Christine Robinson was brutally murdered by a gardener at her game lodge in South Africa in 2014.
Her killer managed to evade justice by fleeing to Zimbabwe, but his return to South Africa and social media was to be his downfall.
Andrea Imbayarwo, also known as Andrew Ndlovu, had underestimated the tenacity of Ms Robinson’s grieving niece, Lehanne Sergison.
Based in the UK, the retired chartered surveyor managed to track down and eventually entrap 26-year-old Imbayarwo using Facebook.
Her quest for justice for her aunt is retold in a new documentary for Prime Video, The Facebook Honeytrap: Catching A Killer, which debuts on Sunday, 27 July.
Who was Christine Robinson?
Christine Robinson was a school teacher from Liverpool who had travelled the world in her career and eventually ended up in South Africa.
She had lived and taught in international schools everywhere, from Moscow to Kuwait, but finally settled in South Africa after meeting and marrying her husband Daniel Robinson, known as Robbie, in 2002.
The couple bought a game park with lodges in South Africa, near the border with Botswana, after falling in love with the region.
Sadly, 10 years later, Robbie died of liver cancer and Ms Robinson was left to run the game park alone.
She was in the process of selling the business when, on 30 July 2014, Ms Robinson was found dead at the game lodge in Thabazimbi, 150 miles (240km) north of Johannesburg.
Her death came a day after she had withdrawn a large sum of cash from the bank to pay her staff.
The 59-year-old had been raped, strangled, and stabbed in the neck, then left wrapped in a duvet. She was discovered by the lodge manager, Noelle Davis.
How did Christine’s niece Lehanne find her killer?
Christine Robinson’s niece Lehanne Sergison was devastated by the loss of her aunt, with whom she had been close to since childhood.
They would talk on the phone each Sunday and catch up whenever she came back to the UK.
Learning of her aunt’s death was, said Ms Sergison, “excruciatingly painful like an electric shock running through my body”.
When staff had been summoned to the game park office to be told of Ms Robinson’s death, one man was missing – estate’s gardener Andrea Imbayarwo.
He had fled, driven by a friend, to his native Zimbabwe. In a phone call with a colleague, he denied he had anything to do with the killing.
Attempts by South African police and the UK Foreign Office to extradite him floundered and so Ms Sergison decided to take matters into her own hands.
A chronic asthmatic, she was unable to travel to South Africa but she began trawling on the internet for evidence of the absent gardener Imbayarwo, who was by then known as Andrew Ndlovu.
Driven by the desire for justice for her aunt, the 54-year-old, from Bromley in Kent, managed to track Imbayarwo down on Facebook.
Two years after the death of her aunt, Ms Sergison discovered Imbayarwo was back in South Africa and active on Facebook but under various names.
She told The Sun how her “stomach was in knots” when she found out he “was having an active life on Facebook” and on dating sites.
So she decided she would create a false Facebook profile – Missy Falcao – to try and make contact with him.
The ploy was successful and soon she was exchanging flirtacious messages with him on the pretext she was a 27-year-old air stewardess from Ghana.
He eventually revealed to her he was living in Johannesburg and gave her his mobile phone number.
Armed with this information, Ms Sergison contacted the South African police.
But after a failed attempt to arrest him in 2018 he seemed to have disappeared once again.
Then in a final bid to catch him on the sixth anniversary of the death of her aunt, Ms Sergison did the one thing the Foreign Office had advised her not to do.
She posted a picture of Andrea Imbayarwo/ Andrew Ndlovu on social media with details of the crime he had committed.
She wrote: “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.”
The post went viral after it was picked up and shared by Ian Cameron of the civil rights organisation Action Society.
One of the people who got in touch, as a result, was Mellisa Le Hannie. She was employing Imbayarwo as her gardener and he lived on her estate.
Within hours, police were at the property and finally arrested him.
Where is Andrea Imbayarwo now?
Imbayarwo went to trial as Andrew Ndlovu at Polokwane High Court in South Africa in April 2022.
He had denied the charges but was found guilty of the murder and rape of Christine Robinson and given two life sentences by Judge Naudé-Odendaal.
After the sentencing, Action Society said: “Nothing less than a life sentence will serve as sufficient punishment for Ndlovu, who brutally raped and murdered Christine, although no sentence will bring her back.”
The organisation said the conviction was all the more remarkable as in South Africa, “153 rapes are reported daily and eight women murdered”.
Ms Sergison said she was relieved to know her aunt’s killer was finally behind bars.
Of her hard-fought quest for justice, she simply said, “never give up on anything, be tenacious, noisy, a nuisance”.
