The daring prison break, the celebrity girlfriend, and the escape across borders had all the elements of a fictional thriller.
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Bester, dubbed the "Facebook rapist" for using the site to entice his victims, had pretended to be an agent who might help her obtain a job in television. The act of reading his stories in the news is bringing back a lot of unpleasant memories, she explained. He was never convicted of her rape, but Bester was convicted of raping and robbing two women in 2011. Bester went by several names and was a charming, charismatic smooth talker with a magnetism that gained him what he desired.
But behind the charm was a cunning career criminal, a dangerous and ruthless man. "He's a person who doesn't feel much remorse and has gotten worse, not better over time," clinical psychologist Dr. Gerard Labuschagne, who first met Bester in 2011, told the BBC. He said that even 12 years ago, Bester showed indications of "impression management." After the conviction, many in South Africa forgot about him until the news that the man who once preyed on desperate women, enticing them with promises of job opportunities, was back living among the free.
Last year, in the early hours of 3 May, a fire broke out in an isolation cell at the Mangaung Correction Centre. It was thought that Bester was inside. After frantic attempts to douse the flames, the prison authority notified the police and other officials that the man in the cell was dead and had killed himself. The existence of the gruesome, charred body opened the door to a series of months-long investigations about how this could have happened.
The police conducted these, the prisons watchdog, and the firm running the prison, British multinational security company G4S. GroundUp, a South African news agency focusing on human rights issues, was one of the first to report on the fire at the time, to shine a light on the death. It wanted answers about how a fire had started in an isolation cell and how a prisoner had been allowed to die. "Even when it was believed it was Bester who died in that fire, we covered it because we believed it was an issue of public interest," GroundUp editor Nathan Geffen told the BBC.
This was supposed to be a maximum-security prison run by one of the world's largest security companies, G4S. And yet, by their telling, someone managed to kill himself by setting himself alight in prison, and no proper investigation had been done," he said. This suggested a dead body had been placed in the cell before the fire. It was an elaborate ruse to allow Bester to escape that same night dressed in a warder's uniform.
The body had been smuggled into the prison in preparation for the breakout, and Bester had conned his way into the isolation cell, which was located near a fire escape. With no one looking for him for nearly a year, Bester appeared to be living it under a new name in the millionaire Johannesburg suburb of Hyde Park. He hid in plain sight with his celebrity girlfriend, 35-year-old doctor Nandipha Magudumana. "Quite frankly, what's happened is depraved, and South Africans should be extremely concerned that Thabo Bester managed to get out in the way that he did and that G4S ran the prisons so incompetently that this was allowed to happen," said Mr. Geffen.
Other local newspapers followed GroundUp's lead, and Bester and his partner went on the run. He was referring to an ongoing investigation by a parliamentary committee looking at Bester's escape, which has heard evidence from officials claiming that the police and Justice Minister Ronald Lamola knew of Bester's escape last October - and sat on the information. Mr. Lamola has apologized to Bester's victims, saying that more information should have been shared. G4S - summoned to appear before the committee - has admitted to several security failures on the day of the escape, but it has denied that it should be held accountable.
Defending the decision to keep Bester's prison break quiet, the police said it was to gather more information for their investigation before acting. However, MPs criticized them for moving too slowly while the rapist and murderer lived freely. It may have been a mix of public pressure and relentless media coverage of the story that pushed officials to act with haste finally. They left South Africa by car via the Zimbabwean border, then traveled north to Zambia and eventually to Tanzania.
They were arrested, officials have said, after a joint operation with Interpol and private security companies, and the two are now back in South Africa, where they are facing new charges. This week, Bester's alleged accomplice Dr. Magudumana returned to court for her second appearance since their Arusha capture. Isolated from Bester, she appeared in a crowded courtroom with more armed security officers than the general public. These are in connection with three bodies the doctor allegedly tried to claim over the last few months as part of the escape plan, including the corpse found in Bester's cell.
At least four other people, including a former G4S supervisor and Dr. Magudumana's father, Zolile Sekeleni, have been arrested so far over their alleged roles in Bester's escape. He is being held in another high-security prison. In contrast to his seemingly shy alleged accomplice, at his brief first appearance last Friday, Bester scanned the room boldly as photographers snapped away, apparently unfazed by all the attention.
