‘You can call me Bester’

THE VOICE on the end of the line identified itself as The Facebook Rapist. It was Thabo Bester and he wanted a chance to tell his side of the story. The price was cheap – a few toiletry items for answers to any questions we wanted to ask.

Today he is known for orchestrating the most audacious South African prison break in living memory; bribing warders, torching a corpse in his cell in a high security jail and then driving out the front gate. But on that day in the Drakenstein Correctional Centre in Paarl, outside Cape Town, he was facing the prospect of life behind bars for murdering his girlfriend, Nomfundo Tyhulu.

I had covered his conviction the day before in Cape High Court in August 2012. I didn’t know at the time, but it would be the start of a three-year acquaintance with the man who would years later become the country's most notorious fugitive..

I hadn’t even been supposed to be covering the trial. My editor had asked me to fill in for a colleague who couldn’t make it to court that day. I was a young, inexperienced journalist and still finding my feet in the newsroom and courtrooms.

Bester was my second high-profile court case I had covered as a journalist. My first was Jacob Humphreys, the Blackheath, Cape Town, taxi driver who killed 10 school children at the Buttskop level crossing.

Ironically, Bester and Humphreys would become friends in prison. According to Bester they would pray and go to church together. Humphreys, jailed for eight years, would be freed on parole in 2016.

The Facebook Rapist’s time in the dock the day before had been brief. I returned to the office to file the story and thought no more of it, until the phone rang that Friday.

“Hi, it’s Thabo Bester here, you guys wrote about me and I would like to speak to the reporter to give my side of the story.”

He wasn’t prepared to speak over the phone, instead he wanted to meet in person. The next day, on a cold and wet Saturday, my friend and fellow journalist Tshego Lepule drove to Paarl for our first exclusive interview wiht Bester.

Bester was affable. Composed and soft-spoken, he encouraged us to ask anything we wanted. He said he committed fraud, but only did so survive. He was a ladies’ man, he said. He had multiple identities and aliases. I asked him what his real name was. “You can call me Bester,” he said.

He admitted killing Tyhulu, but claimed it had been an accident; that he had only held a knife to her throat to scare her. Instead, he ended up stabbing her in the chest at the Cape Town B&B where they had been staying, leaving a do not disturb sign on the door and flying to Durban.

The only time he became defensive was when we asked him about the rape charges. He had previously been sentenced to 50 years in jail for raping and robbing two models. But he denied that he was a rapist.

“It is not like I wake up in the morning sexually frustrated… I’m a father, I have daughters and would not want anyone raping them.”

His life had hit rock bottom that Thursday when the judge jailed him for life, he said. The sentence was too harsh, “a very long time” for someone like him who wasn’t “really” a violent person.

According to Bester he was on anti-depressants and seeing a prison psychologist three times a week. He had been placed on suicide watch, he said, to make sure he didn’t kill himself.

It was difficult to sift the fantasy from the facts, one of his false claims being that he had fathered a child with actress Pearl Thusi.

One visit morphed into more, with us flying to Joburg to interview him a fortnight later after he had been transferred to Leeuwkop prison.

He was soon as notorious within the prison walls as he had been on the outside. We weren’t the only ones visiting him. One of the warders jokingly referred to us as “more ladies coming to visit”. We never found out who else had been visiting. A few weeks ago I found out from another journalist that Dr Nandipha Magudumana visited Bester soon after us.

Bester would keep in contact, phoning me with constant tip-offs on other well known celebrity inmates, like Oscar Pistorius.

What was always clear though was that Bester, who had lived the high life and hustled for all he was worth before being locked up, was never ready to accept his life behind bars, not even when he was transferred to the notorious G4S privately run correctional facility in Mangaung in the Free State.

Last May, he drove out the gates, leaving a corpse in his bed, the cell doused in petrol and flames licking the wall.

He was behind bars for nine years. He was probably planning to escape from the very beginning.

“One thing about Bester is that he knows how to walk into a room and appear both bashful and sincere as well as have a commanding presence that required one’s attention.

“I’d been to prison to cover different stories but had never visited an inmate. And because this was a regular visit, we did not take notepads or pens so the minute we got into the car after our visits, we’d grab our notebooks and start writing as quickly as we could while the memory was still fresh and we’d swap books to see if we recalled the conversations the same. But what stuck with me was how, even though there was two of us, he made sure to look each of us in the eye when answering a question – a tactic that made it seem like it was a casual conversation between two people out in the world instead of two journalists crammed in a booth looking at him through a foggy partition,” said Lepule.

One thing about Bester was that he liked to name-drop, and mention names of celebrities or influential figures to give off the impression that he knew and moved in the same circles, so as to be taken seriously.