Chase Your Shadow (34 page)

The prosecution’s hope was that a message from Reeva would be found that could have caused Pistorius to fly into a murderous rage before shooting her. Along with the prosecution, a large part of the general public had suspected from the start that the motive for the killing was jealousy. The most widespread version of the Othello theory was that the man with whom Reeva had had a relationship prior to Pistorius, the famous South African rugby player Francois Hougaard, had sent her a provocative or salacious Valentine’s message – or perhaps some joke about her boyfriend’s missing legs – to which she had replied with enthusiasm. Those who chose to believe in Pistorius’s guilt invariably chose also to regard Reeva in a saintly light, but this inconsistency did not appear to loom large in their thinking. The unsubstantiated gossip surrounding Reeva and Hougaard, which only made a wide public impact after her death, was sufficient to persuade those who chose to believe it, that Hougaard was the reason behind the supposed argument that had led to her fleeing into the bathroom, locking herself inside the toilet cubicle, and dying in a blaze of gunfire. It was pure hypothesis, rendered all the more implausible by Hougaard himself having stated publicly before the trial that there had been no such messages between him and Reeva.

When the WhatsApp evidence was revealed in court, however, the phone messages did not turn out to be the smoking gun the prosecution was looking for. Their chief impact was on Pistorius himself, who found the experience of listening to them being read out to a worldwide audience of millions excruciatingly embarrassing.

Had he been on the outside looking in, he might have seen something funny in the spectacle. The person reading out the messages from the witness stand was a large, bluff police captain called Francois Moller who had accessed 1,709 communications between the couple. Captain Moller solemnly recited the love burblings that they contained.

The single incriminating shadow in the entire collection appeared in that line where Reeva had said, ‘I’m scared of u sometimes and how u snap at me and of how u will react to me.’ But then Barry Roux asked the captain to read the line that immediately followed. The captain duly did: ‘You make me happy 90% of the time and I think we are amazing together.’

Roux maintained – and Nel did not contradict him – that close to 98 per cent of the messages the prosecution had unearthed contained not recriminations but endearments. To prove it, he asked Captain Moller to read out a representative, and lengthy, sample of messages Reeva had sent to his client. Moller duly deadpanned, ‘I love sleeping next to you and never want to cramp your style’, ‘you are an amazing person and you are more than cared for . . . blessings’, and – the final WhatsApp exchange between them on the afternoon before he shot her – ‘Baby can I cook for you on Thursday?’ ‘I’d love that,’ was the reply.

If Captain Moller felt some discomfort himself at being obliged to continue reciting a long and numbing litany of the ‘my boos’, ‘my babas’, ‘my angels’, ‘babycakes’, and variations on ‘I miss you’ and ‘I miss you 1 more’, contained in the lovers’ exchanges, he did not show
it, remaining gamely professional all the way through. But even he might have wondered what use this could be for the prosecution. Shedding all this light on the cooing intimacies between the man the prosecution was seeking to convict of premeditated murder and the victim he had evidently been besotted with, seemed unlikely, on balance, to lend much weight to their case. And less so when it emerged that not only had she not received any Valentine’s messages from any previous lovers on the night she died, but that the last Twitter message she wrote, on the evening of February 13, read, ‘What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow?’

More worthy of the judge’s consideration in her duty to arrive at the most ‘reasonably possible’ interpretation of what happened on the night Steenkamp died was the evidence of the sounds heard by the neighbors, three of whom would be produced by the defense team after the end of the prosecution case, which lasted fifteen days.

These three witnesses had been interviewed by the police, but Nel had chosen not to call them. The five he had called were all white; the three whom the defense would call were all black. They were Pistorius’s next-door neighbors, living either side of his home.

The first was Michael Nhlengethwa, whose balcony was 11 meters (36 feet) from the bathroom where Reeva Steenkamp was shot. Nhlengethwa told Roux, who led his evidence, that he had been friendly with Pistorius, although they did not socialize, and had met Reeva, whom Pistorius had introduced to him as ‘my fiancée’. Nhlengethwa, who worked in the construction business, said he had been very taken with the couple.

