The Sickening Murders of Logan Mwangi & Hannah Cornelius | Killers Caught On Camera | Forensic Files

[MUSIC PLAYING] MAN (ON PHONE): It just sounds like something bad is happening to her.
WOMAN (ON PHONE): I heard her scream, no. Stop it. MAN: And I heard some gunshots.
POLICE OFFICER: Drop it. Whatever it is, drop it. That is not true that I killed my wife.
WOMAN: We know what happened because the video tells us what happened. MAN (ON PHONE): The camera doesn't lie.
NARRATOR: This time, on "Killers Caught on Camera--" In the UK, a five-year-old boy goes missing
in the middle of the night. As police desperately search for answers. Was he dead or alive?
Was he in danger, or had he been taken by someone? NARRATOR: And in South Africa, a woman is found dead in a field.
There's going to be a point of time where she realizes that they don't intend to let her live.
NARRATOR: As law enforcement piece together the 11-hour carjacking that resulted in her death.
One of the assailants tells him quiet or she dies. [MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: Bridgend Wales.
Logan Mwangi was a five-year-old boy who lived with his mother, Angharad Williamson
and stepfather, John Cole. He was a very happy, polite, chatty, young boy. A little bit cheeky but was very sort of affectionate
and just had a real thirst for learning. Everyone who came into contact with him
just thought he was a really lovely little boy. NARRATOR: 5:45 AM. 31st of July, 2021.
A frantic 999 call was made. Phillip Dewey is court correspondent for "Wales Online."
She woke up that morning, had gone into Logan's room, and he had disappeared. She said she checked the back door, and it was open,
but Logan hadn't taken his shoes or a coat. She said she was absolutely petrified
that he had left the house, was somewhere cold and afraid. NARRATOR: After Angharad called 999,
John and his 13-year-old stepson, Craig, searched the neighborhood, as captured on a home surveillance system.
Within sort of 10 minutes, police officers were on the ground, looking everywhere,
everywhere that Logan might have gone to, friends and neighbors. And John and Craig were out looking for Logan, as well.
NARRATOR: The police needed to get as much information as possible from the family.
Officers asked them to go back to the house. A police body cam filmed Angharad distraught
on the doorstep. Angharad was very upset, as any mother would be in that situation.
It was just about finding out what had happened to Logan. Kirsty Bennett is a criminal psychologist.
When we initially have a child disappearing, our first concern is obviously where is that child
and what's happened to them? And to do that, we have to cooperate with the family, who
are going to be able to give us ideas about where Logan might be. They had the mother, who was beside herself with worry,
and they were having to deal with the aspect of trying to reassure her and calm her down.
Not knowing what happened to this little boy, there was a whole sort of range of possibilities
about what they were facing. Like, was he dead or alive? Was he in danger, or had he been taken by someone?
These were all sort of questions that were still yet to be answered, and the investigation
to find out what happened to him was critical in those stages. NARRATOR: Less than an hour after Logan went missing,
police located him just a few hundred meters from the family home. Two police officers were searching in nearby Pandy Park,
along the River Ogmore, when out of the corner of one of the officer's eye, they saw what looked like a body
floating in the River Ogmore. At that point, one of the officers dived in, got into the river, and retrieved the body.
It was quite apparent from the descriptions that this was Logan. NARRATOR: Logan was pronounced dead at the scene.
Angharad was given the devastating news. The police's initial impressions about what had happened to Logan,
obviously, it looked like he had wandered into the river and had drowned. There was a lot of unanswered questions,
obviously, about how we had come to be in the river, how he had left the house. And police were keeping an open mind at this stage.
His body was taken to hospital and was then sent for a postmortum shortly later.
NARRATOR: While the family were dealing with Logan's death, investigators got to work piecing together what happened.
They started with a key piece of body-worn footage recorded at the house when the police first arrived.
Coral Dando is a professor of forensic psychology. She used to be a police officer and understands detective work.
They are very good at what we refer to as situational awareness. So they'll walk into a situation or a context
and be very cognizant, very aware of what's going on. They don't necessarily acknowledge it,
but it will all have been taken in. What we actually see on the body-worn camera is
the washing machine going off. And that's a bit concerning, because if they're asleep
and they've woken up to find Logan missing, your first step wouldn't be to put the washing machine on.
