Jason Rohde sentenced to 20 years for wife's 'callous and brutal' murder

Wife killer Jason Rohde has been sentenced to an effective 20 years' imprisonment by the Western Cape high court on Wednesday.

The former property consultant was convicted in November last year of murdering his wife Susan at an event at Spier wine estate in Stellenbosch in 2016.

During sentencing, judge Gayaat Salie-Hlophe described the murder as "callous, brutal and shocking".

"The degree of violence you meted out on your wife was egregious. It was excessive and exhibits horrifying aggression. You executed successive blows and fatal force in the taking of her life," Salie-Hlophe said.

She added it was a significant feature of the crime that he did not hesitate or call for medical assistance.

Susan had insisted on attending the event with her husband as she was suspicious of Rohde after finding out he was having an affair with Cape Town estate agent Jolene Alterskye.

Salie-Hlophe found that Susan's death was consistent with manual strangulation and asphyxiation, and that Rohde had tried to make it look as though his wife had hanged herself with the chord of a hair iron from a hook on the back of the bathroom door.

During arguments ahead of the sentencing, witnesses sympathetic to Rohde said much about how his children would suffer if the high court meted out a harsh sentence.

But the prosecution produced evidence that a policy held by his deceased wife had paid close to a million rands into a trust set up for their three daughters' upkeep.

Rohde admitted during cross-examination at his trial that he had had a secret meeting with his mistress at the conference at Spier. He also exchanged messages with Alterskye.

He told the court that he wanted to live a double life. "I wanted to have it both ways‚ but leading up to Spier I had seriously started thinking about divorce as being the way forward‚" he said.

"I had mentioned it to Susan ... but I had never taken concrete steps in the sense of going to see a divorce attorney or working out financially what the implications would be."

He raised the possibility of divorce during the many rows he had with his wife.

"But it was more out of an anger‚ it was to hurt her‚ to spite her. I knew that Susan wouldn’t want to hear the term and it would escalate the matter," he said. "When you have an affair‚ the bottom line is you’ve got to be deceitful‚ otherwise it’s not an affair."

Judge Salie-Hlophe said on Wednesday that Rohde had used Susan's body as a showroom to "stage" the impression that she had killed herself.

"I did not find an acknowledgement that she was your wife, the mother of your children. Naked and stripped of her dignity, you dragged her to the bathroom and inflicted more pain."

Rohde's counsel, Graham van der Spuy, said: "We have already received instructions to apply for leave to appeal."