Chase Your Shadow (35 page)

Nel, who made little headway against Lin, concluded his cross-examination by asking him directly whether he questioned the truthfulness of his witnesses.

‘You’re not saying the witnesses who told us they heard a woman scream are lying, Mr Lin?’ Nel asked.

‘We’re talking about a possible scenario from a scientific perspective,’ responded a mildly affonted Lin. ‘I’m not saying the witnesses are lying at all.’

Nel, having endeavored to portray Lin to the judge as an egghead blind to the obvious, called it a day there. The contest between them appeared to have ended as a muddled tie – muddle having been precisely what Barry Roux had sought in presenting Lin as a witness. The question that remained to be decided was how much clarity the judge had been able to glean from the confusing testimonies of the eight individuals who – save for Pistorius himself – would pass for the closest thing to material witnesses that the court would hear during the entirety of the trial.

*

Legions of pundits had submitted their opinions on South African television’s ‘Oscar Channel’ and across numerous media outlets at home and abroad, evaluating the quality and credibility of the witnesses, offering blow-by-blow analyses of Roux’s and Nel’s strategies and tactics, seeking to second-guess the thought processes of the judge. Views differed widely, depending on the pundits’ legal knowledge, or lack of it, or simply because some, like many members of the general public, had made up their minds before the trial began as to the guilt or innocence of the accused. Calmer heads pointed out just how implausible were both the prosecution’s and the defense’s versions of the events at Pistorius’s home in the early hours of Valentine’s Day. It was as hard to comprehend the ‘tragic accident’ version as it was to glimpse what possible motive he might have had for wanting to kill the woman whom he apparently loved, and who was apparently in love with him. Barring Estelle van der Merwe’s vague and uncorroborated testimony, the prosecution had offered no evidence to support the theory of an argument having taken place prior to the shooting.

What all observers agreed upon, however, was that everything that would be heard from the start of the trial to its finish would dim in significance in comparison with the testimony of the only person alive who knew exactly what had happened that night. In the absence of decisively compelling facts, the outcome would turn on how coherent or incoherent the testimony of Oscar Pistorius would be, on how he would stand up to what everyone anticipated would be a merciless interrogation by Gerrie Nel, and on whether the judge would feel that he was lying or telling the truth.

17

I am bound upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears do scald like molten lead
.

SHAKESPEARE,
KING LEAR

A
T 12.10 A.M.
on April 7, 2014, Barry Roux said, ‘I call Mr Pistorius.’ Pistorius stood up and strode briskly along the bench he occupied alone at the front of the court, towards the witness stand, looking neither left at the judge nor right at the public gallery, where June Steenkamp, Reeva’s mother, sat. It was the moment for which he had been steeling himself for more than a year, the first time he would tell his story in his own words since the day he shot Reeva – but he could not have been in a more fragile state of mind.

Pistorius had not slept the night before, despite all the pills he took, and earlier that morning the first defense witness Roux had called, a pathologist named Jan Botha, had described in clinical detail the wound on Reeva’s hip, the perforation of her skull, the spilling brain tissue. Then Nel, during his cross-examination, had flashed up on a screen, so that everyone in the court could see, close-up images of the blood-splattered bathroom and of the wounds themselves, including, for one harrowing instant, a photo of Reeva’s dead face in profile, gray and bruised, her hair matted with blood, the entry point of the bullet to her head distinctly visible. Reeva’s mother
had put her hands to her face and gasps rose from the public gallery, but no one had responded with more visible dismay than Pistorius. He put a handkerchief to his mouth, pressed his thumbs to his ears and sobbed more loudly than he had at any point in the trial so far. It was impossible to carry on. Roux stood up and asked the judge for the ‘courtesy’ of a brief adjournment; she granted it, and once more Aimée, almost as distraught as her brother, rushed to his side.

The one faint comfort now, as he stood facing sideways on to the judge, preparing to take the oath, was that his image was forbidden – by his own choice – from being shown on TV. But millions around the world could hear him on TV, radio, tablets or phones as a female court official instructed him to say after her, ‘I swear that the evidence I shall give, shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.’ He struggled to get the words out. He would struggle still more a moment later when, still standing, he recited a rehearsed statement.

