One Tragic Night
Authors: Mandy Wiener
âWe are told that a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying to be clean. One may be a villain for ¾ of his life and be canonised because he lived a holy life for the remaining ¼ of that life. In real life we deal, not with gods, but with ordinary humans like ourselves: men and women who are full of contradictions, who are stable and fickle, strong and weak, famous and infamous, people in whose bloodstream the muckworm battles daily with potent pesticides.'
â NELSON MANDELA
,
Conversations with Myself
, page 234
âM'Lady, what happened behind that door, you will never know.'
â WOLLIE WOLMARANS
, defence expert witness
The Oscar Pistorius
Murder Trial
Mandy Wiener
and Barry Bateman
St. Martin's Press
New York
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Please be aware that some of the material that follows in both text and photographs could be deemed disturbing to sensitive readers as a result of its graphic nature. Readers are advised to exercise due caution in approaching this material.
All of the emails, court records and messages â including WhatsApp, BBM, iMessage, SMS and other quoted materials â have been reproduced verbatim in the pages that follow. Original errors and inconsistencies have been retained in order to preserve the authenticity of the original communications.
The interactions, including phone messages, and the events described in this book are either in the public domain in one form or another â via sources ranging from affidavits and documents, which formed part of the court record, to newspaper investigations and articles â or were shared with the authors in the course of research undertaken for this book â in the form of on-the-record interviews, responses to questions as well as volunteered information. Webber Wentzel is gratefully acknowledged by the publisher and authors for its advisory role in this regard.
On several occasions over the past year and a half members of the Pistorius and Steenkamp families have been contacted through various channels by Mandy Wiener and Barry Bateman to offer them the opportunity to be involved in this project. Both families have elected not to comment on the book or be interviewed. Most recently, Oscar and Carl Pistorius have, through their lawyers, declined to comment on right-of-reply questions sent to them.
Breaking News â Barry Bateman
Fall from Grace â Mandy Wiener
From Investigating Officer to Accused
Jack of all Trades, Master of âNine'
The Secrets of the Missing Apple
Contaminated, Disturbed, Tampered
Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
I Put it to You â Closing Arguments
The battered meranti door stands ajar, a crude gap stretching from its mid-point towards its upper reaches. Three of the four panels in the top two-thirds of the door are missing, leaving a gaping hole in the structure. A key with an apple-green plastic tag dangles from the brass lock next to the handle. One long shard of wood lies inside the toilet cubicle, a half-moon bullet hole along the spine of the plank and a chip on the side. Several splinters litter the floor of the tiny space, which measures only an arm's length in each direction.
A large rectangular piece of meranti â the bulk of the missing panels â lies discarded on the bathroom floor, where it had been flung in a moment of desperation. It has come to rest next to a buckled silver plumbing access panel of the corner Jacuzzi bath, and squares of broken tile have fallen off the wall adjacent to the hinge of the door, testament to the force with which the door was bashed down.
The deep reddish-brown grain of the wood is marred by bullet holes, bloodstains and garish cracks. What appears to be a tiny fragment of human bone has come to rest on the timber. Later, as they reassemble the broken pieces, investigators will tack strips of police marking tape near the holes as indicators of where the bullets cracked through the wood.
Behind the door lies the real horror. A congealing Rorschach-like pattern of crimson has formed on the mottled beige marbled tiles. On the wall tiles, rivulets of blood have trickled down to the floor where more wood splinters and bits of black metal from the bullet jackets came to lie, the detritus of the devastating events that played out in this bathroom pre-dawn. On the back wall, three separate ricochet points mark where bullets struck the ceramic and shattered the tiles. An old-fashioned dark-wood magazine rack with a heavy, curved handle, packed with glossy titles, stands against the wall, one leg resting in the puddle.
The square porcelain toilet is on the left of the space, the lid up against the cistern. The right half of the seat is smeared in a thin film of red, cascading into the bowl below in thick ribbons, separated by strips of white where it appears running water has washed it clean. The macabre sight of the dark red water in the bowl, where one would expect to see sanitised blue, jars. Floating on top of the water are globules of varying sizes, creating the appearance of oil in the water. So murky is the liquid in the bowl that a spent bullet projectile would not be visible to investigators and would be missed during an initial inspection of the site.
