Chase Your Shadow (32 page)

The next witness, Charl Johnson, Michelle Burger’s husband, corroborated the basic elements of his wife’s testimony by testifying that he had heard screams before and during the shots. The only significant discrepancy with his wife’s story was that he said he was not as sure as she that he had heard four shots. It might have been three. Roux’s main line of attack in the cross-examination was that his testimony bore a suspiciously uncanny resemblance to his wife’s.

‘She spoke about the scream fading after the last shot and you spoke about fading too. How is that, Mr Johnson?’ Roux asked.

‘If two people witness the same incident ten meters apart then they will have similar recollections of the event,’ replied Johnson, a tall, lean, placid witness, determined not to be shaken by Roux the way his wife had been.

Picking up another phrase of Johnson’s that was identical to one his wife had used, Roux shook his head, smiled wanly, and said, ‘Mr
Johnson, I must stop you. You don’t know what you are doing to yourself. You discussed the evidence with your wife.’

‘I can honestly tell you we did not discuss it,’ Johnson insisted. To which Roux replied, ‘When witnesses start to use “honestly” then I wonder about it. Your interpretation of events is designed to incriminate the accused and it’s unfortunate. You and your wife could just as well have stood together in the witness box.’

Nel objected and this time Judge Masipa was on his side. In a calm, soft voice she said, ‘Don’t you go too far, Mr Roux?’

‘That is for the court to decide, my lady,’ Roux replied, by ‘the court’ meaning the judge. But he had made his point and did not continue this line of questioning, turning instead to what he considered to be a decisive piece of evidence indicating that Johnson and his wife did indeed mistake the cricket-bat sounds for gunshots.

The timing of a phone call Johnson made to his security company, just after he heard what he thought were shots, was at 3.16. Yet at 3.19., the record showed that Pistorius had made his first phone call, to Johan Stander, his friend and manager of the estate. There was not enough time for him to have fired the shots, run to get his prosthetic legs, knocked down the door with the bat and made that call, Roux said. It must have been the cricket bat he had heard. Johnson, unruffled, repeated that what he had heard were gunshots.

‘Sometimes people genuinely believe something has happened and then that is what they tell people. It is a different thing from it being correct,’ Roux said, chiding Johnson for what he seemed to think was his frivolity by remarking, ‘A man’s life is at stake, Mr Johnson.’

The next state witness was Dr Johan Stipp. Of the five neighbors who testified for the state, Stipp, a doctor in private practice, was the most impressive in terms of the apparent clarity of his mind, his eloquence and the steadiness of his English-speaking voice. At 72 meters
(230 feet), he and his wife, Anette, who would testify later but added little that her husband had not mentioned, lived closer to the scene of the crime than Burger and Johnson or Estelle van der Merwe.

Stipp appeared to be on all counts the best state witness, yet his testimony ended up backfiring for the prosecution case. It also delivered one of the most dramatic episodes of the entire trial.

What Stipp said in his evidence in chief to Nel was that, first, he was woken by three loud bangs, which, as he immediately told his wife who had also woken up, he believed to be gunshots. Second, he heard screaming. ‘It sounded to me like the voice of a female,’ he said. ‘She sounded fearful. She sounded to be emotional, anguished, scared almost scared out of her mind, I would say.’ Third, after noticing that the lights were on in the accused’s home and seeing a person behind a window move from right to left, he called the estate’s security guards, but the phone was busy and so he dialed the emergency number for the police. Fourth, while on the phone he heard ‘two to three’ louder, rapid bangs. Fifth, he went out onto the balcony of his home and heard a man shout, ‘Help! Help! Help!’

Except for Stipp’s belief that the screams he heard were a woman’s, the sequence of events correlated more neatly with the defense’s version of what had happened than the prosecution’s – namely, that there had been shots, then Pistorius’s screams, then the cricket bat striking the door. The prosecution agreed that after the four shots, one of which struck Steenkamp’s head, she would not have been able to utter a sound ever again. Nel, it dawned on Roux, had made a mistake in calling Dr Stipp as a witness.

