One Tragic Night (45 page)

She explained that in hindsight, and after careful thought about what transpired, she could not in fact recall seeing the man walking behind the windows. And for Oldwadge, this was the proof he needed to show that Stipp did not have a clear and accurate recollection of what transpired that night. So, although she insisted she had a good recollection of the events, Annette Stipp agreed that on this particular score there had been a lapse of memory.

While Stipp left the stand with that concession, the state believed she had further cemented its case. Like witnesses before her, she was in no way persuaded that what she heard could have been Oscar in a heightened state of anxiety, as suggested by the defence team. And the sounds she heard? Stipp was adamant that they were identical, which again posed a hurdle for the prosecution to explain the source of the sounds that had woken this couple.

It was security guard Pieter Baba who welcomed Reeva to the Silver Woods estate for the last time. With a smile and a quick chat, he opened the boom gate and allowed the model to enter in her Mini Cooper. He testified confidently wearing a bright-red collared shirt, and was the only other layperson witness, besides Kevin Lerena, not to object to visuals of himself giving testimony being broadcast.

While Baba isn't a neighbour and doesn't live at the estate, he was amongst the first to be alerted to the unfolding drama. The shift leader had been working at the estate for about two years and was on night shift with four of his colleagues on 13 February. While he managed the team, he was based at the gate with another colleague, and there was a supervisor and another two guards to deal with issues inside the estate, including patrols.

Many middle-class South Africans are familiar with the duties Baba would have performed: when visitors enter the estate, he takes down the vehicle's registration number and the driver's personal particulars, including an identity number. Then he contacts the person they intend visiting to confirm that they are expecting the visitor. This security procedure is fairly standard at such gated complexes, but Baba said Reeva was exempted from such paperwork:

In his testimony, Baba said Oscar arrived a short while after his girlfriend. He spoke to him, but the athlete was on his phone. Baba didn't know Oscar personally, but he recognised him as the international sports star, ‘a person who was always on the TV since I was young' and regarded him as one of his company's clients.

That night, at about 8pm when the front gate of the complex is closed, the guards were doing their rounds. Baba said it was shortly before 3am that a colleague told him he had heard what he believed to be gunshots, and after that he received a call from Johan Stipp who reported that he too had heard gunshots. He said he also received a call from another neighbour, Mike Nhlengethwa. With another guard, Baba sped over to Stipp's house where they found the doctor standing on the balcony. He said Stipp pointed him towards a house across from his where lights were on – he was pointing at Oscar's house.

The security guard said that when he arrived at the house he made a call to Oscar's phone, a claim that was tackled by the defence team.

Baba stated that when Johan Stander and his daughter Carice Viljoen arrived at the house, he and two colleagues followed them to the front door where they spotted Oscar carrying Reeva down the stairs. He said he never went in to the house, and merely observed the unfolding drama from outside.

Roux questioned Baba about a guard-tracking system installed at the estate that monitors their movement on shift. At specific locations around the estate are clock-in points that a guard has to swipe past every hour. One of these devices is located right outside Oscar's house.

Roux presented to the court the guard-track records, which showed that at 2:20am the device outside Oscar's house was activated. This accorded with Baba's statement that he and colleague Nyiko Maluleke were in the vicinity at that time.

Baba's evidence, however, contradicted the testimony of Estelle van der Merwe, who said she woke up to what sounded like a woman having an argument at around 2am. And the state, of course, was relying on her evidence to suggest that Oscar and Reeva had had an argument. But, according to Baba, the lights were off and everything appeared normal.

Roux moved on to another vital piece of evidence for the defence, the call record of the security telephone. It showed that Stipp called the number at 3:15:51am. Baba said Stipp told him that he had heard gunshots coming from a neighbour's house. This was the call that Johan Stipp claimed had not connected.
The next entry in the log showed that neighbour Mike Nhlengethwa called security at 3:16:36am, and he also reported hearing shots to the security guard.

