Murder in the dining room

Anyone who has spent time reading the novels of Elmore Leonard or James Lee Burke (or even just spent a few minutes chatting to a detective) will know that criminal stupidity is a much-appreciated tool for solving crimes.

To the Western Cape High Court, then, where Zurenah Smit, and her ex-cop accomplice, are to go to trial next week for their alleged involvement in the murder of her then husband, Stefan Smit, on his wine farm outside Stellenbosch in June 2019.

Smit, you may remember, was shot three times by masked gunmen who entered the house while he was having dinner with his wife and a friend. At the time it was passed off as a farm murder.

The sound of gunshots had barely faded away before, the state alleges, the widow forged her husband’s will to leave the vast chunk of his substantial estate to her and make her the executor — with very little going to his children from a previous marriage.

Murders by familiars are, I’m told, usually about sex, money and, occasionally, revenge. Still, the investigation really galloped across the line when one of the gunmen “came clean” and turned state witness.

Not long afterwards, the widow Smit sought a court order declaring the allegedly forged will as the real deal. Accepting on “a balance of probabilities”, however, that she had had her husband killed, the judge ruled “the bloodied hand cannot inherit”.

That judgment itself is full of grim allegations about how the hit was planned, including such details as where the dog should be kept, lest it bite the gunmen and leave their DNA all over the place, as well as an undertaking from the assassins to not shoot the farmer in the head in case the steel plate in his skull caused a ricochet.

If true, this is banal, dark, evil, soon to be ventilated at length in a tawdry murder trial that sounds like a Leonard story, but isn’t.