One Tragic Night (2 page)

The horrifying path of arterial spurts – vertical lines on the walls and tiles – trace the route he followed out the double doors of the bedroom, across the upstairs lounge past the TV unit, the flat screen, surround-sound amp and headphones on the left and the tawny faux-suede couch and ottoman on the
right. A red line stretches from the ottoman across to the L-shaped couch. It follows his route past an open linen cupboard stacked with towels and sheets that have been left dishevelled as a result of a scramble to find something, anything, to stop the haemorrhaging. A blue hand towel lies abandoned on the floor next to the cupboard.

The trail follows his route across the landing towards the stairs, past two paintings of bushveld savanna in heavy wooden frames and a tall wooden sculpture on a metal stand. All along the cream eggshell-coloured walls are sprays in a serpentine pattern. The splotches are reminiscent of cuttlefish, with their bulbous heads and long twisted tentacles.

Some of the spray reached over the silver balustrade down to the lounge below where drops landed on the beige leather bucket chairs and couch, raw-wood wine rack, animal-skin ottoman and pillow, and Nguni-hide rug. It is in this room that the trophies are paraded, witnesses to years of success and achievement. Their polished sheen has escaped blemish.

There are maroon drops on every step leading down to the ground floor – on the mottled tiles, the walls and streaked on the balustrade as if a paintbrush has been flicked deliberately and violently. Finally, the trail stops at the bottom of the stairs where the body lies. The woman, once a paragon of beauty and grace, now lies broken and damaged, drained of life.

She lies on her back, stretched out with her head closest to the main entrance of the house. Those who were amongst the first to arrive on the scene were met by this harrowing sight as they threw open the doors. Her legs are splayed, revealing the cursive ‘Lioness' tattoo on her left ankle and the shimmering pink polish on her toes. The light-grey Nike basketball shorts are soaked red on her right side where a bullet struck her hip. Her head is cocked to the left, away from the staircase, and her left hand rests on her exposed navel, showing the wound on the webbing between her index and middle fingers. Her black vest has been pulled up to below her chest and a white ECG electrode pad peeks through on her right breast. The white stickers from the ECG pads have been discarded near the staircase where paramedics left them in their haste. Her right arm, destroyed by a wound to the elbow, is bent unnaturally at her side and a light towel has been draped over her bicep – a hasty tourniquet abandoned when it became clear that any attempt at stemming the flow was in vain. There is another towel at the wood skirting and several black plastic bin bags to the side. Her head, devastated by the wound high above her right ear, lies on a black-and-white patterned towel. Her right eye is bruised grey over the lid, reminiscent of the smoky eye shadow she was painted with for model shoots. Her manicured eyebrow has
halted a trickle of blood from her forehead onto the bridge of her nose. The rim of her nostril is bright red and a thick line runs at a 90-degree angle across to her left cheekbone, as if it has been drawn across her face with a stick of lipstick gone awry. Her lips are pale.

She lies where he left her. It is here, at the foot of the staircase, where others tried to help her, where the paramedics came, scrambled and then had to walk away. In the pre-dawn hours following her death, police officers arrived on the scene to investigate. They made their way through the house following the trail from her body up to the primary crime scene in the toilet cubicle where she was shot. A photographer recorded the images for posterity. The spatter, the bullet jackets, the cellphones, the cricket bat, the gun and the door would all later be scrutinised as investigators hunted for the truth.

And then finally, only once the sun was already high in the sky over Silver Woods estate, would members of the pathology services arrive to remove her from where she had died, leaving a bloody chaos at the bottom of the stairs where the trail had gone cold.

Estelle van der Merwe glanced over at the clock. It was 1:56am and she was irritated. She had had barely five hours' sleep and knew that her 11-year-old son was writing an exam in the morning and was probably also being kept up by the disturbance. Her husband Jacques lay asleep in the bed alongside her, apparently oblivious to the voice wafting over the warm night air across the Silver Woods estate.

Estelle couldn't hear what the fight was about or even what language the woman was speaking, but to her it sounded like an argument. The voice was loud and the breaks and pauses suggested she was speaking to someone else – who was it? Estelle couldn't hear a second voice.

She got out of bed to peer out of a window, looking towards the Farm Inn, a small nature reserve neighbouring the estate, but she couldn't see anything and went back to bed. Out of desperation and annoyance, she folded a pillow and put it over her head, hoping it would shut out the persistent voice. She heard it go on and on for about an hour before she finally dozed off.

An hour later, four ‘
plof geluide
' (‘thuds' or ‘bangs') shook her awake again. Then there was silence.

This time her husband had also been jolted awake and Estelle anxiously asked him what the noise had been.

