Lehanne Sergison was out for lunch with a friend when her phone buzzed with an international number. Assuming it was her aunt Christine, who lived in South Africa, she picked up, waiting to hear her cheerful Liverpudlian voice.
‘Chris was adventurous and loved to travel,’ Lehanne tells Metro from her London home.
‘She loved to chat; she’d be next to somebody on the bus, and they’d know her whole life story. She was very much an open book.’
Describing her aunt as ‘warm and inspirational’, while a little chaotic at times, Lehanne says that Chris, as she was known to family, was definitely someone who lived their life to the fullest.
‘She was a great one for finding the good in life. She was fun-loving and had good energy,’ Lehanne remembers.
The popular school teacher had never had children of her own and so would treat Lehanne like the daughter she never had. ‘I was very close with her,’ she shares.
So when a voice over the phone delivered the horrific news in 2014 that Chris had been raped, stabbed and strangled in her game lodge home in Thabazimbi, Lehanne was astounded.
After making dazed calls to her family to let them know what happened, she later googled her aunt’s name.
Plastered across the internet was the excruciating reality that her lovely, generous aunt had been brutally murdered. Staff had found Christine Robinson’s body on the floor, covered with a duvet and with a knife in her neck, and immediately called the police. Meanwhile, lodge gardener Andrew Ndlovu had vanished.
Lehanne’s first instinct was to travel from her London home to South Africa to help in some way. However, it wasn’t possible as Lehanne, who hadn’t flown for 20 years, was chronically ill with severe asthma, so she was in and out of the hospital.
Instead, Lehanne, now 54, took to the phone, talking to the Foreign Office and the police, and was told that Ndlovu, who had fled over the border to Zimbabwe, would be caught.
After three unsuccessful attempts from the South African judiciary to get an extradition order, weeks of waiting turned into months, and it started to look as if Ndlovu might get away with his terrible crime.
South Africa is notoriously violent, and with detectives carrying an average of 300 cases each, eight out of ten murders remain unsolved. Growing increasingly frustrated, Lehanne, who was stuck at home after being medically retired from her job as a chartered surveyor, started to hunt online for any sign of the missing man.
‘I followed him [on Facebook] for a while, but there wasn’t a lot of activity. But then it turned out that he had three other accounts, and he was advertising on dating sites, quite crudely, saying he wanted a woman; any woman, of any colour, any age – and that sickened me,’ she recalls.
Frightened that Ndlovu could go on to commit more harm, Lehanne impulsively made a Facebook profile for a flirty, Christian air steward who she named ‘Missy Falcao’ — a combination of her two dogs’ names. She liked his friends’ posts, adding little comments, and befriending his contacts to build a history. Then she started liking his photos until one day she messaged him: ‘Hello handsome. You’ve got sexy eyes.’
Ndlovu replied: ‘Thanks. Hey. You are one in a million.’
‘I was elated that there was a contact, but anxious about what may come of it. Although it gave me hope that something could be done,’ Lehanne explains.
She struck up a relationship with the man, which sickened her to her core. Lehanne, as Missy, told him that she lived in Johannesburg, where Ndlovu had been spotted, and that she travelled a lot through work, implying that they might meet one day.
‘I was very much, very freaked out by it. It was surreal. My husband, Simon, thought I was nuts and worried about the consequences, but I just persevered. My two focuses were obviously getting justice, but also not allowing him to hurt anybody else,’ remembers Lehanne.
She would chat to Ndlovu regularly, often at night. Every time he got in touch, calling her ‘Princess’ and asking her more about herself, Lehanne felt compelled to reply, fearful that she would lose him. But she hated it.
‘It was sickening. Really quite disturbing. Often, it would result in nightmares, and they could be quite traumatic. I’m very good at boxing things away, but the emotion and the trauma came quite badly, and it was very vivid,’ she recalls. ‘All I wanted to do was tell him I knew who he was and what he had done, but I couldn’t say that. It was frustrating. There was a whole raft of emotions involved.’
Around six months after Lehanne had set up the Missy Falcao account, she told the Foreign Office about her amateur investigation, and they passed on the information to the consulate and the police in South Africa. But then she found Ndlovu’s phone number online. With little happening, she got in touch with Detective Sakkie Louwrens, who had been on the case at the time of the murder, but had since retired and was working as a private detective. He offered to help Lehanne, contacting police officers and arranging an arrest.
Ndlovu had told Lehanne that he lived in a dangerous area of Joburg, so the team needed to get the right resources together to make the arrest overnight. Leanne was excited, worried and hopeful – it was the first time something positive seemed to be happening in the investigation in months. However, once again, the trail went cold and officers were unable to trace Ndlovu.
‘I contacted him a day or two later, and he said that his phone had been stolen,’ says Lehanne. ‘Everything fell away at that point, and it was frustrating. It was a long time getting there for it all to end up with nothing. Two days later, we continued the conversation, but he was getting frustrated because he wanted to speak to Missy and wanted to meet up.’
With relief, Lehanne gave control of the Missy Falcao account to the South African police, who tried to organise another sting, but Ndlovu went quiet and stopped replying. For a third time, the trail went cold.
As the years passed, Lehanne tried to get on with her life, believing that Ndlovu would never be brought to justice. That was until one day in 2020, on the sixth anniversary of Christine’s death, when Lehanne hadn’t been able to sleep and was trawling for information on Ndlovu on Facebook again.
Glaring at the screen, she spotted a new image of him in front of a Ferris wheel in Johannesburg. Infuriated that he was still out there and living his life, Lehanne posted the picture on her aunt’s memorial page, stating: ‘This man is wanted for the rape and murder.’
Within an hour of posting, Ian Cameron, who had been working on Christine’s case as part of a civil rights organisation, got in touch. He asked Lehanne to send him the pictures that she’d collected and wrote his own post.
From there, it went viral, with Ian’s post being shared thousands of times. Within a few hours, a woman called Mellissa contacted Ian, saying Andrew worked for her husband and chillingly, was living on her family’s property.
Another attempt was made at an arrest, and this time, Lehanne watched the whole thing on Ian’s FaceTime.
‘It was quite distressing, and it became very real. While I was grateful for everybody’s involvement, there was always that worry that it might not have been him. I was apprehensive.
‘I also knew that in South Africa, even when people do get arrested, it doesn’t mean it goes to trial because there’s such a backlog. It was no foregone conclusion,’ she explains.
However, the terrified-looking suspect who held his hands up for the police was Ndlovu – also known as Andrea Imbayarwo, among other aliases. He looked like he’d seen a ghost in the illumination of the officers’ torchlight, and when Ian Cameron asked if he knew why they were there, he simply replied, ‘Yes’. Footage from the arrest shows him being handcuffed and taken away to a police car.
Ndlovu pleaded not guilty, but in 2022, he was convicted and handed two life sentences for the rape and murder of Christine Robinson.
Now, Lehanne is sharing her story in the documentary The Facebook Honeytrap: Catching a Killer to honour the memory of her ‘amazing’ aunt and to highlight the issue of femicide around the world. She tells Metro that she was relieved to have finally got justice for her aunt, who no longer had a voice.
‘We were very lucky that we had a very good prosecutor and a female judge – we achieved justice,’ she says. ‘It was never going to bring Chris back, but the most important thing is that he couldn’t do it again. I didn’t want him to hurt anyone ever again.’
The Facebook Honeytrap: Catching a Killer is out on Prime Video on 27 July
