Authors: John Carlin
What Pistorius did not know was that South African lawyers not involved with the case, but as riveted by it as the general public, believed it would be impossible for him eventually to avoid serving time in prison, even if he was released on bail now. Under South African law to be acquitted of premeditated murder still left open the possibility of being found guilty of another, lesser charge. The judge would have the discretion to convict him of a lower category of murder, for which the sentence would also be jail. Or, what many lawyers believed would be the best option for him, to find him guilty of culpable homicide, or manslaughter, for which the range of sentencing possibilities was wide. He could be lucky in such an instance and get out on a suspended sentence, or unlucky and be ordered to serve fifteen years.
Spared these gloomy reflections during the bail hearing, there came a moment in court when his defense team was presented with an unexpected gift. It came in the shape of Hilton Botha, the first police investigating officer to arrive at his home after the shooting. Botha was a blunt and hardened detective who had shown no sympathy for him as he knelt by Reeva’s body, wailing at the horror of what he had done. Now Botha received his comeuppance in court. He was supposed to have been there to further the prosecution’s case against bail; in the event, he ended up undermining it.
Stirring memories of the O. J. Simpson case in the minds of American reporters present, it emerged that Botha had made a mess of the scene he had found at Pistorius’s home, stomping all over the place with apparent scant regard for safeguarding evidence and generally revealing himself, in the face of questioning by Barry Roux, to be an unreliable witness as well as a less than competent investigator.
Botha had initially declared in court, led by Nel, that the fatal shots had been fired downwards into the bathroom door, which would have meant that Pistorius had had his prosthetic legs on, contradicting his account that he had been on his stumps. But when Roux put it to Botha that he had no evidence to support the contention that he was wearing his legs, Botha backed down and admitted that this was so.
Botha said a female witness had heard an argument between two people at Pistorius’s home between two and three in the morning on the night in question, before the shooting happened. Under cross-examination by Roux, Botha conceded some uncertainty as to whether the witness had been 300 or 600 meters away at the time. Botha also agreed that the witness would not be able to know if the voices she heard belonged to Pistorius and Steenkamp. As for another claim
made by Botha, that he had found steroids at Pistorius’s home on the morning of the shooting, Roux convinced the court that there was no basis for it, that what he had thought were performance-enhancing drugs had in fact been innocuous herbal remedies.
Roux’s case centered on demolishing the state’s case, but he also came up with a useful piece of counter-evidence in the shape of a female witness who knew Reeva well. This witness cast doubt on the state’s argument for premeditated murder by saying that her friend had been ‘very much in love’ with the accused.
Nel fought back, telling the court that it was an indisputable fact that Pistorius had killed somebody and, questionable witnesses aside, that it seemed inexplicable that he would not have checked to see whether Reeva was in bed prior to seizing his gun from under it, that he would not have called out her name at the first sign of danger, or that she would not have screamed after he fired the first of the four bullets, alerting him to the fact that she was in the toilet. Nel added a populist touch to his arguments when he said that if Pistorius were granted bail it would be a slap in the face for South African women who had been victims of crime. He counseled the magistrate not merely to pay ‘lip service’ to the national cause of reducing crime against women, but to be seen to take tough action against it.
In the event, the magistrate paid little heed to this appeal, limiting himself to the evidence he had heard. In a two-hour reading of his judgment, he set out the arguments for and against bail, offering no clue as to what his verdict would be right up until the end. The tension was excruciating. Pistorius would not be able to cope with jail, living alongside murderers. Even if they didn’t get to him first, how would he be able to carry on living with the memory of what he had done with no aunt or sister or cousin or grandmother to comfort him?
On the magistrate droned, one moment raising Pistorius’s hopes,
dashing them the next. Nair acknowledged the flaws in the police handling of the case but noted also the ‘quite pronounced improbabilities’ of the bail applicant’s account of what had happened. He had a list of difficulties, as he put it, with that version; but neither, on the other hand, was the prosecution’s case watertight. There again, it would be unreasonable to expect the state to have ‘all the pieces of the puzzle now’. As to the possibility of Pistorius jumping bail and fleeing the country, Nair judged it to be limited because of his national and global fame and his physical impairment. Nor did Nair believe he presented ‘a threat to the public’.