‘Gunshots,' he responded. Jacques got out of bed to look out of the windows, but could see nothing out of the ordinary. He climbed back under the covers next to her. But then the sounds of a commotion caught their attention once again. Jacques called the estate security to establish what was going on and moments later they both heard what sounded like someone crying in the distance.

‘Who's crying?' asked Estelle. She was in shock, felt paralysed and too scared to get up herself to see what was happening.

‘It's Oscar,' said Jacques, which confused her because it sounded like a woman who was sobbing.

The couple didn't know Oscar well, but Jacques had occasionally chatted to the athlete when they happened upon each other in the street. He was a friendly neighbour, always willing to offer a smile and a wave when leaving his house. When the men did talk, the topic was usually cars.

Terrified, Estelle slowly climbed out of bed and joined her husband at the window. Together they watched as several cars began to arrive at 286 Bush Willow Crescent. Eventually an ambulance pulled up and they saw it drive off again minutes later, lacking the urgency with which it had arrived.

Michelle Burger shot up in bed just after 3am, jolted awake by what she believed to be the blood-curdling screams of a woman in distress. Her husband Charl Johnson heard them too and lifted his head from his pillow to make sure what he had heard was real and not a dream. Charl leapt out of the bed and ran onto the balcony to focus his ear on what had pierced the early-morning silence. The couple had left the windows wide open – it was a warm evening and the lack of air conditioning made the bedroom stiflingly uncomfortable.

They had lived on the Silver Stream estate, adjacent to Silver Woods, for about two years and their house was 177 metres from Oscar's home. Standing on the balcony, Charl heard what he thought to be a terrified woman calling into the night, clearly distressed and in trouble. ‘Help … Help,' he heard. Then what sounded like the voice of a man, also calling for help three times. Was this an armed robbery gone wrong? Both Charl and Michelle wondered.

‘Charl! It's no use standing there, call security!' shouted Michelle to her
husband out on the balcony. As he rushed back inside, Michelle reached for her cellphone on the bedside table. Frantically she scrolled through her phone's contact book and dialled the number saved under ‘Security'. It was 3:16am when she passed the handset to Charl.

They hoped the estate's security officers could call their colleagues at the neighbouring complex to alert them to what seemed to be a terrible attack in progress.

When the call was answered, Charl rapidly explained that there were people being attacked, but he was met with confusion on the other end of the line. The guard who had answered handed over to a colleague and Charl repeated the story. When the second guard still didn't respond, the penny dropped. Charl realised that the number Michelle had dialled was for security at the Strubenkop estate, several kilometres away, where they had previously lived. Realising the error, Charl ended the call, which had lasted 58 seconds, and ran back out on to the balcony.

All that separated their house from the source of the noise was a few spindly poplar trees and an open field, and from the bed, Michelle could hear the screams becoming increasingly intense. She could only think about how scared the woman sounded. Charl sensed the fear in the voice escalate and to him it was clear that the woman was in imminent danger.

And then, just as the screaming reached a climax, it was brought to an end by four cracks.

First one shot, a slight pause, and then three more.

Bang. Bang, bang, bang.

The couple heard the woman scream again and then the final scream fading out after the last crack. Alarmed and shocked by what he had heard, Charl stepped back through the balcony door into the bedroom.

‘I hope that woman didn't see her husband being shot in front of her,' said Michelle to her husband.

They did not hear the voices again that night but the memory of the shrill scream stayed with them, haunting them.

Annette Stipp was feeling slightly fluish and was battling a troublesome cough that woke her up just after 3am on Valentine's Day. The occupational therapist, her radiologist husband Johan and their three children live in the Silver Woods estate, with a clear line of sight of the home of Oscar Pistorius. The kids had gone to bed at around 8:30pm the previous night and the couple settled in to watch a few episodes of a TV series before going to bed at 10:30pm.

Nearly four and a half hours later, Annette's cough woke her. She looked at the digital clock radio on her husband's bedside table. It was 3:02am but she knew that the clock was set three or four minutes fast.

Annette lay in bed contemplating what to do about her cough, wondering if she should bother getting up to have a drink of water or just ignore it. Finally, she resolved to get up to fetch a drink. She didn't want her husband to be disturbed by her coughing.

As she was climbing out of bed, she was startled by what sounded to her like three gunshots.

‘What was that?' Annette asked her husband.

‘I think it's gunshots,' he responded as he jumped out of bed and rushed out onto their balcony.

Annette looked across to the row of houses directly opposite their own. She could see the lights on in two of the homes. She sat on the edge of her side of the bed and focused her eyes on Oscar Pistorius's house and noticed the light was on in his bathroom.