Everson Luhanga
Part 6 of 9
The police officer leading the investigation into Sergeant Rosemary Ndlovu quit the case because it shocked him so much.
- The officer, Constable Bheki Zulu, told the Tembisa Magistrate’s Court that Rosemary was “dangerous and evil.”
- He said he felt so sorry for the victims, allegedly killed so Rosemary could get their insurance payouts.
- “I don’t want to see this woman ever again,” Zulu said, while Rosemary sat across from him in court.
Constable Zulu spoke loudly and angrily, pointing his finger at Rosemary’s lawyer, Gibson Ngobeni. “If you had seen the victims’ families,” he said to the lawyer, “you would never defend Rosemary again.”
Zulu then said of himself: “I was traumatised with the nature of the cases and seeing the people she planned to kill was too much for me”.
Rosemary, wearing a floral dress, smiled as she listened to the testimony, occasionally fixing her hair extension with blue-polished nails. In the gallery there were about 20 people, some of them Rosemary’s family members.
Zulu was part of the team of police officers that trapped Rosemary in the sting which we wrote about in episodes 4 and 5. It was he who arrested Rosemary after she told undercover policemen to kill her sister and her sister’s children.
Zulu said he had been heartbroken when he interviewed Rosemary’s sister Joyce, who Rosemary allegedly planned to murder – along with her five children – in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga. Zulu was particularly shocked at how poor Joyce was – struggling to cope in a small RDP house.
Zulu told the court how later, in Rosemary’s house, he had seen how other family members’ IDs had been sorted together with funeral-policy papers, in what looked like a hit list.
“I visited most of the families and it was very sad to see the pain Rosemary has brought into those families for the sake of money,” Zulu said.
“The ethics of the police states that when you become emotionally attached to the case you are investigating, it is better to hand it over to someone else or else you won’t give the case the justice it deserves.”
So Zulu handed the case to his colleague, Detective Sergeant Keshi Mabunda, who remains the lead cop on this investigation, and helped consolidate all the charges for the High Court.
According to an affidavit by Investigating Officer Mabunda, Rosemary took out at least four insurance policies for her mother totaling R95,000; seven for her sister Joyce totalling at least R25,000 and three for another sister, Nomsanto, for unspecified amounts.
Read: Part 7
