Wife murderer Rob Packham denied leave to appeal

Wife murderer Rob Packham's bid for freedom has suffered yet another blow.

The Cape Town high court dismissed his application for leave to appeal his conviction on Friday.

The 58-year-old Constantia businessman was convicted of his wife Gill's murder and attempting to defeat the ends of justice in May. He was handed a 22-year jail sentence in June.

In court papers, Packham's attorney Ben Mathewson told judge Elizabeth Steyn that she had misdirected herself by accepting the evidence of all state witnesses.

"It is respectfully submitted that the honourable court misdirected itself in ... finding that all state witnesses were honest, reliable and credible, in circumstances where certain witnesses demonstrated themselves to be untruthful, wholly unreliable and intent on misleading the court," argued Mathewson.

He said Steyn had misdirected herself in "accepting and attaching weight to all the state evidence without critically evaluating each of the individual components of the evidence, in circumstances where the probative value of certain ... state evidence was such that it ought not to have carried weight against [Packham]".

Steyn found that Packham killed his wife of 30 years, loaded her body into the boot of her car and set it alight at Diep River railway station in February 2018.

Delivering sentence, Steyn said: "The accused methodically, brazenly and clinically went about in an attempt to obliterate any proof of his cowardly deed. The actions of the accused prevented his family, including his daughters, from getting closure."

In an 11-page-long judgment on Friday, Steyn said there were no prospects of success in Packham's proposed appeal.

"In my opinion the argument on behalf of [Packham] in the application for leave to appeal before me lacked the degree of substance and merit required to allow the application,"  Steyn said in the judgment.

"The testimony indicates unequivocally that the only reasonable and plausible inference to be drawn from the evidence presented is that the accused was the person involved with the death of the deceased at all relevant stages of the offences, as charged. The application for leave to appeal against the conviction of the accused is accordingly refused."

National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) Western Cape spokesperson Eric Ntabazalila welcomed the judgment.  

"We said after the sentence that we will strongly oppose the appeal. We were confident that we would get an outcome that is in our favour. If they [Packham's counsel] go to the Supreme Court of Appeal, we will go there as well and oppose the application because we believe there was no other person who was responsible for the murder of Mr Packham's wife - only him. All the evidence, although it is circumstantial, points to him."