The trail leads out past the toilet door, alongside the shower, across the tiles towards a crumpled charcoal bathmat and a pile of soaked pebble-grey towels and on to a worn cricket bat with its perished rubber grip partly torn from the handle.
The trail has settled in various shapes â there are smears, drops, crowns and larger puddles where it seeps away into the grouting. There are flecks on the screen of a black iPhone 4 and its metallic cover, partially hidden under the bathmat, and droplets on the handle of the silver-and-black Taurus 9 mm firearm, which has been abandoned on the mat with its hammer cocked and the safety off. Droplets crowd around the cricket bat, itself marked by squiggled wisps along the blue-and-yellow âLazer' text and the chevron logo. The signatures of famous cricketers along the face of the bat have not been saved from the indignity of being tarnished, but investigators only discovered that when turning the bat over hours later.
Nearby is a fragment of a hollow-point, strands of hair entangled in its jagged metal claws. There are three spent cartridges on the tiles in the bathroom: one near the bath, one near the cricket bat and a third at the entrance. A fourth lies in the passage near the cupboards, its copper casing marked by the black residue of spent gunpowder and its distinctive head stamp âWCC +P+' identifying the bullet as Winchester-produced hollow-point ammunition.
There are dark red spots on the two square white basins, where his and hers toothbrushes rest neatly alongside each other, and on a toilet roll parked in the cabinet of the dark-wood vanity. While the flecks on the basins could be missed at a glance, there is no ignoring the blatant smear on the tiled pillar alongside. The streaks mark where her soaked blonde hair swept past as he carried her out of the bathroom, her head resting on his left arm. He had to navigate his way over the towels, wood panels and splinters as he rushed through the doors and then down the passage lined with clothes cupboards into the bedroom. The trail bears testament to this journey that was her last.
At the end of the passage, the trail makes a sharp turn through the bedroom after passing a tall four-tiered bookshelf, a washbasket and a pair of smart black
suit shoes. On the left it avoids a chocolate-brown leather couch, her white flip-flops and her black-and-white Virgin Active kitbag, a black bra peeking out from the unzipped opening. There is no spatter on the side table that holds an extreme sports magazine, a silver damask lamp, a squeezed tube of Voltaren gel, and a white coffee mug holding the dregs of the previous night. But, inexplicably, there are a couple of stray drops on the wall above the bed and the ebony headboard.
The spatter also does not make it as far as the right side of the bed alongside the sliding doors that lead out to the balcony, where an iPad, its cover and a grey T-shirt have been left on the floor next to a pair of men's hair clippers. The contents of the drawer on this side of the bed include an array of sexual lubricants, pellets for a pellet gun, playing cards, Mickey Mouse plasters, a USB stick and a spare firearm magazine containing Ranger ammunition.
His rushed exit from the bathroom, with her in his arms, left several marks on the contents of the bedroom. Experts suggested this was the result of so-called arterial spurt â sprays from the devastating wounds to her body as her heart continued to beat. One spurt, likely occurring as he rounded the bend from the bathroom passage towards the bedroom door, reached around a metre and a half along the carpet onto a grey duvet, which had a pair of inside-out jeans resting on a corner.
An open leather-wrapped watchcase containing eight high-end timepieces was spattered and four streaks of red, resembling cracks in the glass, show where her hair flicked past, while speckles are visible on the watches themselves. The box rests on a dark chest of drawers, next to a silver amplifier with an iPhone cable dangling from it, two BlackBerry phones, a silver Tiffany & Co. bracelet, a packet of syringes in a plastic bag and a plastic container, along with several boxes. Spatter also landed on the tall aluminium-and-glass Oakley stand next to the drawers, housing in excess of 40 pairs of sunglasses in varying shades and shapes. Next to the cabinet rests a black air rifle and a small blue baseball bat, indicators perhaps of his heightened security awareness.
The trail is more obvious again where carpet meets tile at the doorway and there has been no opportunity for it to soak away. The bedroom door itself is damaged â not only from speckles of blood but there is also a small hole in the top third of the door caused by a projectile, scuff marks near the spine and a section of the wood is cracked at the bottom near the latch.
