The prosecution in the Jordan Leigh Norton murder trial on Monday took the first step in its bid to link a crucial piece of evidence — a waybill — to accused Dina Rodrigues.
The state alleges that the waybill was left on the scene of the murder on June 15 last year by the three men and a youth it claims Rodrigues paid to carry out the killing.
During Rodrigues’s bail application last year, a prosecutor said an expert had identified her handwriting on the document.
On Monday, Speedfreight’s Western Cape transport manager, Michael Engelman, testified that the company Dulce Lume, where Rodrigues was an administrative assistant, had been a client and that he had dealt with Rodrigues over the phone.
He said Speedfreight gave customers blank waybills to fill in before collections to speed up the process.
Handed two waybill pages found at the scene of the crime, he confirmed they were from Speedfreight, and said the waybill from which they came was part of a batch issued to a Speedfreight driver for the Montagu Gardens area on May 30 last year.
Earlier, another witness, Arendene Fourie, told the court she was good friends with Jordan Leigh’s biological father, Neil Wilson; with Rodrigues, who was then his girlfriend; and the infant’s mother, Natasha Norton, at the time of the murder.
She phone Rodrigues on learning of Jordan Leigh’s death from a friend that day, because she thought Wilson should know and she did not have a new cellphone number for him. She asked Rodrigues to let him know.
Wilson phoned her that afternoon and asked if the news was true. She said it was. He ”broke out crying” and his father took the phone, she said. The father asked her if it was a hoax, and she said it was not.
The next day she went to visit Rodrigues, but ”didn’t discuss much”. Rodrigues was ”quite drawn” and ”looking out the window”.
Rodrigues told Fourie she was upset because Wilson had withdrawn from her and had asked her to go home because he wanted to see Natasha Norton alone that afternoon.
Fourie confirmed Wilson’s earlier testimony that it was she who told Rodrigues there was a possibility that Wilson — who had taken a paternity test — was Jordan Leigh’s father.
”She was upset that Neil did not tell her when he found out,” Fourie said.
Rodrigues told Fourie she would support Wilson whatever he decided, but that if he decided to play an active role in the baby’s life, this support would be only as a friend, not in a relationship.
Asked why Rodrigues said this, Fourie said she thought Rodrigues’s family ”would not approve”, because they were Catholic.
The court did not sit on Monday afternoon because of difficulties in obtaining an Afrikaans-English interpreter for the next witness.
Rodrigues and her four co-accused — Zanethemba Gwada, Sipho Mfazwe, Mongezi Bobotyane and a 16-year-old youth — have pleaded not guilty to charges including murder and conspiracy to murder.
Six-month-old Jordan Leigh’s throat was slit when the accused, allegedly acting on Rodrigues’s instructions, gained entry to the Norton home on the pretext of delivering a package. — Sapa