Authors: John Carlin
Pistorius was among those who used to believe that there was only one thing worse than being talked about, and that was not being talked about. He had changed his mind. He looked on with helplessness and dismay as he found that he would be facing trial not only before a legally appointed judge, but in the court of public opinion. Inside the courtroom he would be subject to the solemn rituals of the criminal justice system; out in the internet ether, mob justice would rule.
Aware of the sound and fury he was generating, he fought the temptation to enter the conversation. A busy Twitter participant until the shooting, he had remained silent since then, on the advice of his
legal team. Except once, two and a half weeks before the trial, on the anniversary of the day he shot Reeva, when he had issued a statement to the media that read: ‘No words can adequately capture my feelings about the devastating accident that has caused such heartache for everyone who truly loved – and continues to love – Reeva. The pain and sadness – especially for Reeva’s parents, family and friends consumes me with sorrow. The loss of Reeva and the complete trauma of that day, I will carry with me for the rest of my life.’
He could no longer restrain restrain himself from telling the world how much he had loved Reeva, nor could he resist the opportunity to make an appeal to public opinion – one that might reach the ears of the judge – to try and believe him when he said that he had killed Reeva by accident.
Alert as he had been since childhood to the impression that he made, he knew full well that the prevailing view of him in the South African media was unsympathetic. Pistorius was aware, too, that in order to amplify the horrendousness of the crime and to embroider his newly minted image as a monster, Reeva had not only to be a beauty to his beast, but to be portrayed as a woman who embodied all the virtues and had had a triumphant career cruelly cut short. Not only in South Africa but far beyond, newspapers and broadcasters gathered testimony from friends and loved ones variously describing her as ‘angelic’, ‘intelligent’, ‘diligent’, ‘vivacious’, ‘classy’, ‘generous’, ‘kind’, ‘funny’, ‘witty’, ‘humble’, ‘self-deprecating’, ‘selfless’, ‘caring’, ‘gentle’, ‘loyal’, ‘strong-willed’, ‘consistent’, ‘amazing’, ‘socially engaged’ and ‘a child of God’. As was to be expected, no dissenting voices emerged during the year leading up to the start of the trial.
Pistorius himself would have been the last to dissent. He idealized Reeva in death more than any journalist could ever have done. What he had wanted to show in that statement he put out – as he would
later, when he testified in the trial – was how much he had loved her and, despite the quarrels between them which the prosecution would inevitably bring to light, how much she had loved him.
She certainly regarded him as more than a passing flame, investing in the relationship. She would accompany him to training, taking tips from his coach, Ampie Louw, on how to keep her legs trim, and when Pistorius finished his sessions he would lie down exhausted on a bench with his head on her lap, while she stroked his hair. She prayed with him, knowing how important his Christianity was to him, and she went out of her way to take an interest in the things that interested him, to the point that on at least one occasion she accompanied him to a shooting range and fired a gun at a target under his fond and approving eye. Their appetite to preserve intimate photographic records of their relationship was not dulled by their continual exposure to the flash of cameras in public. It was those pictures of the two of them in affectionately unguarded poses that he would pore over at his uncle Arnold’s cottage during the year before the trial, gazing with special wistfulness at the one where she lay cradled asleep in his arms.
She was loyal to him, too, her commitment having been put to the test soon after she told her mother of the seriousness of her intentions towards him. One night in December, Pistorius was assaulted in a Johannesburg nightclub and, though he had to go to hospital for stitches to the back of his head, he never revealed who the assailant was. The background to the attack preceded Reeva’s appearance in his life, lying in the last days of his relationship with Samantha Taylor. At the Kyalami race track, the very same place where he would meet Reeva, he had had a furious altercation with Quinton van der Burgh, the man who had taken Samantha on a trip to Dubai while he was away in London for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The trip had been
the reason for the heartache and all the frantic phone calls his roommate, Arnu Fourie, had had no choice but to overhear. Van der Burgh, a wealthy businessman, saw nothing wrong in having taken Samantha to Dubai, as he had understood that her relationship with Pistorius was over. At that encounter in Kyalami he realized that Pistorius did not see things that way. He screamed at Van der Burgh and, as was amply reported later, called an acquaintance who intervened on Van der Burgh’s behalf, a former professional soccer player called Marc Batchelor, who alleged that Pistorius threatened to break his legs if he did not back off.
