She Was Gone in Seven Minutes | The Hannah Cornelius Case

This episode is brought to you by TXU Energy. For the first time ever, Texans have an energy plan that combines free nights all year with daytime summer savings. It's called Free Nights and Cool Summer. You get free nights every night all year long, plus a 25% bonus toward your daytime use all summer. It's a first-of-its-kind plan created for how Texans actually use energy. Discover how much more you could save with Free Nights and Cool Summer. TXU Energy. Energy for everything. Visit TXU.com for more information. Rep number 10004. It's around 8 a.m. shortly after dawn. A man in a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of town glances into his backyard. He sees a stranger climbing the wall to get onto his property. Now, this is the sort of thing you don't expect to see. A man that he's never seen or met before breaking into his yard. But it gets stranger. The intruder begins stumbling around barefoot and seems confused. The resident's first thought is that maybe the intruder is drunk. Maybe last night he went out to a bar or a party, drank too much, got lost on his way home, and ended up right here. Or even worse, maybe he has bad intentions. He might be there to break in and hurt him or rob him. In this situation, almost anyone would double-check that their doors are locked, and then they would call the police. But that's not what this resident did on the morning of May 27th in 2017. At least, not right away. Instead, he watched as the stranger slowly moved towards his house. And then he realized. The intruder was covered in blood. He begged for help. He was screaming that someone was trying to kill him. Hi everyone. Welcome back to my channel. And if you've never been here before, I am Kimberlea. It's nice to finally meet you. Now I know that some of you may have found my podcast for the very first time today. And others have been watching me for at least the past couple years. And some of you have even watched my recent video where I mentioned that I was trying to kill a stranger. And some of you have even watched I mentioned not even having control over the show for all that time. But I'm back. And things are changing for the better. You've probably heard this before if you've been here in the last couple videos. But because I have your attention for just a moment, I did want you to know that I have another show here on Spotify that also does true crime deep dives and even some current true crime cases. And it is with my husband, Jonathan, called Dark Liberty. So you can actually look right below this episode. You're going to see a little tab with our picture on it and the name Dark Liberty. So you click it, and it will take you there to see it. So if you ever run out of content over here, you can always start binging over there. I will also link it below in the show notes. And I have been diligently going back through hundreds of my videos that were chopped up without my doing by the company that was managing my account. And I've been making sure to link part one or part two below so you can find and jump to the right episode that you're trying to view very, very easily. Okay, so now we can get into this case for today, which by the way, is another South African case. This was totally unplanned. I create my list of cases months in advance, and it just happened to be that two of them were in South Africa. So please do what we did last time, which was actually just a couple days ago, and go easy on my pronunciations. Also with braces, it's hard. I want to try to get the words right, though. So if I do say anything wrong, kindly just let me know in the comments. The man I told you about whose backyard was invaded, his name is Avril Forte. And by the time he understood what he was looking at, the stranger was close enough that he could see how bad it was. There was blood on his clothes, blood in his hair. His face was swollen. He was moving like a man who couldn't feel the ground underneath him properly. He wasn't even wearing shoes. He was shouting, but not the way a drunk person would yell. He was saying that people were trying to kill him. That they were going to kill his friend, that he didn't know where she was. And he sounded terrified, like he was being followed. So Avril called for help. An ambulance came to the scene, and so did police. The young man was loaded up and taken to a community health center, which was the closest place that could handle the situation. And once the doctors got a proper look, they understood why he had been staggering. His skull was fractured at the base. He'd been bleeding from his brain. There were open wounds. He was bleeding from his brain. He was bleeding across his head. And one of the bones in his arm was broken. His eyes were raccoon eyes. Doctors call it that. It's a sign that the fracture runs deep. There was fluid leaking out through the bones behind his left ear. And the doctors couldn't tell whether it was blood or spinal fluid. Needless to say, it was very serious. It was almost as though he was a literal walking dead man. The physician who treated him said he was lucky to be alive. Injuries like this kill people. And when they don't kill people, they don't kill people. And when they don't kill people, they tend to leave them with epilepsy or meningitis or even worse. So the first job was keeping him breathing. Nobody was taking a statement yet. His name was Cheslin Marsh. He was 21, a theology student at Stellenbosch University. He lived in a student apartment building called the Novo. It's on the corner of Bird Street, right in town. And the reason why this man found him in his 20 miles from his own front door was something Cheslin was going to have to explain himself. Because here's the thing about this entire case. Almost everything that happened over the previous 11 hours happened in the dark, in places where no one was watching. The inside of a car, on dirt roads, in empty fields outside of town. There's no version of this story that could come from an outside observer. What we know, we know because Cheslin Marsh survived to say it. So this is his account. And this is his and Hannah's story. Yes, Hannah. I know I haven't mentioned her yet, but that was the person police needed to ask him about first. The young woman named Hannah Cornelius. He said they were together the previous night on Friday the 26th of May at a student dorm room with a group of friends. Nothing unusual about it. Just a normal Friday night. And at the end of that night, Hannah insisted on driving Cheslin home. That's when things became a nightmare. So let me start with Hannah Cornelius. She was born on the 13th of February in 1996 in Cape Town, South Africa. She grew up in Scarborough, which is a small coastal village at the bottom end of the Cape. It's the kind of place where the houses look out over the water and the wind comes off the ocean all year round. It's beautiful. The Cornelius family home also had a distinctive blue door and a pathway that faced the sea. Her parents were William and Anna and both of them were lawyers. William was a magistrate, or as we know it here in the U.S., he was a judge, which meant he spent his working life listening to people explain the worst days of their lives. Anna was in private practice. Between the two of them, there wasn't much about human behavior they hadn't already seen, sadly. Hannah had one sibling, a younger brother named Andres. And from what I gathered, he is autistic and needs full-time care and has never been able to live on his own. Anyone who has a special needs child or sibling knows the care, the patience, and the understanding that you must possess. Hannah and her parents had that. Actually, from the time that Hannah was very small, her parents noticed something about her that set her apart from the other kids. She was unusually kind, not just polite, and not just raised well. A lot of children are those things. Hannah was something else. If someone around her was happy, then she was happy. If someone was upset, she could feel it. She was an empath. It was like things happened to her personally. It almost seemed like she felt other people's emotions more strongly than they even felt them themselves. Her family had a word for how close she was with her father. She was a daddy's girl. Everyone agreed on it. But here's the story people tell about her, and it's the one that gets at the heart of who she was better than anything else. Hannah's 16th birthday was coming up. Her parents did it. And it wasn't a one-time gesture either. It wasn't a one-time gesture. It was a one-time gesture. Hannah did it again the next year, and the year after that. Every birthday that she had from 16 on went to those kids instead of her. She said it made her happier than a party would have. She said she couldn't really enjoy celebrating while she knew that other people were going without. That was Hannah. She was also an idealist. She had a picture in her mind of the way the world was supposed to work, and she had a habit of acting like that's how it actually worked. She didn't want to entertain the idea that people might be lying to her or using her or setting her up. She looked for the good in people, and she would find it. Sometimes by looking straight past the things that maybe some of us would see as a red flag. Which is strange when you're growing up in the particular house that she did with the family that she did. Her mother and father worked in the legal system. They knew exactly what people were capable of. They built their entire careers on it. They saw the worst of didn't see things the same way. Her friends noticed that about her. Some of them thought she was too trusting. They also thought she was one of the most generous people they had ever met. And they knew if they ever needed anything, whether that was a ride, a favor, a place to stay, or just someone to listen, Hana would say yes before they even finished asking. She was smart too. She got really good grades. She went to Redham House for high school, and she was genuinely excellent at playing the piano. And in 2017, Hana was 21 years old and enrolled at Stellenbosch University. Now, Stellenbosch is a name that you're going to hear a lot, and I hope I am pronouncing it right. It's the best I can at this point. So let me set it up for you. It's a university town about 30 miles inland from Cape Town, and it's the second oldest town in South Africa. It's small. The population is a little above 175,000, and it doesn't feel like a city. It's a city that's a little bit older than South Africa. It's a city that's a little bit bigger than the city. And I was thinking, still kind of big to me. But drive a few minutes past the town limits, and you are surrounded by vineyards and farmland. The whole area is wine country, and it is gorgeous. But on campus especially, it has this close-knit, everyone-knows-one-another feeling that a lot