Authors: John Carlin
For Pistorius it was love at first sight. As he would testify in court later, he was ‘bowled over’. Three years older than he, Reeva was strikingly beautiful, lithe and self-confident – worldly in a way that the much younger girlfriend with whom he had broken up with only weeks earlier, after eighteen months together, had not been. She felt an immediate attraction to him too. He had more star quality than anyone in South Africa save for Nelson Mandela, yet he had a winning shyness about him, an old-fashioned courteousness and an unusually soft and gentle voice. And he was handsome. Six-feet tall on the prostheses hidden under his jeans, he had a gymnast’s body, high cheekbones and kind, smiling eyes.
When he invited her to attend a red-carpet South African Sports Awards ceremony that very evening she assented without a second thought, phoning a close woman friend as soon as she could get away, to tell her the mind-boggling news that she had a date with the famous Blade Runner. Just how famous she would find out later that evening when the two of them became the magnet for all the photographers’ attention – she in a short, tasseled, cream dress and high heels; he, celebrated in magazines as South Africa’s best-dressed man, wearing a sharp dark suit, white shirt and black tie. More engrossed in one another than with the crowd attending the glittering event, that night the two of them stayed up talking until three in the morning.
Now, three and a half months later, it was five in the morning on Valentine’s Day, of all days. The ambulance had come and gone, taking Reeva’s body away, and his home, cordoned off with yellow tape, was flooded with police. He was not handcuffed, but there was no possibility of escape. If there was one thing he would not be able to do, given that everyone in South Africa knew his face, it was to slip away unseen. Botha, the policeman in charge, said he should go into the garage and not move from there.
What happened during the next few hours would remain for him a tear-stained blur. His lawyer, a large man called Kenny Oldwadge, arrived. His older brother Carl was the first family member on the scene. Then an uncle, Arnold Pistorius, and then his younger sister, Aimée, appeared at the garage door, his gasping cries like knives to their hearts. Arnold, the stiff-backed family patriarch, stood back as Aimée and Carl wrapped his trembling body in their arms. Pistorius regarded Aimée, who was twenty-four, as his closest friend. Carl was usually more emotionally awkward, the burly, rough and tumble playmate who had watched over him when he was a child in the schoolyard. But they were all broken now, sitting silently by his side, taking turns to put their arms around him as he sobbed.
The policemen let an interval pass, then told Pistorius the time had come to go away with them. He put on a grey tracksuit top with a hood and slid into the back of a police car. They drove him to a nearby precinct and led him into an office where he was informed that criminal procedure dictated he should go to hospital for tests. Then a short, bald man wearing civilian clothes appeared and introduced himself as the head of the South African Police Service’s forensic psychology section.
Colonel Gerard Labuschagne had learned of the shooting from the news broken by a South African paper at 8.03, nearly five hours after it had happened, via Twitter. The post had read: ‘Oscar Pistorius shoots his girlfriend dead in his house.’ Labuschagne responded with the same disbelief and stupefaction as the rest of the public. By 9 a.m. images of the Blade Runner’s home turned into a crime scene, juxtaposed with a photograph of him smiling and arm in arm with Steenkamp, were appearing on TV and computer screens in every corner of the globe. Labuschagne made a call to a superior and received an order to rush to the police station. He had judged, and his
superior had agreed, that, in the absence of any eyewitnesses, a reading of Pistorius’s psychological state immediately after the shooting might yield some clue as to what exactly had happened that night. Hilton Botha, a policeman for twenty-four years, had already made up his mind that it was an open and shut case – he had seen dozens like it and was sure it was murder, deliberate murder following a lovers’ argument.
Labuschagne, aware of Pistorius’s claim that he had imagined he was firing at an intruder, anticipated that when the trial came the athlete would lodge what the courts called ‘a psychological defense’. There was always the prospect of a confession. How long could he carry on insisting on the implausible story that he imagined a burglar had locked himself in the toilet? But, short of that, Labuschagne wanted to observe Pistorius as closely as he could in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The news that the suspect was about to be taken to the hospital would give the psychologist the opportunity to observe him over the course of several hours, to try and gain a sense of whether he was telling the truth or not.
