Chase Your Shadow (31 page)

‘I deny this allegation in the strongest possible terms because there was no argument.’

Finally, on the firearms charges, he flatly denied guilt on all three counts.

Oldwadge sat down and, upon receiving permission from the judge, wiping a tear from his eye, prompted by the painful recollections contained in his plea, so did Pistorius.

The terms of battle had been set and he was determined to see it through, clinging on to his innocence and to his version of what happened, whatever the prosecution might throw at him. He had steeled himself for the necessity of losing his dignity in this trial, and of the public image he had labored so long to build being annihilated, but even in his sorrow and fear he would not relinquish his life’s driving force, the conviction that no challenge was beyond him. This challenge was of a different order from anything he had faced before. But he had his guardian angels, two people he had convinced himself he could count on to watch over and protect him, both of whom were dead. One was his mother, the other was the woman who, he had wanted to imagine, would come closer than any other to compensating for his mother’s loss.

Alone in his cottage, seeing her gaze down on him from the framed photograph on the wall, and now in court, he sensed Reeva’s ghostly energy. The night before the first day of the trial he had placed a candle under the photograph, and lit it. When he left for court the next morning, the last thing he did before stepping out to face his torment was to blow the candle out. He would light it again on returning home that night, and he would blow it out again the following morning. The ritual gave him a passing reassurance and calm. He would repeat it every night and every morning until the day came when the living woman who loomed largest in his life now, Judge Thokozile Masipa, would pronounce his fate.

16

Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long
.

WILLIAM FAULKNER,
THE SOUND AND THE FURY

G
ERRIE
N
EL,
the state prosecutor, called his strongest witnesses first, the ones who said they had been awoken by the sounds of screams or shots, or both, in the early hours of February 14, 2013. They were Michelle Burger and her husband, Charl Johnson, who lived on the other side of a high wall on a neighboring estate, 177 meters (580 feet) away; Estelle van der Merwe, who lived 100 meters (330 feet) away, within the Silver Woods Estate; Johan Stipp and his wife, Anette, who lived directly behind the house where the shooting took place, across a stretch of open ground, 72 meters (230 feet) away. All five of them were Afrikaners; all asked for their faces not to be shown on the live TV broadcast.

This first batch of state witnesses, the neighbors, were the only ones whose evidence might support the prosecution’s core contention that Pistorius had shot Reeva Steenkamp intentionally, after an argument, and that accordingly he should be found guilty of premeditated murder. It was circumstantial evidence, as Nel himself conceded, based not on what people had seen but on what they had heard. It was the best he could come up with, given that there were
only two eyewitnesses, one of whom was the accused, while the other was dead.

Nel led Michelle Burger, a trim and elegantly dressed university professor, through her testimony. She began by saying that she had woken up at about 3 a.m. on the night in question, to the sound of a woman’s ‘terrible screams’.

‘It was the most helpless screaming I have ever heard in my life, my lady,’ she said, observing the South African legal protocol whereby, irrespective of whether the prosecuting or defense lawyer is asking the questions, it is always the judge who is addressed.

‘I knew something terrible was happening in that house,’ she continued. ‘You would only shout like that if your life was really threatened. It was blood-curdling.’

Burger said she thought it was a house invasion – the biggest fear of South Africans, across all racial lines, according to research by the University of Cape Town, though it is far from being the most common form of crime.

‘I was convinced that a woman was being attacked, that she and her husband were being attacked in that house,’ Burger said.

Barry Roux, reclining with one arm over the back of his chair, eyed Burger lazily over the top of his glasses. Nel, on his feet and leading her through her testimony, encouraged her.

‘I heard a man crying for help, then more woman’s screams. It was like a climax. I heard her anxiety. She was very scared.’ Then Burger said she heard a gunshot, followed by a pause, then three more shots in succession. ‘It was bang . . . bang, bang, bang.’ In between the shots she heard a woman scream for the last time, then silence.

