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Corpus Delicti

281: Stranger Than Fiction: Thabo Bester, The Facebook Rapist

Corpus Delicti

CDM Productions

True Crime

4.4608 Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Thabo Bester was in prison for rape, robbery, and murder. But that's not the strangest thing. A fire broke out in Bester's cell only, resulting in him being declared dead by suicide. But some things don't add up, leading many to think it was murder. Or was it something else entirely?

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Music by:
Kai Engel
"Daemones"
Blooper music by:
Art of Escapism
"Coal Miners"
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

Sources:
EXTRACT | How Thabo Bester murdered Nomfundo Tyhulu | News24Where Is Thabo Bester Now? Inside the 'Beauty and the Bester' Subject's Life"Facebook rapist" who escaped prison by faking death with help from guards is brought back to South Africa - CBS NewsConvicted murderer Thabo Bester found in Tanzania after faking burning to death in South African prison - ABC News'Beauty and the Bester': Where is Thabo Bester now?Thabo Bester and Dr Nandipha made millions from construction company | GroundUpThabo Bester escape: ministers and officials scramble to answer MPs’ questions | GroundUpThabo Bester escape: Many unanswered questions about the death of Katlego Bereng | GroundUpThabo Bester: Body used in South African rapist's prison break identified

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey everyone, it's Jen.

0:25.1

And this is Lindsay.

0:26.7

And welcome back to Corpus Delictite, the podcast.

0:29.4

We are steamrolling through the Stranger Than Fiction series.

0:32.9

We are indeed.

0:34.3

And just a quick note, last night we have the pleasure of recording with two of our friends

0:41.3

jen and cam from our true crime podcast and we talked to them for a good while last night so we

0:48.4

will be appearing on their podcast soon i don't know the actual date yet we'll tell y'all when it drops

0:53.1

but we're super excited because we love them.

0:55.0

We've been friends with them for years and have talked about doing this for years and just finally did it.

1:00.1

So something to look forward to.

1:01.6

But yeah, let's go ahead and jump into our Stranger Than Fiction story tonight, which actually is a somewhat recent case.

1:11.6

It has a lot of things still happening in it.

1:15.3

So we will go ahead and jump right in.

1:17.8

This is Tabo Bester.

1:20.9

And a lot of Tabo's details about his early life are very hazy.

1:25.6

But we do know that he was born June 13, 1986 in South Africa.

1:32.4

And this was under unstable and unrecorded circumstances.

1:36.6

And what we mean by that is that his mom never quote unquote registered him.

1:43.2

So this would be like here in the U.S. birth certificate,

1:47.5

social security number, filling out all the paperwork when you're born. And that is because

1:52.7

she also was unregistered. She was 16 years old at the time of his birth. And he was reportedly

...

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