Whereupon, he finally declared on February 22, eight days after the shooting, that Pistorius would be granted bail pending payment of 1 million rand (US$100,000) and his handing over his passport and any guns he might own (other than the one with which he had shot the victim, which was in the possession of the police). On meeting these conditions, he would be free to go home – or, as it turned out, to the home of his uncle Arnold. The Pistorius family members embraced each other, then reached out to hug him.
He sobbed with relief, but on the streets of South Africa the magistrate’s decision was greeted with outrage by many. It reeked of preferential treatment – rich boy’s justice. It felt like an insult to the many thousands – 46,000 was the official figure for the whole of South Africa – who lay in filthy jails pending trial, many of them either on charges far more innocuous than his or where the evidence of guilt was substantially less. A case in point, as one newspaper pointed out, was that of a fifty-year-old black paraplegic called Ronnie Fakude, who had spent two years in prison awaiting trial not for murder but for fraud. He continued to wait as the Pistorius bail verdict was delivered, able to move only by dragging himself around a crowded cell on his hands.
South African columnists had a field day. Justice and equality were the legacies Nelson Mandela had bequeathed to the country; the favorable treatment received in a law court by a rich and famous white man had put those principles to the test and found them wanting. Justice in South Africa, as a judge had once said of justice in Britain, was open to all men, like the doors of the Ritz Hotel. Pistorius had found himself the best team of lawyers that money could buy and that, aided and abetted – in a view widely held – by an impressionable magistrate, had won him an undeserved freedom.
Pistorius himself was in no state to dwell on such considerations. For him and his family Barry Roux was the hero of the hour. He had confirmed his reputation as one of the top criminal defense lawyers in South Africa by the meticulous doggedness with which he had successfully pursued what seemed to many of his peers to be an unwinnable cause. But Roux pressed on. He lodged an appeal against the conditions set and, still more surprisingly, won again. A second court lifted the restriction on leaving South Africa and revoked a ban imposed by magistrate Nair on drinking alcohol, deeming it to have been ‘unreasonable and unfair’.
A further victory came when Hilton Botha was removed from the case after it emerged that he had been charged with attempted murder relating to an incident in 2011 in which he and two other police officers had allegedly fired on suspects inside a minibus. The state’s case was, for now, in disarray.
Pistorius had won round one of the legal battle and now, instead of wearing a green prisoner’s uniform, he would be in his own clothes, eating his own food, sleeping in his own bedroom at his uncle’s place – for he could not bear to go back to live in his own home. His family would be there to comfort him when images of Reeva stormed his guilty mind – but he would seek comfort, too, in the ghostly presence
of another woman, one who had shaped his character, leaving a deeper imprint than Reeva or any other of his lovers had ever done: his mother, Sheila. Tattooed in Roman numerals on the inside of his right biceps were the date on which she was born and the date on which she died.
4
If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it
.
SIGMUND FREUD
F
ROM THE
start, Sheila Pistorius had had no intention of enrolling her son in any kind of special school for children with disabilities. Pistorius spent his primary years at a regular school, and when adolescence beckoned she presented him with the challenge of attending Pretoria Boys High School, where the best and the toughest went.
It was a school that produced champions, high achievers, many of whom would excel in later life in sports, politics, business and the law. A South African institution established in 1901 and famed throughout the land, Pretoria Boys High had been conceived in conscious imitation of the strict and venerable British public school model, and for most of its years it had been a whites-only institution. But around the time of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison the school began admitting black children and soon acquired a reputation for enlightenment, so much so that at Mandela’s presidential inauguration in May 1994, an event that drew heads of state from all continents, its students were invited to serve as waiters.
In 2000, when Pistorius was thirteen and a year away from starting high school, he and his mother had a meeting with the headmaster,
Bill Schroder. Schroder was a giant of a man, in whom benevolence and toughness impressively combined. He took a paternal interest in his boys while also presiding over a regime where old-fashioned caning continued as a punishment of last resort. He took the school’s founding motto
Virtute et Labore
, virtue and work, seriously and held firm in his defense of the values those words embodied.