of university towns have. However, it also has a crime rate that's high for the town of its size. Most of what gets reported is non-violent though. We're talking robberies, thefts, break-ins. But it's a place where people pay attention to which street they're on after dark, and whether they're walking alone, so they keep that in mind. Hannah was studying for a bachelor's in the humanities. And here in the U.S., this would be more like psychology and the social sciences than history. And that was a small disappointment to her parents. If we're being honest about it, they said as being two lawyers, one of them a judge, they assumed that she would go into law. But Hannah told them, to their surprise, that she had zero knowledge of the law, zero interest in that whatsoever. Which kind of makes sense to me. Sometimes you couldn't want to break free from what your parents are doing. But Hannah said she did not want a prestigious career. And she wasn't interested in chasing money. She wanted to be in a field where she could actually help people. That was the whole criteria. And that degree is how you get there. In South Africa, a bachelor's in humanities isn't a stopping point. It's actually the runway. You spend three years on things like psychology, sociology, anthropology, and politics. And even languages. And then you specialize on top of that. It's the standard way to becoming a psychologist or a teacher or even a social researcher. The university's own description of the program says that it prepares you to deal with the current problems in South Africa. Which is so ironic. We're talking about true crime here. Hannah was on that campus during the student movement as well. There were fights over tuition, over language, over who she was. Who a university like that one was actually built for. Those arguments were happening in her building while she was in them. And her father put it this way. He said, he and Hannah had been so proud of raising a child for the new South Africa. A child without the baggage of their generation. No prejudice about race or religion or where someone came from. She lived in a woman's residence on campus called Irene. 321 women lived there that year. And Hannah was one of them. And her first two years went really well. She was a great teacher. She was a great really well. She was well-liked, she had a solid group of friends, and she was really plugged into the student life there. But she also stayed close with her family. She called home, she went home, and she and her father stayed as close as they were growing up. And she had a car. Now this is going to be significant. It was a blue Volkswagen City Golf. If you're not familiar with that model, it's a small, boxy, older hatchback. The City Golf was a very popular South African vehicle for about 30 years. They were cheap everywhere and easy to fix. Hers was two-toned. It was blue with a white stripe going down the side on the bottom. And it wasn't new. And she had not bought it. It actually belonged to her 91-year-old grandmother, who gave it to her when she was too old to drive. Nothing fancy, just a way to get around. So on the evening of Friday, May 26th of 2017, Hana was where a 21-year-old university student, usually is on a Friday night if they're social and like going out. She was at a college bar in town called Bohemia with a group of her friends. And one of those friends in that group was Cheslin Marsh, who I introduced you to, the one bloodied and climbing over that wall into a stranger's backyard at the beginning of this video. The two of them had been friends for two years. They were both enrolled the previous year, and they were in their second year now, both 21. After the bar, the group moved to a men's dorm, building, and this is where they spent most of their night in a guy's dorm room. It wasn't a wild party. There was music, there was dancing, and at some point, people were playing dominoes. That's the kind of evening it was. Hana had a couple drinks over the course of the night, not enough to get drunk. She was clear-headed by the time she headed out. It was around 3 a.m. She would have no idea at that moment what the next few hours would be like, and no one could have predicted what could happen next. Except Cheslin Marsh knew, because he survived it. And at this point in the story, he spent the next several days in the hospital at three different medical centers. The doctors at Croixfontein got him stable. They stitch up his head, and they sent him to a second hospital, Tidrebarge, which was a major trauma center for that side of the Cape Town. By the time the doctor at that hospital examined him, the wounds on his head had already been sutured. But there were things that the stitches couldn't fix, and they were still there. His eyes had gone dark and bloody around the sockets. And this wasn't just a bruise from being hit in the face. It's what happens when the skull fractures at the base, and the blood seeps forward into the soft tissue around the eyes. It's a sign that there's damage underneath. So they scanned his head. The scan showed exactly that. His skull was fractured. He had bleeding inside his brain. There was also fluid in his brain. He was bleeding inside his brain. There was also fluid escaping onto the air cells of the bone behind his left ear. I know this is a lot. And the doctors couldn't even say for sure whether it was blood or cerebral fluid, the fluid that's supposed to stay sealed around your brain and your spinal cord. If it's leaking out through your skull, that seal is broken. And a side note, I know I don't usually talk about personal things, but I had a botched lumbar puncture back in 2013, and I had a cerebral fluid leak in my back. This episode is brought to you by. TXU Energy. You get free nights every night, all year long, plus a 25% bonus toward your daytime use all summer. It's a first of its kind plan, created for how Texans actually use energy. TXU Energy. Rep number 10004. It's nothing compared to what happened to this poor young man, but I know the feeling of your spinal fluid leaking. I know that feeling. It wasn't as detrimental, but it still made me unable to walk for months. His left ear had a laceration on the inside with nothing visible on the outside. The damage was internal, and one of the bones in his left arm was broken, and that required an operation. They put a metal plate inside, and then there was a dispute between his doctors. And that tells you something about the state he arrived in. The physician who treated him first at the community health center believed that some of the wounds on his head were actually stab wounds, that he had been stabbed as well as beaten. But the doctor at the next hospital said that the pattern of bleeding in the brain and the way the base of the skull had fractured was more consistent with blunt force trauma, like a rock or something hard, not a blade. But what they didn't disagree on was how serious it truly was. As I said, it's the kind of injury that kills people or leaves them with seizures for the rest of their life. Cheslin was at the second hospital for two weeks, and then he was transferred to Parle Hospital. More stitches and more time healing. His mother Marilyn was there from day one. She was a single mother of three, and she had gotten that call in the early morning, and she saw her son in pain. He could barely hold a thought. Those were her words. And that what he kept coming back to was Hana. While he was still at the very first hospital that he was brought to by ambulance, a detective drove out there from Stellenbosch to see him. His name was Captain Loesch. And he sat down beside this young man who had had his skull broken a few hours earlier, and he asked him to describe what he could remember. And there he was, sick and confused. But he talked anyway. He told Captain Loesch from the very beginning that he and his friend had been sitting in her car, parked in a parking lot right across from his apartment complex, when out of nowhere, four men appeared and hijacked the car. He said three of those men had forced him into the back seat, pushed Hana into the middle of the front seat, jumped into the car, and drove out to a field and beaten him with bricks. It was a lot for them to follow, but most importantly, Cheslin named his friend, a young woman named Hana Cornelius. When he last saw her, she was still in that car. Now that was the entire apartment on the first day. Four men hijacked the car, he was beaten and left in the field, and watched the car drive away with Hana inside. They had to find her. And they had to find her And that's all this detective had to work with. But over the following days, as officers kept coming back, Cheslin gave them more. In pieces. Out of order sometimes. Whatever he could reach in his mind and remember, he was able to give them. And he finally gave them this. He said they were parked across the street from his apartment with the windows down, just talking. The way they'd been talking all night. He said he had his hand on the door handle. He was about to get out and leave for the evening. It's the part of the night where you say goodbye and you walk away. And I just wanted to point out that in South Africa, the driver's side is on the right. So for those of us in the U.S., you just have to picture everything happening on the opposite side of the vehicle. Cheslin said he looked over at Hana and there was a hand coming through her window. It all happened so fast. The hand was holding a screwdriver and it was pointed at Hana. Cheslin pulled his own door to make sure it was shut and he grabbed the man's grip. That was the first thing he did. Before he didn't process a single thing about what was happening, he reached across and took hold of this hand, holding the weapon that was pointed at his friend. He didn't get to hold it for long, though, because his own door opened right next to him. And when he turned, there was a second man standing there with a knife. And that man said something to him in Afrikaans. I'm going to do my best here. Stand still or she dies. It means stand still or she dies. So Cheslin let go. After that, things happened even faster. And this is where his account starts to have holes in it because he was being moved around. The man with the knife got into his seat and forced Cheslin into the back. The man with the screwdriver shoved Hana to the side and got behind the wheel. Hana was down in the gap between the two front seats, kind of on the floor where the gear shifter is, where she couldn't reach a door to escape. She was trapped between these two, and Hana was trapped in the back seat of the car. And Hana was trapped in the back seat of the car. Then two more men got into the back with Cheslin. One on his left and one on his right. And that's when six people were inside this Volkswagen City Golf. This is a small car. Cheslin says the man on his right went through his pockets and took