‘I’d like to begin by tendering an apology,’ Pistorius said. ‘I want to take this opportunity to apologize to Mr and Mrs Steenkamp, to Reeva’s family and friends, you who are here today.’ His jaw was quivering, his soft voice cracking, barely audible. ‘I can hardly hear you, Mr Pistorius,’ the judge interrupted him.’ I apologize, my lady,’ he replied, and resumed his speech at a higher volume.

‘There hasn’t been a moment since this tragedy happened that I haven’t thought about your family,’ he said, turning his head in the direction of Mrs Steenkamp. ‘I wake up every morning and you’re the first people I think of. The first people I pray for. I can’t imagine the pain and the sorrow and the emptiness that I’ve caused you and your family. I was simply trying to protect Reeva. I can promise you that when she went to bed that night she felt loved. I have tried to put
my words on paper many times to write to you, but no words would ever suffice.’

Was it a ploy, suggested by his lawyers, aimed more at the judge? Was it a sincerely heartfelt appeal to Reeva’s family? It was both – but June Steenkamp listened to him with her face as hard as stone, her lips puckered, acid the look in her eyes. A day later she would tell a British tabloid newspaper, the
Daily Mirror
, that Pistorius’s apology had not had the desired effect. ‘It left me unmoved,’ she said. ‘I knew it was coming. My lawyers had prepared me for it. I cried for the first time, yes, but not because he apologized, because of the suffering and agony that my darling daughter went through and because I will never have her again.’

Almost from the day Reeva died, it had been possible to find out what the Steenkamp family was thinking only from television broadcasts or from the publications of news organizations, like the
Mirror
, that had a policy of paying for interviews. Advised by the family lawyer, Advocate Dup de Bruyn, the Steenkamps chose to speak publicly about their daughter’s death only in exchange for money. June Steenkamp and her husband, Barry, were poor, and especially so at the time Reeva died, Barry having been reduced to selling wood on country roadsides and June to selling home-made food at the local racecourse. During the brief period that Reeva was with Pistorius, they had depended on money from her to pay their basic bills. Their future had relied on Reeva having a successful career in modeling or else returning to the law, which she had studied at university. With her death, retirement appeared to promise only destitution. They had hoped initially to receive some money from a civil settlement with Pistorius, but it seemed likely that all of Pistorius’s assets would be swallowed up by his legal fees. It was after receiving a deluge of requests for interviews from all over the world that they hit upon the idea, using De Bruyn
as their intermediary, of charging the media handsome fees for their time. The Steenkamps grieved, but in a perverse and cruelly unexpected way their daughter did more to swell her family’s fortunes in death than she ever had in life.

Two South African media outlets that had the money and the ethical inclination to make the required payments were the sister celebrity magazines
You
, in English, and
Huis Genoot
, in Afrikaans. De Bruyn revealed that for an interview with the Steenkamp parents they paid 500,000 rand, or US$50,000, and for the photographic rights to a ceremony in which the family scattered Reeva’s ashes on the Indian Ocean another 250,000 rand, or US$25,000. Over the following year, then into the trial and beyond, the Steenkamp family gave interviews to London’s
Mail on Sunday
,
Daily Mail
,
Daily Mirror
and
Hello
magazine, as well as to British TV’s Channel Five.

Thus the public learned of what they described as their ‘unbearable grief ’ at the loss of their adored daughter, of ‘a space inside that could never be filled’, and that Barry would often get out of bed at night and sit on his porch weeping, drink and cigarette in hand.

De Bruyn would routinely tell journalists who called him that the Steenkamps were ‘indigent’ – but that did not last long. Before the start of the trial, Barry and June moved to a new house in the countryside, near the Port Elizabeth racecourse. Barry stopped selling wood for a living and resumed training horses, making plans to build stables on the large plot, almost the size of half a football field, on which his new home stood. By November 2013, Barry Steenkamp was back at work, with as many as three horses competing on race days. Sometimes his jockey would be Wayne Agrella, Reeva’s old boyfriend.

