One Tragic Night (46 page)

He jumped out of bed, waking his wife in the process, and walked out of their room into the passage where he found Carice, who told him she had heard someone screaming for help. Together they sped across the estate to Oscar's house where they found his front door slightly ajar. When Carice pushed it open Oscar was coming down the stairs with Reeva in his arms.

Stander said Oscar was relieved to see them and pleaded with them to help take her to the hospital before placing her on the floor at the foot of the staircase. He described Oscar as being in a state of panic as the pair tried to calm him down, but just as he was about to call an ambulance, Dr Stipp arrived at the scene. While the radiologist assessed Reeva, Stander called emergency services. Paramedics arrived about 20 minutes later, only to declare her dead. Stipp and Stander then exchanged numbers before the doctor left. During their brief conversation, Stipp had explained to Stander that he had heard four shots, screaming, followed by another four shots.

Stander told the court that he had remained at the scene where he saw Oscar go upstairs to collect Reeva's ID for the paramedics, and was there when the first police officer – Lieutenant-Colonel Schoombie van Rensburg – arrived on the scene. He said several vehicles had parked outside the house, with officers both in uniform and civilian clothes. From where he was standing outside, ‘one could see how the people were moving up and down the stairs'. It was a claim that would be seen to support the defence's contention that the crime scene had been contaminated and tampered with.

Stander explained in detail, often coming close to tears himself, how he first set eyes on Oscar that morning, that he was ‘broken, desperate, pleading', how remorseful he believed Oscar was for the killing – the type of comments the defence needed and had been asking previous state witnesses about.

In his cross-examination, Nel questioned Stander about the security in the estate and the breaches about which he had earlier told the court. He believed the incident in which the woman had been tied up had happened some time in 2011 or 2012, but said he could not disagree with Nel if the police records showed that it was actually in 2009. Stander said the incident involving the ladder took place also between 2011 and 2012, but could not say whether it had been reported to the police – in fact, it had not been.

As per estate regulations, Stander's property was also not secured with burglar bars – in fact, his daughter went to bed on the night of 13 February with her balcony door open. Nel had thus made his point: there were few incidents of crime in the estate and the Standers felt comfortable enough to sleep with doors wide open. Stander also confirmed to Nel that when Reeva stayed at Oscar's house alone for a week while he was in Cape Town, there was no real concern for her safety, although they did communicate via SMS.

Nel pressed the witness on whether he had discussed with Oscar how many shots he had fired and why he had opened fire. ‘He never said to you it was an accident?' asked Nel.

‘When he phoned me he said: “I made a mistake”,' explained Stander.

That was exactly what the prosecutor wanted to hear. It was precisely what Oscar would say during Nel's opening salvo – ‘I made a mistake' – which he repeated three times before Nel asked him what mistake he had made. It also spoke to Oscar's ‘intention', which was a crucial element the state needed to prove in the case.

And now here was Oscar's friend offering the same version of his defence – that it was an accident. But then Stander apologised, saying that he himself had just made a mistake and it was the inference he had drawn from the conversation that morning.

But Nel wasn't convinced, and interpreted the comment as Stander showing his support for the accused by introducing a claim to support his defence.

After a brief re-examination by Oldwadge, the assessor Henzen-Du Toit asked Stander several questions about the alarm system and whether Reeva knew how to operate it – as she had similarly asked Oscar. The neighbour was confident that Reeva did know how the system operated and which buttons to press on the remote control to activate and deactivate the alarm. It was unclear why the assessor sought to establish this, but she might have been testing the possibility that Reeva might have at some stage during the night left the bedroom and gone downstairs to eat. This would explain pathologist Gert Saayman's findings related to the contents of Reeva's stomach. Stander's evidence provided the defence with another timeline to work from and it also confirmed Stipp being outside Oscar's house at 3:28am when the call was made to an ambulance service.

Carice Viljoen is Stander's daughter, who has married since the incident. At the time, she lived with her parents in the Silver Woods estate and was also friends
with Oscar. Viljoen was clearly nervous when she took the stand, at times speaking so fast that Roux was forced to interject and ask her to slow down. And yet, despite coming close to tears on several occasions, she insisted that she be allowed to continue.

On the witness stand, she described being woken up by the barks of her dog on the morning of Valentine's Day. Her balcony door was open and in the distance she could hear a man screaming for help; there were three screams, she said. She stated that after closing the sliding door to her room and climbing back into bed, where she contemplated taking some action, she saw the lights switch on in her parents' bedroom. As she left her room she encountered her parents and her mother explained that Oscar had just called saying he had shot Reeva. Viljoen and her father arrived at Oscar's house minutes later.

Viljoen said when she pushed open the front door to Oscar's house she saw the frantic athlete carrying Reeva down the stairs. The witness started crying as the tempo of her testimony picked up. She described how she told Oscar to put Reeva down on the floor, dismissing his request to help take Reeva to a hospital. Viljoen said she was kneeling on one side of Reeva with Oscar on the other where together they tried to assess her. Viljoen then ran upstairs to collect towels from a linen cupboard to try to stop the bleeding, but it was all in vain. She remembered Dr Johan Stipp arriving, but he was inside only briefly before going back out, and later the paramedics prompted her and Oscar to step back from Reeva to allow them to work on her.