Unusual behavior when your child is missing, and you're absolutely traumatized. You're grief stricken.
You're hysterical. NARRATOR: The contents of the washing machine raised more questions.
When police looked inside the washing machine that there was bedding that belonged to Logan
that was being washed. NARRATOR: Their story wasn't adding up, but the police still needed more evidence.
They spoke to a number of neighbors to see if they had CCTV cameras on their property
that could be used to see how Logan had left the house, whether he had left on his own or whether there
had been another explanation as to how he came to be in the river. NARRATOR: Emi Polito is an expert
witness and video analyst. Luckily, the police finds CCTV footage of a neighboring property pointing
directly at Logan's bedroom. NARRATOR: Dr. Vasileios Karagiannopoulos is a leading
figure in digital forensics. There is light turning on in Logan's room during the night on multiple occasions,
and it stays on for many minutes. NARRATOR: Angharad told police she went to bed
and slept all night. This footage suggests that there are people awake and not asleep in bed.
NARRATOR: Someone had been busy. Looking at the CCTV, they find out that something else
is going on. NARRATOR: Two figures were seen leaving from the back of the house in the middle of the night.
They appeared to be carrying something over their shoulder and walking up the garden path and then walking
in the direction of the river. At the same time, we can actually see someone opening the curtains in Logan's bedroom.
Given that Logan's mom account was that she's been asleep all night and there was no activity in the property
during the night, clearly the police have now information to suspect that something more sinister
is going on. Detectives wanted to re-examine the 999 call made by Angharad. The CCTV in the daylight, now shows
Logan's mom coming out of the property, making the 999 call. There's quite an emotional response from Logan's mom,
which we would normally anticipate, but she's not really crying. Obviously, the operator was trying to reassure her,
but she was having none of it. And it's very hard to pin her down and get her to engage with the police.
It starts to raise suspicions as to why she's not giving the information being asked of her when
she's so concerned about her child being missing. Obviously, the operator was professional and trying
to cope with the situation. But there just seemed to be something very melodramatic about the way she was acting and possibly,
not quite ringing true. The time of the day is quite interesting, as well, because Logan is five years old.
You wouldn't expect him to voluntarily leave the house during those hours. And because of that time, we'd like
to think the house is secure. It's locked. He wouldn't have access to leave the property.
And that wouldn't immediately raise suspicions at 5:40 in the morning that a five-year-old boy has seemingly
wandered out of the house. NARRATOR: As suspicions grew, the police had another look at the footage of John and Craig
out searching for Logan. People will go incredibly far to try and cover up their crimes, and search parties
are not irregular. Pretending to look for them, pretending to be distraught, all of these can be a package of that sort
of deceptive narrative you're trying to spin, where you're trying to convince other people that you had
nothing to do with this, and you're just an innocent parent who's looking for their loved one.
NARRATOR: The footage in the kitchen became increasingly important. So when police arrive at these sorts of situations,
they have to tread a really complex path, because they have no idea whether on this occasion,
Angharad, so Logan's mother, is actually telling the truth or whether she is acting out a trauma
response or a grief response to the terrible news that her child is missing. So they have to be really careful.
They want to gather information from her, and in order to do that, they need to just let her talk.
Because at this point, there is no concept or no understanding that he is actually dead.
There are elements about her behavior that you can see on the body-worn camera footage that are quite interesting to psychologists,
such as myself. She's screeching. She's howling. She's saying an awful lot. But there are no details.
There's no real information. There's nothing that the police officers can really use in terms of trying
to seek out where Logan is. Are there any verifiable details in her account? And there are very few.
But of course, in a trauma response, that might well be the case. So it's really difficult. And she's also dropping down
to her knees in a traumatic, behavioral sort of way, which I think, she thinks is how a parent in her situation
should behave. You'd expect a mother to be upset and even quite hysterical, but this was sort of something
different. One minute she was wailing, crying for her baby. Next minute, she was acting aggressively towards officers.
Next minute, she seemed to be in denial. People who feel like they're not able to mask their true emotions enough or not
show the right emotion enough, so they don't look sad enough. They don't look concerned enough.