Burger sounded compelling, but Roux looked unflustered. He took off his glasses and slowly nibbled at the end of them, his eyes fixed on Burger, as if relishing the chance he would soon have
to submit her testimony to scrutiny. Pistorius watched her with undisguised skepticism, shaking his head from time to time, pausing every now and then to look down and scribble comments on a white notepad he had brought in the briefcase that he carried into court every day. Every now and again he would lean over and, via his attorney, Brian Webber, pass a note across for Roux to read. It had been said that O. J. Simpson looked morosely absent during his famous trial two decades earlier. Pistorius was determined to take an active part.

‘Her shouts, her screams were petrifying,’ Burger continued. ‘It is the most helpless feeling I have ever had in my life. It was something that leaves you chilled. You can’t explain it, you just know that a woman’s life was very threatened.’

Nel turned to the judge – ‘No further questions, my lady’ – and Roux stood up to begin the cross-examination. His tone, right from the start, expressed incredulity. His client had told him she was lying, he said, and he believed that, in the most charitable of interpretations, she was confused – and that, at worst, she was tailoring her testimony to fit the news reports she had been following during the year since the shooting.

The defense’s contention, as Roux put it to Burger, was that Pistorius had fired the four shots, shouted in confusion as it dawned on him that he might have mistakenly shot his girlfriend, then shouted for help, then bashed down a panel of the bathroom door with three blows of a cricket bat, and then screamed hysterically on discovering her wounded body inside.

Roux tested this version against Burger’s, his purpose being to find enough holes in her testimony to sow in the judge’s mind a reasonable degree of doubt as to the credibility of what she said she recalled hearing.

‘I put it to you that if Mr Pistorius is very anxious,’ Roux said, ‘his screams sound as if they come from a woman’s voice. He was screaming higher and lower and that is why you would hear what you, at that time of the morning, would associate with a woman screaming.’

Burger remained adamant that she had heard a woman. Roux insisted, but Burger would not concede the possibility that it might have been a man she had heard.

‘To me it’s obvious, madam, you will not make this concession,’ Roux said, ‘because you think it will be good for Mr Pistorius.’

Roux turned to her contention that she had heard screams in between the shots, a critical point because the prosecution maintained that Pistorius had heard Reeva screaming behind the bathroom door and kept on firing regardless. Was Burger sure about this? She said she was. ‘A moment after the shots I heard the woman’s voice fading away, my lady.’

‘You are not sure,’ Roux replied, raising his voice. ‘I put it to you that you are adapting, you are speculating, trying to close all the gaps . . . You have watched Sky News, you watched other news channels, you have a retrospective knowledge and you come to court with that.’

Burger denied it.

The clincher for Roux was that she could not possibly have heard the victim’s cries after the shots were fired, even ‘fading away’, because, as he put it, ‘She already had brain damage.’ It was the first reference made in the trial to Reeva Steenkamp’s injuries and the brutality of the statement caught Pistorius off guard. He clutched his head, as if for protection, and released a loud, sharp sob.

It was a shocking interruption to the silence of the court, but Roux, who had anticipated the possibility of his client breaking down, and expected it to happen again, pressed on as if he had heard nothing,

‘You had the ability from 177 meters to hear emotion and fear and growing intensity?’ Roux asked her, a note of exasperation in his voice.

‘Our windows were open, we had no air conditioning on,’ Burger replied.

Roux begged her to try and be objective. She had said in her testimony to Nel that she had heard a man crying for help before she heard the shots; if a man was about to shoot his girlfriend who was hiding in a bathroom, was it not inconsistent that he would shout for help before doing so?

‘She shouted for help. He shouted for help. I don’t know why, my lady,’ Burger replied.

Roux paused, pointed a finger at her, and asked her point-blank: ‘As you stand there, as you testify in chief, you do it from the perspective that Oscar Pistorius lied in the bail application and his defense is a lie?’

She replied, ‘I could not understand how I could clearly hear a woman scream but Mr Pistorius could not hear that.’

‘You decided, if he said the victim was not screaming, he was lying. In your view, he cannot be telling the truth. Do you believe Mr Pistorius is lying?’ Again, she said she had heard a woman’s terrified screams, and again Roux insisted, ‘Do you believe Mr Pistorius is lying?’ Burger insisted that she could not understand how she could have heard the cries while Pistorius did not.

