Authors: John Carlin
Pistorius arrived at the entrance to the court building at nine in the morning. A mob scene greeted him. TV cameramen and photographers battled to get clear shots of him, grunting and cursing as members of the general public – so many of them that they spilled from the sidewalk onto the busy road, blocking the rush-hour traffic – jostled with them for a glimpse of the Blade Runner. Drawn and thinner than in his athletic days, he had chosen to wear a dark suit, white shirt and black tie. Whether it was a coincidence or not, it was the very same outfit he had worn on the first night he had gone out on a date with Reeva, to the South African Sports Awards event. Pistorius ran the media gauntlet, escorted by three of Arnold’s sons-in-law, strong, silent men, with whom he lifted weights in the gym and who had made the half-hour trip from Arnold’s home with him in a van. Trauma was written all over Pistorius’s face, but his mind was clearer than when he had appeared before Magistrate Desmond Nair at the bail application hearing five days after the shooting, when the media crush had been just as bad. He had lain not on the floor of a cell the night before but in his own soft bed at the cottage that had been his home since Nair let him out on bail. But he had barely slept. His body’s adrenaline would have to carry him through.
The judge made her entrance later than expected, at 11.32 in the morning. ‘All rise in court!’ a uniformed policeman cried, a door opened at the back left-hand corner of the chamber, and Thokozile Masipa revealed herself for the first time to the man whose destiny she held in her hands.
Pistorius was taken aback by how frail she was, startled to see that she walked with far greater difficulty than he did. No taller than he was on his stumps, she limped slightly, her body swaying unsteadily inside a long red robe as she negotiated the three steps up to the raised platform from where she would preside over proceedings.
Behind her came two assessors, legal officials she had selected who would sit either side of her throughout the trial ready to dispense advice when she needed it. One was a middle-aged Afrikaans woman called Janet Henzen-du Toit, who had considerable experience as a defense lawyer in criminal cases; the other was Themba Mazibuko, a young, sharp-suited, black legal academic freshly out of university, about whom little was known to either the defense or the prosecution.
Judge Masipa bowed reverently before the court and Pistorius bowed back, as did his lawyer, Barry Roux, the prosecutor, Gerrie Nel, and everyone else in the packed courtroom. Then she took her seat on a black orthopedic chair, while the assessors settled down either side of her, in burgundy leather chairs of the type on which judges normally sat.
Pistorius sat alone, facing the judge, on the extreme left of a wooden bench long enough to have accommodated thirty defendants. In front of Pistorius, between him and the judge, sat his defense team: his attorney and old friend Brian Webber, two junior defense clerks, Barry Roux, and Roux’s number two, Kenny Oldwadge. Roux and Oldwadge, in black gowns, had the title of advocates. They were the trial lawyers, their job to speak on Pistorius’s behalf. Roux, the more senior of the two, would do the lion’s share of the interrogation of witnesses and presentation of the defense case; Oldwadge, a junior counsel, would be his occasional backup.
Oldwadge had handled some high-profile cases before. He had successfully defended the driver of a car that had crashed four years earlier, killing Mandela’s thirteen-year-old great-granddaughter, Zenani, the night before the start of the 2010 soccer World Cup in South Africa. The driver was charged with culpable homicide, driving under the influence of alcohol, and reckless and negligent driving. It was a difficult and politically delicate case, but Oldwadge won it,
securing the defendant’s aquittal on all charges. Olwadge persuaded the magistrate that there had been no evidence of alcohol consumption or of negligence on the part of his client, and came up with two expert witnesses who convincingly testified that it had been a freak accident.
Oldwadge had a bigger personal stake in the current trial’s outcome. He had not known Pistorius since childhood, as Brian Webber had, but they had struck up a friendship after Oldwadge represented him in 2009 following the incident at a birthday party at his home when he was arrested, and spent a night in police custody, for having allegedly assaulted a young woman. She claimed that he had slammed a door on her, injuring her leg. Oldwadge’s swift intervention ensured that no charges were ever pressed.
