Authors: John Carlin
To this end, the prosecution introduced into the courtroom a wooden door, off its hinges, that would remain on display, propped up with some rudimentary scaffolding, until the trial’s end. It was the bathroom door through which the bullets had been fired that had ended Reeva Steenkamp’s life.
The door, mute witness to what had happened that night, was studied by all parties in court, as if they were archeologists before a slab of ambiguously understood hieroglyphics. It stood as a symbol of the difficulties the prosecution would face in the attempt to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the man in the dock had pulled the trigger in a fit of murderous rage. The exact locations of the four bullet holes were clearly marked, rising and then falling in an arc just above or below the level of the door handle, roughly at waist height.
The prosecution produced an Afrikaner police colonel, who testified with the help of a black female interpreter, and a black police captain, who spoke in English. Wisely, the prosecution did not call Hilton Botha, the first police investigator on the scene. Botha had not only been a poor witness at Pistorius’s bail hearing a year earlier, but soon afterwards he had been charged with attempted murder.
Colonel Johannes Vermeulen, the first of the two to testify and a forensics specialist, had had a year to analyze the bathroom door, but it turned out in court that he had failed to register, let alone scrutinize, a significant mark on the door frame. Roux contended that this was the point where his client had kicked the door with his prosthetic leg in an attempt to break it down after firing the lethal shots. Roux said forensic experts for the defense would prove as much. Colonel Vermeulen had no reply.
The prosecution also tried to prove that Pistorius had lied when he said he had stumbled to his bedroom to put on his prosthetic legs before attacking the locked door with a cricket bat. Roux, dripping scorn at times, had the hapless colonel get down on his knees in court, cricket bat in hand, in order to show that Pistorius could not possibly have been on his stumps when he struck the door. The marks were too high.
Colonel Vermeulen performed so ineptly under cross-examination by Roux that there was an outcry in the South African media at the bumbling inefficacy of the country’s police investigators.
Nel’s next witness, Christian Mangena, a police captain and gun expert, restored some confidence in the force. Scientifically precise in his manner, he argued that the first bullet would have hit the victim in the hip, shattering the bone, that the second missed, and that only the third or fourth shot would have struck her skull. The bullets in the accused’s 9mm gun, said Mangena, were black metal-jacket Talon bullets, expanding missiles with folds like petals and jagged edges – dumdums intended to mushroom on entering the human body, causing maximum tissue damage.
As Mangena spoke, the attention of the court suddenly switched, alerted by a sharp cry, to Pistorius. Again he crouched in his seat, again he put his hands behind his head, again he let out a sob, then
another sob, and again he retched, but this time, overpowered by the convulsion in his stomach, he vomited into the green bucket.
Aimée wept. So did Lois Pistorius. Her husband, Arnold, remained as unmoved as if he were posing for a portrait. Later, during the lunch break, on the street outside the courtroom, Arnold said, ‘He knew this was coming. He just has to go through it, as we all have to.’ Aimée, her eyes red, rushed out of the court building, past the photographers and TV cameras permanently camped at the entrance, and turned down a side street, as she would do every day of the trial, to fetch a sandwich for her brother from a nearby café owned by a Russian woman who asked no questions.
After lunch, Roux ploughed on with his questioning of Captain Mangena. The breakdowns Pistorius was experiencing two rows behind him were becoming ever more frequent, but Roux could not keep asking the judge to allow for further pauses in the proceedings. The court would have to get used to the background noise of Pistorius’s sobs and whimpers, and keep going.
Captain Mangena was not making thing easy for Roux, outclassing him with his specialist knowledge of guns. The policeman had used laser beams to trace the trajectory of the bullets, which, he explained, traveled from this particular gun at a speed of 380 meters (1245 feet) per second. He had measured the probable distance from which they had been fired, and the position of the person firing. Roux sought to get Mangena to concede that the order of the impact of the bullets might have been different, but he made little headway. Later on in the case the defense would provide its own expert witness, a retired Afrikaner policeman, to refute Mangena’s hypothesis. The defense’s expert, more experienced but less articulate and convincing than Mangena, argued that it was not possible to establish the precise order of the bullets. But another possibility, raised by a further defense witness – namely, that
the loud bang of the first bullet inside a bathroom with reverberating tiled walls would have deafened the accused, making it impossible for him to have heard any screams, even if there had been any – cast doubt on the overall value of the lengthily explored ballistic evidence.