Pistorius took the nightclub assault on him two months later to be a delayed reaction to that bust-up over Samantha. He had hoped to keep the incident quiet. Even though he was the victim, he did not want it to be spread about that he moved in the kind of social circles where such altercations took place. But a news reporter from the Johannesburg
Sunday Times
got wind of what had happened and phoned up Pistorius. ‘It’s the first time I have heard of this,’ Pistorius said. ‘I am not that type of person . . . Please don’t write this. It could ruin me.’
Sensing that the reporter was not entirely convinced, Pistorius asked Reeva to back him up. When the reporter phoned her, she played a properly supportive role, explaining how worried her boyfriend was that the publication of such a story would undermine his public image. ‘Please don’t write this,’ she said. ‘Oscar is worried this will ruin his reputation.’
Pistorius’s vanity was in play, but also, she understood, his sponsorship deals. Nike, for example, already damaged by their association with Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong, might begin to ponder the wisdom of extending their association with him if the public began to see their brand icon as a quick-tempered brawler. As it was, the story was not published until a year after Pistorius had shot Reeva dead.
While she lived, the image the public saw of the couple was the one they themselves wanted to see, and that friends saw too. A couple they had dinner with in January 2013 would report after Reeva died that they had seemed ‘extraordinarily happy’ and ‘awesome together’. By that third month into their relationship, even his jealous fits appeared to be under control. Wayne Lahoud, Reeva’s previous boyfriend, spent time with the two of them at social events and reported no discomfort in their presence, nor any visible ill feeling towards him.
At a party in a fashionable Johannesburg shopping mall on January 26, a few days after the tetchy WhatsApp exchanges in which Reeva had said he scared her sometimes, they were the center of attention. The party was held at Tasha’s, a restaurant whose owners’ delight at having him among their clients had not been tempered by the incident in which, only a few days earlier, he had accidentally fired a bullet under a table, and for which he would face a charge of criminal negligence. Everybody at the party was dressed in white – with dubious humor, the party was billed as a ‘Whites Only’ event – and the chatter among the guests was all along the lines of ‘Oh, they look so in love’ and ‘What a great couple they make’ and ‘This looks like the real thing’. The editor of
Heat
spent the night badgering them to pose together for the cover of the magazine, but they told him, ‘It’s still new. Give us some time to enjoy each other’s company before we jump into the celebrity circus.’
Now, on March 3, 2014 – one year, one month and one week after that happy event at Tasha’s – the celebrity circus had reappeared with a vengeance.
Pistorius had spent weeks going over the case with his lawyers, applying the rational part of his mind to the task at hand, quieting his
demons in a way the haunted wreck he had been a year earlier could not have done. He had come prepared. He knew more or less what to expect. Barry Roux and the rest of his legal team had explained to him, and he had understood, the possible outcomes of the case and the elements on which the judge’s verdict would turn. They had also explained that he had always to address the judge as ‘My lady’, that he should bow deeply when she bowed, that he should adopt a serious and contrite demeanor, and that, while he should entertain no illusions as to how pitiless an adversary Gerrie Nel would be, he should retain a poker-face when the prosecutor spoke and reveal no glimmer of the animosity he felt towards him.
Now the day Pistorius had been dreading had arrived; the judge sat before him in her blood-red robes, ready to initiate proceedings. He tried to convince himself that he felt some relief that the ordeal was finally under way. If the public saw it as a sports contest, it would serve him to try and see it that way, too. For them, it was an optional entertainment, in which they could invest or withdraw their passions at will; for him, it was a race for his life, and now that it was about to begin he experienced a familiar pang, the mix of high-strung tension, hope and fear that he used to feel when he took his place on the starting blocks in that earlier life he had destroyed. It was at this point on the running track that he had always bowed his head and said a prayer, and he repeated the ritual now. It really did have the feeling of a big race, because his family was there on the sidelines supporting him, as they had been at the London Games – and while his large, genial coach, Ampie Louw, was not present today, in his place he had Barry Roux, who looked in his element in his black advocate’s robes, calm and smiling.
