Authors: John Carlin
‘I don’t know why not,’ he replied.
If he was very scared, why did he just fire four shots? Why not empty the magazine? Why did he not fire at the open window in the bathroom, given that he seemed to think there might have been someone outside on a ladder?
He said he did not know why he fired four times. He wasn’t thinking.
‘ “
I wasn’t thinking” isn’t good for you, Mr Pistorius. It’s also reckless,’ Nel said.
Did he aim and then fire, or did the gun just go off accidentally in his hand?
He said he did not aim, he merely fired.
‘So you were just lucky that you hit the door?’
‘How would that be lucky?’ Pistorius cried, in outraged tears. ‘She lost her life!’
‘There is no need for that,’ Nel tut-tutted, as if reproving an over-wrought child.
Roux had been sarcastic at times during his earlier cross-examinations. He had been confrontational, skeptical, combative. But for the most part, he had kept his emotions in check. Nel exhibited a wider and more histrionic range of feeling. He was condescending, he was sneering, he was contemptuous, he was mocking, he was shocked, he was outraged, he was indignant, he was angry and, that one time, he laughed out loud. Yet he brought the long interrogation to its conclusion with surprising restraint. He did not end the way he had begun, with a clatter and a bang. He felt he did not need to. He might not have landed a knock-out blow – there had been no single overwhelmingly damning piece of evidence in the accused’s testimony – but, by a wide margin, he had won on points. He had achieved his chief objective, which was to damage his opponent’s credibility. The judge had seen how self-contradictory and evasive Pistorius had been, how agitated and confused at times. He had rambled and over-explained. Judge Masipa might yet conclude that Nel had failed to show beyond
reasonable doubt that the accused’s version was false, but she did hear him offer Nel two different explanations as to why he had fired the lethal shots: that it had been an instinctive reaction, an accident provoked by a rush of fear and a twitchy trigger finger; and that it had been a deliberate and rational act of self-defense, intended to protect both himself and the woman he loved from what turned out to be a tragically imaginary attack.
Nel, wishing to believe the judge had reached the same conclusions as he had, brought the trial’s decisive act to a calm finale, drily reiterating his claim that the accused’s version made no sense and that the only possible inference to be drawn was that the screams the neighbors heard were the victim’s, not his own, as she ran away from him in terror for her life following an argument.
‘Your version is so improbable that it cannot possibly be reasonably true,’ Nel said. The truth was, rather, that ‘You shot four shots through that door whilst knowing that she was standing there. You knew that she was talking to you . . . You armed yourself for the sole purpose of shooting and killing her, and that’s what you did.’
‘That is not true, my lady,’ Pistorius replied.
Nel turned to the judge and announced that he had no further questions. The Pistorius family let out a collective exhalation of breath. Aimée wept and, in the break that followed, Arnold Pistorius went up to his nephew and, in a public display of affection that was unusual for him, held him in a long embrace. ‘He may have a difficult time,’ Arnold remarked to an acquaintance in the public gallery, ‘but there is one thing I can tell you for sure: Oscar is not a criminal.’
Roux judged that, by a narrow margin, he had made the right choice in advising Pistorius to testify. Roux had been irritated by his client’s insistence on debating with Nel, on over-explaining, on not answering more questions with a simple yes or no. Pistorius had been a poor
witness, self-contradictory and muddled. But under South African law that was not proof of guilt; it still left scope for the judge to detect reasonable doubt. Besides, Roux’s worst fears had not materialized. Pistorius had not broken down beyond repair; he had kept answering the questions thrown at him, however inconsistently at times; and he had resisted what might have been a dangerous impulse to tell Nel what he really thought of him.
Fifteen minutes after the end of Nel’s cross-examination the court resumed, and Roux stood up to question Pistorius one last time, hoping to turn the judge’s attention away from the muddle of his client’s testimony and towards the prosecution’s failure either to give any substance to the theory that there had been an argument prior to the shooting, or to come up with any motive for murder. The signs were, rather, that at the time of the shooting his client and the deceased were very much in love, indicating no reason for a violent argument, much less a motive for murder. As evidence, Roux produced an envelope with a card inside. Pistorius had already made mention of this when Roux had led him through his testimony six days earlier, but Roux calculated that this piece of evidence was so central to his case that he should seek to imprint it as indelibly as possible in Judge Masipa’s mind.
