One Tragic Night (21 page)

Five months earlier, I had been in London with the Paralympics in full swing and the Blade Runner riding the crest of a spectacular wave of popularity. He had been the first disabled athlete to run in the able-bodied Olympics and was the unofficial face of the Paralympic games.

I woke one morning in my hotel room to screaming headlines about a controversy. Oscar had been the man to beat in the 200 metres final but had come up short, and he had accused the winner, Brazilian Alan Fonteles Oliveira, of having an unfair advantage because his blades were too long. Oscar had spent years fighting claims that carbon-fibre prosthetics were an advantage compared to human legs.

That Monday morning, there was little sympathy for Oscar. It was the first indication I, and many others, had that the gloss of the golden boy might be tarnished. There was talk about how the outburst might have ruined his brand. He issued a statement apologising for the timing of his comments after the race but, in essence, he stayed true to his complaint. The damage had been done and the seed had been planted.

Watching the criticism build on television breakfast shows, I tweeted:

Now, less than 24 hours since the shooting at his house, stories began to emerge of a rather different Oscar. Of a petulant, hot-headed young man prone to flashes of anger. Rumours began to surface of the questionable circles he was moving in; so too did anecdotes about bad behaviour, a passion for fast cars and lethal firearms. I reflected on all of this and wondered why it had not been picked up sooner. Did we, the media, choose to ignore the leads and the stories because it was our hero Oscar?

On the Joburg rooftop I flicked through my phone and reread a litany of messages that had come through during the day amidst an overwhelming bombardment of calls. Some were from a mutual friend, one who was mourning a deep loss. It was one of those poignant, unique moments in which I had to pause and
shift from the sometimes surreal frenzy of the news machine and allow reality to sink in. Until then it had been all Oscar, Oscar, Oscar: the Blade Runner, Paralympics golden boy, worldwide icon, PR machine.

I hadn't realised until that point that Reeva Steenkamp and I shared several mutual friends and yet had never met. In the messages left on my phone, they all spoke glowingly of her with genuine love and affection:

I realised that for Reeva Steenkamp's family, the reality of her absence would be unmistakable. For her friends, who were once afflicted by ‘Reeva Fever', there would be no denying the reality of her bloody, tragic end. For Oscar, the incomprehensible reality of the nightmare he was in would only just be beginning to dawn.

The Pretoria Magistrate's Court shares the same block as the Pretoria Central police station, sandwiched between Pretorius and Frances Baard streets and Bosman and Sophie de Bruyn streets. The older and original section of the court building, with its marbled facade and pillared entrance, was gutted by fire in 2010 and remains a burnt shell. The pavement overhang at the Schoeman Street entrance to the newer magistrate's court building is the overnight shelter for half a dozen city vagrants and the smell of stale urine and rotting rubbish permeate the air as you walk through the large steel doors into the court complex. Once you're through the ageing metal detectors and into the gloom of the officious facebrick corridors, the waft of oily hot potato chips from the canteen is overwhelming.

Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair's office is deep within the bowels of the building. It sits beyond a heavy metal door, a uniformed security guard and a clumsily taped-over intercom system, at the end of a rabbit warren of passageways on the ground floor. The labyrinth of corridors opens into a small waiting room with a bench and discarded wooden table holding a visitors' register, and then into a large spacious office featuring an impressive boardroom table with plush chairs and a royal ruby carpet. The office has no windows and is lined with wood panels and legal journals while brown cardboard folders are piled up on the floor, each one holding the contents of disciplinary cases against colleagues on which Nair is working.

The moustachioed lawman is small in stature, but large in presence. He's occupied this office since being appointed Chief Magistrate of the Pretoria region and its contents are testament to the years of familiarity. Well-worn legal handbooks are within an arm's reach for quick reference, his black-and-red robe is slung
over a coat stand behind him and three separate images of Nelson Mandela hang on the walls. A toilet roll, a yellow-scented oil candle, teacups, piles of paper and stationery clutter the polished red-wood desk.

Nair had arrived at work on Thursday morning, 14 February 2013, and had taken his seat at his desk. He had not heard the news on the drive into work. Only once he was into the swing of the morning, was he told by the Acting Senior Magistrate at the court that he had received a message from prosecutors that Oscar Pistorius had been arrested.

The investigating officer Hilton Botha would have called the Magistrate's Court to let officials there know that he had a high high-profile case that needed to be allocated. Chief Prosecutor at the Pretoria Magistrate's Court, Matric Luphondo, discussed the matter with the Senior Public Prosecutor for the region, Sibongile Mzinyathi, and together they took the decision to allocate the case to Advocates Gerrie Nel and Andrea Johnson.

The initial plan was to take Oscar to court at the Pretoria Central Prison. The Prison Court is a branch of the Pretoria Court, which falls under Nair's jurisdiction. Nair was concerned from the outset that it would not be feasible for the matter to be held at the Prison Court due to space constraints and ordered that the case be brought to the Magistrate's Court. However, there was also confusion on a legal basis around which level of court should hear the bail application. According to legislation in South Africa, a crime considered to be a so-called Schedule 6 offence must be heard at the District Court unless the Director of Public Prosecutions issues a certificate or otherwise orders that it be heard in the Regional Court. As far as Nair was concerned, there was no reason why the case should not come before him.

While the legalities were being deliberated, police officers in charge of the investigation were also attempting to follow protocol. If a matter arose within a certain geographical jurisdiction in Pretoria, such as the Silver Lakes area in which the Silver Woods estate is situated, it would fall under a particular police station. Following the fire at the Magistrate's Court, certain police stations had been allocated to specific courts in order to speed up the work backlog. Ordinarily, Oscar's case would have been amongst those allocated to the Prison Court, but for Nair that made no logistical sense.

