Authors: John Carlin
‘I shouted for Reeva.
‘At some point I walked back to the bedroom, my ears were ringing, I couldn’t tell if there was a response or not. I kept on shouting for Reeva. I didn’t hear anything. At this point it hadn’t occurred to me yet that it could be Reeva in the bathroom – I still thought that there could be intruders. I retreated to a point where I got to the corner of the bed. I tried to lift myself up. I was talking to Reeva. There was nobody. Nobody responded to me.
‘I lifted myself onto the bed and placed my hand on the right hand side of the bed and felt if Reeva was there and couldn’t feel anything. The first thing I thought was maybe she’d got down to the floor like I’d told her to, maybe she’s just scared. I kept my firearm pointed at the passage.
‘It was at that point, my lady, that it first dawned upon me it could be Reeva in the bathroom or the toilet.’
He jumped to the other side of the bed, he said, and ran his hand along the curtains covering the sliding balcony door to make sure she was not hiding there. He made his way back to the passage with his gun still in front of him.
‘At this point I had mixed emotions,’ he said. His jaw trembled. ‘I did not know – I did not want to believe it could be Reeva in the toilet. And I was still scared somebody was coming to attack me, or us. I made my way back inside the bathroom and I tried to push the toilet door open but it was locked. I ran back to the bedroom and out to the balcony and shouted, help, help, help, for someone to help me. I went back in and I put my prostheses on and I ran as fast as I could back to the bathroom. I tried to kick the door but nothing happened. I ran back to the bedroom where the cricket bat was . . .’
‘Were you still screaming at this stage,’ Roux asked him.
‘I was screaming and shouting the whole time. I don’t think I’ve ever screamed like that, my lady. I was crying out to the Lord to help me. I was crying out for Reeva . . .’
The sobbing became more frequent now – the silences, too.
‘I went back to the bathroom, I placed my firearm on the carpet. The light was on now . . . I kicked the door and then with the cricket bat I think I hit the door three times. The first time I felt a shock in my hand. Then I hit again and a small piece opened and then I hit again
and there was a big plank. I broke it off with my hands and threw it into the bathroom . . .’
Choking again, gasping, his eyes red, Pistorius looked as haunted as a condemned man at the gallows.
‘I then opened the little partition and I tried to open the door from the inside and I saw the key was on the floor at that point . . . I leant over the partition and I got the key and opened the door and threw it open . . .’
His shoulders were heaving, tears coursed down his cheeks. He bit his upper lip. Nobody in the courtroom moved. Having striven for fourteen months to banish this very image from his mind, an image that returned only in his nightmares and that he had never been able to bring himself to describe even to his family, he was reliving it now as if it were happening right there, then, for the first time.
‘I now rolled down to the floor,’ he said, dragging each word out. ‘I sat over Reeva and I cried, I don’t know how long . . .’
Another silence, then a sharp, deep breath and then, in a long drawn-out howl, he forced the words out, ‘She wasn’t breathing . . .’
Then the floodgates broke.
His head collapsed onto his lap as if his neck had snapped and a rasping sob tore out of his throat, then another, and another, as he gasped for oxygen like a drowning man. His face in his hands, he bawled like an infant, beyond shame or consolation, uncorking a lifetime of stored pain. Aimée was the mirror of her brother’s anguish. Lois wept. Arnold, until now a monument of Afrikaner rigidity, padded an eye with a white handkerchief. June Steenkamp held her head in one hand. The North Gauteng High Court was too mean a stage for the emotion on display, and the judge knew it. Needing no prompting from Barry Roux, she stood up and, barely pausing for the ritual bow, with Aimée already on her feet running to comfort her brother, the
judge hurried out of the back door as Pistorius’s cries echoed around the chamber’s august wooden walls.
Five minutes later the judge returned and Roux rose to his feet. ‘I cannot responsibly ask the court to carry on,’ he told her. She could not disagree. Nor could Gerrie Nel. Court was dissolved for the day.
18
When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean
.
LEWIS CARROLL,
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS
T
HE NEXT
day, April 9, the nineteenth day of the trial, Gerrie Nel began his long-awaited cross-examination of Pistorius. The South African press had billed it as a duel between the Pit-Bull and the Blade Runner. The Johannesburg Star had already decided how it would end. ‘Death Nel For Oscar’ ran the headline that morning. But some reporters covering the case in court wondered whether the duel would take place at all. How could Pistorius possibly stand up to Nel if he could not face his own lawyer without breaking down? Might he be declared unfit to stand trial? Or would he even show up at all? It was not entirely outlandish to ponder, as did some in the public gallery, whether he might have taken an overdose of sleeping pills the night before.
