The 2025 Netflix true-crime documentary series, Beauty and the Bester, brings to the screen one of the most outrageous and high-profile criminal cases from South Africa, which involved every heinous act one can think of, ranging from murder to manipulation. In 2012, a man named Thabo Bester was arrested on charges of rape and murder, and was even given the name ‘Facebook serial rapist’ because of his atrocious acts, but it was only just the beginning of his unbelievably crooked and wild criminal career. Beauty and the Bester presents the case with brilliant detail and raises enough pertinent questions along the way, making it a layered and fantastic true-crime docuseries.
Who is Thabo Bester?
Netflix’s Beauty and the Bester can be divided into two separate parts, just like the criminal life of its subject, Thabo Bester. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, Thabo Bester became known to the country in 2011 for all the wrong reasons, as he used to befriend and lure women on Facebook to sexually attack and loot them. The media soon started using the name ‘Facebook serial rapist’ to refer to Bester because of his unique modus operandi. At a time when Facebook and other social media platforms were becoming very popular and commonplace in the country, he used various profiles to get in touch with young women and offered them lucrative modeling gigs, sometimes promising to pay lots and other times, to get the models connected to the glamor world.
Once the women would agree to the deal and meet Bester, he would force himself upon them, threatening to kill them otherwise, and then also loot money and valuables from them, including laptops. He successfully committed these heinous crimes against at least two women and tried them against numerous others before graduating to an even more horrific crime. In 2011, he checked into a hotel in Cape Town with his girlfriend, Nomfundo Tyhulu, and mysteriously checked out alone the next morning. When the owners finally broke into the room after hours of no response, they found Nomfundo’s murdered body on the bed, covered with blankets and sheets.
Despite these brutal crimes against his name, Thabo Bester was first arrested in 2011 in an attempted carjacking, and he eventually confessed to the rapes and the murder as well. In an interview with a journalist, parts of which are shown in Beauty and the Bester, the man admitted that he always had a deep urge to threaten someone with a knife and take control over them, which had led to him committing the acts. When asked about how he assessed himself after the crimes, Bester said that he hardly felt like a human anymore, and was more like a beast or a demon, seemingly showing some sort of guilt for his actions.
But even when he started serving his life sentence, Thabo held on to his most prized skill, which he had already used against various women on the internet—his ability to smooth talk and make people feel connected to him instantly. He had convinced many women on Facebook using this very skill, and now, even in prison, he became popular as a smooth talker. One of the security guards who worked at the prison at the time appears in the docuseries to describe how the private company that he worked for had been warned by the government about Thabo Bester’s natural ability and had asked all the guards to stay away from him. Yet, Thabo somehow managed to gain an audience, in the form of women who visited him in prison almost on a regular basis. In a few years’ time, a celebrity doctor in South Africa, named Nandipha Magudumana, also became a close friend of the criminal, and would visit him in prison often, although this became known after a few years, in May of 2022, when a deadly fire broke out at Mangaung prison in Bloemfontein.
The fire specifically broke out in the cell where Thabo had been kept, and only his charred dead body could be retrieved by the time it was contained. The man was declared dead by the government and the media the next day, and it was then that Dr. Nandipha claimed the body. Although the body of an incarcerated criminal is usually claimed by their close family, and in this case, Thabo’s mother was expected to make the claim, Nandipha did so first and revealed to the world that she and the criminal had been married under customary law. Despite the doctor’s urgency in claiming the body, the authorities still had to carry out a detailed post-mortem, and this is when things started to seem off.
How did Thabo pull off an outrageous escape from the prison?
It was initially believed that Thabo Bester had committed suicide in prison by setting his own cell on fire, since there was no record of any electrical fault that could have caused the accident. However, it was also debated whether the prisoner could have actually arranged for adequate material to start the fire by himself. When the first reports of the post-mortem examination came, they clearly concluded that there had been a deadly blunt force trauma to the head of the victim, and the body did not show any signs of having inhaled toxic smoke either. All of this pointed to the fact that the prisoner had been murdered by someone before the fire broke out, which was clearly just an act to make it look like a suicide or accidental death.
