It is the quintessential crime story: murder, rape, cons, an improbable love affair, a prison break, a burnt body, a coffin filled with meat, a flashy lifestyle, and then a hasty escape in a black SUV through three countries.

The sensational escape of murderer and rapist Thabo Bester, assisted by his lover, society doctor Nandipha Magudumana, shocked South Africa and set social media alight. In The Thabo Bester Story, Marecia Damons and Daniel Steyn, the award-winning GroundUp journalists who exposed the couple’s scams and caught the government sleeping at the wheel while Bester and Magudumana lived the high life in Sandton, go behind the headlines.

Here they tell the full story, from Bester and Magudumana’s early lives, their unlikely love affair and the tragedy surrounding their many victims, to a web of complicity in South Africa’s broken prison system. Incredible, but true.