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.
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.
[1] Soon after, she met Balenga Kalala, a Congolese forklift operator and refugee who had also arrived in 2004 to flee a rebel army that had killed his wife and child when he was 24 years old.
[4] 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.
After returning to Melbourne on 22 February, she arrived at her house, where a final group of mourners had just left her funeral.
[9] 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 as of 2022[update].