But this was only half the twist that came the way of the South African authorities and the citizens, for a few suspicious matters were already getting uncovered. Firstly, Dr. Nandipha seemed in a bit too much of a hurry to claim the body, claiming that she wanted to bury her husband with all the respect that he deserved. But the height of the body did not match with that of Thabo, and even the DNA sample collected from his biological mother did not match with the one from the dead body in the prison cell. Investigative journalists, who had access to all this information, started to ask questions of the authorities, wondering whether Thabo had indeed died in the prison fire, or if he had somehow pulled off an outrageous escape.
The doubts were finally put to rest about a month later, in June of 2022, as someone managed to photograph Dr. Nandipha and her two children at a shopping mall. Much to everyone’s shock, a man was also photographed with them, and he looked identical to Thabo Bester except for the different hairstyle and facial hair. Very soon, the police officially confirmed that the burnt body found inside the prison cell did not belong to Thabo Bester, and the man had indeed fled from prison through an elaborate scheme. As further investigations were carried out into the matter, more shocking details were found, which made the crime seem like nothing short of a story from an intense thriller film.
Thabo and his associates had planned the escape for quite some time, and they had also successfully turned a few of the prison guards to their side to aid in the execution of the plan. A few days before the escape, a car transported a wooden box to the prison, and it apparently contained a new TV set to be installed inside the place. The box managed to avoid any proper check or scrutiny and was taken to a workshop inside the prison, very close to cell number 35, which would soon house Thabo. Around the same time, Thabo complained to the guards that a dangerous gang inside the prison had been targeting him in recent times, threatening to kill him as well, because of which he wanted to be moved to solitary confinement, in cell number 35. On the night of the dramatic incident, the 3rd of March 2022, one of the guards gave Thabo his uniform, which the prisoner wore and quickly escaped through the emergency exits, and was even seen escaping the building on one of the CCTV cameras, although the authorities could not identify him because of the guard uniform.
Just 5 minutes later, a guard put the inmate’s uniform on the dead body and set the cell on fire, executing the plan to perfection, while Thabo managed to get free. Apart from his most important collaborator (who we come to in the next section), the prisoner was clearly helped by a number of the prison guards, who worked for the private security company, G4S, and were seemingly paid off by him. A few of the prison officials might have also been involved, considering how the decoy dead body managed to be brought into the workshop without any scrutiny at all. Once Thabo pulled off this daring escape, he stayed out of sight for some time before appearing in public once again, just a month later, casually shopping with his wife and her children.
Was Nandipha really an accomplice in the crimes?
What shocked the country even more was the involvement of Dr. Nandipha Magudumana in this whole affair, as she was definitely not someone expected to be helping criminals escape a maximum-security prison. Graduating in medicine from Wits University in 2013, Nandipha started practicing as a professional doctor and soon became quite famous for her specializations in dermatology, anesthesiology, and plastic surgery. Although she married another doctor and had two children with him, the marriage did not ultimately last long. By this time, she was successfully running her own cosmetic surgery clinic, Optimum, and she was even more successful as an influencer, with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram. Along with sharing tips and awareness about skincare, Nandipha also flaunted her lifestyle on her page and was quite a well-recognized figure in the digital sphere of South Africa.
Yet, she seemingly fell in love with the charismatic criminal and went to absurd lengths to help him escape prison. It was Nandipha who had managed to get hold of the decoy corpse from the local government morgue after claiming the man was the brother of a friend. In fact, she had smuggled out one more corpse just a couple of weeks earlier, claiming the man to be her father, who was in fact very much alive. But when Nandipha realized that this first body would not be an adequate decoy, she dumped it into a river and settled on procuring the second body. Then, she convinced her own father, Zolile Sekeleni, to drive the body to the prison, which naturally led to the police later bringing charges against the man as well.
