Noela Rukundo

Noela Rukundo is a Burundian-Australian woman who became notable for crashing her own funeral. In January 2015, she was presumed dead after her husband, Balenga Kalala, secretly paid several gunmen to kill her while she was in Burundi for her stepmother's funeral. Unbeknownst to Kalala, the gunmen had refused to kill Rukundo, though they told him they had. They released her two days later and gave her evidence to incriminate her husband for his plans to have her murdered.

Following Rukundo's own funeral in February 2015, where Kalala told attendees that she had been killed in a tragic accident, she arrived at the couple's house in Australia unannounced to confront him. Kalala was later charged with incitement to murder and sentenced to nine years in prison.

Background and attempted hit Noela Rukundo emigrated from Burundi to Australia as a refugee in 2004, a mother of five at the time. The two shared a social worker at a resettlement agency they both went to, who would often ask Kalala, who spoke English, to help translate for Rukundo, who spoke Swahili.

Kalala began to wrongly suspect that Rukundo was cheating on him, and paid nearly $7,000 to a group of gunmen to kill her. On 21 January 2015, while Rukundo was staying at a hotel in Bujumbura to attend her stepmother's funeral in Burundi, she spoke with Kalala on the phone, who instructed her to go outside to get some fresh air. Almost immediately after walking out of her hotel, she was confronted at gunpoint by a man who forced her into a car, where there were two other armed men waiting inside. They blindfolded her and drove her to a rural warehouse, where she was tied to a chair. There, a fourth man revealed that Kalala had ordered for them to kill her, but that they would not do it since they knew her brother and they refused to kill women and children. Although she initially did not believe that her husband had tried to have her murdered, the kidnappers proved this to her by calling Kalala on speaker phone. On the call, he confirmed that he wanted her dead, which caused Rukundo to faint. While Rukundo was still missing, her brother, who was also in Burundi, began to worry. He called Kalala and asked him to send $545 so that the police could investigate her disappearance, which Kalala sent. On 19 February, the kidnappers dropped Rukundo off on the side of the road with an envelope filled with evidence to incriminate Kalala, including recordings of phone conversations with him planning Rukundo's murder as well as two receipts from Western Union for the $7,000 payment. His explanation for attempting to have Rukundo murdered was that "sometimes [the] devil can come into someone to do something". On 11 December 2015, Kalala was charged by a court in Melbourne with incitement to murder, and sentenced to nine years in prison; he is eligible for parole . Members of the Congolese community threatened Rukundo for reporting Kalala.

In popular culture The 2021 Lifetime film Death Saved My Life, about a woman named Jade (played by Meagan Good) who fakes her own death after her abusive husband orders a hitman to kill her, was based on Rukundo's story. Also in 2021, a TikTok video about Rukundo's story went viral online.