his phone and his money out of his wallet. This wasn't a big amount. It didn't matter to him. But then these two men in front started looking for the keys to the car. Because somehow in the commotion, Hana had hidden them. Cheslin didn't know when she did it. He hadn't seen her do it. He just knew that these men couldn't find them and that she was telling them. She didn't know where they were. So they searched. They pulled their flashlights up on their phones and they went through the car as it was right there in that parking lot, steps away from Cheslin's building. They looked under the seats, into the gaps, all around with Hana still sitting in between them. Her own phone in her wallet, sitting up on the dashboard the entire time where she'd put them when she parked her car. Cheslin said the men got irritated. That's the word he used. It went on long enough. They couldn't find the keys that they got irritated. And in their irritation, they told him and Hana that they were going to kill them. He didn't know how long the search lasted. He had no way to measure it. He was sitting in the middle of the backseat of his friend's car with a stranger's shoulder against each of his in the dark, listening to two men get angrier and angrier. Eventually, someone did find the keys and the engine started. And Hana wedged between the two men in the front, asked a question. She asked them what they were going to do. The man in the driver's seat told her they just wanted to use the car to get themselves home. That was it. They would take the car, get where they needed to be, and then they would give it back. Cheslin heard him say it, but he was lying. But there was no way to know that at the time. And then Cheslin heard Hana ask them something else. She begged them not to take the car. She told them that it had been her grandmother's and she begged them, please don't, but they didn't listen. The car pulled out and turned towards Halshukta, which is the mountain pass road heading out of town. At some point, the road ended and Cheslin could feel gravel underneath the tires. That was where he lost his sense of direction. And that was the problem with everything he was giving detectives. When it came to specifics, there were none. He couldn't tell them what these men looked like, where they took him, and where Hana was. He said he didn't know. He couldn't name a single, one of these men. He had never seen any of them before in his life. He couldn't tell the police where he had been driven because for most of it, he hadn't been able to see out of the car. He didn't know that a fourth man had even gotten out of the car. This is back when they were searching for the keys and that man walked away. So it was actually only three men in the car with him at that time, plus Hana. Cheslin never saw that. He also had no idea that a security camera was on a building right there, pointed at them the whole time. Even though some of them knew that Hana was in the car. Cheslin didn't know this view was obscured because there is a parked white truck right in the middle. But Cheslin didn't even remember at this point that he had actually been put inside the trunk of Hana's car. He doesn't remember that an hour after the car was hijacked, he was ordered out of that trunk and into a field and told to kneel down and put his head on top of some bricks on the ground. He didn't remember at this point being beaten almost to death by two men, each of them holding a gun. At one point, a police officer came in. He went to Cheslin's bed with 32 photographs and asked him, look at these and tell me if you recognize anyone. He didn't. I mean, I wouldn't expect him to with all that trauma that he had been through physically and even emotionally. He was unconscious for hours. And when he finally came to, he ran to the nearest house he could find. That's how he found himself in a stranger's backyard out in wine country. The officers, of course, went out there. They searched. There was no sign of Hannah's car, no sign of her. It was all a mystery. They needed to piece together the missing parts of this puzzle to make it make sense. And they were about to get their first clue, 20 miles away on a farm. Now, this farm sits off of a road called Norhook. It's outside of a little place called Kulenhof, about 20 kilometers from the middle of Stellenbosch. Now, this is real wine country. Vineyards running up the slopes, a stream at the bottom of the property, and long stretches of grass and dirt in between where nobody goes unless they have a reason. And on Friday afternoon on the 26th of May, the same day Hannah would go out with her friends, two men had a reason. Their names were Flippy Boussen and Conrad Methy. Now, Flippy was 54 and Conrad was 32. And when they set out there, they were fixing a borehole pump. And if you're like me, you probably said, a what? In South Africa wine country, a borehole is a deep, narrow hole that's drilled straight down into the ground until it hits water like a well, but much deeper and much thinner. Farms all over that region use them for irrigation. And this one had a pump that stopped working. So these two men spent the afternoon hauling the broken pump out of the ground. It's slow work. It's tiring. And by the time they had it out, it was getting really late. And unfortunately, they didn't have what they needed to finish. They had to come back in the morning, which left a problem because now there was a big open hole in the ground and that can be dangerous. Part of them knew that it probably would be fine because they really didn't think someone was going to fall down into this well. But sometimes the farm kids out there throw garbage down the hole and they didn't want to come back to a shaft full of garbage that they needed to clean. So what did they do? They looked around this field and they found a big rock, actually an enormous rock. It weighed about 82 pounds. Flippy at 54 years old couldn't even lift it. And Conrad, being the younger of the two, wrestled it into position himself and dropped it over the top of the borehole. Then the two of them got in their pickup truck and they drove home. And that was it for the night. It was before five o'clock in the evening. At that hour, Hana was alive. She was 10 miles away, getting ready to go out with her friends. The next morning, those two men drive back to that farm road to finish the job. They get there around 20 past eight in the morning. And the first thing Flippy notices before they even get parked was that the rock was gone. That 82 pound rock that they had put over the top of that hole, the one that this 54 year old man couldn't even carry, was no longer where they left it. And then Conrad noticed the rest. The area that they had been working in the day before was a complete mess. The borehole was still there, but there were rags scattered all around, what looked like a sponge. And then there was something out in the grass. Flippy looked at it and he said what he thought he was seeing. He said, Conrad, there's a white bag out there. Conrad was like, no. So Flippy looked again. And that's when he corrected himself and said, Conrad, there is a person lying there. But Conrad says no again. He says, it looks like a doll. Because that's what your brain does. Your brain will offer you a bag, a doll, a pile of rags. It will offer you anything at all rather than the thing it actually is that's in front of you. But they had seen enough to get scared. So the two of them went to find the foreman. And then the foreman called the police, just in case. When officers arrived, it was obvious to them what they were looking at. To their trained eye, they knew it was the body of a young woman. She was lying face down in the grass on top of a sprinkler pipe. down. There was bruising across her knees and her legs and on top of her arms, and it wasn't the pattern you would get from being struck. They were oval-shaped. They were in clusters, the shape that a hand would make when it holds something down and doesn't let go. There was a great deal of blood in this area. The grass around her was flattened, and one of the officers carefully turned her over. He also noticed a large stone lying nearby. A constable arrived and started walking the entire scene, marking things for the police to take pictures of. There was a woman's hair tie on the ground, tire marks in the dirt, vehicle tracks that came in very close to where she was lying, and then went out again. A forensic pathologist, Dr. Deidre Abrahams, came out to that field. Before the body was moved, she took the temperature, the bodies, and the airs, and she worked backward from the difference to estimate when this person had died. Her estimate was that morning, that this woman died somewhere between four o'clock in the morning and nine o'clock, but most likely around half past six or half past seven, to be more precise, which meant that when those two men drove up on that road that morning, they had been roughly an hour too late to do anything, to stop her murder, to witness her death. And I'm not saying that this was a near miss or anything like that, but it was cutting it close to when this murder occurred, which is just tragic to think about. A sergeant got to the scene, looked at that rock nearby, and nobody at this point connected it to anything yet. It was just a rock in a field, and that field happened to have a deceased body in it. But the sergeant made a decision that morning that turned out to matter later on. He said that it should be collected, bagged, booked, taken in, because it might have been used in the commission of this crime. Even though when you looked at it visually, it did not have any blood on it or anything like that, this was the 82-pound rock that was put on top of the borehole. Impressions of the tire tracks were taken, and somewhere in the middle of all of this, the head of the detective branch in Stellenbosch arrived. His name was Colonel Damon Benecke, and he had a young woman dead in the field with no vehicle, no witnesses, and a farm road that ran to nowhere. And while he was standing there, he heard about something else that happened that morning. He heard that 20 miles away, in a residential suburb outside of Cape Town, a young man had climbed over a wall into someone's backyard at dawn, covered in blood, screaming that people had tried to kill him. We know that's Jesslyn. It's a first-of-its-kind plan, created for how Texans actually use energy. TXU Energy. Rep number 1-0-0-0-4. And I think you already know that the body in this field is Hana, but they didn't know that yet. They had two incidents, 20 miles apart, roughly around the same hour, two separate emergencies in two separate districts, being handled by the TXU. Two separate sets of officers. So, of course, the communication there isn't going to happen right away. And in that moment, they stopped being two cases, though. Because Ben Aki sent an officer to go and find