But Pistorius would have a price to pay for this unexpected gift. Dr Stipp, he well recalled, was one of the first people to show up at his home after the shooting. Stipp had identified himself as a doctor and Pistorius had hoped, for a despairing moment or two, that
Reeva might be saved. But Stipp had not been able to do anything for her, and here he was now, come to destroy Pistorius’s life too, a witness for the state, on the side of the detested Gerrie Nel. Pistorius feared that, sooner or later in his testimony, Stipp would sketch in words the horrors that assailed him in his nightmares and that he had struggled for more than a year to keep from invading his waking mind. He was right to be afraid. Nel had no intention of sparing him this torture.

Nel asked Stipp what had happened when he arrived at the accused’s home.

‘I was motioned inside,’ Stipp replied. ‘A lady was on the ground, a man next to her on his knees. His right hand was on her groin, the fingers of his left hand in her mouth, her teeth clenching. He said, “I shot her. I thought she was a burglar. I shot her.
” ’

Pistorius, sitting on his wooden bench, bent over, his head almost down between his knees, his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking. But Stipp kept on regardless.

‘I think the accused had his fingers in her mouth because he was trying to open her airway. I tried to assist her, check for signs of life, but there were none. There was no pulse. I opened her right eyelid but her cornea was already milky . . .’

Pistorius let out a sharp, wrenching sob. Peering through the gaps between his fingers, he saw that the judge’s eyes were turned not towards him but towards the witness, to her left, and that she was listening carefully and taking notes. Pistorius had broken down and wept like this alone in his cottage, or with his sister by his side with her arms around him, and now here he was breaking down and weeping before a roomful of startled strangers.

Stipp carried on, clinically describing the scene he had found that night. Pistorius laced his fingers behind his neck and clamped
the inside of his forearms over his ears, but he could still make out the words.

‘Her teeth were clenching down hard on his fingers. It was obvious she was mortally wounded . . .’

‘Yes, Dr Stipp, please continue,’ said Nel.

‘There were wounds to her right thigh and arm, brain tissue visible, the top of her skull open . . .’

Pistorius retched. The smell of her blood flooded his nostrils. The court sketch artist, sitting alongside, passed him a white plastic bag, but though his stomach was heaving he did not vomit. Not this time. He retched again and Aimée, sitting behind him, covered her face in her hands, weeping too. Brian Webber reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. Barry Roux stood up and, with arms outstretched in supplication, asked the judge for a recess. Instantly assenting, she stood up, bowed to the court and limped out of the chamber. Aimée rushed over to Pistorius, his brother Carl close behind, and the three siblings sat with their arms huddled around one another, heads bowed, like orphans in a storm.

It was March 6, the fourth day of the trial, the twelfth anniversary of their mother’s death.

Floundering as he was in the cross-currents of the two most devastating episodes in his life, it seemed impossible that Pistorius would be able to regain his composure sufficiently to endure what remained of the day in court; yet, to the surprise of everyone present, he did. Half an hour later, when Judge Masipa re-entered the room, he had collected himself and soon after, when Roux began his cross-examination of Stipp, he was listening attentively again, taking notes, revealing himself to the court, not for the last time in the trial, to be a man of rapidly shifting moods.

Roux had been listening very closely and with growing surprise
to Stipp’s testimony for the prosecution, and when the time came for him to conduct his cross-examination he was courtesy itself, addressing the doctor as one esteemed professional to another, engaging him not so much in an argument as in scholarly debate. Roux sought not to undermine Stipp’s evidence so much as to ratify it.

Finding himself in the rare circumstance of not wishing to sabotage a state witness’s credibility, Roux informed Stipp that a medical specialist had told him the victim could not have screamed after the shots were fired. Did he agree? Stipp said he did. So, Roux continued, it could not have been the deceased who screamed after the shots, given that there was no other woman present in the house.

Nel stood up abruptly. ‘I object my lady.’ He seemed flustered. It was becoming apparent that he might have erred badly in calling Dr Stipp to the witness stand. Should Nel doubt it, Judge Masipa made the point for him. The witness appeared to be stating Mr Roux’s case, not the state’s, she said, sounding gently perplexed. But this was hardly a reason to stop Mr Roux from persisting in his line of questioning. She overruled Nel’s objection and asked the defense lawyer to carry on.