Five times Roux repeated the question and five times she would not give him a yes or no answer. Nel stood up to object, but the judge, who never stopped taking notes during Burger’s testimony, overruled him.

Roux turned to the cricket bat. The defense version was that Pistorius screamed between the time he fired the shots and the time
he struck the cricket bat against the door to try and break it down. Burger maintained that the screaming came from Reeva. Roux put it to her that if the second gunshots she had heard had in reality been the noise of the bat against the door, then the screams she had heard would have to have been Pistorius’s, not Reeva’s, because by that point Reeva was dead. Roux suggested that she did not know how to distinguish between the sound of a gunshot and of a cricket bat.

‘I put it to you,’ said Roux, ‘that you made up your mind not to believe his version and interpreted cricket bat sounds as gunshots, his cries as her screams.’

It was another critical point.

‘I’m sure the sound of a gunshot is louder than a cricket bat,’ Burger retorted, matching Roux’s sarcasm with her own.

Burger had held her ground, she would not be browbeaten; but when the cross-examination ended and Judge Masipa gave her permission to leave, thanking Burger for her assistance, the effort she had been making in standing up to Roux showed. He had done what good advocates were trained to do and boxed her into a tighter and tighter corner until she hardly had space to breathe, let alone think. When Burger stepped off the witness stand, she bent over in tears.

For Nel, there would be similar mismatches with later defense witnesses. Under Roux’s experienced interrogation – thirty-two years’ practice at it – many people might have struggled to recall what they had for breakfast that morning, let alone the details of what they had heard on waking up in drowsy confusion twelve and a half months before.

Roux was more gentle with the next witness, Estelle van der Merwe, however, partly because she was more visibly nervous on the
stand than Burger and he did not wish to be seen by the judge as a bully, partly because her main piece of evidence was not backed up by any other witness, and partly, too, because in one important respect her evidence indirectly reinforced the defense case.

Van der Merwe, a middle-aged woman, was the sole state witness able to back up the prosecution’s hypothesis that the shooting had been preceded by an argument. Speaking in Afrikaans, with a black interpreter alongside translating her words into English, she testified that she was woken up just before 2 a.m., more than an hour before the shooting, by a row in a neighboring house. ‘It seemed people were involved in a fight.’ She said people continued talking ‘in loud voices’ for an hour, giving an added ring of truth to her story by saying that she recalled being irritated because her son had a school exam the next day. At one point she said she put a pillow over her head to muffle the noise. The problem for the prosecution, as Roux established when he questioned her, was that she did not hear what the voices were saying, nor in what language they were speaking, and neither was she clear where exactly in the estate the argument had taken place.

She did hear four gunshots at around three, she said, but not with a pause between them, as Michelle Burger had testified; rather, they had rung out ‘one after the other’. Then, she said, there was total silence, followed by a commotion. Her husband woke up and looked out of the window but could not see anything. But then she heard someone crying out loudly. Roux asked her what those cries were. ‘I asked my husband that and he said it was Oscar’s voice. To me, it sounded like a woman’s voice.’

Roux declared an end to the cross-examination. Unsurprisingly, the prosecution did not call Mrs van der Merwe’s husband, Jacques, to the stand, even though his name was on the state’s witness list. The list originally had 107 names on it, but most of them – some were
paramedics who had arrived at Pistorius’s home after the shooting, some were policemen there just to protect the crime scene – had been included by the prosecution as a precaution, in case some small or unexpected detail emerged in court that needed to be backed up with evidence. Nel would end up calling only twenty-one witnesses to testify.

A curious detail that Mrs van der Merwe mentioned in her testimony was that she said she had gone back to sleep after hearing the shots and the commotion that followed. She also testified that she did not discuss the previous night’s events with her husband over breakfast the next morning. It said something about how routine a part of South African life it was to hear shots in the night, even within a residential compound heavily fortified against criminal intrusion. A night of mayhem was not considered anything out of the ordinary.