I snared my aunt's killer by seducing him on Facebook when cops botched hunt… sick sex lie in court made my blood boil

Scottish Sun

5 days ago

Two botched police operations left the grieving niece fearing her chance to get justice was 'gone forever'
HONEY TRAP I snared my aunt's killer by seducing him on Facebook when cops botched hunt… sick sex lie in court made my blood boil
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SHAKING with so much rage that she struggled to breathe, Lehanne Sergison read a flirtatious Facebook message declaring her 'one in a million'.
The Kent woman, 53, had received a response from the monster responsible for raping and fatally stabbing her aunt in the neck before going on the run.
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Christine Smith, 59, with husband Robbie, 63, who died of cancer two years before she was killed
Credit: Facebook
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Despite being on the run, Andrew Ndlovu regularly posted on Facebook
Credit: Facebook
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Christine's niece Lehanne Sergison used a fake profile to try to snare her aunt's killer
Credit: Amazon Prime
Using a stranger's photo under the alias Missy Falcao, she had been trying to snare evil Andrew Ndlovu by tricking him into revealing his whereabouts so that he could be arrested by police.
In 2014, the brute butchered Christine Smith, 59, who was recently bereaved, at her safari lodge in South Africa where he worked as a gardener.
He then fled across the Zimbabwe border before sneaking back to Johannesburg under the radar - and cops told Lehanne: 'The chances of finding him are nil."
But after spotting the killer actively looking for love on Facebook, "desperation" led her to take matters into her own hands and hatch her flirty plan, writing: 'Hello handsome u've (sic) got sexy eyes."
As well as two and half years of exchanges with him, it would take three undercover police operations and a viral social media post before the ghoul was snared and handed two life sentences in 2022, eight years after the chilling attack.
Despite Ndlovu's incarceration, Lehanne tells The Sun about the haunting memories that plagued her, his sickening attempt to escape justice and the botched investigation.
'It was spur of the moment and out of desperation,' Lehanne tells us. 'After seeing him advertising for women on dating sites, I feared there was going to be another victim.
'Shock, surprise, hope, a whole raft of emotions ran through my body when he first replied to me. I had to think quickly, flatter him and play to his ego.
'All of the time, I just wanted to tell him 'I know what you have done and who you are'. It was a bizarre way to live your life.
'The hardest thing was trying to keep him hooked. He always wanted to speak to Missy Falcao on the phone or video call, which I couldn't do.
I snared my murdered aunt's rapist as flirty Facebook honey trap when cops gave up & botched sting…then sicko told evil lie
'It was difficult protecting my own sanity too. Authorities weren't interested in catching him so it was down to me. It left me frustrated, nauseous and with nightmares."
Speaking ahead of the release of Amazon Prime Video documentary The Facebook Honeytrap: Catching A Killer, which recounts her battle for justice, she says her memories of her aunt are forever tainted.
'While I remember Christine and the wonderful woman she was, the grief you experience is untold and it's hard to distinguish between the memories and her traumatic murder," she says.
'Her life was taken from her in the most awful circumstances, we know she struggled, she fought him off her and tried her best to survive but he took that away.
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Ndlovu was handed two life sentences for rape and murder
Credit: Amazon Prime
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Lehanne (left) was always close with her aunt Christine (middle)
Credit: Amazon Prime
'The attack was so cruel that it's difficult to remember the lovely memories, often all I can imagine is her lying in a bed bleeding to death.'
Liverpudlian Christine was reeling from the passing of her husband Robbie, of Northern Ireland, from liver cancer, when she was violently killed in 2014.
She was discovered dead in her South African lodge a day after withdrawing £1,000 to pay her staff, which had vanished when lodge manager Noelle Davis stumbled upon the grizzly crime scene.
'It's like a nightmare,' Noelle said through tears. 'She was strangled, stabbed, raped. I was sick… I couldn't cope with it… it was so unreal.'
