‘I used a fake profile to hunt my aunt’s murderer’
Lehanne struck up a relationship with the man, which sickened her to her core.
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.
Christine Robinson was found raped, stabbed and strangled in her South African game lodge home (Credits: Facebook)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.
Unable to fly and blocked by legal barriers, Lehanne took the investigation into her own hands (Picture: Middle Child Productions)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.
Lehanne created ‘Missy Falcao,’ a devout Christian, air steward, to lure Ndlovu(Picture: Facebook)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.
Messaging Ndlovu, she endured a disturbing fake romance (Picture: Facebook)‘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.’
