Alibi is an award-winning, South African true crime podcast. The first series is about a man who may have been wrongfully convicted for 17 years. Anthony De Vries was convicted for double murder and robbery under apartheid. But he might be innocent.

When we first meet Anthony, he has already served 17 years for his crimes. We investigate if the claim of his innocence is right. Has a man been locked-up wrongfully for most of his life? And is it somehow linked to the cops who put him inside?

Shoot-outs, a cash-in-transit robbery, car chases and deception form the backdrop of an intriguing series of South African encounters with apartheid cops, remorseful lovers and bank robbing brothers.

We begin in 1994 (outside a DVD store) and end in the present day, with Anthony still holding on to the desperate hope that somehow, justice will be served.

The Alibi story starts with Paul bringing to Freddy what he thinks could be a wrongful conviction case. It is about a man called Anthony De Vries and he has been in jail for 17 years.

In the second episode we have a panga fight, find masses of brotherly love and uncover an important deception that could sabotage the whole series…

For episode 3 we visit the crime scene in Vereeniging. The crime, an early morning cash-in-transit robbery at a Checkers supermarket, resulted in the murder of two security guards. The changes and similarities of South Africa then and now become incredibly apparent in this episode.

The shoot-out happened in front of the video store, piercing the glass beside posters for Sylvester Stallone’s dodgy mid-nineties movie Cliffhanger. The clerk working that day at Video Check had to duck down behind the counter as the shots were fired. The owner, for years afterwards, used posters for each month’s new releases to cover up the bullet holes so they were concealed from customers.

For episode 4 we spend a morning in a Wimpy eating bacon and eggs, witness a man shoot an AK-47 from a moving car back at the cops and find a second set of statements, ones that never made it to trial, that give us a completely different picture of the case.

The fifth episode takes a deep look how a man was tortured by police in order to figure out if he was innocent of murder. To do this we meet Rebiki Joyphus Moremi. He lives in Davyton, an East Johannesburg township.

Moremi now offers his time as a private investigator, but used to be an internal investigator for the police, so he spent his time looking at the crimes of other cops. He is a man who can reveal information to us about certain police atrocities he worked on during the nineties and specifically the case of Anthony De Vries.

In the sixth episode, we go to court and finally get to see Anthony face-to-face. We are also put into a spiral as we try to understand an injury he suffered over twenty years ago. What we discover reframes the extent that evidence can be manipulated, and how paperwork – even from doctors – can lie.

In episode 7, we finally track down where Anthony’s co-accused have been all these years. What we discover makes it more astounding that he was ever convicted.

The names of his co-accused were Steven Mkwanazi and Calvin Collins. Since the start of the investigation, Anthony has said he only met his co-accused on the day of the arrest. This was specifically on a patch of field beside a car crash where the police collected and photographed their suspects. Though there is no blood on Steven and Calvin, they look like they are in their mid-twenties and are standing on a grass bank on a beautiful, sunny March afternoon.