It was Gerrie Nel who spoke first, rising to his feet at a nod from the judge and starting the proceedings with a recital of the first of
the four charges of which the state hoped to find Oscar Leonard Carl Pistorius guilty.
Pistorius stood up, too, facing the judge as protocol demanded, with his hands clasped before him at waist height, his shoulders hunched and his body bent slightly forward. The judge, her left elbow on the desktop in front of her, scrutinized Nel through a pair of round, grey-rimmed glasses. Count one, Nel read, was that on February 14, 2013 the accused ‘did unlawfully and intentionally kill a person, to wit, Reeva Steenkamp, a twenty-nine-year-old female’. The judge turned to him. ‘Do you understand the charge?’ Her eyes did not seem unkind; her voice was soft and low-pitched. He noticed the tight corn-row plaits of her black hair. ‘Yes, my lady’, he replied. ‘How do you plead?’ ‘Not guilty, my lady.’
He continued standing as Nel, bouncing briskly on the balls of his feet, a habit he would keep up throughout the trial, read out count two, which stated that in contravention of the Firearms Control Act the accused had discharged a firearm through the open sunroof of a car. The judge turned to Pistorius again. Did he understand the charge? ‘Yes, my lady.’ How did he plead. ‘Not guilty, my lady.’ Count three was another contravention of the firearms act, discharging a gun recklessly and unlawfully in a public place, namely a restaurant in Johannesburg called Tasha’s. ‘Not guilty, my lady.’ Count four, again in contravention of the firearms act, the illegal possession of ammunition. ‘Not guilty, my lady.’
Nel sat down. Pistorius remained standing up, holding his hands together as if in prayer. If he let them hang loose by his side, the judge might see he was trembling. But he had answered in a steady voice. He had not broken down.
It was not Barry Roux but Kenny Oldwadge, so taut he seemed in danger of bursting a blood vessel, who launched the defense case.
Oldwadge stood up, a head taller than the bantamweight Nel, exchanged glances with the judge and began reading his client’s ‘explanation of plea’, a sworn statement written in the first person in which he stood by the sequence of events he had given at the bail application hearing, rejecting the accusation of murder ‘in the strongest possible terms’.
‘In fact at the time of the tragic accident that led to Reeva’s death we were in a strong loving relationship,’ Oldwadge read on Pistorius’s behalf. ‘Whilst I admit that I inflicted the fatal gunshot wounds to Reeva, this occurrence was indeed an accident in that I had mistakenly believed that an intruder or intruders had entered my home and posed an imminent threat to Reeva and me.’
He had got out of bed, the plea continued, in the middle of the night to bring in two fans that stood outside on a terrace adjacent to his bedroom. Then came something new, not mentioned in the bail application.
‘I had shortly before spoken to Reeva who was in bed beside me.’
This was an important detail, since it might answer a question many had asked: why had he not checked to see that she was in bed before advancing down the corridor to the bathroom and opening fire? The brief conversation had led him to assume she was still in bed, he maintained, and that the noise he heard in the bathroom was that of an intruder who had slipped in through a window.
‘Unbeknownst to me,’ the plea statement continued, ‘Reeva must have gone to the toilet in the bathroom at the time when I brought in the fans . . . I approached the bathroom with my firearm so as to defend Reeva and me. At that time I still believed Reeva was in the bed. The discharging of my firearm was precipitated by a noise in the toilet that I, in my fearful state, knowing that I was on my stumps unable to run away or properly defend myself physically, believed to be the intruder or intruders coming out of the toilet to attack Reeva and me.
‘I respectfully believe that the State has no basis whatsoever for alleging that I wanted to take Reeva’s life.’
Oldwadge, still reading from his client’s first-person plea statement, noted that two of the critical points on which the state’s case rested, the details of which the defense team had already received, as required by South African law, would be shown in court to be wrong. A state witness who said she had heard screaming at his client’s home prior to the shooting could not have done so; the state hypothesis that there had been an argument between his client and the victim prior to the shooting was groundless.