Viljoen testified that when Oscar went to fetch Reeva's ID upstairs, she went after him to call him back, fearing that he would shoot himself. A short while later, at about 3:55am, she saw Oscar trying to place a call, but he was not making any sense. She took the phone from him and told the person on the other end of the line – his friend Justin Divaris – what was happening before helping him call two more people: his brother Carl and agent Peet van Zyl.

Viljoen remembered Colonel van Rensburg being the first police officer on the scene, and seeing two additional officers in plain clothes inside the house. She told Roux that besides those three police officers, she saw no others inside the house until later in the morning when more arrived. She said that only after Carl arrived did Van Rensburg properly secure the scene and control who entered and exited the area. Viljoen said while she was with Oscar in the kitchen, trying to comfort him, she remembered seeing people going up and down the stairs, but she could not identify them.

Viljoen testified that she later accompanied Aimee upstairs to fetch clothes and a few personal items for Oscar. After collecting the items and sitting in a car,
she said Aimee decided she would take Reeva's handbag from the crime scene. ‘She went into the house and walked past the policemen standing there and took the bag. I left the bag on the kitchen counter, the table, after I took the licence out and I left it there and she just went and fetched it because we wanted to keep it safe for her mother,' said Viljoen.

This testimony was to provide another example of how the police failed to secure the crime scene properly; that someone could simply walk into the house and exit with an item without it being checked or documented was not correct procedure. Oscar's second cellphone was another item removed from the scene, but police would only make this discovery days later.

Viljoen did remember, however, that when she joined Aimee upstairs to collect clothes and a watch for Oscar, a policeman – who she pointed out in court – accompanied the pair. The same police officer did not allow them to go into the bathroom, the primary crime scene.

‘This is Warrant Officer Van Staden, Bennie van Staden, photographer,' said Nel.

‘It is kind of burned into my mind for the rest of my life,' she said, indicating the magnitude of the trauma experienced that morning.

‘Unfortunately … his face,' quipped Nel, before he continued. ‘Now can I also just show you a photograph? There is an album in front of you. If you open that red one over here.'

‘Is this going to be a photo that is going to make me cry?' asked the witness, fearing it could be a graphic image from the crime scene.

‘No, it will not,' said the prosecutor, to hushed laughs from the gallery.

The photo depicted the upstairs linen cupboard with one of its double doors opened and a blue towel crumpled on the floor in front of it. It was exactly as Viljoen had left it; she clearly recalled dropping the towel there in her haste to attend to Reeva downstairs.

This proved two things for Nel: the crime scene upstairs was being preserved and the police didn't allow unaccompanied people to wander around the bedroom; and that an item like the towel had not been moved. This was contrary to Oscar's claims of at least six items being moved by cops after the shooting.

Nel questioned Viljoen about her understanding of Oscar's state of mind that morning. She confirmed that he was able to tell her that the towels were upstairs when she asked, and that he specifically asked her to keep her fingers in Reeva's mouth while he fetched black bags.

‘He is the one that constantly asked when the ambulance would arrive, so he was following what is going on?' asked Nel.

‘Well, he asked questions, but he was … everything was in a frantic state, My Lady, so I would not know if he was following what was happening.'

‘But if you gave him an instruction, he would follow it?'

‘Yes, he would, My Lady,' she said.

In the meantime, the defence was slowly constructing the timeline of events that would form the backbone of its case when it came to closing argument. Viljoen's evidence would prove to be crucial in this construction.

Her evidence supported the timeline as set out by her father. Stander received the call from Oscar at about 3:19am and, according to Viljoen's evidence, it took them about three minutes to get to the house. The defence used this to estimate the time that the first witnesses arrived on the scene at about 3:22am. The defence would also look to Viljoen's testimony about the time that she heard the three calls for help, to corroborate the testimony of other neighbours who had heard the same calls. They matched up, slotting another block of the overarching timeline in place. And while Roux continued to build the timeline, he believed that Stipp's version – and with it the state's case – would crumble.

Michael Nhlengethwa, a self-employed civil engineer, lived next to Oscar on the other side of a shared wall. If you were to face the athlete's house, Nhlengethwa's home would be to the left in the same street. He shares the house with his wife Rontle, who also testified, and his children.

Nhlengethwa met Oscar in 2009 when he was considering buying the house – the developer introduced them to each other so he could inspect the athlete's house to get an idea of the types of finishes intended for his own home. Oscar was also the first person to welcome the new resident to the estate, and they struck up a neighbourly relationship. Oscar usually made the effort to get out of his car, come over and greet him properly, but they did not socialise together.

It was during one of their impromptu sidewalk encounters that Oscar introduced Reeva to his neighbour as his fiancé – a moment Nhlengethwa said he would never forget. ‘When she came towards me, I raised my hand to greet her and she just opened her arms, she just came and hugged me.