Let’s be honest, Bros. Who among us hasn’t had this happen? You hire a team of hitmen to kill your wife, paying them thousands of dollars. They tell you the job’s done, the body disposed of in a way it will never be recovered. You, pretending to be grief-stricken, throw a funeral for your now deceased wife.
But afterwards, as people are departing the wake, she confronts you, having avoided the assassination.
It’s, like, Mondays, am I right?
That … fortunate … unfortunate (I’m not sure which) scenario befell Balenga Kalala of Australia this past year. Now he’s in jail. From the Australian Broadcasting Company:
Balenga Kalala, who arrived in Australia in 2004 as a refugee, paid almost $7,000 to a group of kidnappers to kill the mother of his three children, Noela Rukundo, when she was attending her stepmother’s funeral in Burundi in early 2015.
According to The Washington Post, after the funeral of her stepmother, she was taken at gunpoint into a van, then to a strange room where a group of men told her her husband sent them. Except the contract killers got cold feet.
They weren’t going to kill her, the men then explained — they didn’t believe in killing women, and they knew her brother. But they would keep her husband’s money and tell him that she was dead. After two days, they set her free on the side of a road, but not before giving her a mobile phone, recordings of their phone conversations with Kalala, and receipts for the $7,000 in Australian dollars they allegedly received in payment.
As we all know, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned (and attempting to kill your wife is the ultimate scorn), so she immediately began planning her “Gotcha, bitch,” moment.
Shaken, but alive and doggedly determined, Rukundo began plotting her next move. She sought help from the Kenyan and Belgian embassies to return to Australia, according to The Age. Then she called the pastor of her church in Melbourne, she told the BBC, and explained to him what had happened. Without alerting Kalala, the pastor helped her get back home to her neighborhood near Melbourne.
Meanwhile, her husband had told everyone she had died in a tragic accident and the entire community mourned her at her funeral at the family home. On the night of Feb. 22, 2015, just as the widower Kalala waved goodbye to neighbors who had come to comfort him, Rukundo approached him, the very man whose voice she’d heard over the phone five days earlier, ordering that she be killed.
“Surprise! I’m still alive!” she [said].
Kalala initially denied any involvement, because, yea, what else would you do, but eventually came clean. His confession was recorded by Rukundo, who was wearing a wire provided by police, and he was arrested for incitement to murder.
Kalala was found guilty and sentenced to nine years in prison this December.