Durban - The wife of a retired Richards Bay engineer, who staged a hijacking so that he could be killed, was convicted in the Pietermaritzburg High Court on Monday.
Judge Rishi Seegobin found Thenjiwe Griffiths, 29, guilty of the murder of 60-year-old Allan Griffiths on January 20, 2006. His body was found in long grass alongside a gravel road in the Winterton/Colenso area.
Proceedings were halted because of load-shedding and will continue on Tuesday.
Griffiths, of Imbali Township, Pietermaritzburg, had her bail revoked and spent the night in jail.
The state said that Allan, an alcoholic, was killed in the hijacking staged by his wife after she had siphoned large sums of money from his bank accounts. He met her at a club where prostitutes touted for business and they got married in April 2005.
Soon afterwards, he wanted a divorce because she was abusive and assaulted him to the extent that he approached a lawyer and obtained a domestic violence interdict against her. Griffiths decided to kill him and, while they were travelling from Gauteng to KwaZulu-Natal, she arranged for people to pose as hitch-hikers. She made him stop and give them a lift. He was later strangled.
Griffiths was dropped off near Estcourt and went to the police station.
She told police that she and her husband had been the victims of a hijacking and that the attackers had forced her to undress and tried to rape her. The car was found abandoned on the N3.
The hijackers were never arrested.
The Mercury