Jayde Panayiotou was a South African teacher who was murdered in April 2015. Her husband had arranged her killing to solve a financial problem he had created himself.
Jayde Inggs was born in 1986 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. She grew up as a warm and caring person, and those qualities eventually pushed her toward a career in teaching. In 2004, when she was 18, she went to a friend’s gathering and met Christopher Panayiotou, who was also 18 at the time.
Chris came from a business family. His father, Costa Panayiotou, owned several stores around Port Elizabeth, including a snack bar on Market Street. Chris was hardworking and ambitious, and the two connected quickly. They started dating not long after that night.
While Jayde enrolled at university in 2005 to study education, Chris focused on growing his side of things. He opened a grocery store in Algoa Park under the Ok franchise and a restaurant and cocktail bar called Infinity right next to it.
By 2011, Jayde had finished her degree and landed a teaching job at a local elementary school. That same year, Chris proposed. The two got engaged and moved in together, and from the outside, everything looked solid.
Around 2009, roughly two years before the engagement, Chris had hired a woman named Chanelle Coutts to work at his grocery store. Things between them were professional at first, but by 2012, that had changed.
The two started a secret affair. Colleagues noticed small signs of affection between them at work, though nothing was ever said openly. In private, Chris and Chanelle met at local hotels. When Jayde was away, Chanelle stayed at Chris’s home.
Chris’s father, Costa, eventually found out. He had known Jayde for more than eight years by that point and thought of her as a future daughter-in-law. He respected her and genuinely cared about her.
When he confronted Chris, he made his position clear — if Chris continued the affair or left Jayde for Chanelle, Costa would cut him out of his inheritance entirely. Since Chris expected to one day take over his father’s business empire, that was a serious threat. Chris told his father the affair was over. It was not.
In June 2013, Chris and Jayde got married. To everyone around them, they looked like a couple doing well. She was a dedicated teacher. He was a young businessman. But behind that image, serious problems were already building.
After the wedding, Chris’s businesses started to struggle. Local competition increased and customer numbers were lower than he had hoped. Some months, both the grocery store and the cocktail bar were operating at a loss.
At the same time, Chris was spending heavily on Chanelle. He bought her a luxury polo handbag, an expensive watch, hair straighteners, and contributed toward a new car. He also covered the cost of multiple hotel stays.
On top of that, he gave gifts to Chanelle’s close friend to keep her quiet about the affair. Running two separate lives was draining his finances fast.
To manage the situation, Chris worked longer hours, which meant he was rarely home. Jayde felt it immediately. She told friends that Chris was almost never around and that when he was home, he was emotionally distant.
She made small efforts to close the gap — pushing for him to come home for dinner, dropping by his work in the evenings — but it was not enough.
By September 2014, Jayde had reached a breaking point and poured her feelings into a private letter to herself. She wrote that all she had ever truly wanted was to feel fully and completely loved, yet she no longer felt that in her marriage.
She admitted feeling jealous when she saw other couples living the kind of life she had hoped for. She longed for a simple, stable home — a husband who came back at a normal hour, who was honest, and who placed his wife first.
In the letter, she questioned how much longer she could continue living this way. She described her heart as damaged, torn apart, and filled with emptiness. It was a painful letter, and it showed just how deep her unhappiness had gone, even though she still had no idea about the affair.
People around her could see it too. When Chris once asked Jayde’s best friend what Jayde wanted for her birthday, the answer was — she just wanted to spend time with him.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015, started like any other workday for Jayde. She had to be at Riebeek College, about 40 minutes from her home in Stellen Glen, just west of Port Elizabeth.
Her colleague and close friend Cherise Swanepoel was supposed to pick her up at 6:15 in the morning from outside the gates of their gated community. That was the routine they followed regularly.
When Cherise arrived that morning, Jayde was not there. Calls to her phone went unanswered. Knocking at the house got no response. Cherise called the police.
By 10:00 that morning, a missing persons alert was posted on social media. Police launched a search right away, using the flying squad and several K9 units. Jayde’s family put up a reward of 50,000 rand for any information.
By nightfall, that amount had climbed to 150,000 rand. The hashtag Find Jayde started trending online, and the story was spreading well beyond South Africa.
