Authors: John Carlin
Roux, eager to portray his client to the judge as a philanthropic-minded soul, got him to talk about the project he had worked on with Strathclyde University in Scotland to develop prosthetic legs for African amputees. The court learned of his charity work with land-mine victims in Mozambique, and of a visit to a Mozambican coastal town where he had challenged the fastest people to run a race against him. He won the race, whereupon, he said, a group of amputees who had been watching were ‘not ashamed anymore’, and they pulled up their pants ‘to show off’ their prosthetic legs.
Yet, Pistorius confessed, he struggled to act in accordance with the example he set. His prostheses, he said, were an extension of his body. ‘I don’t really want to be seen without them . . . I get shy, embarrassed, when I don’t have them on. They are a part of me.’
With that, his first day of testimony drew to a close, twenty minutes before schedule. ‘Mr Pistorius is very tired,’ Roux told the judge. She was not unsympathetic.
‘He does look exhausted. He sounds exhausted’, she said. She asked Nel if he had any objection, and he said he did not, ‘so long as this is not a daily occurrence’.
Pistorius stood up, bowed before the judge as she got up to leave and, the moment she had left the chamber, collapsed in his chair, almost crumpling to the floor. His sister hurried across the courtroom to his aid.
Aimée was by her brother’s side all day and every day during the trial, both in court and at home. In the morning she would lay out his clothes – always a dark suit and a white shirt and tie – and make him some breakfast. She sat in court unfailingly with him from the start to the end of every session; she had lunch with him in a room in the court building, the two of them invariably alone; she cooked for him in the evenings, sat next to him watching TV. Often she put him to bed and then slept on a couch alongside him, watching over him as if he were a sickly child, keeping an eye on him to make sure that he stayed true to the promise he had made his uncle Arnold months earlier that, yes, he saw a purpose in carrying on living.
Day two of Pistorius’s testimony dawned with a message posted on Twitter by Samantha Taylor, which she evidently regretted for she quickly deleted it. The message read, ‘Last lies you get to tell . . . You better make it worth your while.’
Roux, coincidentally, began proceedings by questioning Pistorius about the accusation that he had fired a gun through the sunroof of a car, and on the two other subsidiary firearms charges. He denied
all guilt, flatly contradicting Taylor’s and Darren Fresco’s testimony about the gun in the car; blaming the incident with the gun at Tasha’s restaurant partly on Fresco, whose gun it was, for passing it to him under the table when it was not safe to handle; and dismissing the charge concerning the unlicensed bullets found in his home, saying he had never claimed to own them, that he was just storing them for his father.
Roux asked him what his attitude was towards guns now. ‘I don’t ever want to hold a gun in my hand again,’ Pistorius said.
Roux nodded, paused to retrieve a piece of paper from his desk and, deliberately calm, as if seeking to drain the tension from the moment, said, ‘I am taking you, Mr Pistorius, to the events of the 13th of February’.
Seats shifted in the packed courtroom. Necks straightened. The drama’s central act was about to begin.
Roux led him through the events of the evening before ‘the incident’.
Reeva, Pistorius said, had come over to his home to spend the night. She was already there, preparing dinner, when he got home around six in the evening. He showered, changed his clothes and at seven they ate, chatting about the day – he telling her about a visit to the new home he meant to buy in Johannesburg, and the two of them discussing the details of a new contract she was about to sign. They went up to the bedroom at about eight and he opened a sliding door onto a balcony because the air conditioning was not working and it was a hot and muggy night. He placed two fans – one big, one small – by the balcony door. Ever cautious about security, he placed his gun under the left side of his bed and a cricket bat by a cabinet near the door to the bedroom.
He took off his prosthetic legs to air them, placing them between
the bed and the sliding balcony door, then the two of them lay on the bed – he, unusually, choosing the left side, because of a pain in his shoulder for which he was receiving treatment. He trawled through the internet on his iPad; she got down from the bed to do some yoga exercises, pausing in her routine for an occasional kiss. She returned to the bed and they chatted for a while. He began to drift off. He asked her to remember to pull the curtains tight shut and close the balcony door before going to sleep. He fell asleep before she did, with his head on her stomach.