out what this young man had to say. Then he got in his own car and he drove out to that house, where it happened, to walk the property himself, to work out exactly where this young man had come over that wall. And somewhere between those two scenes was Hana's Volkswagen City Golf. And as of that morning, Hana was in the car, and she was in the car, and she was in the car, and she was in the car, and she was in the car, and she was in the car, and she was in the car. And as of that morning, Hana was in the car, and she was in the car, and she was in the car. Nobody had any idea where it was. Well, someone did. Faith is all they needed. And I mean a woman named Faith Sheldon. She had been driving down North Pine Road, heading towards Bracketfell. It was about half past eight, and as she drove, she saw something happening on the street ahead of her. There was a young woman, and there were two men, one on either side of her, grabbing her bag. Faith Sheldon did not just drive past. She watched the two men break away and run towards a car that was parked on the side of the road. It was a blue Volkswagen City Golf with white striping down the side. They got in through the rear doors, and one of them on each side, and she could see two more men already sitting in front. And then Faith did something that most people, if I'm being honest, would not usually do. She drove her car at them. She tried to block them in, and I was stunned in a good way that she did this. They drove straight at her. She had to reverse to get out of the way, or they would have hit her. And she didn't stop. She followed them. She got close enough to read the license plate. She wrote it down. And she called it in to her neighborhood watch. Not the police, but she was doing what she could. She saw them drive off in the direction of Bernardino Heights. Then she turned around, and she went back to check on the young woman. I know what you might be thinking right now. Hannah. But it's not. Hannah was already dead. This happened approximately the same time that those workers were discovering Hannah's body. This was a different young woman. Her name was Enkomisu. She was a 20-year-old young woman who had been walking through North Pine that morning, when she noticed a blue city golf park near a church. As she walked past it, she remembered four men sitting inside. Then she saw two of them get out, and she started to feel that feeling, like she was being followed. But every time she turned her head around, there was nobody there. She was wearing high-heeled boots, so when she tried to cross the street, she looked around, and she saw two men sitting in front of her. She saw two men sitting in front of her. She looked back, and she fell. At this point, they were right behind her, and one of them reached in the front of his pants. And that's a gesture that you make when you want someone to believe that you have a gun. As she's falling down, her bag goes into the middle of the road. She gets up. She runs across to a park, and she saw the men take her bag and go back to the blue car. Hannah's car. These men took her bag, her cell phone, the SIM card that was in it, a pearl necklace and earrings, her wallet, her bank card, and. another, like, clothing store card from her wallet. Basically, anything in her possession that they found valuable. They made her take off her jewelry before she was able to actually get away from them. But Faith Sheldon was able to find this poor woman. She took her to a friend's house nearby, and they called the police. And the two of them waited together. And Kumisa was crying. She was in shock. And Faith said she was shaken as well. And at that moment, at half past eight in the morning, three separate things were happening within 20 miles of each other: a body on a farm, a survivor in a hospital bed, and a plate number written down by a stranger who chased a car that she had no reason to chase. She just wanted to help. But that was all it was. A number on a piece of paper in a suburb 20 miles from a farm in a completely different police district reported to neighborhood watch, not even to the police. And then that car just disappeared. And for the next five hours, nothing. And that car just disappeared. No sighting, no report, no cameras, no witnesses, just some men in a stolen Volkswagen with another woman's blood on their clothing driving around Cape Flats through the middle of a Saturday. And nobody who could have stopped them ever saw them. They didn't know where they went, and what they did in those hours would not be known for a long time. But the car surfaces again, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, in Kales River. A woman named Mimi October was walking from a shopping center to a taxi. She saw this blue Golf pull up beside her. A man got out of the back on the left side, and he was holding what she believed was a firearm. He told her not to make a sound, and he told her to get in the car. And she did. She said afterward that she complied, because she was scared. They put her in the back seat between two men, and there were two more in the front. The man on her right, she said, was asleep. They asked her for her bank card and her pin. And the man in the front was sleeping. The man in the front was sleeping. And the man in the front passenger seat asked her whether she had money, and then asked her for her number again. The man on her left demanded her wedding rings, her cell phone, and her bank card. She actually had two phones on her that day, though. They found one, and they took it. The other one was still in her jacket pocket. They drove to a gas station back in the direction they had just come from, and they parked away from the gas pumps. The man from the front passenger seat gets up, goes into the store, and a little while later, the driver follows him inside. And then sitting in the back seat of the stolen car between two men, Mimi notices her second phone is buzzing in her pocket. And guess what it was? A notification from her bank that a thousand rand had just come out of her account. The man who had pointed that gun at her heard that phone buzz too, and he took it. The two men came back from the gas station, get in the car, and they drove off. She said that they finally let her out at a four-way stop on Broadway. Now remember that road, because what she had no idea about at the time, and no one but the killers knew, is that this is where Hana had been attacked earlier that morning, before being driven out to that field nearby. After the men drove away, Mimi went straight back to the gas station to block her SIM card and her bank card. By the time she managed to do that, they had already moved on to another gas station, and then another, and they kept withdrawing money, until the bank stopped them. At the end it was 3,000 rand, just under 200 US dollars. She had been in that car for 15 minutes, and when she got out of it, the last thing she could have known is that she was the third person forced into that blue Volkswagen City Golf, and the second one to get out of it alive. And speaking of getting out alive, Captain Loosh, who I introduced you to in the beginning, had been at the hospital speaking with Cheslin that morning, not knowing Hana was found already by another agency. These two people were not connected at the time. Loosh spent hours beside Cheslin, who at that point could barely speak. Recall what I told you? That he was only able to provide minor details in his first statement. It was sparse, that he and a friend had been sitting in her blue Volkswagen City Golf parked in a parking lot right across from his apartment complex, when out of nowhere, four men just appeared and hijacked the car. That was everything he had. And he was driving back to town after his meeting with Cheslin at the hospital. And somewhere on that road, Captain Loosh sees a blue Volkswagen City Golf. And of course, at that moment, he's investigating a hijacking. The car is the reported item. By the time Loosh was driving back, that golf was the single most wanted object in his active investigation. So he starts following it. He calls in the plates. This happened sometime mid-morning. So probably after leaving the scene of Hana's body. And after robbing Ankamisa. But before they picked up Mimi and forced her inside that car and used her pin to steal that money from the ATM. But since it was a gas station where the ATM was used, police were already working to obtain the footage from that exact station that Mimi had run back to to report the crime. What happens next was at 2.27 p.m. So roughly an hour and a half after Mimi's encounter. An officer sees the blue Volkswagen, puts on his lights behind it, and it speeds away. What followed was a chase through the outskirts of Stellenbosch with his blue hatchback about the size of a Honda Civic, 30 years old, being pushed as hard as it would go. With a police car behind it, and then more than one. They finally turn up. And they turn off onto a farm road. And I'm probably going to pronounce this wrong, but it was called Dorsen-Dywig, which means something close to right in the way. And ironically, there would be something in the way. A gate. This, again, is wine country. It's in Devon Valley, just outside of Stellenbosch. And the road running to it is a dirt track between vineyards. And that was the end of the line for this car. Because that farm road turned into farm land. And there was the gate and the security guard and nowhere left to drive. The gulf came off the track and stopped in the grass. Two men get out and they run. One of them ran towards the river. And an officer, Constable Siko, went after them on foot, through the water, and finally caught them on the other side. This was 32-year-old Vernon Wittboi. The second man got further. He made it onto the farm. And he went somewhere in the vineyards. And for a while, the officers searching could not find him. But then some of the farm workers pointed. They had watched the man run past them and hide. And when the police came through, they showed them exactly where he was. An officer was able to pull him out. This was 27-year-old Geraldo Parsons. Now there were two men in custody by mid-afternoon. And a blue Volkswagen City Golf abandoned in the grass at the end of a dirt road, which police could now actually get their hands on. What I thought was ironic about this part was that Captain Loosh was called out to that exact farm where the blue golf was sitting in the grass where these two men had left it. Now the captain is staring at it. And the work begins. He had seen it on the road, called it in. It was just, everything was coming together. An officer went through the inside of it. They swapped surfaces. They collect what was in there. Hair fibers, bits of grass, vegetation that had come from somewhere outside in a field and patches on the ground. And on the floor under the front passenger seat, there was a knife. Outside of the car