You get someone leaning more and more and more and almost becoming more and more theatrical and more
and more obvious, even though what they're trying to do is the opposite. NARRATOR: Investigators concluded
that the nighttime footage of the two figures leaving the house at 2:43 AM were John and Craig, who carried
Logan's body to the river. A minute later, in Logan's bedroom, it was Angharad who turned the light on and off
and opened the curtains. It was enough to implicate all three in Logan's death. The 1st of August, 2021.
When the police officer starts to arrest her, she turns from being grief-stricken,
hysterical to then starting to lash out verbally at the police officer. How can you think this is me?
How can you even assume that I'd have anything to do with my beautiful child's death, and so on and so forth.
So we get a switch straight away. She's pointing. She's shouting. And this behavior suggests that she's now in panic mode.
What she is now is really, really cross. She's being quite aggressive. She realizes that it's all failed.
It's all coming down behind her. It's very self-preservation. She's very concerned about what's
going to happen to her and her involvement in it, rather than Logan and the circumstances
surrounding his murder. One of the really interesting things that emerges from the footage is this clear performative grief.
She listens to what's being said, and then it kicks off again. It all starts again.
NARRATOR: Angharad couldn't have acted without John Cole. This police officer here is involved
in the arrest procedure. He will be talking, watching, gathering information. He's happy to provide a story, which
seems to be well-practiced. NARRATOR: John's 13-year-old stepson, Craig, was also taken into custody.
While in foster care, he told his foster family that he wanted to kill Logan, who he referred
to as "the five-year-old." Here, we have body cam footage of Craig, Angharad's boyfriend's stepson, being arrested.
He just stands there with his hands in his pockets. He says and does nothing at this point.
The fact that a 13-year-old boy was capable of taking part in such a brutal act was just something that no
one would ever have expected. When you're 13 years old, you literally don't have the full-sized brain that
you will have later on in life. And you are going to make worse decisions overall because you
don't have as much brain. So holding children, who especially are that young, as responsible as adults is always one
of those tricky things to do. And in most parts of the world, we don't. But then we sometimes make exceptions, especially
for extreme things like murder, because we assume even young kids can understand the consequences of something
that extreme. We can never point to a single difference between someone who kills people and someone who doesn't.
But we can look at the risk factors, and in his case, he had lots of them. He had an unstable environment growing up.
He had callous, unemotional traits. He seemed to struggle to adjust into families
and to be part of the family unit. He then was moved into another high-risk situation.
There's just a whole series of things going wrong here for this kid to mature in a normal, healthy way.
NARRATOR: The results of the autopsy on Logan revealed the extent of what he endured in his home.
He had suffered 56 injuries. Among the injuries found on Logan's body was serious injuries to his abdomen,
which had caused a large amount of blood loss. And there was two brain injuries,
which had been caused by blunt force impact in the days leading up to his death.
One doctor said that these sort of injuries were normally seen in people who had fallen from a great height
or in a high-velocity car crash. NARRATOR: Further research revealed the fatal injury was a culmination
to months of suffering. Logan, unfortunately, has a history of abuse within the family.
People have come forward, who know the family, have recounted this abuse. About a year before Logan's death,
he was taken to hospital by Angharad, who believed he was suffering a dislocated shoulder.
In fact, he had fractured one of his bones and was in severe pain. Angharad later told police that she had popped Logan's shoulder
back into place after he had fallen down the stairs and sent him to bed with Calpol.
NARRATOR: It was also revealed that a lack of communication with Social Services resulted in a series of missed
chances to protect Logan. John Cole had a bit of a checkered past. He had convictions for petty crime,
like robbery and burglary and battery. Because of Cole's previous convictions, Social Services became involved of Logan.
He had his own social worker, who sort of would look in on the family. NARRATOR: In the same month that Logan was murdered,
Social Services made one of their regular checks on the family. When Social Services went to visit Logan at home in July,
he had contracted COVID. So he was isolated and didn't get to see him, weren't able to visibly check that he was OK.