I broke down. I physically cried and cried and cried. Police should have made it work. It felt like Christine didn't matter… there were no more chances
Lehanne Sergison
When she summoned all the staff to break the news, there was one notable absence - Ndlovu - and when a teammate called him he yelled 'it's not me, it's not me.'
By then, he was heading 340miles away to the Zimbabwe border after forcing his friend Hope to drive him at knifepoint so he could temporarily leave South Africa.
Recalling the news of her aunt's death, Lehanne says: 'It was very weird, excruciatingly painful like an electric shock running through my body.'
'Hunt the b******'
With Ndlovu in another country, the investigation soon dried up and Lehanne says the Foreign Office were 'all platitudes, all ticking boxes' but didn't aid her attempts to catch the killer.
After a year, the South African government had yet to see an extradition order, which made Lehanne feel Christine 'was forgotten about' so she began her own search for answers on Facebook.
The internet became a 'useful tool' because she was unable to travel to South Africa due to having such severe chronic asthma that she's hospitalised every six weeks.
That year, Noelle informed Lehanne that Ndlovu has been spotted at a Johannesburg church and longing to 'hunt the b****** down' she told police, who monitored the area but didn't find him.
'I was told 'the chances of finding him are nil.' We saw it as a lost opportunity,' she adds.
On the second anniversary of her death, Lehanne looked again at Ndlovu's Facebook profile only to see he had multiple accounts with varied spellings and that wasn't all.
'My head was shooting off all over the place, my stomach was in knots,' she says. 'He was having an active life on Facebook.'
On some the profiles, he spouted religious verses but on others she realised he was actively posting on dating pages and described wanting 'a serious partner' of 'any age'.
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Lehanne says it turned her stomach having to flirt with her aunt's killer
Credit: Amazon Prime
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One of tens of thousands of messages between Lehanne and Ndlovu
Credit: Amazon Prime
Determined to bring him to justice, Lehanne created her Missy Falcao fake profile, named after her two ex-racing greyhounds, and took a generic photo from the internet.
Slowly, she added friends and posted pictures and comments to make the account look more legitimate. Within a few weeks she sent Ndlovu a flirty message.
Lehanne described being 'barely able to take a breath' and panicking when he replied 'thanx (sic) hey… u are 1 in a million'. 'My heart was in my mouth, my stomach was doing somersaults," she adds.
She claimed to be 27 years old, originally from Ghana, and an air stewardess, which acted as cover for the weird times she messaged, due to the time difference.
Soon his messages became more flirty, with him calling her 'princess' and sending kiss-face emojis and eventually he revealed he was in the Johannesburg suburb of Brixton, and she obtained his phone number.
She continued to extract information from him to buy police time and to find out more details in order for them to track him down - despite saying that flirting with him 'hurt every time and sickened me'.
But the South African police refused to make any arrests. She contacted Sakkie Louwrens, the detective on the case, only to find he was now a private investigator.
'It snowballed from there,' Lehanne says. Sakkie convinced cops to try to triangulate Ndlovu's phone - where they track people through their mobile signal.
Unfortunately, it wasn't successful. Sakkie said they were 'not far from him' when his phone battery died, meaning he could no longer be traced.
He looked like he had seen a ghost
Reg Crewe, ex-army reservist
After two days of silence, Ndlovu told 'Missy' his phone had been stolen but was growing suspicious of her and asked 'are you for real?'
It set off alarm bells to Lehanne, fearing he was 'slipping away'. But police were planning a sting operation and took over contacting him on a local mobile phone.
It gave a glimmer of hope to the Brit, who had exchanged thousands of messages with Ndlovu over nearly two and a half years.
Shockingly, after the police operation date was pushed back, Ndlovu suddenly disappeared and cut all contact with Missy. Neither Lehanne nor police heard from him again.
'The moment to capture him, arrest him and get justice was gone forever, Missy Falcao was no more… and I felt lost,' she says.
'I broke down. I cried and cried. Police should have made it work. It felt like Christine didn't matter… there were no more chances.'
'To hell with it'
In 2020, on the six year anniversary of her aunt's death, Lehanne disobeyed Foreign Office orders by sharing a picture of Ndlovu and his horrific crimes.