on the left-hand side, officers picked up the neck of a broken bottle and a can of spray. Fingerprints were lifted. They were able to see what was going on. the outside of it, but none of it meant anything yet. That car had been driven for 11 hours across two different districts, and at that moment, nobody could say where it had been. And the two men that they captured were now taken to be examined by a doctor. That's routine. When you get arrested in South Africa, apparently they document your injuries, they take samples of your DNA, and they also record the condition that you're in before you can argue about it later when it goes to court, if it does. One of the two men was standing there with his hands behind his back, and the doctor said, what are you holding? He had a set of wedding rings, and he had some condoms, and he had a torn page from a French language textbook. Kind of odd. My first thought was, this probably came from Hanna's car, because she was studying languages with humanities. The doctor also documented something else on both of these men. Fresh scratches on the first man behind his left ear, on the second man behind his ear, and on his cheek. And these were not old marks. They weren't healed. They were fresh, like they happened that day. By that evening, police had a third man. Officers had gone to a house in a neighborhood in Stellenbosch after a tip came in. They searched it, and he was found inside of that house, hiding under a mattress. This was 28-year-old Eben Van Niekak. The next man was arrested. His name was Nashville Julius, 29 years old. Four men, 24 hours. But here's what those arrests did not give them. An account of the night after Hanna and Cheslin were taken. Not one of these men was saying anything about what happened between 3.40 in the morning and dawn. And the only living person who had been in that car for the first part of it was in a hospital bed with a fractured skull. Unable to name a single one of them. Unable to say where he had been driven. The car was recovered. The men were in cells. But they needed more. And the farm outside of a paintball club on that road that I told you to remember, Badaway Road, was still yet to be connected to both where Cheslin was found and where other crimes these men committed occurred. And then there was poor Hanna. The medical examiner, the same one that came out to the scene, Dr. Abrahams, took her back to Cape Town for a full autopsy. The student affairs department contacted her parents. Now, in South Africa, Hanna was in a hospital bed with a fractured skull. And the medical examiner, Dr. Abrahams, formal identification is normally done by a family member at the mortuary. So I'm assuming that's what happened in this case. But it's part of the story that no one has ever told because they can't unless they were there. We don't know who told her parents, what words they used. Were William and Hanna Cornelius told together? Or did one of them find out first and have to tell the other? Had they already spent the day wondering where their daughter was, trying to find the dashboard of that car that had been driven across two districts and abandoned in a field? None of that exists except in the minds of those involved. And I think that silence is worth sitting with because it's the only privacy that this poor family got. This case spread far and wide. There's one thing Hanna's dad William would say much later that tells you what he was carrying that day. A year and a half later, when the trial was underway, he didn't attend. Not the opening, not the evidence, not a single day of it until the very end. And when he finally did, he stood up in that courtroom and the first thing he did was apologize for not being there. He explained why though. He said that the officers investigating his daughter's murder had taken him through the docket before the trial began, walked him through every single thing done to Hanna item by item because that's what had to happen. And he said he did not want to go through that evidence again. He didn't want to hear it a second time. Because by Sunday, this case was everywhere in the news. The Afrikaans papers ran it on Sunday morning. A young woman killed in a hijacking in the Winelands. And the town of Stellenbosch, this small, wealthy, beautiful university town where people say the crime is mostly property crimes, had to look very closely at what really happened on Bird Street at half past three that morning and what it was connected to. They didn't speak publicly at first. But three days later, on the 30th of May, one of them did. Hanna's uncle, Dryas Cornelius. He gave an interview and spoke for all of them. He said Hanna's parents were, of course, devastated. He said the family couldn't get past the same question that everyone else was asking. Why? What was the reason for her killing? They already had her car. They'd taken her friend as well. And they seemingly tried to kill him too. Just seemed to him that they just wanted to kill. And then he talked about Hanna's brother. He was 18. He was not able to understand what he was being told. The uncle said he assumed his nephew would never really know. He said you could tell him what happened to his sister, but he would still never stop asking when she was coming back. That week, the university started saying goodbye. On the Wednesday evening, they held a memorial inside Irene, the woman's residence where Hanna had lived. 321 women had lived there. At the start of the service, they handed out ribbons in black and white. And one of the residents explained the two colors. The white was for peace and humility and innocence and youth. The black was for grief. They read out messages that people had written. And one of them said, we were 321 because you were here. You are Irene. I am Irene. Irene is all of us. And without you, I don't know. Someone described her as a flower child with the red shoes and afterward they went outside and planted seeds in the garden by the dining hall. The next day on Thursday the 1st of June they marched. Students and staff walked through the middle of Stellenbosch. The women of Irene handed out black ribbons along the way. They went down Victoria Street and Merriman and they kept going until they reached the block of apartments on Bird Street, the parking lot where Hana and Cheslin sat talking. They stopped there. They sang Amazing Grace and they stood in silence. That evening there was a vigil and on Friday the 2nd of June at 11 in the morning they buried Hana where she had grown up. The building was full. A friend from high school named Karen stood up and said that Hana was a ray of sunshine who brightened every single day she was alive and that she was the purest soul on the planet. A student named Ryan who had known her as well said Hana didn't have one bad bone in her body and the only way he could honor her was to remember everything. Good about her. Even the former mayor came out. He said he was there as a concerned citizen and as a parent and that the child being buried that day could have been anyone's child and when it was over motorcyclists came past the church. Nobody in that family had asked for this. They came anyway and they rode past in tribute and Hana's parents stood outside and watched them. William raised his hand and gave them a peace sign. Cheslin Marsh wasn't there. He couldn't be because he was still in the hospital with a metal plate in his arm and a fracture running through the base of his skull. He had no idea yet that he was going to be deaf on one side for the rest of his life. He'd been asking about Hana since the morning they brought him in and now I'm going to tell you what Hana's autopsy found. I'm not going to go through every detail because there is just no version of this that will serve anyone and I want to be respectful but I also want to tell you that I'm not going to go through every detail because there is just no version of this that will serve anyone and I want to be respectful but I also want to be respectful. I also want to balance that with the truth. But there were findings here that told the police what kind of crime this was and that's really important. The first thing was the sequence. Hana was stabbed before she was struck. There were two deep penetrating wounds to the left side of her neck. One of them went through the soft tissue and muscle and perforated one of her left arteries all the way to the level of the cervical spine. Dr. Abrahams classified that as a fatal wound on its own. The second went through the gland between her jaw and contributed to her death through blood loss. Those wounds came first which is why there was so much blood on the ground where she was found because at that point she was alive. Her heart was still working when those wounds were inflicted. And then there were two smaller cuts as well. A shallow one to her left earlobe and another to her left shoulder. And then there were head injuries. Dr. Abrahams described them as severe blunt trauma to the face, head, and skull. The base of her skull was fractured. Dr. And those fractures ran forward into the eye sockets, the nasal cavity, and the mouth. There was also tearing on her brain and a brain stem. Her finding was that this was consistent with a minimum of two heavy blows to the head. One delivered from side to side with the head resting on the ground on her right ear. And one from the back to the front with the head resting on her lips, forehead, and her right cheek. She was face down on the ground when they struck her. Dr. Abrahams found the cause of the injury as follows: Dr. Abrahams found no evidence of blood aspiration. And what this meant was that Hana had not breathed in any of the blood that was in her airway. The doctor's conclusion from that evidence was that her death was actually instantaneous after the first hit. Upon that injury, there would have been no breathing, no further brain activity, no circulation, and no heartbeat. But what she did suffer through was everything before it. Because the rest of what Dr. Abrahams documented is a record of a person being held down. There were those oval bruises I told you about on her upper left arm, the shape that a hand makes when it grips. There were more of them on her lower arm and several overlapping. There were three on her right wrist and her forearm. Those ones, the doctor said, had been made through her clothing. Some of them were inflicted while she was alive and some of them as she was dying. There were scratches and abrasions across her thighs, her knees, and her eyes. Dr. Abrahams found no evidence of the cause of the injury. Upon that injury, there would have been no breathing, no circulation, and no heartbeat. Upon that injury, there would have been no breathing, no circulation, and some of them as she was dying. across her thighs, her knees, and her abdomen. A pattern of bruises on her chest, on her left thigh, and a set of scratches with debris in