Authors: John Carlin
At least they were not strangers. Brian Webber was one; the other was Kenny Oldwadge, who had represented him on the previous two occasions when he had got into trouble. Problematic at the time – trifles in comparison with what he faced now. Once, in 2009, he had crashed a speedboat into a wooden pier, but the damage was almost all self-inflicted, for he had broken his jaw and a pair of ribs and spent two days unconscious, needing 180 stitches to his face. Another time a drunken woman at a party at his home had tried to sue him after he
smashed a door in her face. In both cases Oldwadge saved him from criminal prosecution. He considered Kenny and Brian to be friends as well as legal hired hands. He was right to think so. The two lawyers arrived at Brooklyn police station as if for a funeral.
The thought did not occur to Pistorius – as it would to others later, when the trial began – that he might have done better to enlist the help of lawyers who could view his predicament in a colder, more professional light. Back in that cell he was relieved that it was Kenny and Brian, and not persons unknown, who were ministering to his needs. An affidavit had to be prepared if he was going to get out on bail, and every detail had to be re-created and set down on paper. He had not slept for two nights and he was confused, uncertain where he was. The task was made all the more complicated by the fact that there was no table to write at in the cell, nor anywhere to sit down. For the two lawyers, who between them had accumulated more than forty years in the profession, it was the most emotionally excruciating and technically complicated encounter they had ever had with a client. He wept and vomited throughout. But somehow, torn between their professional duty and their personal distress, they succeeded in extracting from the chaos of his mind what seemed like a coherent narrative of the sequence of events at his home that night, which they hoped would convince magistrate Nair to set him free.
Early in the morning of Tuesday, February 19 his cell door was opened, and minutes later he found himself being driven once more in the back of a police vehicle through the streets of Pretoria, towards the court where his bail application was to be heard.
Photographers would be waiting for him, battalions of them. Nothing new there. In that other life, which felt every day more like a distant dream, they had followed him wherever he went. He would arrive in a chauffeur-driven sponsor’s car at a hotel in London or
Paris or some other foreign city, knowing that when he stepped out there they would be scrambling to snatch a picture of him. He had responded to it all with confusion and delight at first, after he won that first Paralympic gold in Athens, but by the time the crowning triumph at the London Games had come along the experience of being mobbed by the media was as routine for him as it was for the most famous soccer players or Hollywood stars. He had learned how to prepare his face for the cameras as circumstances required. He had his PR people around to help him, but, as they themselves would tell him, he was a natural, smiling grandly, striking noble poses or brooding handsomely, like a trained model. When he had to talk in public, he knew when to be self-effacing, when to be gracious, when to be appropriately grateful. His fellow athletes, who did not know of his anxious preparation for such encounters, were in awe of the seemingly effortless ease with which he presented himself to the world.
He was far more insecure than he let on, however, to the point that he would sometimes endure moments of befuddlement as he waited to appear on the media stage, wondering who this character called Oscar Pistorius that he played really was. From childhood he had been building a shell around himself, learning to put on a brave face to the world. He felt braver, the shell felt stronger, when he had a woman by his side. First it had been his mother, a far greater presence in his life than his father, and then, from the age of sixteen, he acquired the habit of falling serially in love.
Nandi came first, the girl of his dreams. She was attractive, wise for her age, loyal – and she would always remain loyal. Years later, after his fall, she would not say a word against him. But success changed
him and she moved on. He was heartbroken for about a month and then Vicky took her place. He fell truly in love with her too, and proved it to her one Valentine’s Day when he went to her house, hung two hundred balloons on the trees and garden fence, and wrote ‘I love you, Tiger’ with a can of spray paint on the tarmac of the road outside her gate. (His very first romantic encounter, at the age of eight, had also been a Valentine’s Day moment, when he gave a rose to a little girl at his school.) When Vicky went, Jenna took over. Then more women, some older than himself, some younger. Then Samantha, with whom he remained for eighteen tumultuous months; and then, when he had just turned twenty-six, Reeva, who he was instantly convinced would provide his final port of call, banishing all who had gone before her to the shadows.
