Well, this made my day and it wasn’t even 9AM. It’s actually an ugly story but the resolution is just too good.
Basically, a man pays hit men to kill his wife. They don’t do it for various and sundry reasons, let her go and she attends her own funeral and surprise her husband.
First, some background:
A Melbourne man has been sentenced to nine years' jail for having his de facto wife kidnapped at gunpoint in Africa and trying to have her murdered because he suspected she was cheating on him.
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.
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While Ms Rukundo was in Burundi, Kalala, of Kings Park, was at home looking after the couple's three children and his partner's five children from a previous relationship.
Believing the murder plot had been executed, he told friends that his wife had been killed in a tragic accident while she was in Africa.
She was in a hotel room in Bujumbura, Berundi. She was depressed given that she was there to attend a funeral. She wanted to lay down and rest. Her husband called and strongly advised her to not sleep in the day time and to go out and get some air.
Which she did. And as soon as he left the room she was confronted by a man with a gun who threatened to kill her if she made a sound.
He kidnapped her, put her in car with a blindfold—just like the movies. Drove her around for awhile and then took her to some building and tied her to a chair.
Again, like the movies, they questioned her: What did you do to make your husband want to kill you? She laughed at them and said they were lying. They picked up a phone and a male voice—her husband — said “kill her.”
This is where the movies end:
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 cellphone, recordings of their phone conversations with Kalala, and receipts for the $7,000 in Australian dollars they allegedly received in payment, according to Australia’s The Age newspaper.
“We just want you to go back, to tell other stupid women like you what happened,” Rukundo said she was told before the gang members drove away.
Not exactly gentlemen—but somewhere, rattling around in these mostly soul-less husks was a small kernel of decency, or something.
"We just want you to go back, to tell other stupid women like you what happened," the gang told Noela as they parted. "You must learn something: you people get a chance to go overseas for a better life. But the money you are earning, the money the government gives to you, you use it for killing each other!"
She managed to get assistance to return to Australia. Once there she contacted her preacher who helped her return home and began plotting her revenge.
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 told him in their own front yard.
He had been telling friends in his local African community in Melbourne's west how his wife had died in a tragic accident in Burundi, and they had rallied around him to offer significant financial support to help him and the children.
Ms Rukundo told him, "Surprise! I'm still alive. You are a wicked man. Why did you want me to be killed? What about your small children (aged five, 10 and 11)? Who was going to look after them?"
He lied to the people around him about his wife’s death and they took pity upon him, donating him money for her funeral and such.
While he initially denied all this, she got him to confess to the contract in a secretly recorded phone call and he was arrested and sentenced to nine years in prison.
She now has her eight children to raise alone and she has also had to deal, amazingly, with pushback from the Congolese community that thinks she did something bad by turning her husband into the police, just because he wanted her killed.
And it sounds like she has been dealing with PTSD, if you ask me. With all she’s been through, it's no surprise.
And lying in bed at night, Kalala’s voice still comes to her: “Kill her, kill her,” she told the BBC. “Every night, I see what was happening in those two days with the kidnappers.”
Despite all that, “I will stand up like a strong woman,” she said. “My situation, my past life? That is gone. I’m starting a new life now.”
Wow. I imagine she is stronger after all that.