them consistent with lying face down on the ground. It's a lot. It's a first-of-its-kind plan created for how Texans can enjoy their summer. TXU Energy. Rep number 10004. There was also blood on both of her hands and underneath her fingernails. The examination also established that she had been raped. I'm going to keep this brief and clinical, but there was extensive injury to the genital area, abrasions and bruising that Dr. Vicks was bruised on both sides. And the doctor even said that these injuries were the kind that were extremely painful. There was also sand. Sand found inside her and outside. Consistent, the doctor said, with being on the ground with forced penetration and with resistance. And there were two more things. The first was that her underwear was never found. Not on the farm, not in the car, not anywhere. And no one has ever accounted for it. And then the second is the smallest detail in this entire case. There was a cord. Of Hannah's jacket that was tied around her neck, but it was loose. There was no strangulation in this case, but somebody tied it. And at some point, for some reason, they just left it. So this is what the police had by the end of the first week. It's brutal. Here's a young woman who had been held down by more than one person, raped on the ground, stabbed twice in the neck and left bleeding. She was killed face down with something heavy in that field outside a town where she was where she went to university. And now they had four men in custody. And they still had no idea where any of this happened. But I said, remember Bowery Road. After the arrest, nobody was talking. And there was a stretch of roughly four hours from 20 to four in the morning until sunrise that no witness, no camera, and no officer could account for. But one person could. Cheslin. Over the days that followed, in pieces, he told the detectives what those hours had sounded like. Because that's mostly what he remembered. The sounds. Because now he did remember he was put in the trunk of Hannah's vehicle. The car drove out of Stellenbosch and towards a road on the outside of town. And at some point that road ended and he knew they were on gravel. And then it stopped. The man sitting on his left got out, told him to go to the back of the car. They opened the small trunk area of this hatchback and they forced him to get inside. And he was able to get inside. And one of them told him to take off his shoes. So he did. He got in. And then they closed it. He said afterward that he was in shock. And that it felt claustrophobic. And that he felt helpless. That's the language that he used. And that he could hear people talking inside of the car. But he couldn't see any of them. He heard them say something about going to a gas station. They drove for a long time. And then the car stopped. And the trunk opened. And one of them was standing above Cheslin, showing him to someone else. They were both just standing over the trunk. And then someone frisked him. They took his vest. They took his bank card. They took the diamond earrings out of his ears. And they asked him for his card pin. Cheslin gave him a number. But it was the wrong one. They shut the trunk and they drove away. And not long afterward, the car stopped again. And Cheslin heard the doors open and then close. And he heard one of the men say, got what they were looking for. Then he heard whistling and the click of a lighter. And he knew they were smoking. They stopped again. And then at one point, someone hit the trunk from the outside and told Cheslin he'd given them the wrong pin. And they seemed very angry. And then they drove again. And then they stopped again. And this time, somebody asked a question in Afrikaans. Do you want to go inside and smoke? And somebody answered that they couldn't leave the girl alone. So everyone got out. Can you imagine being locked in a trunk and hearing all this and not being able to do anything? Cheslin didn't know where they were. He didn't know how long they were gone. He was lying in the dark in a small space, listening to a conversation he couldn't see. And the only thing that told him anything was who wasn't speaking, Hana. But later, he heard them all get back in. And that's when he finally heard Hana's voice. She asked them where they were going. And he said, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't even know where they were going. He said that her voice was soft. And it was frightened. Cheslin said he could hear in it that she was scared. And that's the last time he heard her voice. They asked him through the trunk how much money he had in his bank account. He told them, I only have 50 rand. That's about $3. The car stops again. Someone comes to the back, opens the trunk, looks at Cheslin and says, you have nothing in your bank account. Now they're on gravel again. Cheslin said, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. The car stops again. A few minutes later, someone comes to the back and they yell through the trunk that there's nothing in Cheslin's bank account. And they're off driving again. And that when they're on a gravel road. Then the car stops, the trunk opens, and there's two men standing over him. They told him to get out and come with them. They walked him to a field. They kept going until they reached a tree, and on the ground under that tree were a pile of bricks. They told him to put his head on top of them. He looked up at these two men standing over him and saw them each holding a brick in their hand. He said he closed his eyes, and he prayed. And that's the last thing he remembered, but it was a lot more than what he gave them when he first arrived at that hospital. His next memory is the sun starting to rise. He's lying in a field that he had never seen, in a place that he couldn't name, with no shoes, no phone, no idea whether the men who had done this to him were still nearby. But he found that he could stand up, so he did. He looked around, to see where he was, and he went to the nearest wall he could find, and he climbed over it. So how would detectives solve this case? Well, they started with what they could hold in their hands. The first thing was the ground. At the farm that morning, an officer had made those impressions of the tire marks in the dirt, the tracks that came in close to where Hannah was lying, and then went out again. Once the blue golf was in storage in the police custody, they took the impressions, and they matched them. So that was the first thing. In this case, it didn't tell you who did anything, but it put that specific car on a specific patch of ground, just feet away from where Hannah was found. Then the car itself started giving them things. And I want to make sure you remember who the men are that are in custody, because their names could be a little hard to recall. We have Vernon, Geraldo, Eben, and Nashville. Okay? Are you following? I'll put the words on text on the screen, so you can kind of remember, with their faces. But there was a palm print that had been lifted from the left rear panel of the car. And when it was compared, it matched to one of the men in custody, Geraldo Parsons. From the orientation of the print, you could tell how he was standing when he left it. He was at the trunk, leaning on the back of the car. Other prints came in from off that vehicle, and Parsons was a match to release one of those as well. So that put him there with the car. Now inside the car, they found Vernon's DNA on the inside, on the left front door handle. And then they found Vernon's DNA on the inside, on the left rear window handle, and on the mouthpiece of a drink bottle. On the floor under the seat, there was a cheap folding knife that you could buy pretty much anywhere in South Africa. Geraldo's DNA was on the handle of that knife. And Hanna's DNA was on it too. And then came the wedding rings. The ones that were stolen from Mimi's hand. Those had been in Vernon's possession when he got arrested. Along with cell phone, cash, condoms, a lighter, a plastic bag, kind of used to sell substances. And then they found Vernon's DNA on the inside, on the right front door handle, on the left front door handle, on the left front door handle, and a random torn page out of that French textbook I told you about. They also found a Mandrax tablet on Geraldo when he was arrested. That is an illegal, highly addictive sedative drug. Interesting, right? And then the men start talking, not to each other, but finally to the detectives separately over the following days. And there's one thing you need to understand about all of this. Every man who talked, put himself inside the car. Not at the field with them. Not on the farm road. In the car. Sitting. Or waiting. Or smoking. Or being told about what happened afterward by somebody else. So distancing themselves from the crimes. Four men were in that vehicle. According to those men, none of them did anything wrong. Ebbin said the least. He admitted that he had been walking with the others in the early morning hours when one of them spotted people inside of a Volkswagen Golf. He said he couldn't dispute being with them, but he hadn't committed a crime. And then he asked for a lawyer. Nashville, Nashville said the most. And he could afford to because his account ended before anything else began. And it was true. He left before the Volkswagen even took off with Hannah and Cheslin inside. He described meeting the others, walking into town, watching at least two of them take the car, rob Cheslin of his phone and 40 Rand, look for the keys, and then he walked away. Geraldo said nothing. He sat in silence for eight minutes. He said nothing, but he was in silence for 18 months. And then there's Vernon Wittboi. He sat down in front of a camera in an interview room and talked for 113 minutes. And it seemed like he wasn't holding back. He described going into Stellenbosch to see what they could find. That they intended to go to a completely different set of apartments to rob someone. But then they stumbled upon that blue Golf with two people inside. And then they went to the police station and they found two people inside. But just like the other said, it wasn't him that did anything violent. He said when Cheslin was beaten, Vernon was in the car with the girl. Sadly, he said, she wasn't even trying to get away. If anything, to him, she seemed frozen in fear. He said he couldn't help but notice the way she was sitting perfectly still. She was staring directly ahead, not looking out the windows during the drive, not looking at her captors. She was like an animal that was frozen on the ground. She was like a dead man after sensing a predator, hoping not to be spotted, except she had already been caught. It's horrific. I just kept thinking this poor girl. Vernon claimed the others came back half an hour later and told him they tied the man up. And Vernon said he didn't violate the girl either. The others did. But he told them a location. He said