Oldwadge, like Webber, was almost family, and while it was comforting for Pistorius to hear his lawyer rage indignantly in private at the iniquitous way in which the news media had turned against him, it would not have been wise to place his fate entirely in Oldwadge’s hands. Oldwadge was a big man, with a blustery nature, and there was a risk that if he played too central a role in the case Gerrie Nel might rattle him. His judgment might be swayed by his emotions.
Roux, on the other hand, approached his task as a surgeon would an operation. A cold-blooded professional in the courtroom, away from it he was a mild-mannered man, light-hearted and affable, a wine lover who was never happier than in the company of his many friends. Silver-haired and stockily built, he was regarded by his peers as one of the top two criminal defense lawyers in South Africa. Roux had been in legal practice since 1982, often taking on cases without regard for his personal belief as to whether the defendant was innocent or guilty – sometimes, not unusually for a defense lawyer, even when he suspected his client was lying to him. In such instances he would
recommend a guilty plea, but if his advice was turned down the ethics of his profession required him to go ahead and conduct the defense to the very best of his ability. In this case, the biggest of his life, he had sincerely convinced himself of his client’s innocence. At least in the sense that Pistorius had not shot his victim knowingly, that Reeva’s death had been a terrible mistake. Roux’s considered judgment in this matter was that it had all been, as he would tell friends over a bottle of red, ‘a fuck-up, the epitome of a fuck-up’.
Pistorius trusted Roux. It was going to cost him a fortune to pay for his services, draining him of his savings and, in due course, of his house. But Oldwadge and Webber had told him that he was the best advocate money could buy and Pistorius was grateful to have him on his side. Roux was at least the equal of his adversary, the short, ginger-haired prosecutor sitting parallel to him, over on the far right of the court.
Nel was an Afrikaner, as was Roux. Doggedness came with the culture and the two shared a reputation for nitpicking persistence in their interrogation of witnesses. But where Roux saw himself as a hard-eyed lawyer trying to make an honest living, Nel had a touch of the moral crusader about him. As an employee of the state, he earned less than private practitioners like Roux, but he found sufficient compensation in the belief that he was contributing to the consolidation of his country’s new democracy by upholding the law without fear. A prosecutor since 1984, he had played an Eliot Ness role as the chief in Gauteng province of South Africa’s ‘Untouchables’, a supra-police organization called the Directorate of Special Operations (known popularly as ‘the Scorpions’) that specialized in combatting organized crime and corruption in government. Nel, whose hobby was wrestling, was known by his peers as ‘pit-bull’ for the aggressiveness of his cross-examinations, though colleagues who knew him outside
court described him as self-effacing and likable. He had leapt to national fame in 2008 when he led an investigation into the national commissioner of police and former head of Interpol, Jackie Selebi, who was accused of receiving bribes from a convicted Johannesburg drug-smuggler and mafia chief. As Nel prepared to arrest Selebi, he himself was arrested – twenty armed policemen loyal to Selebi had detained him at his home, in front of his wife and children. He was released on bail and absolved of what were revealed to have been baseless fraud and perjury charges, but, far from being intimidated, he pursued the police commissioner with still greater animus, eventually putting him in the dock and subjecting him to a brutally relentless cross-examination. ‘You know what this means, Mr Selebi?’ Nel said at one point. ‘It means that you are arrogant and that you lie.’ Nel won the case and Selebi went to jail.
Roux, familiar with Nel’s reputation, had a grudging professional regard for him, but detected a measure of vanity behind his image as a man with a mission. Sensing that Nel might be unable to resist playing up his pit-bull persona on the big stage, Roux’s greatest fear in this case was that his emotionally fragile, manifestly traumatized client would fall apart when the two came face to face in court.
Sitting alongside Gerrie Nel from the first to the last day of Pistorius’s murder trial was Mike van Aardt, the policeman who had been put in charge of the investigation after the first detective at the scene of the crime, Hilton Botha, had been taken off it. Tall, heavy-set, jowly, with bulbous, melancholy eyes, Van Aardt was divorced with two teenage children, wished to give up smoking but could not, wished also that he was paid more, but contemplated nothing other than persisting at a job that he found endlessly compelling and, he wanted to believe, socially useful. Liked and admired by his colleagues, black and white, he had been a homicide detective for twenty-two years,
witnessing unutterable horrors but striving always to keep a clinical distance from the cases he took on, finding solace in his children, watching rugby and reading books.