Breaking the tension in the courtroom, Roux asked him whether he and Reeva had made any plans for Valentine’s Day. Pistorius said they had no plans to go out, but he had ordered a bracelet for her from a designer she liked and had meant to go and pick it up with her from a jewelry store during the course of the day. She, for her part, had wrapped a present for him addressed to ‘Ozzie’: four framed photos of the two of them and a Valentine’s card.
The message Reeva had written on the card had read, ‘I think today is a good day to tell you that I love you.’
Pistorius paused, sighed, wiped his eyes. She had not had a chance to give him the card before she died.
Roux returned to the night of the 13th. What had he been wearing? Pistorius said he had worn a pair of basketball shorts. This was Roux’s cue to ask for ‘a very short’ adjournment. He said the defense would like to offer a demonstration for the benefit of the court, giving no warning what it would consist of.
The judge left the chamber and Roux nodded to Pistorius, who left the courtroom by a side entrance. Five minutes later, Pistorius reappeared in a long-sleeved white vest and baggy black shorts, exposing his skin-colored prosthetic legs, on the ends of which he wore a pair of running shoes.
The judge returned, everybody bowed, and Roux apologized to her ‘for the informal dress of Mr Pistorius’. But there was a reason for it.
Roux instructed Pistorius to step down from the witness stand and position himself next to the wooden door with the bullet holes, which remained propped up in place at the side of the courtroom. Roux asked him if he would please remove his prostheses.
Pistorius sat down on a chair, swiftly removed his two artificial legs and stood up again. Everybody in the courtroom craned their necks for a clearer view. The judge leaned forward on her desk. ‘Oooh,’ gasped a woman in the public gallery.
Pistorius had shrunk nearly a foot in height. South Africa’s ‘hottest hunk’, ‘sexiest man’, and national sporting hero stood transformed into a dwarfish individual, balancing with difficulty on a pair of thin, pale, wrinkled stumps. Judge Masipa leant forward and, her head stock-still, silently studied his calf-less half-legs. Thirty seconds later she relaxed her posture and sat back in her black orthopedic chair. Pistorius sat down again, slipped on his artificial legs, and returned to his place on the witness stand.
It had been a bold move by Barry Roux, another gambit in his quest ‘to soften the judge’s heart’, under the legitimate pretext of allowing her to see what Pistorius looked like when he got up in the middle of the night and fired the fatal shots. For Pistorius, baring his deformity before the court had been one more twist of the knife, but one to which he had grudgingly lent his consent.
A far worse torment awaited him in the afternoon session when, dressed again in suit and tie, Roux led him through his version of what happened when he woke up in the early hours of February 14.
‘I sat up in bed and noticed that the fans were still running and that the door was still open,’ Pistorius said, ‘although the lights had
been switched off. Reeva was still awake or obviously not sleeping. She rolled over to me and asked, “Can’t you sleep, my baba?” I said, “No, I can’t.
” ’
The tone of his voice, melancholy throughout, became plaintive as he struggled to stop himself from crying.
‘I got out of my side of the bed, walked around the foot of the bed, holding onto the foot of the bed with my left hand, and got to where the fans were and took the small fan, the floor fan, and placed it inside the room. I took the bigger fan and took it by the part underneath the fan and placed it in the bedroom. The fans were still running at the time. I then proceeded to close the sliding doors and lock them, I then drew the curtains.’
He was walking on his stumps. The lights were out. His bedroom’s thick curtains were tight shut. It was pitch dark.
‘I came into the room at this point. The only bit of light that was in the room was a little blue LED light on the amplifier . . . I could see a pair of jeans on the floor, Reeva’s jeans . . .’
He paused, fighting to stop himself from falling apart.
‘I picked her jeans up and was going to place them over the amplifier, over the light . . .’ Another pause – dead silence in the courtroom, as if everybody had stopped breathing. He paused to take a deep breath and continued.
‘It was at this point that I heard a window open in the bathroom, it sounded like the window sliding open. I could hear it hit the frame, as though it had hit a point where it couldn’t slide anymore.’