Various days were expended, too, in analyzing the veracity of Pistorius’s claim that Reeva did not get out of bed in the middle of the night. Experts in gastric digestion were called in by both sides and learned medical documents produced to try and prove from the study of the contents of her stomach how many hours before she died she had last eaten. The objective of the prosecution was to try and demonstrate that Pistorius had lied – that, contrary to his claim that she had never got out of bed after she fell asleep at around 10 p.m. on February 13, she had got up after midnight to eat something and, presumably, have an argument with him. Members of Pistorius’s family and his defense team declared themselves baffled by the energy the prosecution case put into this ultimately unresolved question, not least because it had always been possible that Steenkamp had indeed slipped out of bed unnoticed in the middle of the night to grab something from the kitchen.
Of all the witnesses the state produced, none stirred more eager anticipation among the reporters in court than Pistorius’s ex-girlfriend, Samantha Taylor, the woman scorned, who had a more intimate knowledge of him than anyone else who would testify in the trial. She had been called by the prosecution to support another of the four charges against Pistorius – namely, that he had violated the firearms act by firing a shot through the open sunroof of a car. But his defense lawyers believed Nel’s parallel and deeper purpose was to elicit character evidence from her that would reinforce the charge of murder.
Blonde, pretty, petite, Taylor took the stand. Pistorius wore a wistful look. She had been seventeen when they started going out. He had been crazy about her. He used to call her ‘Sam’ and ‘My little butterfly’. ‘You’re my dream, you’re all I want and all I need,’ he would say to her. ‘You’re the love of my life.’ And here she was in court now, playing her part to get him sent to jail.
Pistorius remembered that Samantha’s mother had posted a message on Facebook just after Reeva had died saying she was so glad ‘Sammy’ was ‘out of his clutches’ and that ‘things could have gone wrong with her and his gun during the time they dated’. What Pistorius did not know was that a friend of Taylor’s had been telling reporters over the previous year that one day, in the middle of one of his rages, he had held a gun to her head. This was the main reason the press were so excited. Would she recount this alleged incident in court? Would she deliver the prosecution’s killer punch by saying that when she was with him she had feared for her life?
She did not. Had the story been true, Nel, it was assumed, would have got it out of her. She did testify in response to Nel’s questions that Pistorius had fired that shot out of the car, and that he had laughed immediately afterwards. In so doing, she reinforced the image the prosecution wished to convey to the court of Pistorius as a reckless gun fanatic.
In cross-examination, Roux asked Taylor whether when Pistorius screamed and was really anxious he ever sounded like a woman. She could have offered him a lifeline by saying yes, or expressing some doubt. But she was categorical.
‘No, my lady. That is not true. He sounds like a man. I’ve seen him be very anxious and he would shout at myself. It sounded like a man, my lady.’
Roux did get Taylor to concede that she had never heard him
screaming in a life-threatening situation, but when he asked her a question that went to the core of the defense case, whether Pistorius was a person who seemed to her to be unusually scared of coming under criminal attack, she replied, ‘Not necessarily.’
Pistorius, who made notes all the time that Taylor spoke, reacted stonily to that response. But his look changed, and a shadow of a smirk passed over his face, as she revealed under questioning from Roux that she was still sad that he had left her.
‘He cheated on me. I was upset, my lady,’ she said, and shed a tear. Taylor was the only person apart from Pistorius who wept on the witness stand during the trial, also forcing breaks in the proceedings, each time consoled by her sister, as he would be by his.
This evidence held little relevance for the case, either for the murder charge or the firearms charge, and was of value only to those sectors of the media whose public found the subject of infidelity endlessly entertaining. The one potential difficulty that Taylor’s testimony about her relationship with Pistorius presented for the defense was that it could portray him in the judge’s mind as a liar. Roux, seeking to refute this perception, found himself in the undignified and almost farcical position of having to debate with Taylor who had cheated on whom first, his client’s contention being that she had cheated first, with Quinton van der Burgh, in the middle of 2012, when he was away at the London Games.