it happened at a paintball club in a secluded area on Bottleway Road. While he sat in the car smoking. And the murder, Vernon said, that took place in the vineyards. That the men came back without Hannah and told him they tied her up and that the farm workers would just find her the next morning. But we know that's not what happened. So three times, Vernon says he's in the passenger seat, not involved, but he knows about the crimes. He cried during this recording, but not from the horror inflicted. He cried describing the police chasing him. And I'm not surprised. But here's what that confession cost Vernon. To tell his story, even one that entirely was just to save himself, he had to describe where this happened. And the places were real. So the police asked him to show them. Vernon led detectives to two locations. The first was in a field at Bernardino Heights on a dirt road by a sewage plant. This is where Cheslin Marsh had been walked to, to that tree. And put his head on a brick and left to die. Police hadn't found that place yet. Cheslin couldn't tell them where it happened because he arrived in a trunk. The second location was Reapers Paintball Club on Bottleway Road. Nobody had mentioned it yet. It wasn't in a single statement or witness account. And there was no reason on earth for these police to look there. But that's exactly why these men chose it to begin with. And that was the moment that this case took a turn. Because a man trying to talk his way out of a murder charge walked the detectives onto the ground where the attack on Hannah happened. Specifically the rape. Once they were standing there, the detectives brought in dogs trained to detect human bodily fluids. And on the ground, the dog reacted. Technicians then went over. They collected what was there on the ground. Condoms, condom wrappers, right there in the dirt. After more testing, they had more evidence. Inside one of the condoms was DNA. Can you guess whose? Vernon Vitboy himself. The man who had just told police that he was sitting in the car smoking the entire time. Liar. You could have guessed it. Two more condoms had the DNA of Geraldo Parsons on them. On the outside of one was Hannah's DNA. They also matched a fingerprint on one of the wrappers to Geraldo Parsons as well. And the swab taken from Parsons' body after his arrest had Hannah's DNA. And then there was Eben Nikak. Nothing. His DNA matched nothing tested anywhere in this entire case. Just keep that in mind. We're going to come back to it. And then the footage arrived from the two gas stations and from a battery shop on a street corner in Stellenbosch. A camera that had been recording the whole time that nobody had looked at for weeks. A camera that was right in front of her car. It showed the four men crossing a road at 29 minutes to 4 in the morning. It showed them walk past the blue gulf. It showed Nashville turn his head and look right at the camera. It's like they didn't even care. They weren't worried about what they were about to do. And it showed them come back, the doors open, Cheslin being pulled out and put in the back. And it showed Nashville climb out again, search the ground and the base of a tree for four minutes. And it showed them walk away at 17 seconds past 3.38 a.m. Seven minutes from the doors opening in that car to that car pulling out. Everything Cheslin Marsh had told police from a hospital bed. While the doctors were still describing him as confused, he had been right from the first day. The gas station footage gave them Vernon twice and also gave them something else. What they believed is the last sighting of Hannah herself. The first gas station that they pulled into. I'm going to play this footage for you. They said that she was wearing a beige jacket, but from what I can see, to me, it looks red, but this would have been where she was. she was sitting so this most likely is her. I didn't know if they were possibly talking about something next to the person that's sitting in the passenger seat or not because if she was in the middle then we would only be able to see maybe this little light part here and that was part of her jacket but it's chilling either way. Vernon was on camera two times at 20 past four in the morning standing at an ATM in Cheslin Marsh's stolen vest on his body and dark track pants and then 10 past one that afternoon at a different ATM in the same vest but different pants so at some point along the way he changed clothing and then there were the phones. An analyst mapped Hannah's cell phone activity against the tower in the area. Her phone hit at 4 31 in the morning and again at 4 32. Two sectors. that faced the gas station where Cheslin's card had been used and then the phone pinged one last time at 58 seconds past 6 52 a.m. from the area where her body was eventually found. That's the final electronic trace of Hannah Cornelius. That was so close in time to when the medical examiner believed she'd been killed. One of the doctor's estimates was around seven o'clock in the morning which appeared to be very accurate. Detectives looking for the physical phone found it. Somebody was using it with a different SIM card and apparently they'd either found it or it had been sold to him and then on the 6th of December more than six months after he climbed over that wall Cheslin Marsh walked into what's called an identification parade at a prison. It's what we know as a lineup and he was able to pick out two men. Vernon Vitboy who he said was in the front row of the prison and he was able to pick out two men. Vernon Vitboy who he said was in the front passenger seat who took Cheslin's seat and then there was Nashville Julius the man who was sitting on his right. For the first time ever Texans have an energy plan that combines free nights all year with daytime summer savings. You get free nights every night all year long plus a 25% bonus toward your daytime use all summer. It's a first of its kind plan created for how Texans actually use energy. TXU Energy. Rep number 10004. In the back seat and had gone through his pockets. So this is what the state had. All four men had pleaded not guilty and it's not surprising at all. The trial started in October in 2018 in the Western Cape High Court in Cape Town. 17 months after that morning where Cheslin jumped over that stranger's wall. And I want to thank you for that. I want to thank you for that. I want to tell you how they behaved in that courtroom. These men. Because several journalists who sat through it wrote the exact same thing. They were laughing. While they watched each other testify, they laughed like something was funny. They looked at the witnesses and they looked at the reporters and they just gawked at them. And that's when Cheslin Marsh walked in. He was 22 by then. He had had another CT scan not long before this. And that was the one that told him that he was going to be deaf in his left ear. It wasn't just his left ear. It was his left ear. And he was going to be deaf in his left ear. And he was not going to heal. He hadn't been able to go back to college. And he told the court why. He couldn't focus anymore because of what happened to him that morning. He sat down and he had to look at those four men. And the reporters watching him noticed that his eyes kept going to them. He would swallow. He would take a deep breath. And then he would answer. And he told them everything. The car. The hand at the window with the screwdriver in it. Grabbing it. The knife at his own door. And those words. Being put in the back. Hannah on the floor between the seats. The keys that she had hidden. The men getting angry. Her asking them please don't take the car. Because it was her grandmother's. And then the trunk. Taking off his shoes. The sounds. His pin. The wrong pin. Hannah's voice. Small and frightened. Asking where they were taking them. The tree. The dog. And this is where you learn what these men were actually arguing in this courtroom. I'm not going to go through the whole thing. Vernon Vipboy's lawyer argued with Cheslin trying to get him to admit to things that were not true. Things like Vernon said he opened the passenger's door and he pulled him out of the car. But he didn't have a knife. Cheslin said he did. Then the defense said that Vernon never threatened to kill Cheslin. Cheslin said he did. The defense said Hannah sat alone in the front passenger seat and Vernon was in the back. Cheslin said no. And the defense kept going. Saying Vernon was not one of the two men standing over him with a brick. Cheslin said he was. And then the two surviving women testified. One of which was so terrified they had a hard time finding her. She didn't want to be before those men in a courtroom. Mimi October testified too. More than a year after two men had put her in the back of that same car at gunpoint. The court noted, that she was still crying and still scared. I mean, I think anyone would be under those circumstances. And then it was the pathologist's turn. And when she was finished, the defense stood up and asked her nothing. Four separate legal teams were working on four separate defendant cases and not one of them asked a question. Nobody in that room disputed a single word about what was done to Hannah Cornelius. And then Geraldo Parsons took the case. He was the only one of the four who actually testified. And after 18 months of silence and blaming everybody else, he did something nobody expected. He told it straight. He said they had been walking around town looking for someone to rob that night. He said stealing a car was his idea. And that he gave Vernon the knife. And that he lied to Hannah when he told her they had stolen the car. And that he had stolen the car. And that he lied to Hannah when he told her they everything. Putting Cheslin in the trunk, the dirt road by the sewage plant, where he admitted he was looking for a rope to tie Cheslin up. But Vernon took him into the field instead. And Geraldo also described how he found Cheslin face down on the ground with Vernon standing over him holding a brick. He said Vernon told him they had to kill Cheslin. And at first, he actually thought Vernon was joking. And then there was the paintball club. Geraldo said he just wanted to kill Cheslin. He drove there because he knew nobody would be there. He said Vernon handed him a condom and told him that Hannah agreed. Agreed to it? Geraldo actually asked Hannah to confirm it. But then he said he could just see the fear in her eyes. And he was the one that forced himself first. He said afterward he actually cried. Because he had a girlfriend and children and he didn't feel good about what he had just done. And then Vernon took his turn and then Eben. He described putting Hannah inside her trunk afterward and driving out to the farm and pulling her out while she was fighting the entire time. Geraldo also said that it was Eben who stabbed Hannah in the neck to stop her from resisting them. And that