‘What did you think at the time, Mr Pistorius?’ Roux asked.
‘My lady,’ he said, dissolving into tears, ‘that was the moment that everything changed.’
He paused to collect himself. The eyes of the judge were riveted on his face. At Roux’s prompting, he continued.
‘I thought there was a burglar entering my home. I was on the side of the room where you first have to cross the passage that leads to the bathroom. I just froze. I heard this noise.’ He paused, glanced down at the floor, continued, ‘I interpreted it as someone climbing into the bathroom. I thought they could be there at any moment. The first thing I thought was I needed to arm myself, I needed to protect myself and Reeva, I needed to get my gun. I was looking down the passage scared that the person, people, were going to come out at that point. I rushed as fast as I could. I couldn’t see anything in the room.’
He felt under his bed in the dark with his fingers, he said, took his 9mm gun out of its holster and moved towards the narrow passageway, seventeen feet long, linking the bedroom with the bathroom. Continually he paused for breath now, as if wishing to delay the terrible climax that lay ahead.
‘I whispered for Reeva to get down and phone the police. At that point I just wanted to put myself between the person that had gained access to my house and Reeva. When I got just before the passage I slowed down because I was scared that that person could have possibly already been in the closet passage, so I slowed down and had my firearm extended in front of me. As I entered where the passage is to the bathroom I was overcome with fear and started screaming for the burglars to get out of my house. I shouted for Reeva to get on the floor . . .
‘I slowly made my way down the passage, constantly aware that these people could come at me at any time . . . I didn’t have my legs on.
‘Just before I got to the wall where the tiles start in the bathroom I stopped shouting as I was worried the person would know exactly where I was. I could get shot.
‘I heard a toilet door slam, what could only have been the toilet
door . . . I couldn’t see inside, but it confirmed for me there was a person or people inside.’
Roux called on a police official to put up a photo of the bathroom on the screen. Instead, apparently by mistake, a picture of Reeva Steenkamp’s dead body flashed up for an instant, for the whole court to see. June Steenkamp covered her face in her hands. Pistorius gasped. A uniformed policeman hurried over with the green plastic bucket. Pistorius vomited. The judge called an adjournment for lunch. Arnold Pistorius strode angrily towards the policeman who had displayed the wrong photograph. Aimée left the courtroom in tears.
An hour later court resumed. Roux asked Pistorius to pick up where he had left off.
‘I got to the entrance of the bathroom at the end of the passage, where I stopped screaming. At that point I was not shouting or screaming, I thought the intruders were going to come out or were in the bathroom at that time. With my pistol in my right hand I peered into the bathroom. I then made my way to where the carpet and tiles meet on the left-hand side. I had my shoulder against the wall and I had my pistol raised to my eye to the corner of the entrance of the bathroom. There was no light in the bathroom.’
There was another long pause. Roux coaxed him on gently. ‘Please continue, Mr Pistorius.’
‘As I peered in I could see that the window was open. I was with my back against the wall, with my hand against the wall for balance, slowly scuffling along the left-hand side wall.
‘I wasn’t sure if the intruders were in the toilet or on a ladder that they would have used to gain access or if they were round the corner
at that point. I still had my firearm in front of me to look round the corner, to look at the shower.’
He stopped again for fully half a minute. There was not a sound in the courtroom. Roux stood statue-still.
‘At that point I saw there was no one in the bathroom and the toilet door was closed and the window was open. I retreated a step or two back.
‘At this point I started screaming again for Reeva to phone the police.
‘My eyes were going between the window and the toilet, I must have stood there for some time. I wasn’t sure if someone was going to come out of the toilet and attack me or come up the ladder and point a firearm in the house and start shooting. So I just stayed where I was and I kept on screaming.
‘Then I heard a noise from inside the toilet that I perceived to be somebody coming out of the toilet. Before I knew it I had fired four shots at the door.
‘My ears were ringing – I couldn’t hear anything – so I shouted. I kept shouting for Reeva to phone the police. I was still scared to retreat because I wasn’t sure if there was somebody on the ladder, I wasn’t sure if there was somebody in the toilet. I don’t know how long I stood there for.