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- A former Crime Intelligence officer has been found guilty of murdering his ex-girlfriend.
- She was shot in the head, leaving her eight-year-old daughter confused over why her mom would not wake up for her crying baby sister.
- Thando Faku tried to pass it off as a bizarre hijacking.
A former Crime Intelligence officer was found guilty of murdering his former girlfriend in Cape Town in a judgment handed down by the Western Cape High Court on Tuesday.
Thando Faku was found guilty of shooting Wendy Papu once in the head on the couch of the home she had moved into two days before the shooting on 10 January 2019.
Faku was also found guilty of attempting to defeat the ends of justice when he told an implausible story that Papu was shot by men who hijacked him, stole his wallet and gun, forced him to take them to Papu, then shot her.
After that they put him in the boot of his own car and dumped him in the veld.
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Judge Constance Nziweni also found him guilty of assaulting Papu the year before her death, on her birthday in an incident where her daughter had pushed him off her while he was slapping her mother.
"It seems to me the accused adjusted his testimony as he was going," said Nziweni when she handed down judgment on Tuesday.
She said he told a bizarre story of being on his way to visit Papu for the first time at her new home, to take her money.
As he was approaching the backyard dwelling in Khayelitsha, two or three men hijacked him and forced him to take them to the person he was visiting.
Faku said he heard a shot go off in Papu's home, and then later, he was stuffed into the boot of his car and eventually pushed out in a veld.
He managed to walk to the Mfuleni police station to get help. He told colleagues what happened, and they went to Papu's home to check on her.
Nziweni found his defence implausible and began the day with a synopsis of the evidence before her.
She said Papu had just moved into the backyard dwelling with her eight-year-old daughter and two-month-old infant she had with Faku.
On the night of the murder, her landlord said he heard someone knocking at her door from his bedroom less than 2m away and heard her ask who it was.
The reply was: "It's me, Thando."
He later heard a noise that sounded like a chair bumping against something and drifted off to sleep.
He was woken twice during the night by the sound of Papu's baby crying but thought nothing of it.
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Another neighbour thought he heard the tell-tale bang of something going wrong on the electricity box outside, and while standing in the stillness of the night, Faku walked past him alone, got into a black VW Golf and left.
The following day, Papu's landlord was woken by the sound of people speaking English in his yard, and the unmistakable crackle of a police radio.
When he went out, Papu's daughter was at the locked security gate of her mother's dwelling crying, holding her baby sister, who was also crying.
She told the police who went up to her:
The little girl struggled with the keys to open the security gate, while she held the baby and eventually passed them to one of the police officers to open it for her.
When she saw her mom's former boyfriend, Faku, about to enter with the police, she started saying "no… no… no" and did not want him to go inside.
The court heard evidence that during their relationship, Faku would hit Papu, and on one occasion the little girl pushed him away from her to make him stop.
When the police walked into the home, they were confronted with what the eight-year-old had to deal with in the early morning hours while she tried to wake her mom to attend to the crying baby.
Papu was slumped on the couch, with brain matter showing on her head and on one of the walls of her shack.
The police were suspicious about Faku's hijacking story because nothing was stolen from either Papu, or from his Golf, which was found near dunes in Strandfontein.
With an eight-year-old child and a baby as the only potential witnesses inside the house, it would be a difficult case to prove.
Nevertheless, prosecutor Kepler Uys presented a case that Nziweni ultimately accepted.
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She found the witnesses who testified credible and honest, compared with Faku's selective memory.
She said he even placed himself at the crime scene by saying the mystery hijackers forced him there.
"It really boggles the mind," added Nziweni.
Once found guilty, Faku's bail was cancelled, and he will remain in custody until he is sentenced.
He had a clean record until Tuesday's convictions.
In a poignant silence, with a woman in the public gallery weeping softly, Faku gave his lawyer his wallet and cellphone.
After a few minutes of scuffling, while he was bent over in the dock, he rose again and gave his lawyer his shoelaces as a sign of acceptance that his next stop is jail.
Sentencing proceedings begin on 24 October.