‘Oscar is the type of person who if he sees me, he will stop, get out of his car and greet me.’ As for Reeva, the first time Nhlengethwa met
her, he recalled, he had stretched out a hand in greeting. ‘But she just opened her arms, she came to hug me. I could see the person that she was.’ Nhlengethwa said he had advised Pistorius not to let her go; she should be ‘for keeps’.

Nhlengethwa testified that on the night of the incident he was woken by his wife, who had heard a loud noise. He worried at first that it might have come from inside his house and rushed to check on his daughter, whom he found to be asleep and safe. He realized the sound must have come from outside.

‘Then we started hearing a man crying very loud . . . Something was wrong. We started panicking,’ Nhlengethwa said. ‘There is a difference between normal crying and crying when you are in danger, when you need help. We felt probably he was in danger. It was very loud.’

Roux asked him to describe the pitch of the voice. He replied that it was ‘very high’. He said he could hear the man shouting, ‘Please, please, no!’

Nhlengethwa rang the estate security guards at 3.16, he said, and the crying went on during the call and after. Suddenly he realized that the sounds were coming from his neighbor’s house. ‘The question for me was, is Oscar okay?’ he said.

Gerrie Nel began his cross-examination of Nhlengethwa in a vein similar to the one Roux had pursued with Michelle Burger, suggesting his evidence had been contaminated by his reading of the news about the crime and, in particular, by following the trial on TV. Nhlengethwa did not deny he was taking a keen interest in the action in court. ‘Oscar is my neighbor,’ he said. ‘There’s no way I would turn a blind eye to the case.’

Nel, citing the evidence of the neighbors who had appeared for the prosecution, asked him if he had heard gunshots, or the sound of
a cricket bat breaking down a door, or a woman’s screams. ‘I did not hear those things,’ Nhlengethwa said, adding that it surprised him that neighbors much further away had heard both shots and screams.

Nel asked him if he had talked to the accused since the incident. He replied that he had not. With that, and with surprising swiftness, Nel announced that he had no further questions.

The next witness Roux presented was Nhlengethwa’s wife, Eontle Nhlengethwa. She said she was awoken by ‘a bang . . . a very loud sound’. Then she heard somebody crying, ‘Help, help, help.’ It was a male person’s voice, she said. Roux asked her if she could make a sound that resembled the crying she had heard. Mrs Nhlengethwa obliged with a high-pitched wail and then immediately clarified, ‘But it was in the voice of a man.’

Nel took over and asked if she had heard a woman screaming. She insisted that she had not and, without much further ado, Nel said he had nothing more to ask.

Rika Motshuane, Roux’s next witness, was a psychologist working at the Ministry of Labor. She testified that she and her husband were not friends with the accused, but when they moved into their home in 2008 he had come round to welcome them. They were out at the time, but ‘the next day’, she said, ‘we went to greet him and he asked us to come in for coffee, but we were in a hurry so we could not.’

She heard no shots or loud bangs, but was woken up by a man crying. ‘To me, my lady,’ she said, ‘it was a cry of pain. I woke my husband up. I said, “Do you hear?” He said, “Yes, but I thought I was dreaming.” I said, “The crying is real.” I was panicking . . . I said it could be that one of the security guards has been shot. The crying was very loud and very close. I even thought it could be in the house.’

Roux asked her to try and imitate the cry she heard. She obliged, as Eontle Nhlengethwa had done, producing a long, eerily convincing
howl that amazed and chilled those listening in court and following the action on TV.

Roux asked her if she had also heard a woman scream and she said that she had not.

Nel gave Mrs Motshuane short shrift, surprising the court once more by how quickly he completed his cross-examination. He asked her whether she had been following the case on television. She said she had, after the prosecution had told her they would not be calling her to give evidence. He asked her if she had heard gunshots. She said that she had not. Nel said, ‘The state has nothing further’. The judge thanked her for her assistance and Mrs Motshuane was free to leave the witness stand.

Two theories were discussed in the public gallery as to why Nel had expended so much less time cross-examining the neighbors who appeared for the defense than Roux had spent on those who appeared for the prosecution. One was that he simply did not place much value on their testimony, because what they had heard had happened after the shots, or the sound of the cricket bat, meaning that they must have slept through the screams of a terrified woman that the prosecution witnesses said they had heard. The second theory was that he wished to try and minimize the significance of the male screams that they said they had heard.