Baba testified in his evidence-in-chief that he called Oscar first, before the athlete returned his call. Roux referred the witness to Oscar's phone records, which showed the sequence of events was, in fact, the other way around: it was Oscar who called security at 3:21:33am and Baba who returned the call at 3:22:05am. Despite this indisputable evidence, Baba insisted he was correct. ‘M'Lady, I phoned Mr Pistorius first. Mr Pistorius then called me back afterwards and that is true. It is true, M'Lady, that Mr Pistorius had been crying,' he said. Roux presented other records collected by the state to show that the security was indeed wrong, but no amount of evidence was going to change Baba's mind. Roux eventually withdrew on the matter, confident that the court would make a finding in his client's favour based on the available evidence.

The next debate was around what exactly Oscar said to Baba. The witness said the accused told him, ‘Security, everything is fine', but Roux referred to the security guard's initial statement to the former investigating officer in which he said Oscar had told him that ‘he is okay'. Roux was challenging the inference that the accused attempted to downplay the situation at his house, and show that what Oscar was actually telling security was that he was unharmed.

The security's guard's evidence did not prove to be particularly helpful for the state, but it did assist the defence in setting out its timeline of events. The calls to the security phone and Baba's movements would be compared against the statements of neighbours, particularly the Stipps. The security guards further confirmed that about an hour before the shooting, all was quiet at the Pistorius household – suggesting that testimony from other witnesses who claimed there had been sounds of an argument in the early hours of the morning was inaccurate.

The neighbours called by Nel to testify in the state's case were not the only people who heard something that deadly night, and they weren't the only ‘earwitnesses' consulted by the state in the months leading up to the trial. When the prosecution closed its case, these witnesses became available to the defence to be called to testify.

For weeks the court had heard of Johan Stander – the first person Oscar called after discovering Reeva in the toilet cubicle and amongst the first to arrive on the scene – but he was not called as a state witness. Many of us sitting on the media
benches in the public gallery wondered why. Was it because what he had to say did not correlate with the state's version of events?

Stander is a middle-aged man with grey, spiky hair and a weathered face with reading glasses perched on top of a sharp nose. He considers himself more than simply Oscar's friend, but rather a confidant, mentor and father figure. When Stander moved in to the estate in 2009, Oscar offered to help move the Standers' furniture in for them. The friendship grew, with Oscar regularly dropping by for coffee, and Stander caring for the athlete's dogs when he was competing overseas. Oscar also befriended Stander's daughter Carice over the years.

Stander had provided the police with a statement the day after the shooting and then deposed a second affidavit later in 2013 when Mike van Aardt had taken over the investigation. He had also consulted with the prosecuting team and was under the impression he was a state witness, expecting to be called, albeit reluctantly, to testify against his friend and neighbour. One of these consultations with Nel took place as recently as January 2014 when he was told that only he or his daughter would be called to give evidence. But once the state's case had been closed, neither of them had been called to the High Court in Pretoria. This left the door open for Oscar's legal team to use Stander and Viljoen to bolster the defence's case. Stander was the defence's fourth witness and his testimony was stirring and vivid.

Stander testified about how he was a member of the estate's management committee until January 2013 and recalled several incidents of crime, which he had relayed to Oscar. He remembered an incident in Milkwood Way where intruders scaled the electric fence and tied up a woman before stealing items from the house. In a second incident, intruders used a ladder to gain access to the house. This was important for Oscar's defence because it planted the seed of possibility – and fear – that a ladder could be used to gain entry to a house. Stander further recalled a house being burgled and a robbery in his street where the home-owner was locked up while items were stolen. The evidence was to show the court that, as a friend of Oscar, and former member of the estate management, the subject of crime would have come up and been in Oscar's mind. Stander stated that the incidents were recorded in the estate's incident book and were discussed at minuted estate management meetings. He said that when Oscar returned from events abroad he would pop in for a cup of coffee where he would be informed of incidents at the complex.

Stander had met Reeva for the first time in the December before the shooting when Oscar visited his home before leaving for Cape Town on holiday. When the athlete asked his neighbour to look after his dogs, Reeva said it wouldn't be
necessary because she would stay at the house and feed the animals.

Shifting the court's attention to the shooting, Stander testified that he had received a call from Oscar at about 3:19am – he remembers it clearly: ‘Oom [Uncle] Johan, please, please, please come to my house. Please. I shot Reeva. I thought she was an intruder. Please, please come quickly.'