The next morning, a police officer and his K9 unit found a body in a bushy area near a gravel road outside KwaNobuhle. Forensics confirmed it was Jayde. She was fully clothed and had been shot three times — twice in the back and once in the head. Her bank cards and jewelry were gone.
The news hit hard. Her family, friends, students, and colleagues were devastated. Grief spread across the country and reached people internationally through social media.
Two days after the body was found, police released two ATM surveillance images. Jayde’s bank cards had been used twice on the day she disappeared, and the cameras had captured the person responsible. Nobody in Jayde’s circle recognized the individual in the images.
One week after her death, her funeral was held at Most Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Newton Park. Hundreds of people attended. Her students were among them.
Chris delivered a tribute during the service, but it was soon discovered that most of what he said had been copied almost word for word from a published eulogy written by Charles Atkins for his own deceased wife. It was a lazy and hollow act that made people question how genuine his grief actually was.
One day before the funeral, police had already made a move. Based on a tip from an undisclosed source, they arrested a man named Luthando Siyoni. Luthando worked as a bouncer at Chris’s nightclub.
While in custody, he broke down and told police everything. He said Chris had asked him to arrange a hit on Jayde. Luthando had not done the killing himself, but he had put Chris in contact with people who would.
Police still needed direct evidence linking Chris to the murder. A confession from Luthando alone was not enough. So they made a deal.
They released Luthando on the condition that he would secretly record a conversation with Chris and get him to say something incriminating. In exchange, his sentence would be reduced. Luthando agreed.
The recording worked. In the conversation, Chris discussed destroying phones and SIM cards. He referenced the staged robbery and made it clear that he was frustrated the killing had not gone as originally planned.
He talked about covering tracks and staying out of sight. The recording gave investigators exactly what they needed. Chris was arrested two hours after the meeting ended.
As the investigation continued, the full picture came together. Chris had instructed Luthando to arrange the murder. Luthando had then contracted three men — Sinethemba Nenembe, Zolani Sibeko, and Sizwezakhe Vumazonke — to carry it out.
The plan was to make it look like a street robbery near the gates of Stellan Glen early in the morning while Jayde waited for Charisse.
The original date set for the killing was April 20, 2015. But when Charisse arrived earlier than expected that morning, the men held back. Chris was reportedly furious and demanded it happen the following day.
On April 21, the men were waiting in a hired vehicle a short distance from where Jayde stood outside her community gates. They decided not to kill her on the spot to avoid witnesses. Instead, they abducted her, drove her roughly 20 miles northwest to a location near KwaNobuhle, and shot her three times.
After that, they drove to a nearby ATM and attempted to withdraw money using her bank cards. The first withdrawal of 1,500 rand was successful. A second attempt failed because the PIN was entered incorrectly. Both attempts were captured on camera.
Before the trial began, the third hitman, Sizwezakhe Vumazonke, died in hospital after falling into a coma while on approved leave from prison. He had previously claimed he was being mistreated while in custody, but police denied those allegations.
The trial opened on October 11, 2015. Prosecutors presented the secret recording, phone records between Luthando and the hitmen, GPS data from the hired vehicle, and ATM footage.
It was also revealed during proceedings that Chris had been in the process of securing a loan of 2.2 million rand, and that the combined cost of maintaining his marriage and his affair had become financially impossible to sustain.
Chanelle Coutts took the stand and confirmed the details of their relationship, including the gifts Chris had given her and the nights she had spent at his home.
Chris’s defense argued that he was a generous man who had even recently purchased a new home for himself and Jayde, suggesting there was no real motive to harm her. The judge was not convinced.
On November 2, 2017, which happened to be Chris Panayiotou’s 31st birthday, he was found guilty of the murder of Jayde Panayiotou. The judge concluded that Chris had orchestrated the killing specifically to reduce his growing debt and that he deeply regretted having married Jayde.
He was sentenced to life in prison. Sinethemba Nenembe also received a life sentence for his role in the murder. Zolani Sibeko was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder. In a separate trial, Luthando Sioni was also given a life sentence.
Jayde was described by those who knew her as genuinely kind, enthusiastic, and deeply loyal. She had worked hard to build a life and a career, and she had loved her husband despite the loneliness he had caused her.
She was killed for 80,000 rand because her husband could not manage the consequences of choices she never even knew he had made.
On December 9, 2019, Costa Panayiotou was shot and killed outside his own shop while closing up for the night. His car was also stolen.