We should have had some concern about how is he? What's going on with him? While they described Angharad as overbearing,
they believed that she loved her child and cared for him. At first, suspicious of John and his demeanor,
they came to trust him. Eventually, Logan's case was downgraded and there was no longer a need for as much monitoring
as there had been previously. NARRATOR: Shortly after the visit from Social Services,
Angharad and John applied for custody of John's stepson, Craig. Like John, he also had a troubled past.
Craig became involved with Social Services after he was assaulted by his biological mother, who
was then sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He had been in a number of foster families and in care.
Craig had a history within Social Services for quite inappropriate violent behavior and attitudes
towards his foster carers. He wanted to play murder games with his foster sisters.
He had been torturing the family pet. And the carers were quite concerned about how
that behavior was manifesting. Playing really violent games and fantasizing about murder
or talking about murder, those are the kinds of things in a 13-year-old that can be indicative of something called
conduct disorder, which is what we call kids who sometimes go on to become psychopaths
or develop psychopathy. When you don't really feel the same emotions as other kids,
especially empathy. Four out of five of the kids who have those symptoms will grow out of them,
and one out of five won't. John and Angharad were applying for full custody of Craig.
And despite Cole's previous convictions and Craig's complex needs, he was granted custody of Craig.
NARRATOR: Five days later, Logan was murdered. John Cole was sentenced to life imprisonment
with a minimum of 29 years. Angharad Williamson was sentenced to life imprisonment
with a minimum of 28 years. More disturbing facts came out in the trial about how Logan
was treated by Angharad and John Cole when he was in their care. Logan was made to do press-ups when he was naughty
and that John Cole would sit over him and make sure he completed a number of exercises
in order to punish him. He was also denied food. When the family were having a KFC, because of his behavior,
he was told he wasn't allowed to have food and was just given a bowl of cereal to eat.
Neighbors also described seeing Logan being made to stand outside in the cold with no shoes
on as punishment. And at one point, the social worker discovered that there was a burn on his neck.
The reason given for this was that he had burnt it on a hot bath tap, but Cole later
claimed that Angharad had placed a hot coffee spoon on his neck. In my opinion, there wasn't a shred of remorse between them.
Angharad Williamson continued to be self-pitying and maintained her innocence, while John Cole pathetically
looked at the floor and claimed that he had nothing to do with Logan's death. And Mulligan was sentenced to life
detention in the Young Offenders Institute with a minimum of 15 years. Usually, anonymity is maintained for children
because there is this assumption that the things that you do in your childhood are going to be different than the adult
you're going to grow into, and you shouldn't have to carry that baggage with you
forever because of bad decisions you made with a brain that wasn't fully developed in the circumstances
where you were a dependent, where society is really supposed to be taking care of you.
And so your failures are reflecting on us, as society, not just on you as the child.
And so the fact that anonymity is waived is usually because it's seen as to be so much in the public interest, and it's balanced
against the risk to the kid. And it's seen as more important that the society knows who
this person is than it is that the kid is protected, which is really tricky. The CCTV footage in this case was
the main evidence which led to the convictions of the three murderers. Without that, we would never have known how Logan left
the house, whether he left of his own accord or whether the truth of what happened, that he had been
murdered inside the house and his body discarded by his stepfather and stepbrother.
Again, the footage of Angharad's behavior, as well, was also crucial. It showed that this was not a mother
who was scared for her child. It was someone who was taking part in an elaborate performance to cover
up what had actually happened. When news of Logan's death broke out in the village
where he lived and went to school, the reaction was one of complete horror. The fact that a young, innocent, five-year-old
child had been found dead in the river was horrifying enough. But to think that three people had been arrested on suspicion
of his murder was absolutely horrifying for members of the community. The abuse and treatment experienced by Logan
in the months leading up to his death must have been absolutely horrific. He was a young, small, innocent boy
who was being abused and mistreated by the very two people who were meant to love and protect him and provide
a safe home for him. And he was given anything but that. He must have lived a very lonely and painful
existence during that time. He'll never be forgotten by the community as a very sweet,
young boy who just met the most horrendous end at the hands of those who should have
loved him and cared for him. NARRATOR: Almost every crime now contains some kind
of digital fingerprint. Particularly for homicide investigations, the inclusion of video footage is
considered the gold standard. Local law enforcement agencies often rely on home security, business, and street cameras
to catch offenders who would otherwise get away with it. Stellenbosch, South Africa.
