#horror – #podcasts – #Kimbyrleigha – @kimbyrleigha –
On the night of May 26th, 2017, two college students went out in a small university town in South Africa. There was music, there was dancing, and at some point somebody got the dominoes out. It was an ordinary Friday night.
At the end of it, they looked after each other. Cheslin Marsh walked his friend back to her residence so she wouldn’t have to cross campus alone. And when Hannah Cornelius found out he was planning to ride a longboard home across town in the middle of the night, she refused to let him. She had a car. It had belonged to her grandmother. She’d drive him. They parked outside his building at 3:23 in the morning and sat there talking with the windows down.
Seven minutes later, that car pulled out of the parking area — and neither of them was driving it.
What happened over the next eleven hours became one of the most notorious crimes in modern South African history. This episode follows it the way the investigation did: from a stranger’s backyard at dawn, to a farm road twenty miles away, to a security camera nobody had thought to look at.
This is the story of Hannah Cornelius. It’s also the story of the friend she was trying to keep safe.
Everything in this episode is sourced from the conviction and sentencing judgments of the Western Cape High Court, contemporaneous South African reporting, and the testimony of the people who were there.
Thank you for letting me tell their stories.
Podcast: Kimbyrleigha