Introducing her lover as a highly successful businessman, Nandipha had convinced both her father and her brother to work for him. Zolile claims in the docuseries that he had no idea what the cargo box he had driven to the prison actually contained, and neither he nor his family had any idea about what his daughter was up to. Throughout the years, many have wondered whether Dr. Nandipha had genuinely agreed to be a collaborator to Thabo, that too merely out of love, or whether there is some other secret behind their association. However, according to all known evidence, it looks increasingly certain that the woman had indeed helped Thabo in every possible way, breaking countless laws in the process, just to prove her love for him and be with him, for which she left her children as well. Based on countless voice messages that Thabo had sent to Nandipha from prison towards the beginning of their relationship, or friendship, it seems like he had successfully convinced her that a grand conspiracy had been hatched against him, because of which he had been wrongfully jailed. But then again, could a highly established woman like Nandipha really fall for these claims? As most experts in Beauty and the Bester state, Dr. Nandipha alone is to be blamed for her downfall, as she made the choice to support a convicted rapist and murderer, for whatever reason.
Who were TK Nkwana and Tom Motsepe?
Turns out, Thabo Bester had even more crimes under his belt, with financial fraud being a comparatively easy job for him, considering his exceptional communication skills. When Thabo first grew close to Nandipha, he did so by claiming to be TK Nkwana, a successful businessman who wanted to invest in her clinic. But as soon as Nkwana entered the business, he changed numerous things about it, as expressed by Dr. Nandipha’s erstwhile brand manager, Lunga Ndwandwa, and his actions ultimately led to the business shutting down. He even started a business called 21st Century Media from inside prison, and now claimed to be Tom Motsepe, the established chairman settled in New York, and he even managed to get various people in South Africa to attend a conference meeting and invest in the company. In a stunningly bizarre video shown in Beauty and the Bester, Thabo can be seen laughing and conversing with his potential investors over a video call, wearing a suit and a tie, while actually being in prison.
How were Thabo and Nandipha arrested?
As soon as the police released the photographs of Thabo and Nandipha together at the shopping mall, the two embarked on a long journey to flee the country, even wishing to escape the continent and find shelter in Europe. Despite numerous police checkpoints set up at the border areas and at airports, the fugitives could not be found for days at a stretch. They had started driving up from South Africa and had fled the country through the land border to Mozambique. The rampant corruption in Africa, especially at land borders, where anyone can literally pay a fixed bribe to cross over, came in handy for them. Ultimately, almost a month later, in April of 2023, Thabo and Nandipha were spotted in the Tanzanian city of Arusha, and were immediately arrested. Much to the police’s surprise, they did not put up a fight or create a ruckus during the arrest either, suggesting that they knew that their long fight against the law was now over.
Where are Thabo Bester and Nandipha Magudumana now?
Following their arrest in Tanzania, Thabo and Nandipha were deported to South Africa, where they were put up for court trial in 2025, with numerous charges filed against them. The trial, which is still going at the time of the release of Beauty and the Bester, has not yet taken any substantial development, although the attention-seeking nature of Thabo has become more and more apparent. In one of the last trials, Thabo publicly asked for permission to speak, and then urged the court to sentence him to death and acquit everyone else who had helped him escape from prison, including Nandipha. Almost all experts have seen this move just as a sort of brash and egoistic demand for attention made by Thabo Bester, who is still trying to set the terms of his life, despite serving a life sentence.
Nandipha seems to have made a complete U-turn, though, claiming that she had been forced by Thabo to accompany him on his escape plan, and has stated in court that she had been threatened into helping him escape from prison as well. Although there are pieces of evidence, like call recordings, which suggest that Thabo was often threatening and controlling towards her, the jury does not seem to have been convinced by her claims. After all, on the very first day of the trial, when Nandipha and Thabo got to see each other in court, they were seen blatantly smiling, hugging, and holding hands, expressing their love and support for each other despite the grim circumstances. These gestures make it all the more obvious that Nandipha is trying to spin a yarn in court in order to avoid a serious sentence, and she is still very much in love with Thabo.
At present, Nandipha Magudumana is awaiting sentencing at the Bizzah Makhate women’s-only prison in Kroonstad, South Africa, and she could have to spend more than 10 years in prison if found guilty in the case. Thabo Bester has returned to serve his life sentence for the rapes and murder and is awaiting his sentence in the new trial at the Kgosi Mampuru II Correctional Home in Pretoria, South Africa. Both Thabo and Nandipha had made a strong plea in court to stop the release of Beauty and the Bester in South Africa and globally, claiming that their public images would be maligned because of it. But the court ultimately ruled against them and granted Netflix permission to release the docuseries.
