Online Reporter
Danisa Masuku
Double murder convict, Rodney Tongai Jindu stood before a Bulawayo High Court Judge yesterday for re-sentencing and broke down as he received two life sentences.
Jindu committed the callous murders of his two friends in 2017, for which he was initially sentenced to death. However, following President Mnangagwa’s abolition of the death penalty last year, a re-sentencing hearing was mandated. For each murder count, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
His legal representatives, Bob Sansole and Dixon Abraham, conveyed their client’s remorse for the double killings, portraying him as a reformed individual who now dedicated himself to reading the Bible and had turned to religion.
They argued that Jindu had spent his time in prison assisting fellow inmates with literacy. The lawyers suggested that should he be granted a pardon, he would be willing to offer compensation to the families of the deceased.
Representing the State, deputy prosecutor general for the Southern region, Mrs Tariro Rosa Takuva, argued that the accused had committed two murders under severely aggravating circumstances, both of which were premeditated. Mrs Takuva pointed out that the second count involved the murder of Cyprian Kudzurunga during the commission of a robbery.
In delivering the sentence, Justice Nokuthula Moyo stressed that Jindu had committed the offences in aggravating circumstances by fatally shooting his victims. The Judge also noted his apparent lack of compassion and failure to express remorse, highlighted by his not sending emissaries to apologise to the parents of either deceased. She deemed his courtroom apology an afterthought.
Justice Moyo dismissed Jindu’s defence that he was under the influence of drugs when he heartlessly murdered his two friends, stating that he did not deserve to be part of society, having begun a life of crime with such extreme acts.
She further stated that the murders were committed using a dangerous weapon, a firearm, and involved the mutilation of body parts. Shockingly, the whereabouts of these body parts remain unknown. Mrs Takuva described this as the most heinous type of murder committed under aggravating circumstances.
This publication first reported the chilling details of his cold-blooded murder of his childhood friend, Kudzurunga, a young man of just 28, whose remains he heartlessly buried in a shallow grave on a property in Bulawayo’s affluent Burnside suburb.
Jindu disturbingly confessed to investigators that he murdered Kudzurunga out of fear — the fear of exposure. Kudzurunga, it was alleged, had inadvertently discovered evidence of Jindu’s ritualistic murder of Mboneli Ncube. In a calculated attempt to conceal his horrific actions, Jindu even sent a deceptive message to Kudzurunga’s mother, impersonating her son and falsely claiming a sudden departure from the country.
While the public was still reeling from the sheer horror of this revelation, Jindu, already a figure of morbid fascination both within Zimbabwe and internationally, committed another atrocity, plunging the nation into further despair. He chillingly recounted to detectives from the Homicide division how a cross-border transporter had approached him, offering a gruesome exchange: US$20 000 or a Toyota Quantum vehicle for the body parts of Mboneli Ncube. This grotesque proposition, he claimed, ignited his desire to murder his friend, Mboneli, a 30-year-old, who lived just four houses away in Bulawayo’s Glengarry suburb.
Shortly thereafter, he delivered Ncube’s lifeless body to the transporter, who proceeded to remove the head, hands and both legs, leaving Jindu with the torso. This he placed in a plastic bag, transported on a wheelbarrow to the same plot in Burnside and there, with chilling indifference, burnt and buried the remains in four separate shallow graves, mere metres from Kudzurunga’s final resting place. The gruesome discovery was swiftly reported to the police, triggering an urgent manhunt that led to Jindu’s arrest.
With a disturbing lack of remorse, Jindu led detectives to the scene, where the fragmented remains of Ncube were exhumed. When questioned by Homicide detectives, he confessed to the dismemberment. Following this horrifying revelation, he was brought before the court.
His initial court appearance in 2018 was marked by macabre drama as he openly confessed to shooting his two friends and the unspeakable act of consuming their flesh. This prompted Justice Moyo to order a psychiatric evaluation by two state doctors to ascertain his mental state under the provisions of the Mental Health Act.
“The accused person’s conduct is prima facie bizarre and abnormal. It is for these reasons that the court finds it fit that a mental examination be conducted to rule out any possibility of mental issues. This will allow the court to proceed to try the accused person after having been satisfied that he is mentally stable,” ruled Justice Moyo.
Following that, armed with a medical report certifying his mental soundness and fitness to stand trial, he returned to court. He appeared before Justice Moyo again, and during his initial trial appearance, he confessed to hiring his two neighbours to dig the graves. He also claimed to have been intoxicated by heroin and methamphetamine, a synthetic stimulant at the time of the murders.
However, Justice Moyo ultimately rejected this defence, convicting Jindu on two counts of murder with actual intent, committed under aggravating circumstances. In delivering the sentence, Justice Moyo deemed capital punishment the most fitting and appropriate for Jindu’s heinous crimes.