In agreement with the Chief Prosecutor, it was decided that Oscar would appear in the Magistrate's Court the following day to bring a formal bail application. Nair allocated the case to Court C, a room he regularly uses as it is conveniently close to his office and it would be able to cope with a large volume of people.

Nair went home that evening and, over dinner, told his wife Paddy and their three children that he would be presiding over Oscar's bail application the following day. News of the shooting had gripped the family in much the same way that it had caught the attention of the rest of the country. Fortunately Nair had experience with highly publicised cases involving celebrities and knew that the case was not up for discussion – not with his children or his wife.

Over the course of his career, Nair had been the presiding officer in several other cases featuring high-profile individuals. In 2008, he had convicted former middle-distance runner Sydney Maree on two counts of fraud and sentenced him to five years in jail. The athlete, who had competed for both South Africa and the United States, was found guilty of transferring funds from the National Empowerment Fund to his personal bank account while he was the acting chief executive. Nair also presided over the bail application of rugby player Jacobus ‘Bees' Roux who had been arrested in August 2010 for allegedly beating a metro police officer to death. Nair granted bail of R100 000 – seen as exorbitant by the rugby player's legal team. Roux entered into a contentious plea bargain deal in the High Court a year later, for which he was given a five-year suspended jail sentence after pleading guilty to a charge of culpable homicide. Roux had said in court that the police officer, Sergeant Johannes Mogale, had wanted to rob him and he had acted in self-defence. As part of the agreement, the rugby player paid Mogale's family R750 000 as compensation. Another well-known rugby celebrity, Naas Botha, had appeared in Nair's courtroom as part of a maintenance matter, while radio personality Gareth Cliff also made an appearance before him for speeding.

The case that had garnered the most sustained media attention was that of Judge Nkola Motata. In 2007, the High Court judge had crashed his Jaguar into the wall of a residence in Hurlingham in Johannesburg and was video-recorded making racial slurs. Following a prolonged court case, Nair convicted the judge of drunk driving and gave him a R20 000 fine.

Nair had thus tasted the backlash of public and media attention before and was cognisant that there would be intense interest in this case too. However, neither Nair nor his family had any idea of the scale of the story and the sheer size of the media contingent that would face him when he walked into his courtroom the following day.

The drive into the Pretoria central business district before 6am is a breeze. The taxis are just starting their routes for the day and there are very few motorists. Court proceedings usually get underway at around 9am in the Magistrate's Court, but queues were expected on this Friday morning, so getting there early was vital.

At the crack of dawn, the vagrants outside the Frances Baard Street entrance to the courthouse make way for the newspaper vendors who carpet the stone tiles with broadsheets, tabloids and posters blaring headlines. Only one story was leading the papers on Friday, 15 February 2013:

Various portfolio photographs of Reeva accompanied accompanied pictures of her lover leaving the Boschkop police station, his hands thrust deep into his pockets and head bowed.

The courtroom was full but finding a seat was not impossible. Photographers took up their places around the dock. They stood shoulder to shoulder, some of them crouched down, while others looked over their colleagues' heads. The benches to the right behind the dock were reserved for family members. Oscar's father Henke, his uncle Arnold, his brother Carl, and sister Aimee took their places in the front row behind the accused.

Speculation was rife about which prosecutors would handle the matter but it became clear fairly early on that advocates Gerrie Nel and Andrea Johnson had been tasked with the case. They were a crack team famous for putting the country's former police commissioner and head of Interpol Jackie Selebi in jail for corruption. Their handling of that case and of Operation Bad Guys – which centred on the murder of mining tycoon Brett Kebble – had seen them fall out of political favour with their bosses at the National Prosecuting Authority. They were viewed with suspicion and left to their own devices in a forgotten corner of the NPA's Silverton offices. But this was a massive case with international interest and their employers had clearly decided they were the most capable prosecutors for the job. Together, they had recently prosecuted the killers of young Pretoria mother Chanelle Henning, who had been shot dead shortly after dropping her young son at school.

Nel, a diminutive Afrikaans-speaking man with a hard, creased face and short white-blond hair is a relentless prosecutor with a fastidious obsession with detail. His wit is dry and sarcasm thick and he rarely shows emotion. The part-time wrestling coach is known for his patience in meticulously building cases and will carefully craft a conviction witness by witness until the full picture of his strategy emerges. While sitting in court he passes the time by doodling, drawing elaborate sketches in his notebook, yet always following proceedings intensely and quick to jump to his feet to object.

Nel grew up in the Limpopo platteland, in what was known as Potgietersrus and is now called Monoplane. He earned his stripes as a junior prosecutor for the state against former Conservative Party MP Clive Derby-Lewis and right-wing Polish immigrant Janus Walusz, who were convicted of assassinating South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani at his home in 1993. The murder was part of a plot to attempt to derail negotiations to end the apartheid regime.

In 2008 Nel was sensationally arrested by the SAPS in a pre-dawn raid on his Pretoria home on trumped-up charges as part of a bitter rivalry between the SAPS and the elite crime-fighting unit the Directorate of Special Operations, also known as the Scorpions. The unit was controversially disbanded by the ANC government after it investigated and prosecuted several high-ranking politicians, including President Jacob Zuma.

Nel was head of the Scorpions in Gauteng and his persistent prosecution of Selebi drew the ire of senior police officers – so much so that they dug up a reason to see him in handcuffs, but the charges against him did not stick. After his arrest, the National Prosecuting Authority was forced to issue a statement denying that the prosecutor had ever been part of any ‘riot cases', as claimed in
the media at the time. The organisation also denied he had ever been a member of the right-wing Afrikaner organisation, the Broederbond.