A man who was declared dead in 2022 is currently on trial in South Africa. Yes. You read that right. Thabo Bester was believed to have died in a fire at a prison in the country. He’d been serving a life sentence for some serious crimes he’d committed more than a decade ago.

At the time of the fire, he was being kept in an isolation cell. When authorities found his body, they came to the conclusion that the prisoner had deliberately started the fire because he could no longer face his fate behind bars.

The body was taken to the mortuary and was later identified and collected by a woman claiming to be Bester’s wife. The hardened prisoner was laid to rest. Or so most people thought.

But local media wouldn’t leave it there. They wanted to know how a prisoner serving time in a maximum security jail had managed to start a fire in a cell when he was alone. What transpired would shock the nation and make headlines around the world.

It later emerged that the autopsy showed the victim had died from blunt force trauma to the head. Not because of a fire. “His body smelled of accelerant, possibly paraffin, and his lungs were clear with no sign of smoke inhalation,” reported the BBC.

“The body’s height at the time of the autopsy was 1.45m,” reported GroundUp. “But in a police mugshot, Bester stood taller, at just over 1.7m.” Something, or many things were not adding up.

In a bizarre twist, the police collected the body from Bester’s “wife” and confiscated it for further investigation. A woman claiming to be Bester’s biological mother then tried to claim the corpse but her DNA did not match the body’s.

Authorities by now suspected that the dead body did not belong to Bester and had been placed in the cell before the fire broke out. In the months that followed, the public would hear that the body found in the cell belonged to someone named Katlego Bereng Mpholo. The 30-year-old had gone missing in April 2022.

According to the BBC, Mpholo’s father says police told him that his son had collapsed and had died in hospital, before being taken to a mortuary. The dad searched mortuaries across the city but never managed to find his son.

In an elaborate escape mission, and something out of a Netflix series, someone had managed to take Mpholo’s body, and plant it in the maximum security prison. Thabo Bester casually left jail, that night dressed in a prison guard's uniform. The criminal remained undetected for a year, living it up with his partner in a mansion in an affluent suburb of Johannesburg.

As the BBC reported, “he hid there in plain sight with his celebrity girlfriend, 35-year-old doctor, Nandipha Magudumana. She specialised in medically treating things such as skin conditions to improve the way that people look. She had worked for Bester in 2006 when he was an events manager and then started visiting him in jail in 2017.”

In the year that followed the escape, photos started going viral on social media of a man who resembled Bester nonchalantly paying for his groceries at a supermarket. Those who knew the criminal were convinced it was him. An incredible case of acting like you belong.

Fast forward to April 2023 and Bester is arrested in Tanzania, alongside his partner. They’d fled South Africa and were found with several fake passports with fake identities. The couple had reportedly driven from South Africa to the Zimbabwean border, then made their way north to Zambia before arriving in Tanzania.

A massive sting operation resulted in the pair finally being caught and flown back to South Africa under heavy police guard, and with hoards of media capturing their every move.