blood came out so fast that he jumped backward to get away from it. And then he just let go of her and she fell to the ground. Vernon then kicked her in the stomach. And came back with that stone and slammed it on her head. He showed the court using both of his hands how Vernon did this. They actually brought that rock into the courtroom. He looked at it and he said that was the one. He said Vernon told him afterward they had to kill her because they already killed Cheslin. But that didn't happen. They're just so cold and it's so heartbreaking. But then the prosecutor got up and he said, I'm going to kill you. And he said, I'm going to kill you. And it was his turn to cross-examine Geraldo. And this is where the case came apart entirely. Because Geraldo had said it was too dark out there to find a brick. So how did he see Cheslin lying face down and see Vernon lift a stone over his shoulders? Then he said he raped Hannah standing up outside the car. So why did the pathologist find sand inside her body? He said he only did it once. So why were there two condoms on the ground with his DNA on them? He had fresh scratches behind his left ear. Another one beside his left ear. Then he decided one on his left cheek that the doctor said looked exactly like a fingernail mark and three more on his right hand. He said he got them working at the vineyards. Do you believe that? He couldn't explain what happened to Hannah's underwear. It's never been found. He couldn't even explain how her student card ended up at a train station miles away. He was asked why. Why does he rob people when he has a steady job? His answer was that was part of life. Part of life. What about part of death? Part of murdering an innocent person over what? And then the prosecutor asked him about the plan. His own account was that they wanted to get rid of Cheslin and Hannah so they could sell the car without raising a red flag. So why not leave them in the same place then? Geraldo had no answer to that. But the prosecutor said it plainly. You separated them because you knew you wanted to have your way. With Hannah. There was one more witness. She wasn't a police officer or an expert of any kind. Her name was Alicia Johnson. She was Geraldo Parsons' girlfriend. They had two children together, the ones that he supposedly cried over after what he did to Hannah. Alicia testified that on the evening of May 26th, she had given Geraldo a hundred rand. He and Edmund went off to smoke and she went out for the night. The next afternoon, Geraldo still had not come home, so she walked over to Edmund's house to ask him where her boyfriend was and she found him standing in his front yard in front of a fire. She asked, where's Geraldo? And Edmund didn't answer. So she asked, what are you burning? And he told her he was burning his clothes and his shoes because they had blood on them, that he had been involved in a robbery. Remember this was the man where his DNA didn't match anything? Well, there you go. Now you know why. And on the 7th of November of 2018, the judge finally delivered her verdict. Vernon Vitboy, Geraldo Parsons, and Eben Van Niekak, guilty on all 10 counts. Robbery, kidnapping, attempted robbery, attempted murder, rape, and murder. The robbery and the kidnapping of the two other women on the same day as well. Nashville Julius was guilty on four counts. The robbery of Cheslin and Hannah and the kidnapping of both of them because he walked away. The cameras even showed it. But the judge made the point that none of what followed could have happened if the two of them hadn't been taken in the first place. And Nashville helped take them. He wasn't some bystander. He was a perpetrator who left early. When the verdicts were read, the courtroom actually cheered. I know this was a lot. And I learned a lot more that I'm not going to tell you about these perpetrators, their struggles with substance abuse, their home lives, their education levels, or lack thereof, their mental health conditions. Whether they were under the influence or not, what they said about what they had done in letters that one of them wrote to Hannah's parents. But honestly, after thinking about it, I'm going to spare you the details. Because as I'm sure you are aware, when sentencing happens, their attorneys are going to paint them in the most positive light. And I'm just disgusted. And I don't want to discuss anything positive about them. They're monsters to me. So I'm going to leave sources below. If you care to get to know them and their stories, I just don't care right now. On Monday the 12th of November 2018, the judge handed down the sentences. But I have to tell you something first. Both of Hannah's parents are dead. The lawyer and the judge, both successful raising their family. By the time sentencing happened, Hannah's mother had already been dead for 8 months. She never got to know the outcome. But at the sentencing, the person who spoke was Hannah's father. He hadn't attended a day of that trial as I told you. But he stood in that courtroom and he apologized for that. He couldn't hear it a second time. He was wearing a white rose pinned to his jacket. And then he talked about Hannah. He said he suspected every parent believes that their child is exceptional. And that he and Hannah were no different. But that almost from birth, Hannah had been different. From what they thought was normal. No feeding problems. No terrible twos. He said he and his wife had been so proud of her. She had little interest in money or things. No prejudice about race or religion. Or where a person came from. She was a remarkable child on the cusp of becoming a remarkable woman. And then he said the thing that ended up in every newspaper in the country. He said that it was his belief that his family died when Hannah died. And that it was his belief that he was buried a short time later when his wife walked into the ocean and never came back. Yes, his words. And of course there are a lot of rumors about what really happened. Hannah's mother's death was considered a tragic accident. But Hannah was a good swimmer. She enjoyed hiking and she swam regularly at the same beach where she died. William has never used the S word to describe what happened to his wife. But he did say that he believed she may not have had the physical or mental strength left to cope with losing her daughter. He said me and my son are not a family. We're the survivors who live in the ruins of what once was. And then he told the court about his son. How he would hold a picture of his sister. And every night for a year and a half he asked the same question. When is Hannah coming home? Aren't the holidays over yet? How heartbreaking is that? William asked the court for one thing. He asked for a sentence that would stop another family going through what his had. Here's what each of the perpetrators got. Vernon Vittboy, two life sentences plus a further 115 years. Geraldo Parsons, two life sentences plus 115 years. Evan Van Ueckak, two life sentences plus 128 years. And Nashville Julius, who had walked away, 22 years. So, is it justice? You tell me. Then it was just William and his son left. William had been diagnosed with cancer about three months after Hannah's murder. So this poor family had lost so much. A journalist met with him in 2017 and stayed in touch with him. And she wrote about him after he died. She said that after his wife died, he mostly slept downstairs in his study, surrounded by the books that he loved. She said that he still had a remarkable sense of humor. That once, while he was smoking a cigarette, he said, "what more can I lose?" It's morbid, but it was true. And William died at his home on the 9th of December in 2022. He was 64 years old. He only lived five and a half years after his daughter was killed, which leaves Andres behind, Hannah's younger brother. He needs full-time care and he's now looked after at his center a couple hours outside of Cape Town. The story, it doesn't have a happy ending, but it does bring me back to the man who climbed a stranger's wall to get help, Cheslin Marsh. He was 21 years old on the 27th of May in 2017. He was studying theology and he simply went to a party with his friends, walked a girl to her dorm, and then let her drive him back to his apartment because she wouldn't take no for an answer because she wanted him to be safe. Five years later, Cheslin went back to university. And he enrolled in a three-year program at the University of California. He enrolled at the University of the Western Cape to study law. What happened to him inspired him to do so. In 2022, he was in his third year of his law degree. And a journalist who interviewed him for a documentary about Hannah's case had actually quietly paid for Cheslin's second year of law school. And then he set up a page online to help cover the rest of his tuition. And he made a point of saying that Cheslin never asked him to do that. 110 years later, Cheslin is still in his third year of law school, and he is in his fourth year of law school. Cheslin is still in his fourth year of law school. Cheslin is still in his fifth year of law school. Cheslin is still in his sixth year of law school. Cheslin is still in his seventh year of law school. Cheslin is still in his eighth year of law school. Cheslin is still in his ninth year of law school. Cheslin is still in his eleventh year of law school. Cheslin is still in his eleventh year care. I think that's initiative. And for all the support they've been giving me for the past five years, I really couldn't have done anything without you guys. And for that, I can never, never, never thank you guys enough. Now here's the part where I always feel compelled to end with something that we can learn from a case like this. Something that could have been done differently. A rule that you can follow so that this doesn't happen to you. But I don't have anything. Because look at what Hannah actually did. She stayed sober enough to drive home. She parked outside of a friend's building in the middle of a small university town. She sat there for 15 minutes having a conversation with a friend. And the reason she was in that car is because she refused to let him go home alone. She was being careful. She was being careful about her friend. And I think it's worth asking why we go looking for a lesson. Because I catch myself doing it. We do it because if we can find the thing that someone did wrong, then maybe we'll be safe. Did she make a mistake? Maybe we won't. But the decision that killed Hannah Cornelius was made in someone else's head. The men who truly have no conscience. They only cared about money. They were setting out that night to rob someone before they even knew that Hannah existed. They just hadn't come across anybody yet. There's nothing to learn. There's only sorrow. And I'm sorry to Hannah and her family. And I do thank you as always for being here for her story. I'll see you in my next video. Bye.