Content to watch him out of the corner of his eye, asking nothing, Labuschagne accompanied Pistorius to the police car that would take him to the hospital. He sat in the front next to the driver, Pistorius in the back with another policeman, keeping his head down to avoid being seen. Neither of them spoke, save once when Labuschagne, trying to win his confidence, called out a warning for him to duck down because he had spotted a vehicle in the rear-view mirror that seemed to be carrying news photographers.
The car dropped them off at the hospital that serviced the township of Mamelodi – a place the police would never have taken a white man under apartheid, the system of racial discrimination that had lasted
half a century, ending twenty years earlier when Nelson Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president.
Mamelodi was a poor and densely populated residential area on the periphery of Pretoria, which had been blacks-only by law under apartheid and remained blacks-only in practice now. The politics of South Africa had changed utterly since Nelson Mandela’s election as president in 1994 but Mamelodi remained poor, as did hundreds of townships like it. Addressing poverty and inequality was the task of Mandela’s heirs in government now, an incremental exercise plagued by official incompetence and the apparently inevitable corrupting effects on a political party, the African National Congress, that had been in power for twenty consecutive years. The verities of Mandela’s time, when the political and moral questions had been indistinguishable, had given way to the muddle of day-to-day governance in a country whose challenges were no longer unique in the world. But, while dissatisfaction with the party that had liberated black South Africa grew, Mamelodi and places like it had more access to electricity and running water than before. Also, a black middle class, a concept unimaginable in the apartheid days, had emerged and now consisted of some six million people out of a total South African population of fifty million. The power of the apartheid state had been deployed to defend a system in which black people could not vote, in which they were told where they could and could not live and what hospitals, buses, trains, parks, beaches, public toilets or public telephones they could and could not use. The principle had always been to keep the races apart so as to guarantee white people a superior standard of living. But now some members of this new black middle class lived in Silver Woods as neighbors of the country’s most celebrated white man; at least three of them would turn out to have been woken by the sound of gunfire in the dead of night and would later appear as
witnesses for Pistorius’s defense at the murder trial. One thing that had changed unambiguously and for the better during the twenty years of democracy had been the racial climate, one example of which had been that the Blade Runner was, or had been, as much of a hero among the people of Mamelodi as anywhere else in South Africa – the greatest national hero for South Africans of all races since Mandela himself.
Had he visited the township twenty-four hours earlier it would have been cause for exuberant celebration. But the police kept his visit to the hospital at Mamelodi quiet, sparing themselves the commotion and him the distress of a potentially mixed welcome.
Labuschagne and the man who, like Mandela in his day, had suddenly become South Africa’s most famous prisoner spent nearly three hours together at the hospital, most of the time alone – the police colonel on a chair, the prisoner on a medical bed – in a small consulting room. A doctor eventually came in and took scrapes from under Pistorius’s nails, examined his body for scratches and bruises. Then more waiting for blood and urine tests, to all of which he numbly succumbed. As it turned out, all the tests drew blanks. No alcohol, no illegal drugs, no physical evidence of a fight. Nothing here that could be used in court against him, making it all the more urgent that while Pistorius’s state of mind was still raw from the shooting, Labuschagne should try and identify something of value for the prosecution case. Labuschagne’s problem was that the lawyers had already intervened to the point of forbidding the police from asking him anything about the events of the night. In fact, apart from the first fraught exchanges with the police at dawn, never at any point did he submit to police interrogation of any kind.
Labuschagne, casting about for a way to break the ice, mentioned that they had both happened to go to the same high school in
Pretoria. He spoke about sport, asked him about his running in what turned out to be a vain effort to stem his weeping. But the attempt at conversation yielded, at best, monosyllabic replies, until one question elicited a burst of anger. Labuschagne asked him if he wanted anything to eat.