The only woman Pistorius could turn to now, as he prepared for the ordeal of the bail hearing, was Aimée, the one enduring soulmate during his decade of turbulent loves. She would be sitting there in court, as would his brother, Carl. But Carl had a reckless streak. Like Pistorius himself, he was prone to shifting moods, one minute calm and polite, the next in a state of high exuberance. He was loyal but not as dependable as Aimée, the steady sibling. More considered and mature than her brothers, she was the baby of the three but a pillar of strength. There was no guile in Aimée, no hidden subtexts. With the other women in Pistorius’s life it had always been complicated, all-or-nothing infatuation; the love he and his sister felt for each other was easy, affectionate and unconditional.
Yet neither the comfort of her presence in court nor any trace of the skills he had previously exhibited in his public appearances would enable him to compose his features for the ordeal ahead, as the police car slowed down outside the court building and he saw the mob that awaited him. The shell he had labored so long to build around himself
cracked and the cameras, tributes once to the adulation he inspired, flashed in cruel mockery of the champion he had been.
With shame and dread he stepped out of the vehicle, as the policemen either side of him carved a path through the scrum of photographers battling to get a clear shot of him. Once inside the courtroom there was nowhere to hide. His body language laid bare his desolation. Acknowledging his family’s presence with a sad nod, he shuffled in, head bowed, a shrunken husk of the athletic phenomenon who had amazed the world. For a decade he had been inspiring awe, now he evoked pity or contempt. The brutal question on the lips of many was whether he felt more sorry for what he had done to Reeva Steenkamp, or for what he had done to himself.
The state prosecutor at the bail hearing, Gerrie (pronounced ‘herrie’) Nel, had no doubt what was the answer to that question, and he did not shrink from letting Pistorius know it. Nel’s job was not to feel his pain but to compound it, portraying him before magistrate Nair as a callous, self-engrossed glory-seeker, amply capable of premeditated murder.
There had been an age of innocence when Pistorius’s idea of a menacing rival was a young Brazilian double amputee who presumed to challenge his status as the planet’s fastest Paralympic runner. Now the foe was Nel, and what was at stake was not the outcome of a 200 meter sprint but whether he would spend the next quarter of a century behind bars. Nel, who would be the prosecutor at the murder trial too, was a man who could have made five times more money had he opted to become a defense lawyer in private practice. Some of his fellow lawyers said he lacked the self-assurance to operate on his own, without the weight of the state behind him; others said that he was driven by a zeal to uphold the rule of law on behalf of the South African state. Whatever the case, he was dogged and he was plucky.
In his role as state prosecutor he had faced down threats from powerful people in government and from gangland criminals with contract killers on their payrolls.
Nel, dressed in the black robes of his profession, stood before the similarly attired Desmond Nair, and proclaimed the state’s certainty that the accused had known exactly whom he was shooting at when he fired his gun. It was common cause, he said, that the victim had died ‘of multiple gunshot wounds’, that he had fired four bullets through a locked bathroom door, three of which had struck Reeva, one in the hip, one in the right arm, one in the head. Where the state differed from the defense was in the contention that it was premeditated murder. Premeditated did not have to mean that he had meticulously planned to kill Reeva Steenkamp; all the state had to do, Nel contended, was to prove that he had resolved to do away with her life prior to pulling the trigger.
If Nel’s purpose was in part to obtain a reaction from the man in the dock, he succeeded. Battling as he had been to keep his features stonily composed, Pistorius winced at that first mention of the charge that he had knowingly killed Reeva; then he covered his face with his hands and his shoulders heaved.
Nel seized his chance. ‘It is a possibility,’ he said, casting a wry glance at the gallery, ‘that after shooting someone, one starts to feel sorry for oneself.’ Aimée put her hand to her mouth and shook her head, dismayed by Nel’s pitilessness. But the prosecutor pressed on. It was possible the accused felt sorry, he said, because he was thinking, ‘I am going to jail and my career is gone.’
There was method in Nel’s heartlessness. He did not want the public, much less the magistrate, to sympathize with the fallen hero. He wanted them to despise him.