Roux acknowledged the judge’s intervention with a gentle nod and turned again to the witness. ‘So, Dr Stipp,’ he said, ‘if we accept the screams could not have been the deceased’s, who else could have screamed? Could it have been Mr Pistorius’s voice?’

‘I don’t know. Could it?’ Stipp, somewhat at a loss, replied.

Roux, satisfied this particular point had been made, moved on to the most surprising inconsistency in Stipp’s testimony. He said he had heard two sets of shots, even though both prosecution and defense agreed there had been only one set.

‘I’m going to put to you that the last two to three sounds, those sounds, were caused by a cricket bat breaking down a door, but it sounded to you again like gunshots,’ said Roux.

‘They sounded identical,’ said Stipp.

‘You had already heard the gunshots, so there must be another explanation for the next sounds,’ replied Roux.

Stipp shrugged his shoulders. Nel looked tense. His chief police investigator, Mike van Aardt, usually as impassive as he was silent, sat bolt upright in his chair.

‘If the state tells us there were shots first and then shots later, my lady,’ Roux continued, ‘then they must make statements available to us. Or has the state misled us all this time?’

Roux was mischief-making. Nel wriggled. Roux ended Stipp’s cross-examination by asking him to confirm another piece of evidence he had offered earlier, under Nel’s curiously self-destructive guidance, concerning the accused’s state of mind when Stipp entered his home approximately fifteen minutes after the shooting. Stipp obliged. He said he found Pistorius to be ‘very distraught and beside himself ’, begging God to save his girlfriend and crying out, ‘Please let her live!’

‘Did he seem sincere to you?’ Roux asked.

‘He seemed sincere to me. He was in tears,’ Stipp replied.

Stipp left the witness stand, an adjournment was called, and Arnold Pistorius, who hitherto had sat listening to the proceedings straight-backed, alert and poker-faced, broke into a smile. He stepped forward and said something in his nephew’s ear. For the first and last time in the trial that anyone in the courtroom would remember, Pistorius smiled. Then, as if emboldened by the unexpected triumph, and as if beginning to believe that his story might at last be believed, even by his most vociferous detractors, he strode across to where the three ANC Women’s League ladies were sitting in their green and black uniforms, shook each one of them by the hand and said, ‘Pleased to meet you.’ They looked confused, but all took his hand.

Later, outside the courtroom, someone suggested to Arnold Pistorius that his nephew was getting good value from Barry Roux. Arnold nodded, grinned and said, ‘From Gerrie Nel too!’

He would not feel that way a month later, once his nephew’s cross-examination had got under way. Then he would snarl to family and friends that Nel was a vindictive little man, that he strove not to get to the truth but to feed his ego, that he was determined to win the case at any cost, that he was a traitor to the Afrikaner race. But until that moment came, Arnold Pistorius and his family, while never complacent, allowed themselves to think that things were going their way.

The days and weeks passed, interrupted by unscheduled adjournments, and the prosecution waded through the remainder of its case, some of which was so tediously repetitive and inconclusive that even the man whose future was at stake, who at times would retch so violently that a point came when a court official judged it wise to place a large green plastic bucket by his side, would sometimes stop making notes and start doodling on his notepad instead. More instructively, during breaks between sessions he sometimes withdrew from the briefcase he brought into court a Bible study guide, or a book written by Jim Cymbala, pastor of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Church, called
Breakthrough Prayer: The Power of Connecting with the Heart of God
. In it, he read stories of people who had turned to prayer at times of difficulty, among them relatives of individuals who had died in the attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York and Washington DC.

Nel had stated at the beginning of the trial that his case would rest principally on circumstantial evidence, meaning what the neighbors had heard, but also on ballistic and forensic evidence. None of this
provided conclusive answers to the core question: why had the shots been fired? But what it might do, Nel hoped, was point to implausibility or outright lies in the accused’s version of events. The ballistic and forensic evidence the prosecution produced concerned the manner in which the accused had attacked the locked toilet door with a cricket bat, the location of the phones and clothes found in the bathroom and bedroom, and the trajectory of the bullets and the order in which they were fired. Nel sought most of all to demonstrate that the first bullet did not strike the victim’s brain, thereby indicating that she would have had a moment to scream in terror or pain during the shooting, alerting the accused to her identity.