‘How do you expect me to eat now?’ he shouted back. Pleased with the outburst, eager to elicit more of the same, Labuschagne repeated the question moments later. Was he sure he did not want to eat something? Back came the same exasperated response, followed by wails that echoed down the hospital corridors, reaching the ears of his family members Aimée and Arnold who were on their way to the room where he was being held. Escorted by uniformed police who had warned them they could not have any physical contact with him, they had come to bring him some fresh clothing. The police were opposing bail and he would need clothes for the following night, which he would be spending in a cell, and for the next morning when he would appear before a magistrate to be formally charged. The encounter with his relatives was as brief as it was sombre, their faces funereal. The three of them left and he returned to his bed, more shattered than before.
Towards 4 p.m. Labuschagne and two other policemen drove him back to the police station. There he had his first meeting with his attorney, Brian Webber, whom he had known since the age of thirteen, having gone to school with Webber’s son. He had stayed overnight at the Webbers on various occasions and the two boys had remained close friends throughout their teens. Webber had always been fond of Pistorius and, in later years, had taken pride in his athletic achievements. For the lawyer, fighting a losing battle to preserve some modicum of professional detachment, this first encounter was heartbreaking, all the more so once he took in the tiny holding cell, reeking
of urine, where his son’s old pal would have to spend his first night of captivity.
Labuschagne went to bed that night in some frustration, having derived little of value for the prosecution case. The suspect’s emotional state was entirely consistent, he concluded, with that of someone whose life had abruptly gone to pieces. Nothing he had said or done had offered any clue as to whether he had knowingly murdered Reeva Steenkamp, as the police contended, or whether the shooting had been, as Pistorius had claimed in the very first phone call he had made, a terrible accident.
2
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways
.
SIGMUND FREUD
O
SCAR
P
ISTORIUS
was born on November 22, 1986 with a condition called fibular hemimelia. As mysterious as it was rare, the disease had no traceable genetic link to his parents. The fibula, the thin bone that runs between the knee and the ankle alongside the more prominent tibia, was missing in each of his legs, which were consequently unusually short. The ankles were only half formed; the heels faced not down but sideways, parallel to the Achilles tendons; the insteps were not convex but concave, in the shape not of an arch, but of a boat. Instead of five toes, he had two. His devastated parents saw right away that no human being could ever stand, let alone walk, on feet as narrow and twisted as these.
Sheila Pistorius was born Sheila Bekker, a fairly common surname among the 40 or so per cent of the white South African population who defined themselves – in a country where everyone felt historically compelled to have some sort of tribal affiliation – as ‘English-speakers’. Sheila did not work outside the home. Henke Pistorius, her husband, was a businessman, an erratic one prone to dramatic ups and downs, but at the time of Oscar’s birth he was
doing well, providing his family with the abundant material comforts of white, upper middle-class life in apartheid South Africa. They lived in a large home, high up on a ridge in the suburb of Constantia Kloof, in rich, dynamic Johannesburg, forty miles south of Pretoria, the South African capital.
Henke belonged to the majority white grouping in South Africa, the Afrikaners, who had their own language derived from the Dutch colonists who had begun settling in the Cape in the seventeenth century. He took pride in his people’s history. He liked guns, as many Afrikaners did, and was given to making solemn pronouncements before his Calvinist God. A defining moment in Afrikaner history, as every Afrikaner child learned at school, was the Day of the Vow. On December 16, 1838, Afrikaner trekkers who had emigrated from the Cape, outraged, among other things, by the British colonial rulers’ abolition of slavery, had fought a decisive battle against a large army of Zulu warriors. Vastly outnumbered, the trekkers had made a vow that, in return for God’s help in obtaining victory, that date would be honored by them and their descendants as a holy day of worship. The trekkers were victorious, 470 of them armed with guns defeating a Zulu army of ten thousand, armed only with spears.