when DNA tests revealed that the charred body did not belong to Bester. It confirmed prior reporting by the local investigative outlet GroundUp, which covered possible sightings of Bester in Johannesburg back in November.
Law enforcement and officials from South Africa’s Ministry of Justice said more arrests were expected in this case.
Bester was convicted of one count of murder and two counts of rape in the death of his then-girlfriend, model Nomfundo Tyhulu. He was sentenced to life in prison plus 75 years in 2012. He escaped from the private Mangaung Correctional Centre in Free State province in May 2022, when he was formally declared dead by suicide after the fire in his cell.
Details of the prison break only emerged in the past three weeks, leading to accusations of a cover-up.
Lawmakers held a parliamentary hearing Wednesday about security failures and spent hours grilling senior officials from the prison and British private security company G4S, which has a contract to run it.
Three prison employees — the night supervisor and two guards who worked in the security camera control room — were fired on suspicion of facilitating Bester’s escape.
Although one was charged with murder, lawmaker Glynnis Breytenbach said she suspected more guards and officials were bribed to smuggle the dead body into the cell.
“How many palms were greased?” Breytenbach asked during the hearing. “Are you honestly telling us this escape of Hollywood proportion was done with the assistance of only three people?”
The prison and G4S officials conceded under questioning that a TV cabinet big enough to possibly hold a body was brought into the prison in an unauthorized vehicle hours before Bester fled around 4 a.m. Neither the cabinet nor the vehicle was searched at the gate.
They also said that top prison officials green-lit Bester’s transfer to a single-occupant cell located next to a fire exit just three days before his escape.
Lawmaker Xola Nqola argued that it was “not a coincidence” that Bester was moved to that cell.
An internal investigation by G4S found the prison’s security camera recording system had a “power interruption” around the time of the escape.
Bester was an infamous criminal known as the “Facebook rapist” for using the social media platform to lure victims to his home.
He was found guilty of murder for stabbing Tyhulu to death in 2011 and raping two other female models.
For months after Bester’s escape, he and Magudumana lived in a mansion in a well-heeled suburb of Johannesburg, driving luxury cars while running a bogus company that allegedly defrauded businesses out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to media reports.
But their luck eventually ran out as the interest in the escape story intensified, along with suspicions about Bester’s death, which apparently prompted the couple to flee South Africa.
With Post wires
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