2017. Aron Hyman is a journalist for "The Times" and "Sunday Times," in the Western Cape.
A very typical, small student town. You have these mountains all around you. These rolling hills with vineyards, just this perfectly
quaint little town. NARRATOR: It was also home to 21-year-old Hannah Cornelius. Hannah Cornelius was a young student at the University
of Stellenbosch. She was a wonderful, soft, loving person to her friends and everybody that she knew.
NARRATOR: Kirsty Bennett is a criminal psychologist. Hannah was described by family and friends
as a very empathetic, compassionate, young woman. NARRATOR: Hannah had many friends,
including Cheslin Marsh. He was studying theology. Also, just a young, carefree man,
trying to get through his studies and enjoying life as a young student. NARRATOR: 27th of May.
6:00 AM. A couple woke up to the sound of someone in distress. The owners of the house came out,
saw that this young man was in incredible distress and bleeding. NARRATOR: It was Cheslin Marsh.
He had gaping wounds on his head. He was in a terrible traumatic and emotional state.
They called the police. NARRATOR: Cheslin explained that he and Hannah had been kidnapped in her car by three men.
Hannah, as a student, had a blue VW Golf that she had inherited from her grandmother.
He described Hannah's vehicle, so the blue city Volkswagen, and he described his four attackers.
NARRATOR: Cheslin told them that Hannah was still missing, but the police already had information
about a young woman. She was found at 6:30 AM, on Saturday, the 27th of May, by workers at a nearby farm.
NARRATOR: She had been declared dead at the scene. She was found face down and with severe wounds
to her head and stab wounds to the back of her neck. NARRATOR: With Cheslin's help, the body was
quickly identified as Hannah. Cheslin told the police about the traumatic events
of the night before. Friday nights in Stellenbosch, it's bubbly. It's buzzing. They'd been out dancing.
They'd been playing dominoes. They'd been out for quite a while, having a nice time.
Quite early in the morning, Hannah and Cheslin had left a local bar, got into the car, and Hannah
had actually offered to drop Cheslin back at his home. The two of them parked in a parking lot.
NARRATOR: Police looked at CCTV footage from the night before. You can clearly see this Volkswagen
hatchback standing there. Hannah and Cheslin are in the vehicle at this point. NARRATOR: Emi Polito is an expert
witness and video analyst. Four individuals are walking towards the camera. We can start identifying them in the sense
that potentially, we are looking at four males here. We can even get to the point where
we can talk a little bit about the clothing ensemble and what they're wearing. They appear to come back into view
from a different direction. You can see the men looking at the car while they're walking past it, as
though they're scoping it out. What is it that these guys are doing at this time in the morning?
You can see the men basically approach the car from two directions, both from the driver's
side, where Hannah Cornelius was sitting and from the passenger side. The driver's seat window was slightly open.
Thrusts a hand through, gripping a screwdriver, and he puts the screwdriver with the sharp end
pointed at her chest. Cheslin then tries to grab the screwdriver, and at that point,
another assailant gets into the back seat of the car and opens a flick knife and points it at Cheslin.
One of the assailants tells him, quiet or she dies. I'm seeing random flashes of light which
are suspicious to me, in terms of could this be some request for help? Hannah is pleading with them and telling them,
please take whatever you want but please, let us go. At that point, one of the men walks away, presumably
with some of the stolen goods. And the rest of the three men put Hannah in between the two
front seats, and Cheslin is in the back seat with one of the other assailants, who is armed.
And then they drive off. NARRATOR: The assailants reassured Cheslin and Hannah that they just needed their car.
They just want to drive somewhere, and then they're going to drop them off. And they'll be let go.
Everything will be fine. The next time we see Hannah is about seven kilometers outside
of Stellenbosch on sort of a rural back road running in between farmland. It's quite a quiet place.
NARRATOR: Cheslin told police that they stopped at a gas station. Detectives source the CCTV footage
and found the blue Volkswagen pulling in at 4:34 AM. We see a passenger occupying the passenger seat.
