The wheels of justice sometimes grind at a snails’ space, but it does turn and eventually catch-up, as a former Flying Squad officer, Edward Kennedy Fox, discovered after murdering his wife 10 years ago.
Fox was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in October 2017 for the 2014 killing of his wife Che Rudelle Fox. She was hit by a single bullet while in their bedroom.
Fox subsequently appealed his conviction before the Gauteng High Court Pretoria and he was granted bail pending the outcome of the matter.
Judge Anthony Millar, in a judgment concurred by two more judges, on Thursday turned down his appeal and ruled that it was time for Fox to face his life sentence. Judge Millar gave him 48 hours to report to prison, and if he did not, the SAPS were given the green light to arrest him and to take him to prison.
The judge commented that the delay in the hearing of the appeal was in part caused by the need for the record of the actual trial to be reconstructed. After the reconstruction, a question remained as to whether or not the appellant was satisfied with the reconstruction.
In the early hours of the morning of November 6, 2014, Che Fox (the deceased), the wife of the appellant, was killed. The appellant and the deceased had been married since 2008 and they had two children.
At the time, the eldest (a girl) was seven years old and the youngest (a boy) was aged three years. The appellant worked as a police officer and the deceased in an office.
According to the appellant, on the evening of November 5, 2014, on Guy Fawkes Night, the family had shared a meal, and the children had gone to bed. Fox and his wife had stayed up later watching a soccer match on the television and chatting, before going to bed.
The doors of the house were locked, and all the windows were closed.
During the early hours of the morning the couple were awoken by a loud noise. They sat up and the wife asked her husband what had made the noise. He said that he thought it was probably firecrackers.
He then heard two further loud noises, he told the court. He got out of bed to go and investigate. Fox said he opened the front door slightly and peered outside. It was very quiet outside. He saw that the driveway gate was slightly ajar and he went outside to close it.
While outside to close the gate, his dog had come running back into the property. On his way back to his bedroom, he heard a sound which he described as “water dripping” and which he thought was coming from the bathroom.
When he entered the bedroom and switched on the light, he saw blood dripping from his wife onto the carpet. He saw a wound on her forehead and blood dripping from it. He went to her and shook her, but discovered she was dead.
Fox said he then called the emergency services and ran out of the house to call a neighbour.
When they returned, they found the couple’s son standing in his bedroom doorway.
Fox said while they were walking around the property, he noticed two holes in the bedroom window. His mother-in-in-law and sister-in-law had, meanwhile, arrived and blamed him for killing his wife.
The wife’s mother subsequently testified that the marriage was an unhappy one and that the deceased had told her that she intended to leave her husband.
It emerged that shortly after the incident and before the investigating team arrived, the crime scene was cleaned. Fox maintained this was done on instructions of his sister-in-law.
Judge Millar said it was not in dispute that three shots were fired and that the deceased was struck by only one. It is also incontrovertible that the windows of the main bedroom were closed at the time the deceased was killed and that only two holes were discovered in the window.
A police officer testified that in respect of these two holes, each had been caused by a single bullet passing through it. She was able to match the trajectory of two of the bullets which had struck the wall in the bedroom with the holes in the window.
For the third shot, she had found no hole in the window. She testified the probability of someone being able to fire two shots through precisely the same hole in a window (at night) being so remote as to render it almost impossible.
The ballistics expert concluded that only one round had passed through each of the two holes and that accordingly, since the windows were all closed, the third round could only have been fired from inside the bedroom.
Based on her observation of the position of the entrance wound on the deceased and her position on the bed, the officer concluded that the third shot was fired from within the room and not on the same trajectory as either of the two other shots that had been discharged.
Since the only two persons who were in the room at the time that the deceased was shot and killed were her and the appellant, the ineluctable inference was that it was the appellant who had shot and killed the deceased, Judge Millar said.
Pretoria News