Roux asked Pistorius if he knew what it was that he held in his hand. Pistorius replied that it was the Valentine’s Day card he had received from Reeva ‘on the day the accident happened’. Roux asked him to describe the envelope in which the card was contained. It was addressed to ‘Ozzie’, he replied, and was covered with hearts and squiggles. Roux asked him to read the card. Pistorius, in tears, did so. Alongside a printed ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ message she had written, in her own hand, ‘I think today is a good day to tell you that . . . I love you.’
Roux turned to the judge and said he had nothing further to add.
At 11.48 on the morning of April 15, 2014, the twenty-third day of the trial, Judge Masipa politely thanked ‘Mr Pistorius’ for his assistance and told him he could stand down. He had been on the witness stand for seven days, five of them in direct confrontation with Gerrie Nel.
Outside the court building that afternoon, when the day’s proceedings had ended, a dozen teenagers in school uniform waited to catch a glimpse of Pistorius. All of them were black. One of them, a girl of about fifteen, spoke for all of them. ‘Oscar shall always be our hero,’ she said, to nods of assent from her schoolmates. ‘What he did was very terrible, of course. And he may have to spend some years in jail. But we shall never forget what he did for our pride as South Africans.’
On a nearby bus shelter one of the students had scrawled, ‘We will honor always U.R. talent. Prison is not the end!’
19
We are often strong out of weakness, and bold out of timidity
.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD,
MAXIMS
G
ERARD LABUSCHAGNE,
the police colonel who had accompanied Pistorius to the hospital for medical tests on the morning after the shooting, had rightly surmised from the very start that his defense would be in part a psychological one. If Pistorius could convincingly be portrayed as mentally damaged, prey to all manner of phobias and insecurities, it might add credence to his story; it might help explain why he had reacted with such disproportionate terror to the noise he said he had heard in the bathroom. But now, as the defense case neared its conclusion, there was a second imperative to present him as damaged mentally: it would offer some mitigating explanation for his befuddled and confused testimony during the cross-examination by Gerrie Nel. It might help undercut Nel’s contention that he had told a pack of lies.
On the advice of his lawyers, in a move they had not planned at the start of the trial, Pistorius submitted himself in the first week of May 2014 to an evaluation by Dr Merryl Vorster, a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand. She interviewed him over two days, and spoke also to Aimée, Carl and
Pistorius’s agent, Peet van Zyl. On May 12, day thirty of the trial, Dr Vorster took the witness stand, offering the court an interpretation of Pistorius’s character based on the information she had gleaned about his life up until the time of the shooting and in the fifteen months since.
Dr Vorster, led by Barry Roux, began at the beginning. She noted that the amputation of Pistorius’s legs when he was eleven months old had happened at the pre-language stage, and that he would not have been able to understand what was being done to him. But the emotional impact had been enduring.
‘There would have been pain, perceived by an infant as a traumatic assault,’ she said. ‘He would not have been able to be soothed by his mother.’
To help him cope with his loss, his parents encouraged him to behave as normally as possible. ‘He was never allowed to perceive himself as being abnormal.’
But, Dr Vorster explained, there was a downside to this.
The obligation continually to appear normal when he was not, when at primary school the children reminded him of his condition by teasing him about his prosthetic legs, established a pattern of ‘anxiety and stress’, expressed partly in chronic headaches, that never went away.
For Pistorius, to sit and listen to the implacably authoritative Dr Vorster dissect his personality was a new form of torture. She peeled away, layer by layer, the personality he and his parents had sought so assiduously to construct for him, exposing him to the world as a man who had lived a lie – or, at any rate, a half-truth. The picture he had been projecting of himself as, successively, a plucky little boy, a regular ‘one of the boys’ teenager, a champion sportsman, a seducer of beautiful women, ‘the king of the London Games’, was only a part
of the story. The other part, which he tried to keep from himself and from others, was timorous, childlike, painfully self-conscious, afraid of being pitied or laughed at. Unable to reconcile the contradictions of his dual nature, he had endured life, Dr Vorster said, in a state of perpetual stress.