I think it would be quite reasonable to assume that this is Hannah. Between the time that they left Stellenbosch and the time
that they arrived at the gas station, the hijackers had taken Cheslin out of the car
and put him in the boot. One of the hijackers then gets out of the vehicle, and at this point, he's got Cheslin's bank card.
He then walks to the ATM, and he attempts to draw cash inside a shop at the gas station.
This is now a considerable amount of time where this person is attempting to withdraw
money out of the ATM. And I'm seeing different screens flashing and fingers doing all sort of things on the keyboard.
He kind of appears to be leaving the scene deflated and disappointed. Cheslin, he gave the hijackers the wrong PIN code to his bank
card, presumably to buy time for them or perhaps he just didn't want them to steal his money.
This CCTV footage is the last time that Hannah was captured alive. It's clear at this point that the men are becoming
more volatile, more irate. They are angry and aggressive with Cheslin. They take him to sort of a forested area.
They force him out of the boot of the vehicle and order him to lay his head down
on a hard surface on a rock. And two men come and stand over him with bricks broken in half.
And at that moment, he closes his eyes and he prays. And that's the last thing he can remember.
When they get back into the vehicle, Hannah is there with three men, who had taken her.
There's going to be a point of time where she realizes that they don't intend to let her live,
and she is going to die. NARRATOR: The men drove Hannah into some farmland, where she was sexually assaulted.
When we look at certain crimes, we may not have had the specific intention of committing such awful acts, like rape or murder.
But sometimes we work on the opportunity that it's there. It's available. We have a victim that we can offend against.
It's going to be really hard to decide not to take part, because you run the risk of losing
your position in the gang, maybe not being trusted by your peers. So once that decision is made, you've
really got to go with what everybody else is doing. From there, they took a large rock,
and they put her head on the floor. And they crushed her head with this rock, twice.
And then they stabbed her in the back of her neck to make sure that she was dead
NARRATOR: Hannah's body was found and reported a few hours later. But the three men did not stop there.
The men drive around. They smoke drugs. They then kidnap another woman and take her bank card
from her, drive her to a petrol station, and attempt to draw money. She is in the back of the car, when two of the offenders
get out and they withdraw 3,000 rand from her account. They look like they're just going on
about their normal day, going into petrol station, withdrawing money. They don't look agitated.
They look very calm. They look like they've been doing it for a long time, and they're comfortable with it.
It doesn't look like they are improvising or panicking. Just normal business for them.
It shows the lack of remorse and lack of emotional attachment or even understanding what just has happened.
They drop her off and release her, and then drive back towards Stellenbosch. NARRATOR: Police issued a "be on the lookout"
for the blue Volkswagen and three men. Police detective vehicle, driving along a road near
Stellenbosch, actually spots the blue Volkswagen Golf and starts pursuing it, leading
to a high-speed car chase. The detectives pursued them and chased them down a farm road.
These people have got no intention of stopping. They don't care about the damage or hurt that they leave behind.
ARON HYMAN: They basically reach a dead end, and the men jump out of the vehicle.
You can see the detectives chasing two men. At that stage, one of the men had already been dropped off.
And the detectives then apprehend both men as they try to flee into a riverbed. NARRATOR: The two men were identified as Geraldo
Parsons and Vernon Witbooi. They are taken in for questioning, and the police then find out that these two
men had been to prison. They have a criminal history, and they are part of a prominent South African gang.
NARRATOR: The third man was identified as Eben Van Niekerk. A fourth man, Nashville Julius, was also arrested for taking
part in the initial carjacking. Vernon and Nashville gave confessions because the police had convinced them that their friends were
talking. And the police had convinced them that they had credible cases against them.
Those men are just viewing her as an object. She means nothing to them. And there's no concern on their behalf about how she feels,
how she is experiencing that moment, because it's about their own gain and gratification.
It's about October 2018 when the trial starts in the Cape Town High Court. Their demeanor in court was stoic.
They would often smirk and laugh. And when Cheslin had to testify, they tried to intimidate him
in the witness stand. The four men were not really taking things very seriously.