For years Lehanne had been told 'never publish his photo' on Facebook in case it jeopardised the investigation but one moment pushed her over the edge.
'I thought, 'This case is dead in the water' then I saw a photo on his Facebook account of him suited and booted and enjoying life.
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Christine and Robbie ran a safari lodge in South Africa
Credit: Amazon Prime
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Lehanne has since gone on to support others whose family members have been killed overseas
Credit: Lehanne Sergison
'I thought, 'To hell with it, I have nothing to lose' and published a post showing his face and revealing the horrific things he did to Christine. And it went viral.'
Doomscrolling on her phone nearly 8,000 miles away in Johannesburg, Mellisa Le Hannie saw the post - which had been shared 70,000 times - and immediately recognised the man's face.
It was their family gardener of five years, who was their 'best employee', and lived at the bottom of their garden with his girlfriend in a shack.
'I couldn't believe it could be him. I left him alone with my wife, my daughters, fixing things in the house,' Mellisa's horrified father Andrew Du Preez said.
Ian knew they had 'one opportunity' to snare the killer and brought onboard former army reservist Reg Crewe to accompany police and ensure he didn't get away again.
'He looked like he had seen a ghost,' Reg said, recalling how Ndlovu stumbled out of his front door to be cuffed and marched to a police van
Lehanne was kept abreast with the developments and when she saw the monster in cuffs she couldn't believe it - after six years he was finally captured.
'It's still hard for me to believe it's real,' she says. 'The tears just kept coming. I contacted lots of family members and friends. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops."
But in the back of her mind, Lehanne feared Ndlovu may still evade justice because in South Africa 80 per cent of murder charges fail to secure a conviction.
'Zero remorse'
In the weeks leading up to the trial in 2022, her health drastically declined and she ended up in intensive care.
Sickening Ndlovu denied all five charges against him and claimed in court that Christine was in love with him and that they had consensual intercourse regularly.
What he didn't realise was the damning evidence against him - including semen from the crime scene - and damning witnesses testimony.
Our bodies are crimes scenes
Kaylynn Palm, Action Society
Ndlovu's pal Hope, who gave him money and escorted him to the Zimbabwe border, testified that he had been forced to drive at knifepoint proving he was 'a man on the run'.
His ex-girlfriend of three years confirmed that he phoned her to say he was fleeing South Africa because 'I just murdered a white lady' while travelling in the car.
Ndlovu was said to have 'shown zero remorse' throughout the case and was sentenced to two life sentence for raping and murdering Christine.
When Lehanne was told the news in her hospital bed, she recalled being 'so insanely happy' that she 'cried and cried and cried'.
Civil rights organisation Action Society say every day in South Africa 153 rapes are committed, yet only nine are reported, and up to 11 women are killed.
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Chillingly Ndlovu claimed Christine was having a fling with him
Credit: Amazon Prime
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Ndlovu was said to have shown no remorse in court
Credit: Amazon Prime
Kaylynn Palm, head of the non-profit organisation, says there was one three-month period where 900 women were butchered and adds: 'Our bodies are crime scenes'
Andrew says: 'We wanted to show the horrendous scale of femicide in South Africa and the world. It's an important story to tell because justice was found due to Lehanne refusing to give up.'
The justice system runs on limited resources and 'moves at a pregnant snail's pace', says Kaylynn, pointing out it can take as long as four years for a case to conclude, during which time evidence and documents can be lost.
Fortunately Ndlovu is now locked away. Lehanne says it's a relief knowing he 'can't do that to someone again' and adds that her long fight taught her one thing.
'Never give up on anything, be tenacious, noisy, a nuisance,' she says.
Reflecting on her nearly three years undercover to snare Ndlovu, Lehanne believes Christine would have thought it 'gutsy, pretty foolish'.
After a few moments pause, thinking about her 'lovely, chatty Scouser' aunt, she concludes: 'But I know she would have done the same for me.'
The Facebook Honeytrap: Catching A Killer is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video from July 27.