But during that meeting, held in the sanctum sanctorum of his study, Schroder felt unusually ill at ease. Sheila Pistorius, then forty-two years old, was an attractive woman with a big smile and an ebullient personality. Schroder, more accustomed to inspiring awe than succumbing to it, vividly recalled the encounter years later. He had met more parents than he could remember, but this one, he said, ‘was THE most amazing woman – quite remarkable, with a special light about her’.
The school buildings and grounds were unlike anything Pistorius had ever seen or imagined. A forbidding stone archway at the entrance, a Victorian-style red-brick main building, Latin inscriptions on walls, names engraved on wood of the alumni who had fallen in the two world wars, a hundred acres of land with rugby and cricket fields where some of the finest South African sportsmen had honed their talents. It was a scarily imposing scene when glimpsed through the eyes of a child, and all the more so when across a desk there sat a formidably large man of authoritarian demeanor. Yet the boy appeared quite at ease, listening quietly as Schroder and his mother discussed his future prospects, his academic strengths and weaknesses, the sports he would play.
Mention of sports reminded the headmaster of the reason why he felt less comfortable than he usually did at these meetings. He could no longer avoid broaching the question that had been in his mind from the moment mother and son had entered the room. Pretoria
Boys had never admitted a boy without feet before – not, at any rate, during the decade that Schroder had been in charge. Pistorius would start out as a day student, but it was possible, his mother said, that in due course he would become a boarder (the school offered both options) and that prospect rendered the matter all the more delicate. It would be a heavy responsibility for the school, one that would ultimately fall on the headmaster’s shoulders. Unable to restrain his concern any longer, Schroder asked, ‘Yes, but . . . is he going to cope?’
Sheila Pistorius looked baffled. She exchanged glances with her son, who shrugged. ‘I don’t think I follow,’ she replied. ‘What are you saying?’ Schroder mumbled something about the boy’s condition, his, umm . . . prosthetic legs. ‘Ah,’ Sheila Pistorius smiled. ‘I see. But please don’t worry. There’s no problem at all. He’s absolutely normal!’ She explained that she understood very well that Pretoria Boys was a famously athletic school and that, far from being a cause for concern, it was a large part of the reason why her son wanted to be taught there. She listed some of the sports and outdoor activities he had engaged in from early childhood: cricket, rugby, soccer, mountain biking and wrestling, for which he had won several competitive medals. As for getting about, going to the bathroom at night and that sort of thing, no worries there either. He took off his artificial legs when he went to bed but, Sheila explained, was perfectly capable of walking short distances on his stumps. The boy nodded reassuringly. Schroder looked at him and looked at his mother. Had he detected any edge of anxiety in her voice, or any sign of misgiving in him, he might have hesitated. But he did not. Relieved and satisfied, he bade farewell to them both. The boy would fit in well. He looked forward very much to welcoming her son as a student in the next school year, in January 2001.
There had been an alternative to Pretoria Boys, another reputable high school in the city called the Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool
(Afrikaans Boys High School). There was huge rivalry between the two, in particular when it came to rugby, and the Afrikaner one was where his father, Henke, had studied. Pistorius, who spoke Afrikaans, chose the one where English was the language of instruction, which happened also to be the language he spoke with his mother.
His parents had divorced when he was six. Henke left home and went to live seven hundred miles away in Port Elizabeth – as chance would have it, the city on South Africa’s south-eastern coast where Reeva Steenkamp grew up. As the family told it, Henke did not abide by his pledge always to stand by his son as enthusiastically as he had declared he would on the day he was born. He did not disappear. Not at first. He would see his three children once every two weeks, and they enjoyed their outings with him. But money was a problem. The family’s sole breadwinner until the marital break-up, Henke did not meet all his financial responsibilities afterwards. Often because he was not able to. Henke made a living chiefly out of agricultural lime mining, but he was a volatile administrator, one day up, the next down, opening and closing companies with a frequency that exasperated the rest of his family – especially his three brothers, who were all steadily successful businessmen.