Pretoria - A Pretoria woman has two weeks before she hears her fate after she was convicted of murdering her husband and another man.
Portia Tsotesti, 30, is facing life in prison for participating in the murder of her husband Nzimeni Sithatu in February 2012 and Dumisani Ngubeni in May the same year.
Ngubeni is a man she had hired to kill Sithathu. He then started blackmailing her for more money after the murder was committed.
Judge Tati Makgoka said he would hand down sentence on February 1 and would have to consider substantial and compelling circumstances presented before him in court.
Tsotetsi is said to have conspired with three men to have Sithatu killed.
It is alleged that she drugged Sithatu and then called the three men who might have suffocated him and then hanged him in the bathroom to make it look like a suicide.
Tsotsetsi claimed she had taken a sleeping tablet that night and went to bed. When she woke up, she said, she discovered her husband hanging from the ceiling in the bathroom.
Police treated the incident as an inquest as they investigated the alleged suicide until one of the men suspected of being behind the murder was found in a river with 19 stab wounds.
The man - Ngubeni - is said to have taken part in Sithatu’s murder and kept the bedding where Sithatu was murdered and used it to blackmail Tsotesti.
Ngubeni was killed on May 16, 2012, after Tsotsetsi called him to her home after “agreeing” to pay him for his silence. When he arrived, she and Stanley Dube overpowered him and stabbed him to death.
They then wrapped his body in a blanket and used a bakkie to dispose of the body in a river.
Dube was also convicted of murdering Ngubeni.
The third accused, Motsamai Mahlasela, was a diagnosed schizophrenic, but died of unknown causes before the conclusion of the trial.
On Tuesday Tsotetsi testified before the court in mitigation of sentence.
“If it was possible to open my heart I would open it and show it to the Sithatu family,” she said.
Asked why she killed her husband and Ngubeni, she said she could not explain it.
At first she said she wanted to apologise for wronging the two families for her involvement in the murders of their relatives, but later changed her statement.
“I do not admit that I killed them but I am sorry for what happened.”
When questioned further, she said: “As I listened to the witnesses testifying I saw that I was involved because my name was mentioned, so I was involved,” she said.
Prosecutor Annelie Coetzee deduced from this that she had not taken responsibility for her actions, nor was she remorseful.
Coetzee told the court that in certain cases it would be justified to give a woman who had killed her husband a lesser sentence if she, for example, had been sexually, verbally or physically abused by her husband, but Tsotetsi’s case was different.
“In this case there was no evidence that she was abused by her husband. He seemed to be an upstanding citizen. This for her was not an impulsive decision.
“She looked for people over a number of weeks to kill her husband.
“She also helped stage the suicide which misled the police. She participated in the crime,” Coetzee said.
She was described as a danger to society.
Her defence counsel, Joshua Mojuto, said the fact that she was a first-time offender and that she was very young should count as a substantial and compelling factor to be considered for a lesser sentence.
He added that Tsotetsi, at the time of her husband’s murder, had just found out that her husband had secretly been taking ARV medication for HIV and that she herself had been infected by him and had been diagnosed with depression.
Coetzee said she had never told any of her accomplices that her infection by her husband was the reason she wanted him dead.
“She never mentioned any of that. Instead she told (the hitmen) that he was leaving her and he wanted to take everything and she could not have that,” Coetzee said.
She added that there was no evidence suggesting that she got the virus from her husband and she had never said to anyone that she resented her husband for infecting her.
Tsotetsi and Dube will hear their sentences on February 1.
Pretoria News