They were laughing, joking amongst themselves. We don't really see them showing any remorse
for the various crimes that they've committed. For the family, that's horrific to know that how they treated
their daughter in her last moments was awful, and they think it's a joke. NARRATOR: The three main perpetrators, Geraldo Parsons,
Eben Van Niekerk, and Vernon Witbooi were given life sentences. They will spend 25 years in prison
without the possibility of parole. NARRATOR: Nashville Julius was sentenced to 15 years.
The CCTV footage was crucially important in this case. Without it, they might not have been able to piece together
some of the key details that basically tied the men to the crimes. And they might even not have been able to verify
Cheslin's testimony. NARRATOR: Cheslin Marsh was left deaf in one ear. It's probably one of the only positives of this whole story
is that Cheslin miraculously survived and that he went on to live a life. He's studying law.
He's married. He's got kids. It must take incredible strength for a person to ever recover
from something like that. NARRATOR: Hannah's family was left with a lifetime of grief.
Hannah's mother started the Hannah Cornelius Foundation in a nearby underprivileged community, which
helps with early childhood development for street kids and kids that come out of difficult household situations.
NARRATOR: A year later, more tragedy for Hannah's family, when her mother went for a swim
in the ocean. She was swept out at sea and drowned, but there's also others who suspect
that maybe the psychological toll was too much for her and that she might have taken her own life.
The murder of Hannah Cornelius had a big impact on South African society. Out of all the women, and especially,
young women, children who are being raped and murdered in South Africa, Hannah's case was, I think,
particularly shocking in its brutality. There were a lot of conversations afterwards about women's rights in South Africa,
about how violent we are as a society, about how patriarchal our society is, how men view women.
And I think there was a lot of reflection from South African society. I think the courts and the police
were sensitized to these sorts of cases. There was a lot of public outpouring. I remember when they were sentenced,
the gallery was full of people who had just come to watch the case. And they cried out in joy, but also, I guess, in anger.
[CROWD SCREAMING] The positives, I guess, is the fact that we started confronting, as a society,
the underlying problems that lead to men going through the criminal justice system
and coming out of the criminal justice system after having served time for the same crimes
that they would like to commit again. But we still have so many lessons to learn from that, because after that,
there were so many other women who were raped and killed in South Africa. [MUSIC PLAYING]
[THEME MUSIC]

A distraught mother makes a frantic call to police to report that her 5-year-old son is missing. Police rush to the scene and begin their search to locate the little boy. After uncovering his remains, they grow suspicious of the family and begin to suspect that the killer could be someone from under the same roof. Then, in South Africa, a young woman and her friend are sitting in a parked car when a group of men kidnap them and steal their vehicle. What ensues is a night from hell for Hannah Cornelius and her friend, Cheslin Marsh that sparks global outrage. Police utilize CCTV footage to map out the disturbing night and locate the vicious group of killers.

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Killers Caught On Camera is a brand new true-crime series with a voyeuristic twist: video footage from home security cameras, CCTV, and dashcams take center-stage, helping detectives catch perpetrators in moments of criminal intent to acts of pure evil. Family members of victims and law enforcement provide first-hand accounts of how these chilling events unfold while experts like Criminal Psychologist Dr. Julia Shaw dissect the darkest corners of the mind.

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Brief Summary

Logan Mwangi and Hannah Cornelius faced tragic deaths linked to family abuse and violence, revealing systemic failures in protection and justice.

Key points

The Disappearance of Logan Mwangi. A frantic 999 call reveals a mother’s worst nightmare as her son goes missing.
The Discovery of Logan's Body. Police find Logan's body in the River Ogmore, raising more questions than answers.
Uncovering the Truth. CCTV footage reveals suspicious behavior by Logan's family, leading to a deeper investigation.
The Tragic Death of Logan. The community was horrified to learn about the murder of a young boy.
Hannah's Kidnapping. Cheslin Marsh describes the traumatic events leading to Hannah's disappearance.
The Brutal Murder of Hannah Cornelius. Hannah was sexually assaulted and murdered by her kidnappers, shocking the nation.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

She said she was absolutely petrified.

A mother describes her fear after her child goes missing.

2:46WatchMar 16, 2023

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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