After the death of baby Jordan Leigh Norton, murder accused Dina Rodrigues told her boyfriend at the time that she paid R10 000 ”for all of it to go away”, the Cape High Court heard on Wednesday.
Rodrigues is accused of hiring four men to slit the throat of the infant in June last year.
The ex-boyfriend, primary-school physical-education instructor Neil Wilson, was called as a witness in the packed court on Wednesday morning.
He told the court that he had had a previous relationship with Jordan’s mother, Natasha, and that Dina was ”very upset, very angry” when a paternity test showed he was the little girl’s father.
”She actually wanted to break up … she didn’t want to believe it. She might have been a bit jealous,” he said.
At about 1pm on the day of the murder, June 15, he received an SMS from Dina saying she needed to speak to him urgently. He phoned her back.
”She said to me that ‘Your baby is dead’ and that she had paid around R10 000 … for all of it to go away,” Wilson said. ”She was very emotional on the other side. I asked her what she had done and why she had done it. I was very upset and very emotional.”
Asked by prosecutor Nicolette Bell what he understood by what Dina had told him, he said: ”I didn’t understand any of it. I thought it was a hoax. I didn’t understand what was going on.”
He said Dina SMSd him about two months before the killing, asking what she could do to ”make it all go away”. He asked her at that time what she meant, but she would not tell him.
The next day, when they reported to police for interviews with detectives, Dina broke down crying in a waiting room.
”She said to me, ‘Oh my God, what have I done? What have I done? I’m going to jail.”’ — Sapa