My aunt was raped and murdered - I tracked down her killer and seduced him on Facebook after police failed to find him

Daily Mail​

3 days ago

A new documentary reveals how a tenacious British woman took justice into her own hands - turning into an online Miss Marple and seducing the man she suspected of raping and murdering a beloved aunt - after police failed to find him.
The extraordinary story of how Lehanne Sergison, a retired chartered surveyor who lives in Bromley, wooed her cherished family member's killer via DMs on Facebook - telling him 'you've got sexy eyes' - is the subject of Amazon Prime Video documentary The Facebook Honeytrap: Catching A Killer, released on Sunday.
Lehanne, 54, shares the astonishing story of how she turned online sleuth to track down the 26-year-old gardener who'd callously attacked and murdered Christine Robinson, 59, on the 125-acre Rra-Ditau game lodge she lived on in Thamazimbi, South Africa in July 2014.
Andrea Imbayarwo, then the estate's gardener, who now called himself Andrew Ndlovu, had bundled Christine's body in a duvet after raping her and slashing her throat with a knife - which was still left in her neck when her body was discovered.
A retired teacher from Liverpool, Christine, 59, had run the sprawling South African estate alone after the death of her husband Daniel from cancer in 2012.
After the brutal killing, Imbayarwo fled with £3,500 in cash, wages Christine had allocated for her staff at the 30-guest estate.
Receiving a phone call on July 30th 2014 with the tragic news of her aunt, who she would speak to every Sunday on the phone, Lehanne tells the documentary she assumed police would catch the killer.
However, it quickly became clear that he might evade capture, with police saying they were powerless to act - after CCTV footage showed him heading towards his native Zimbabwe.
Andrea Imbayarwo, Christine's gardener, who also called himself Andrew Ndlovu, was prime suspect in the killing - but in spite of Lehanne's pleas, the case was dropped - and it was six years before she herself managed to solve the crime
Sleuth: Lehanne made a fake Facebook account she named 'Missy Falcao' (left) to contact Andrew Ndlovu online, who also hid behind a fake account (right)
Eaten away by the idea that the case would remain unsolved, Lehanne became fixated with finding Imbayarwo, spending years trying to avenge the murder that had cut short her aunt's life.
'He could feel the sun on his face and the wind in his hair when she couldn't,' Lehanne told Weekend magazine in a recent interview.
'Hearing of Christine's murder was like an electric shock running through my body. We'd always been so close. It was a brutal, traumatic death for a lovely, kind, generous woman.'
Despite being 6,000 miles away in London's leafy suburbs, the documentary reveals her dogged determination to catch Christine's killer led her to turn online detective.
After delivering a petition to Downing Street in 2014 calling for action, Lehanne realised it was up to her to hunt him down - and she set to work hatching a plan.
With her own health issues - she suffers with severe asthma, she decided travelling to her aunt's adopted country wasn't the right tack, and realised 'my only tool was the internet.'
Lehanne decided it was futile leaving it to the hard-pressed authorities in South Africa, where around 11 women are killed every day.
She told the Telegraph this week: 'I think life is cheap there [South Africa]. It's accepted. Even when they find the men responsible, cases fall apart because systems aren't robust enough.'
In the new Amazon documentary, Lehanne reveals how she 'seduced' Christine's killer from her sofa at home in the UK, some 6,000 miles away from the tragedy in South Africa
When she finally found her man on Facebook, she says: 'My stomach was in knots'.
'There he was having an active life. He was posting comments on some dating pages, which really concerned me.
'So I thought, "If he wants female companionship, let's see if he bites."'
Without a thought for the potential danger, Lehanne, who's married and originally hails from Kent, set up a fake Facebook account, posing as flirtatious air hostess Missy Falcao.
'I sent him a message saying, "You've got sexy eyes."
'Then I panicked. I was going down a route, but I didn't know where. My emotions were a rollercoaster.
'When he replied, I could barely breathe. My stomach was doing somersaults. My husband was shocked that he'd replied, but we agreed the important thing was to keep him hooked in.'
In the weeks that followed, a 'romantic' online relationship began to develop, which would ultimately bring her aunt's murderer to justice.
'I realised I had to make up a backstory for Missy Falcao,' says Lehanne.
'I decided she was a young, sassy air stewardess from Ghana. He was flattered; I knew flattery would keep him interested.
'As the messaging continued he wanted to meet on FaceTime, which would have blown my cover. But there was also the fear that as he wasn't getting what he wanted, he'd walk away.
'It hurt every time I contacted him. I wanted to say, "I know who you are and what you've done." But I did what I felt I had to do to get justice.'
Having found out the phone number of the killer - who now claimed to be an electrician and living alone in Johannesburg - Lehanne tipped off South African detectives for them to arrange a sting operation.
To her exasperation, the phone tracking failed because his phone was switched off.
'I was angry and disappointed. I contacted Andrew but there was no response,' recalls Lehanne.
'A couple of days later I got a message from him explaining that his phone had been stolen.
'It seemed very coincidental this had happened the night of the sting,' she says.
'There was an exchange of messages, then a chilling, "Are you for real, Missy?"
It was the first time he'd actually questioned anything. I knew then that I'd lost hold of him.'
Lehanne handed over Missy Falcao's Facebook account to the South African police but Imbayarwo either lost patience or became suspicious, and he ceased messaging Missy altogether.
The trail went cold for nearly two years - until the sixth anniversary of Christine's death in 2020.
'It was about 4am and I couldn't sleep, so I checked his profile. He'd posted a picture of himself. There was a ferris wheel in the background and I realised he was still in Johannesburg,' she says.
Incensed, Lehanne decided to post this message on Facebook: 'Six years ago today this man raped and murdered my aunt Christine Robinson. Andrew Ndlovu is still a free man, enjoying his life after taking hers.'
More than 70,000 people shared the post, and it was picked up by Ian Cameron, an anti-crime activist in South Africa who posted it on his social media, sending it viral. Ian was approached by Imbayarwo's boss at the company where he worked installing garage doors, and within hours he was arrested.
'When it came to his arrest, I was on a video call with Ian telling me live what was happening,' says Lehanne. 'I was shaking so much I couldn't believe it. The next thing is I'm seeing him in handcuffs. I just wanted to shout from the rooftops.'
Imbayarwo was finally convicted two years later and given two life sentences. 'If this long, traumatic journey's taught me anything, it's to never give up,' says Lehanne.