Everything you need to know about Convicted criminal Thabo Bester. Thabo Bester, a convicted felon who was born on June 13, 1986, faked his own death in 2022 and then escaped from the Mangaung Correctional Facility in South Africa. He evaded capture for a year before being apprehended on April 8, 2023, in Arusha, Tanzania. Along with him, Dr. Nandipha Magudumana was also detained. Bester was a notorious “Facebook rapist” who was found guilty of both rape and murder.
Everything you need to know about Convicted criminal Thabo Bester
He gained notoriety for his criminal and conniving behavior.[6] With Magudumana, he managed the fraudulent Arum Properties construction company while he was incarcerated, getting clients to pay millions of rand for construction projects but never completing them.
He was missing for a year after it was thought that he committed suicide by setting himself on fire in his prison cell in May 2022, but a recent post-mortem study determined that the burnt body discovered in his cell was not his. In response to this information, a manhunt was started in March 2023.
He had already been convicted guilty of a number of crimes, including the murder and defilement of women he had met on Facebook. He was found guilty in 2012 of killing his lover, a model named Nomfundo Tyhulu, after abusing her. He was convicted guilty of robbing and defiling two further women in 2011. He received a life sentence in prison.
Bester was never formally recognized by the Department of Home Affairs as a South African citizen. According to Minister Motsoaledi, Bester was discovered to be in possession of an American passport while posing as Tom Williams Kelly when he was apprehended in Tanzania last week. This, according to Motsoaledi, is a result of Bester’s difficult upbringing and the fact that his mother, Maria Mabaso, was never able to register him after he was born on June 13, 1986, at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital.
Thabo Bester prison escape
On May 3, 2022, Bester escaped from Mangaung Correctional Services after staging his own demise by putting a body in his cell and burning it on fire.
The escape was discovered after the Correctional Services Department determined that Bester’s DNA was not found on the burned body.
Fidelity, a private security company, posted on Facebook that it would pay R100,000 for any information that would result in the capture and conviction of the alleged Facebook rapist.