The Pistorius case had demanded a great deal of his time, day and night, over the previous year because of the four different charges against the accused and the large number of witnesses he had needed to interview, but it had presented far fewer difficulties than other crimes he had been tasked to solve, and keeping himself emotionally disengaged had not been difficult. The cases he usually took on tended to be gruesome, along the lines of ones that had come to light just the previous month, such as the murder and rape of two little girls, two and three years old, whose bodies had been found, coincidentally, in a toilet cubicle; or the serial killing and burning of three girls aged six, nine and eleven; or the seventeen-year-old boy who had raped and murdered a girl of fourteen, then killed both her parents.
The particular crime he was engaged with now was itself quite routine in a country where murders of women by men were a dime a dozen. The case would have generated no public interest whatsoever had it not been for the identity of the accused. Unusually for a South African, Van Aardt had not paid much attention to the exploits of the celebrated Blade Runner, and he undertook the case with no strong feelings either way. His chief concern was to ensure that he left no loose ends in the investigation, in the manner of the hapless Hilton Botha. His superiors would be watching carefully and any publicized lapses would do his prospects for promotion or a salary increase little good. Otherwise, it was one more case in his busy life in a country where the grisly rate of forty-five murders a day had not diminished over the past year. On the other hand, Van Aardt did take some satisfaction from the notion that his work might serve as a deterrent, for the fact was that, in spite of public perceptions, during the time
he had worked in the homicide department the number of murders nationally had dropped almost by half. He also noted with satisfaction that thefts were being accompanied by less violence, the message having got through to criminals that they would be pursued with more vigor in the event of murder than for just theft.
Van Aardt was satisfied too that he had supplied Gerrie Nel with the raw material, chiefly in terms of witnesses, to present a solid enough case. He would sit in court alongside Nel for the duration of the trial and, warmed by the belief that he had done an honest and thorough job, and redressed the damage done to the police force by his chaotic predecessor, he was content for the law to run its course and for the judge to draw her own conclusions. Van Aardt had no dog in the fight.
Pistorius understood the nature of the detective’s job and had no quarrel with him. It was not on him but on Nel that Pistorius concentrated his loathing, never forgetting how at the bail hearing a year earlier the prosecutor had sought to portray him as a man whose regret at shooting Reeva did not extend beyond the damage he had done to his own life.
Pistorius had never felt this way towards an adversary before, not even towards the Brazilian, Alan Oliveira, who, he would always believe, had cheated him of a gold medal. Yet he understood that the one thing he must not do when the critical moment of the trial came, when he came face to face with Nel, was to allow his anger to explode the way it had in London. To remind him of this, and to provide him with the love and support he needed, Pistorius had a dozen members of his family sitting on the bench immediately behind him. Arnold Pistorius, in dark grey suit and tie, and his ever-elegant wife, Lois, were
there; Aimée, in a black jacket and skirt, her dark hair coiled up in a severe bun, and Carl, wearing a suit but no tie. His mother’s sister, Diana, and other uncles, aunts and cousins on his father’s side were there, too. He was particularly glad to see his cousin, Maria, there, the one who lived next door to her father, Arnold. Six months after he shot Reeva, Maria had given birth to her first child, a boy, and as a gesture that both moved him and would give him more relief from his black moods than anything else, she and her husband had named him as the child’s godfather. The vote of confidence from the family gave a boost to his morale; the connection between him and his godson would endure whether or not the court deemed him a murderer, whether he went to prison or not. During the months before the trial he had spent long periods cradling the baby, gazing at eyes that held no knowledge of misfortune, pity or reproach. Of all the human beings he knew, only this one was innocent of the horror of what he had done, and in the connection with him he found a refuge and some measure of peace.
Not so with his father. Henke Pistorius was not there on the first day of trial, nor would he be until near the very end. Pistorius had no desire to see him there. He had had practically no contact with his father for six years, a period during which he had refused to take his calls. Now the suffering he had endured had brought home to him more clearly than ever how negligent a father Henke had been, how dismally he had failed to fill the parental vacuum left by his mother’s death. Henke’s presence now would have brought him scant comfort.