Married Shoba found guilty of murder of pregnant girlfriend
Despite a request from the court to contain their emotions, friends and family of slain mother-to-be Tshegofatso Pule couldn’t help cheering loudly from the court gallery when Nthuthuko Shoba, the father of her unborn baby, was convicted of her murder yesterday.
Many also wept afterwards. “They’re tears of relief,” her uncle, Tumi Katake, said. “Everyone is emotional. And they are not just emotional because he has been found guilty but also because it has been a tough road.”
Pule, 28, was found dead in Durban Deep in June 2020. The aspirant beautician had been shot in the chest and hanged from a tree. She was eight months pregnant at the time.
Last year, Muzikayise Malephane, 32, confessed to the crime but said he was acting on orders from Shoba, also 32, who had offered him R70 000 to kill Pule as he didn’t want his wife to find out about their relationship.
Shoba was arrested and charged with murder and defeating the ends of justice – to which he pleaded not guilty. At trial, Shoba admitted to visiting Malephane in the lead up to Pule’s death but claimed he was buying cigarettes during the tobacco ban.
In handing down his ruling, Wilson said this explanation “may safely be rejected as false” – pointing to testimony from a friend of Malephane’s and his former partner that he had not been selling cigarettes. “I do not accept that Mr Shoba’s visits and telephone calls were about the purchase of cigarettes,” the judge said.
“There is no evidence that they were about anything other than arranging Ms Pule’s death.”
Malephane’s testimony was that he had picked Pule up from Shoba’s house on the night he killed her under the pretence that he was an Uber driver Shoba had arranged. Shoba told the court Pule had arranged her own lift. Asked if he wasn’t concerned about who was picking her up, he said she knew him. Wilson found this was “insufficient”, as Pule had vocalised concern that Malephane was drunk.
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