Pistorius had gone into the bail hearing knowing that people
would find his version of events difficult to believe. He could see how people might think that in his place they would lie. His lawyers were well aware of how hard it would be to convince the public, never mind a magistrate, that he was telling the truth. The pressure was on him to provide a plausible alternative or, as some chose to see it, to fabricate a good story. The tone and content of the affidavits presented to the magistrate had to be carefully judged. A British media adviser had warned his lawyers not to ‘over-egg’ his case. At the adviser’s prompting, the initial idea of including in the affidavit mention not only of his immense love for Reeva, but of his desire to marry her, was removed. It was true, he insisted to his lawyers – but they had judged the public mood and, by extension, what that of the magistrate was likely to be. The mention of marriage plans might have elicited howls of derision from the courtroom, which was packed with news reporters and members of the public, while adding nothing of material substance to the evidence the magistrate would need to consider.
Everyone in the room heard his sobs as Oldwadge began reading the affidavit.
‘By about 10 p.m. on 13 February 2013 we were in our bedroom. She was doing her yoga exercises and I was in bed watching television. My prosthetic legs were off. After Reeva finished her yoga exercises she got into bed and we both fell asleep. We were deeply in love and I could not have been happier.
‘I am acutely aware of violent crime being committed by intruders entering the home with a view to commit crime, including violent crime. I have received death threats before. I have also been a victim of violence and of burglaries before. For that reason I kept my firearm, a 9 mm Parabellum, underneath my bed when I went to bed at night.’
He said he woke up in the early hours of February 14, remembered he had left a fan outside on a balcony next to his bedroom and went to
fetch it, walking on his stumps. On closing the sliding doors behind him he heard ‘movement’ in the bathroom, down a corridor from the bedroom.
‘I felt a sense of terror rushing over me. There are no burglar bars across the bathroom window and I knew that contractors who worked at my house had left the ladders outside. Although I did not have my prosthetic legs on I have mobility on my stumps. I believed that someone had entered my house. I was too scared to switch on a light. I grabbed my 9 mm pistol from underneath my bed. On my way to the bathroom I screamed for him/them to get out of my house and for Reeva to phone the police.
‘I fired shots at the toilet door and shouted to Reeva to phone the police. She did not respond and I moved backwards out of the bathroom, keeping my eyes on the bathroom entrance. It was pitch dark in the bedroom and I thought Reeva was in bed. When I reached the bed, I realized Reeva was not in bed. That is when it dawned on me that it could have been Reeva who was in the toilet.’
Had he been an ordinary member of the public, had he been able to put some distance between himself and his predicament, he might have considered his story – as so many did – hard to believe. Quite apart from his failure to register whether his girlfriend was lying next to him when he rushed from his bed, gun in hand, to the bathroom, who could possibly believe that he had imagined a burglar would choose to hide in a toilet? What would a burglar have hoped to find in a toilet that was worth stealing? It was surely ridiculous to expect people to believe that he could have been so stupid – and the jokes, mostly of the ‘he hasn’t a leg to stand on’ variety, came thick and fast. A photograph posted on social media of a bathroom door with the message ‘Using toilet – Please don’t shoot’ scrawled on it went viral. It was the kind of thing he too would have laughed about, and maybe
even sent out on his Twitter account, had it been some other celebrity at the center of the drama.
His lawyers, though, were not amused at the obligation to set out the core elements of their case at the bail hearing. Pistorius’s desperation to avoid spending the months – or, as it turned out, one year – prior to the trial behind bars forced them to come up with a vividly detailed description of what he said had happened that night. That included the irreversible acknowledgment that he had indeed fired the bullets that killed Reeva, leaving his defense no option but to acknowledge that he had meant to shoot someone, while arguing that he had not meant to shoot her. He was locked into that version, with little room for maneuver once the trial began, and with ample time for the prosecution to deploy police detectives to pick holes in it. Barry Roux, the veteran trial lawyer who led his defense team at the bail hearing and would do so again at the murder trial, lamented the necessity of showing his hand so early on, but recognized there was no choice.