Pistorius had striven to deny these verities and now not only was he being obliged to confront them, but the whole world was learning about them, too. There were no more secrets. He might just as well have been standing in a public square, pilloried by a jeering mob.
Dr Vorster spoke about Pistorius’s mother, Sheila, whom she identified as his life’s ‘primary attachment figure’, but who was ultimately exposed as having fallen short of the image of saintliness he had projected of her. He did not mind the psychiatrist describing his father as ‘absent and irresponsible’, but when she revealed the family secret that his ostensibly cheerful, devoutly Christian mother had been a heavy drinker, it was another nail in his cross. It was a measure of how low he had sunk and how urgent his predicament had become that his defense required the betrayal of the image he had built up not just of himself, but also of his mother, the person to whom he had always publicly attributed all the good things that had happened in his life.
‘Sheila Pistorius,’ Vorster coldly informed the court, ‘was a very anxious person who abused alcohol intermittently.’
It was not a gratuitous revelation. Armed with this information, Dr Vorster exposed the ghastly truth that his mother’s influence on Pistorius had not, after all, been entirely positive – to the point that she even made an implicit connection between Sheila and Reeva’s death. Describing Sheila as someone ‘whose importance in his life cannot be overstated’, Dr Vorster reminded the court the other secret that had only been known within the family until the trial: that she used
to sleep with a firearm under her pillow, which had had detrimental effects on her children’s mental well-being.
‘It appears that the children were not soothed by their mother, but rather that they all developed features of anxiety,’ Vorster said. When Roux asked her to elaborate, she replied, ‘The children were reared to see their external environment as threatening.’
Pistorius, sitting with his jaw clenched, could do nothing but listen, swallow his sorrow and shame, and try to remind himself that Dr Vorster was on his side.
Urged on by Roux, she continued, explaining how Pistorius’s growing public stature after he took up running at the age of seventeen had generated ever greater stress, as ‘he worked hard to control his environment’, battling to keep ‘the external facets of his life’ separate from the twisted and vulnerable individual within. Famous as he became, and as admirably polite a person as Dr Vorster said he seemed to be, he was more sad and more socially uncomfortable than he let on. While he always remained close to his two siblings, frequent foreign travel caused him to experience loneliness and deprived him of the ability to form lasting friendships or to forge strong emotional ties. He had trouble with sexual relations, Dr Vorster said, and shied away from revealing his disability, which in turn made him ‘less able to access emotional support’.
Running was a refuge, Vorster said. The strict training regime to which Pistorius submitted himself was another mechanism to which he resorted in the ceaseless task of trying to keep his anxiety in check. As for the high fear of crime she had detected in him, it was exacerbated by the fact that he was a double-amputee, which meant he would react to perceived threats in a different way from other people. He was not paranoid, but ‘hypervigilant’, always alert to danger; and faced with a choice between fight or flight in response to a threat, he was
obliged to opt to fight because his capacity for flight on his stumps was limited.
It was against this background that Pistorius’s reaction to the noise he said he had heard in his bathroom on the night of February 14 should be understood.
‘In my opinion,’ Dr Vorster said, ‘Oscar Pistorius’s reaction to the perceived threat should be considered in the light of his physical disability and his anxiety disorder.’
This disorder had a clinical name, she said. It was called Generalized Anxiety Disorder, a condition that she believed afflicted as many as 6 per cent of the South African population. It led people to see threats where there were none, often went hand in hand with sleep disorders, and generated ‘high levels of free-floating anxiety’. Generalized Anxiety Disorder was ‘pervasive and affected all aspects of life’.
‘If he was afraid that there was an intruder,’ Dr Vorster said, ‘then certainly having a Generalized Anxiety Disorder would have affected the way he reacted to that fear.’