{"id":223191,"date":"2022-04-28T14:05:42","date_gmt":"2022-04-28T12:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/article\/wife-slain-businessman-unworthy-inherit-court-rules\/"},"modified":"2022-04-28T14:05:42","modified_gmt":"2022-04-28T12:05:42","slug":"the-bloodied-hand-cannot-inherit-court-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/the-bloodied-hand-cannot-inherit-court-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe bloodied hand cannot inherit\u201d, court rules"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"article_body\">\n<p><a class=\"bigger-image\" href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/images\/Third%20Party\/my_trusty_gavel.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-bloodied-hand-cannot-inherit-court-rules.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Currently standing trial for the murder, the wife of Stefan Smit, murdered on Louisenhof farm in Stellensbosch, has been barred from inheriting his estate by a civil court. Photo: Brian Turner via <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:My_Trusty_Gavel.jpg\">Flickr <\/a>(CC BY 2.0)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The wife of Stefan Smit, who was murdered on Louisenhof farm in Stellenbosch, has been barred from inheriting his estate by a civil court.<\/li>\n<li>The murder trial is ongoing and she remains innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt by the state.<\/li>\n<li>But a civil court has found that on a balance of probabilities Zurenah Smit forged documents and plotted the murder of her husband.<\/li>\n<li>Judge Babalwa Mantame invoked the maxim \u201cthe bloodied hand cannot inherit\u201d.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In a novel case, the widow of a wealthy Stellenbosch farmer has been declared unworthy to inherit from his considerable estate. A civil court found that she forged documents, including his will, and plotted with others to murder her husband.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt class=\"leave\" height=\"1\" id=\"gu_counter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-bloodied-hand-cannot-inherit-court-rules.gif\" width=\"1\"><\/p>\n<p>Zurenah Smit has been criminally charged, along with two others, for the murder of Stefan Smit. The trial has not been finalised. The State will have to prove the charges against them \u201cbeyond a reasonable doubt\u201d. Until then Smit remains \u201cinnocent until proven guilty\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>However, civil courts determine issues on \u201ca balance of probabilities\u201d \u2013 that one side of a case is more plausible than the other \u2013 which is a lower threshold. A civil court has now disinherited Smit, and in terms of the inheritance, it does not matter whether she is or is not found guilty of the crime.<\/p>\n<p>Western Cape High Court Judge Babalwa Mantame noted in her judgment that the maxim \u201cthe bloodied hand cannot inherit\u201d was usually only determined following a criminal conviction. \u201cIn most cases, the maxim is used as a compelling reason to disinherit the party whose hands are bloodied after the pronouncement by a criminal court,\u201d the Judge said.<\/p>\n<p>In this matter, a finding of \u201cguilt\u201d had to be determined on the facts before the judge. Oral evidence was presented by 15 witnesses, including Smit, a state witness, expert handwriting analysts, the farmer\u2019s financial advisors, and other witnesses.<\/p>\n<p>Judge Mantame said the inferences to be drawn were that Smit forged three documents and was instrumental in the murder in order to take control of the entire estate.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShe is unworthy to inherit,\u201d the judge said.<\/p>\n<p>She ruled that the purported will, which Smit claimed had been signed by her late husband in January 2019, was null and void, as was another \u201cdonation document\u201d giving her R7-million purportedly signed in February 2018. Smit was also not entitled to the proceeds of a R3.5-million life insurance policy.<\/p>\n<div class=\"editor-summary\"><strong>Read the full judgment <a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/media\/uploads\/documents\/smit_v_the_master_western_cape_2022_20960-2019_wcc.pdf\">here<\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n<p>Stefan Smit was murdered in June 2019 at his farm, Louisenhof, in what was at first believed to be a \u201cfarm attack\u201d, when three masked gunmen stormed into the property and shot him three times in the dining-room.<\/p>\n<p>Zurenah Smit initially approached the court on an urgent basis in November 2019 seeking an order that the Master accept the January 2019 will as the lawful last will and testament of her late husband.<\/p>\n<p>The will left a \u201cvast portion of his estate and trusts to her\u201d and appointed her as executor of his entire estate.<\/p>\n<p>The application was opposed by two of his daughters from a previous marriage who insisted it was fraudulent. This led to \u201cdisputes of fact\u201d which could not be determined in argument and the matter was referred for oral evidence.<\/p>\n<p>The hearing was adjourned on several occasions at the request of Smit, who changed attorneys at least five times, and this led to a delay of more than two years. It finally began in February 2022 after Judge Mantame refused another request for an adjournment by Smit.<\/p>\n<p>In the interim, in late 2020, one of the alleged gunmen, Bradley van Eyslend, the head of security at the farm, decided to \u201ccome clean\u201d. He made a statement to police and turned state witness. This led to Smit\u2019s arrest in December that year.<\/p>\n<p>In the civil court, Van Eyslend testified that Smit had told her she was unhappily married and she wanted Smit to be killed. He gave detailed evidence of how the murder was planned at a string of meetings at different hotels in Cape Town, and how he and others involved had been promised R2-million each once the job was done. They were never paid, he said.<\/p>\n<p>It was agreed that a visitor would be invited for dinner one night \u2013 as an independent witness to the crime \u2013 and that Smit would open up the back door for easy entry to the farmhouse.<\/p>\n<p>He claimed Smit had also said she would \u201ceffect changes\u201d to the will and he was involved in \u201cbackdating\u201d the R7-million donation document.<\/p>\n<p>Handwriting experts testified that the will and the donation document were forged.<\/p>\n<p>While Smit secured the services of her own handwriting expert, \u201cwho gave unsubstantiated findings, although supported her version\u201d, he did not testify.<\/p>\n<p>Evidence also emerged that Smit may have forged the will of her mother-in-law, Martha Smit, as well \u2013 removing her husband and his sisters as beneficiaries and nominating herself as the \u201csole heir\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Smit testified that she had loved her husband dearly and her life had been shattered by his murder. She denied forging any documents or being involved in the murder.<\/p>\n<p>Judge Mantame said other than a bare denial \u201cshe could not explain herself out of the planning and the actual murder of the deceased as testified to by Van Eyslend\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The Judge said there was also a \u201cpreponderance of probability\u201d that she had committed fraud.<\/p>\n<p>In her analysis, the judge said the evidence presented by the respondents (the daughters) was more probable than that of Smit.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"article_copyright\">\n<p>\u00a9 2022 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a <a href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/\" rel=\"license\">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.<\/p>\n<p>We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, <b>not tracking<\/b> users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-bloodied-hand-cannot-inherit-court-rules.jpg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.groundup.org.za\/\">Source: GroundUp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Currently standing trial for the murder, the wife of Stefan Smit, murdered on Louisenhof farm in Stellensbosch, has been barred from inheriting his estate by a civil court. Photo: Brian Turner via Flickr (CC BY 2.0) The wife of Stefan Smit, who was murdered on Louisenhof farm in Stellenbosch, has been barred from inheriting his [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":223192,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9928],"tags":[28001],"class_list":{"0":"post-223191","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-groundup","8":"tag-groundup","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/the-bloodied-hand-cannot-inherit-court-rules.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}