‘I have never admitted to cheating on Oscar. I did not cheat on Oscar,’ she said in reply, explaining that they had split up during that period but had got back together again after London. It was then, she said, that he had cheated on her, with Reeva. Roux replied that he had e-mails demonstrating they had broken up, to which she righteously retorted that they had not broken up ‘officially’. Roux, as he would confess to his colleagues later, might have pursued the
matter further, but he risked reducing the manifestly vulnerable and innocent Taylor to a quivering wreck. He deliberately held back, figuring that a contest so unequal would not go down well with the judge, whose gentler feelings he knew he had to try and elicit if, when the time came for the judgment, she was to give his client the benefit of the doubt.
The evening after Taylor completed her testimony one of Pistorius’s cousins, a daughter of Arnold’s, asked him how it was that he could have fallen for a woman so young and so naive. The cousin could not understand how the thoughtful, sensitive and worldly Pistorius that she knew could possibly have considered Taylor a fitting match. He was unable to offer his cousin an explanation.
Another figure from Pistorius’s past, to whom he also thought he had been close, took the witness stand after Taylor. His name was Darren Fresco and again Pistorius’s family were baffled, asking him later how on earth he could have made friends with someone who appeared so fickle. This time he had an answer. He had been away from South Africa for long stretches at a time, and when he came back he was lonely and had to find companions where he could. Fresco, like him, had time on his hands during the week to go out and have fun at places like Tasha’s restaurant in Johannesburg, where the young and idle and well-off went to see and be seen.
Unfortunately for Pistorius, Fresco backed up Taylor’s testimony regarding the shooting of the gun through the open sunroof, which Fresco said he had been driving. He also testified regarding the third count on which Pistorius had been charged, concerning the gun he had fired at Tasha’s. Fresco was a key witness. The gun in question had belonged to him, and he testified that he had slipped it under the table to Pistorius, who had fiddled with it on his lap until it went off, the bullet grazing the leg of another friend at their table.
‘Oscar said, “There is too much media attention around me, please take the blame,” and like a good friend, I agreed,’ Fresco testified.
No one at the time of the alleged incidents, either in the car or at the restaurant, had lodged a complaint with the police, and neither charge would ever have come to court had Pistorius not shot Reeva. Gerrie Nel had figured that, should Taylor’s testimony in particular be believed by the judge, Pistorius’s hair-trigger temper would enter into the equation and improve the chances that he would be found guilty of having killed Reeva Steenkamp in a rage.
Roux believed that Pistorius’s rash behavior and wild outbursts served, in the context of the court case, as a double-edged weapon. They could be interpreted as reinforcing the thesis that he had killed Reeva Steenkamp in a rage, but, just as plausibly, they could be interpreted as reinforcing the thesis that he had reacted in a crazily fearful and disproportionate manner to an imagined threat. South African commentators, aware of all the stories in the media about his fast driving and his mania for guns, listened to the evidence about the bullet he had fired at Tasha’s, about the other one he had allegedly shot from the car, saw the extremity of his emotions in court, and declared that there was a deep psychological problem rooted in what one of them called ‘a loose Pistorius gene’. Roux did not necessarily disagree. Evidence of its existence, as he would try and show later in court, might prove beneficial to the defense case.
So might the private WhatsApp messages between Pistorius and Reeva, which the prosecution team went to great lengths to present as evidence in court.
Pistorius had complicated Captain Mike Van Aardt’s life immensely by informing him, through his lawyers, that he had forgotten the
master code for his iPhone. This alerted the detective, and Nel, to the possibility that the critical incriminating material that the murder case needed might lie within the phone. The problem was that there was only one way to break into it and access the messages, including deleted ones, which was to send it to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. Legal permission had to be obtained before Apple would agree to this. A laborious process began in the second half of 2013 that involved appealing to courts in both South Africa and the United States, which ended with the contents of both Reeva’s and Pistorius’s iPhones being recovered with just days to go before the trial.