The judge would need to establish whether the closer neighbors had heard a man’s screams at the same time as the neighbors who appeared for the state had heard a woman’s screams. If so, then the immediate neighbors’ testimony would suddenly acquire great weight. The best clues as to the timing of the various cries would lie in the records of the phone calls the neighbors had made to security guards or the police. If the female screams heard by the neighbors who lived further away coincided with the time the nearest neighbors heard male
cries, then the defense position would be reinforced. If Nel managed to persuade the judge that they had occurred at different times, that the female screams had happened before the next-door neighbors woke up, then he would be proved right and their testimony would indeed not count for very much. Both sides would attempt to fit the puzzle to suit their objectives, revealing their different conclusions towards the end of the trial when they would deliver their ‘closing arguments’, their respective summations and interpretations of all the evidence heard.

The defense team had one more card up their sleeve to try and shift the debate concerning the sounds heard that night in their favor. They produced a witness by the name of Ivan Lin, an electrical engineer and acoustics expert who had carried out research on how people perceive sounds. Lin, who was young and bespectacled, gave the impression – unlike the three neighbors who testified for the defense – that he had no personal stake whatsoever in the outcome of the trial. He conveyed little sense of knowing who the accused was, and even less of taking any interest in his predicament. Whether led by Roux or grilled by Nel, his demeanor remained unflappably scientific.

Lin, led initially in his evidence by Roux, began by saying that he had conducted a series of sound tests in the neighborhood of the accused’s home to help apportion value to the evidence previously submitted. He testified that he had drawn up a report the previous week, measuring the sound levels generated in the bedroom, the bathroom and the balcony of the accused, and had then projected how they would be perceived at the distances of the homes of the neighbors who had testified for the state. He provided numerous and varying examples of how sound would carry at night from house
to house – in decibels adjusted (dBA), the measure of the relative loudness of sounds as received by the human ear. Roux, as if seeking to blind the court with science, had Lin enumerate a wide range of possible registers – 50, 60, 90, 75, 110, 140 dBA – depending on how far away the listener was and whether doors or windows were open or closed.

‘The act of listening is an intellectual event,’ explained Lin, who said that the critical question to be decided here was whether, at a determined distance, sounds could be perceived ‘intelligibly’ as well as ‘audibly’, whether they could not just be heard but understood, analyzed and interpreted.

All of the science and all of the measurements Lin took boiled down to the one question Roux wished him to answer: whether, from the distance where Michelle Burger and her husband, Charl Johnson, lived – namely, 177 meters (580 feet) away – it would be possible to hear ‘blood-curdling’ screams and to identify the gender of the person uttering them.

Lin said it was not always possible to tell whether a scream was made by a man or a woman. Specifically, he said, ‘It is unlikely that a scream from someone in a lavatory heard from 170 meters away would have been heard audibly and intelligibly.’ Lin’s proposition was that it would not have been possible for someone at that distance to distinguish with absolute certainty between a man’s and a woman’s screams.

In his cross-examination, Nel battled to compete with Lin on his specialist terrain – just as Roux had done in his attempts to undermine the credibility of the gun expert Captain Mangena.

The prosecutor’s main objective was to try and discredit not so much Lin himself, as his impressively detailed scientific know-how. Nel put it to Lin that surely distinguishing between a man’s and a
woman’s screams was a straightforward, everyday occurrence which hardly required the taking of complex acoustic measurements.

‘One cannot be absolutely certain, reliably certain’, Lin replied. But Nel insisted, ‘We hear male voices, female voices . . . often we are able to identify that. It is common sense.’

‘Often,’ Lin agreed, ‘it is.’

Nel proposed that a woman’s screams would have a higher tonal character, ‘almost like a musical note’. Lin agreed that this was a common perception. But he said that at 177 meters even a ‘high-end’ scream of 160dBA at source would be perceived as quieter than the ambient sound of the courtroom they were in, which was 40dBA.