An Australian woman stunned her husband by showing up during her funeral.
Noela Rukundo sat in a car outside her home in Melbourne watching the last few mourners file out before getting out and confronting her husband.
He put his hands on his head in horror.
“Is it my eyes?” she recalled him saying. “Is it a ghost?”
“Surprise! I’m still alive!” she replied.
The reason he was so shocked? He had paid to have her killed.
He gave a team of hit men thousands of dollars to kill Rukundo, his partner of 10 years, and they assured him they carried out the plot.
The ordeal went down when Rukundo traveled to her native Burundi to attend her stepmother’s funeral.
She was in her hotel room that night, when her husband called and recommended she step outside to get some fresh air.
When she did, a man approached her, pointing a gun. They took her to a building and had her listen in on a conversation between them and her husband, Balenga Kalala.
“I heard his voice. I heard him. I felt like my head was going to blow up,” she said. “Then they described for him where they were going to chuck the body.”
In the sentencing, Chief Justice Marilyn Warren said the crime involved a breach of trust.
“Had Ms Rukundo’s kidnappers completed the job, eight children would have lost their mother,” she said. “It was premeditated and motivated by unfounded jealousy, anger and a desire to punish Ms Rukundo.”
Kalala was sentenced to jail, with the possibility of parole after serving six years---a shorter sentence, the judge said, taking into account the fact his first wife and child had been murdered in the Democratic Republic of Congo when he was 24.