The actual story behind ‘Death Saved My Life,’ a new Lifetime TV film, seems to be the story of a lady who faked her demise after an tried hit.
There’s a real story at the back of Death Saved My Life, the latest in Lifetime’s Ripped From the Headlines programming slate, however it seems like the writers took some inventive license with the TV film.
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Death Saved My Life — which premieres on Lifetime on Saturday, Feb. 13, at Eight p.m. EST — is most likely according to the life of Noela Rukundo, who made headlines in 2016 when she revealed she faked her death to get the higher hand when her husband put successful on her life.
Noela Rukundo faced her husband at her own funeral.
As BBC News reported on the time, Rukundo traveled from her home in Australia to her native Burundi in 2015 to attend her stepmother’s funeral. As Rukundo attempted to leisure in her lodge room, Balenga Kalala — her husband and the daddy to 3 of her youngsters — called her from Australia and informed her to move out of doors to get some recent air. She followed his advice, and that’s when she used to be abducted through gunpoint.
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Rukundo’s captors drove her to any other location, she mentioned, and so they referred to as their shopper on speakerphone so that Rukundo may listen the conversation. And that’s when Rukundo heard her husband’s voice telling the captors to kill her. “I heard his voice,” she stated, per BBC News. “I heard him. I felt like my head used to be going to explode. … I stated to myself, I was already lifeless. Nothing I can do can save me.”
But the gang’s leader spared her life. “He seems to be at me, and then he says, ‘We’re no longer going to kill you. We don’t kill girls and kids,’” Rukundo mentioned.
The gang informed Rukundo she had Eighty hours to leave the rustic, and they left her at the side of the street with a memory card containing recordings of their phone calls with Kalala and receipts for Western Union cash transfers.
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By the time Rukundo secretly returned to Australia with the help of her church’s pastor, Kalala had told their group she used to be dead, and he was web hosting mourners and well-wishers at his space, lots of whom gave him cash. “When I am getting out of the car, he noticed me in an instant,” she recalled. “He put his hands on his head and stated, ‘Is it my eyes? Is it a ghost?’”
Her response? “Surprise! I’m nonetheless alive!”
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Rukundo later spoke with Kalala by way of phone, and he made a complete confession, which she recorded. “He [stated] he sought after to kill me as a result of he used to be jealous,” Rukundo mentioned. “He [concept] that I wanted to depart him for another man.”
Kalala in the end pleaded responsible to incitement to homicide and sentenced to nine years in prison, and Rukundo vowed to move on. “My scenario, my past existence? That is long gone,” she stated. “I’m beginning a new life now.”
‘Death Saved My Life’ tells a similar tale of “pseudocide.”
Lifetime’s synopsis for Death Saved My Life teases a tale of “pseudocide” — the act of faking one’s dying — that sounds very similar to Rukundo’s enjoy. In the TV film, Meghan Good (Minority Report) performs a woman named Jade, and Chiké Okonkwo (Being Mary Jane) performs her abusive husband.
“Behind closed doors, her [Jade’s] is a long way from idyllic,” Lifetime says. “Her husband, Ed, is a controlling man who is bodily and psychologically abusive. When Jade comes to a decision to depart Ed, he tells her. ‘If I will be able to’t have you, nobody will,’ a threat which becomes very real when she discovers he has hired someone to kill her. Knowing no person will consider her, Jade realizes the one method to escape Ed is to make him imagine the hitman finished the task and that she is lifeless.”
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