The Steenkamps also acquired a pub near the racecourse called the Barking Spider. June would continue to cook food for a living,
but now she would be serving it in her own establishment. Journalists who arrived unannounced in search of free information were shooed away.

Early on in the trial, the Pistorius family, who sat throughout on the same long bench as June Steenkamp, made an attempt to make peace with her. Aimée walked across, with a sad and apologetic smile, and handed her a note. When a journalist from a South African Sunday newspaper asked June if she would reveal to him the contents of the note, she replied, ‘You know the story. You know the story . . .’ The journalist took her to mean that she might do so in exchange for payment.

The last interview the Steenkamps did before the trial began was published in the
Mail on Sunday
. June, always more loquacious with the media than her husband, said it would be torture for her to listen to the evidence of ‘my lovely girl’s last moments’, but she had a need to know what she had gone through, and why Pistorius had done it. ‘That is my obsession: the truth about why Oscar did what he did that night.’

Yet she was surprisingly generous towards the man who had killed her daughter. ‘Whatever the court decides at the end of his trial, I will be ready to forgive him,’ she said. ‘I know many people in my position would want to see him dead or badly punished. But I believe in faith and justice and I don’t have any hatred or revenge in my heart. That’s not my way. I would rather pray for him and pray that my family can get through this terrible time. I want to look at Oscar, really look him in the eyes, and see for myself the truth about what he did to Reeva.’

Inside the High Court in Pretoria on March 7 she finally had her chance. It was the first time she would hear Pistorius speak in person, for Reeva had never introduced him to them. Unmoved by his personal plea to her, June Steenkamp listened expressionless as Barry
Roux, standing across the court from Pistorius, began leading his client gently through his testimony, seeking first to extract from him a sense of his state of mind since the shooting, and then prodding him into recounting the salient moments of his life since childhood.

Pistorius said he had been on heavy medication since the third week of February, when he had moved from a police cell to his uncle’s home. Yet the sleeping pills and antidepressants were of ambiguous value because he was scared to go to sleep. ‘I have terrible nightmares about things that happened that night where I wake up and I can smell the blood, and I wake up terrified. I wake up just in a complete state of terror to a point that I’d rather not sleep than wake up like that. For many weeks I didn’t sleep.’

He drew all the comfort that he could muster from his Christian faith. ‘Religion is what has got me through this last year – I have been struggling a lot,’ he said. But Reeva had been his refuge, too. ‘I always wanted to have a girlfriend who was Christian. She would pray for me at night. We would pray before we would eat.’

Roux led Pistorius through a detailed exposition of his life from birth, highlighting not his triumphs and indomitable character but the emotional and physical trials he had endured, inverting the public narrative of his achievements prior to the shooting of Reeva. He began with a description of the congenital defect in his ankles and feet, his fibular hemimelia, and the choice that was made to amputate below the knee. The two words he repeated most often were ‘my mother’. In a mournful and melancholic voice, so soft the judge repeatedly had to prompt him to speak up, he listed the areas of his life in which she had been the decisive influence.

‘My mother grew up in an Anglican Church and a Methodist Church. My mother taught me to trust the Lord.’

‘My mother wanted me to get over my physical limitations by
trying several sports. She never wanted me to see my disability as something that would hold me back.’

‘My mother taught me to stand up for myself. She always said don’t come crying to your parents.’

‘My mother owned a pistol that she kept in a padded bag under the pillow. My father was not around much. She often called the police at night. Often we were scared, and me and my brother and sister went to my mother’s room and waited for the police to come.’

‘My mother was very important to us. Everything I learned in life I learned from her.’

When he mentioned her death, his voice broke again. ‘My mother passed away when I was fifteen,’ he said, his grief evidently still fresh twelve years on. ‘She died very unexpectedly. I had just started boarding school and she had just remarried. We did not know she was sick and then we were told she was in a coma . . . On the day she died, we rushed to the hospital and were there for ten minutes before she passed.’