Dead Facebook killer living large

“Facebook rapist” and murderer Thabo Bester, who “died” in a fire in his prison cell and once conned two airline charter companies out of R500,000, has been linked to at least three robberies committed while he was supposedly serving a life term in a maximum security jail.

Questions about Bester surfaced this week after a report by GroundUp that he had been spotted alive and well in Woolworths in Sandton City last June, one month after he was said to have “burnt to death” in his cell in Mangaung Prison.

GroundUp said it had received photographs apparently of Bester shopping in the mall.

Bester’s life partner, medical doctor Nandipha Magudumana, who has nearly 130,000 followers on Instagram, launched an urgent application in the Pretoria high court for control of Bester’s body after the fire, asserting they were married under customary law.

Bester earned the nickname “Facebook rapist” for luring women through the social media network with promises of modelling contracts and then raping them.

In August 2012 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder after stabbing his girlfriend, car saleswoman and model Nomfundo Tyhulu, in a Cape Town bed and breakfast.

He later told the Daily Voice in an interview from prison that he did not mean to kill her.

He told the newspaper: “I wanted to scare her, so I took a knife and we got into a struggle. As she held my arm, my hand slipped and I stabbed her. I tried to stop the bleeding, but there was too much blood.”

At the time of his conviction, the Sunday Times reported that he had also conned two airline charter companies into providing flights to Cape Town worth more than R500,000 — which he never paid for — for himself and others.

Zubar Khan, account manager for one of the companies, National Airways Corporation, said he thought the 23-year-old was a trendy “rich kid” with money to burn.

“He is a smooth talker. Looking back at it now, it seems like he’s done that before,” he said of Bester, who is believed to have had at least 14 different aliases.

Now information from police records, which the Sunday Times has been given exclusive sight of, shows that a person using Bester’s name committed an armed business robbery in Heidelberg, Gauteng, in October 2018 and a “common robbery” in Ratanda township south of the town in June 2019.

The police have also linked this person to another robbery in 2012 in Mpumalanga.

In all cases, the charges against him were later withdrawn.

At the time these crimes were committed, Bester would have been serving his life term in the Bloemfontein jail — which is privately run by G4S — 400km from Ratanda and Heidelberg.

Deeds searches show Bester’s grandmother lived in Ratanda.

Eight months after the robbery in the Heidelberg CDB, a person identified in the police system as Bester, with the same ID number, robbed a pedestrian in Ratanda using physical force.

Police spokesperson Col Mavela Masondo told the Sunday Times that the same suspect, Thabo Lawrence Bester, had been arrested for both crimes.

“In the Ratanda case [he] was arrested along with another suspect. The case was withdrawn by the court. In the Heidelberg case the suspect was arrested with four other suspects. The case was withdrawn by the court.”

He said Bester was also linked to a third business robbery — in Balfour, Mpumalanga, in September 2012 — but charges were also “withdrawn by the court.”

Asked if the person who was arrested was Bester, Masondo said: “This will form part of the investigation.”

Asked if Bester had ever left the Mangaung prison before his “death”, Correctional Services spokesperson Singabakho Nxumalo said that this would only be known once his records had been studied.

“Inmates can temporarily leave a correctional centre when attending court, outside hospital or through a transfer to another centre for investigations, should there be other pending court cases,” Nxumalo told the Sunday Times.

“As a maximum classified inmate, Thabo Bester would not quality for compassionate leave in order to attend to a family bereavement.”

Last year, the department of correctional services said Bester had burnt to death in an isolation cell at the Mangaung Prison, allegedly after he set his mattress alight.

According to GroundUp, a woman claiming to be Bester’s biological mother tried to claim the body, but her DNA did not match that of the corpse.

The Sunday Times has seen a copy of Bester’s death certificate, which shows he died of “unnatural causes” in Bloemfontein on May 3 2022 — but his identity number is missing from the document.

Police minister Bheki Cele said police were searching for Bester after it became apparent he had probably faked his death in the prison cell.

“It does look like DNA itself doesn’t confirm that the person that was found dead there is the same person. So it might be correct to say that somebody is out there.

“That’s why the police are investigating ... [and are] trying to find that person,” he said.

Lawyer Vuyo Manisi, who represented Magudumana in her Pretoria high court application, said: “As far as I am concerned, Thabo Bester is dead. His cause of death is all over the news. I don’t have insight into what it is.”

Phone calls to Magudumana went unanswered.

A police source with knowledge of the investigation said: “These other crimes [in Gauteng and Mpumalanga] can be explained in only one of two ways.

“Either someone is using his identity document and is committing armed robberies in his name, or it is him committing the crimes.

“Explanations are needed as to how a person fitting Bester’s exact description was linked to crimes committed while he should have been in prison.

“Answers are needed as to exactly when and how Bester got out of prison. Was it when he died, or was it five years

Police are hunting Thabo Bester, who appears to have continued his life of crime despite supposedly being locked up in a cell

It does look like DNA itself doesn’t confirm that the person that was found dead there is the same person. So it might be correct to say that somebody is out there

Police minister Bheki Cele

ago, when the crimes were committed, with his death staged to cover up his earlier escape?”

A senior G4S manager, with knowledge of the investigation, said the body was released before the inquiry into the death in the cell had been concluded.

“Questions about what caused the fire remain unanswered,” this source said.

“It takes high temperatures to burn a body beyond recognition. That body was charred.

“The claim was that he set a mattress alight and put it on top of himself, yet there was no sign of a struggle. If you are burning alive you scream and move about. You definitely don’t lie still under a mattress.

“So far we know the person who died, died before they were burnt. Until the investigation is concluded we cannot say it is him.”

On the G4S website, the company calls the Mangaung Prison, with space for nearly 3,000 inmates, “the secondlargest private prison in the world … security is tight and controlled at all times”.