But the Pistorius family’s mood an hour before the trial resumed was far less glum than might have been expected. If any of them had been on suicide watch, they did not show it. While gathered for breakfast at a cafe called Tribeca, two hundred yards along Madiba Street from the court building, Arnold and Lois, their pregnant daughter, Maria, and other uncles, aunts and cousins gave the
impression of having shaken off the previous day’s traumatic events. They smiled – wan smiles, but smiles nonetheless – and there seemed to be a greater resolve about them. ‘We must get through this,’ Lois explained. ‘There’s no stopping, there’s no choice. So we must make the best of it.’ Another aunt said that one good thing to have come out of the trial was that the family was more united than ever. They were a team, here to help ‘Ozzie’ shoulder the burden. The experience, she said, had brought out the best in them.
Pistorius himself wore no marks of his ordeal when he arrived in court just before 9 a.m., flanked, as he was every day, by Arnold’s three sturdy sons-in-law. He strode past the camera crews and photographers with a stare as blank as if he were just another lawyer reporting for a day’s work – he even wore something of the confident celebrity air of the old days, before the shooting. He sat down, bowed his head and prayed, but when he had finished he stood up and greeted his lawyers, looking almost refreshed. When Roux beckoned him to one side he listened like a boxer receiving instructions from his trainer before a fight, then gave a brisk nod and sat down again. Ampie Louw, his athletics coach since he was seventeen, was in court for the first time. Louw noted, approvingly, that Pistorius had his game face on, nerves taut but controlled.
Nel would see to it that he did not keep his composure for long.
The prosecutor believed that, short of forcing a confession, his best chance of securing a murder conviction rested on exposing Pistorius, the only living witness, as a liar. His strategy would be to plug away at every detail of what he believed to be Pistorius’s improbably tailored version of events, to throw him off balance and lure him into a web of self-destructive contradictions. Nel’s objective would be to persuade Judge Masipa that the only reasonable inference she could possibly draw was that there had been an argument between the accused and
the deceased, after which Reeva Steenkamp ran screaming to the bathroom, where Pistorius intentionally shot her.
Nel came out blazing.
‘You killed Reeva Steenkamp, Mr Pistorius. You shot and killed her. Is that correct?’
‘I made a mistake,’ Pistorius replied, ‘a terrible mistake.’
‘You made a mistake? You killed a person, that’s what you did!
You still are one of the most recognized faces in the world . . . a model for both disabled and able-bodied sportsmen. Before you killed Reeva, people looked up to you and now you have a responsibility to tell the truth, and now you will not?’
‘I have a responsibility to myself and Reeva to tell the truth,’ he replied, his voice already beginning to crack.
‘You killed her! You shot and killed her! Won’t you take responsibility for that?’
‘I did, my lady.’
‘Say it! Say, “Yes, I shot and killed Reeva Steenkamp”!’
‘Yes, my lady . . .’ he whimpered.
Barely a minute into the cross-examination, Pistorius looked crushed.
Nel, having won the first flurry, declared that he would now be showing him a piece of video footage taken from Britain’s Sky News channel. The video, projected before the whole court on a big screen, showed Pistorius at a shooting range, taking aim with a pistol at a watermelon. He pulled the trigger and the scene cut to a close-up of the watermelon at the moment of impact.
‘You know the same happened to Reeva’s head, Mr Pistorius: it exploded,’ Nel said. Nel paused, letting the image sink in, then added, ‘Now I am going to show you the exact same effect caused by the bullet that went into her head.’
The picture that had flashed up by accident the day before appeared again on screen for the whole courtroom to see. But this time it stayed there. Reeva had her face turned sideways, her blonde hair matted with blood, her skin turned a yellowy-grey, the top of her forehead spattered with brain tissue and white bone matter. The gallery responded with murmurs, gasps and one loud cry of shock. The Pistorius family members present looked down, shaking their heads, horrified and also disgusted by what they would later describe as Nel’s brutal manipulations. No one in the courtroom would have found the picture more devastating than June Steenkamp, who would tell a newspaper that the image would remain carved in her mind for the rest of her life. But Nel had consulted with her, via her lawyer, beforehand, warning her of what he planned to do, and she had agreed that the picture should be shown. She wanted her daughter’s killer to face up to the horror of what he had done.
‘That’s it, have a look, Mr Pistorius,’ Nel snapped. ‘I know you don’t want to, because you don’t want to take responsibility, but it’s time that you looked at it. Take responsibility for what you’ve done, Mr Pistorius.’
‘I’ve taken responsibility, my lady,’ Pistorius replied, his eyes on the judge and not on Nel, as if he was afraid of what he might do if he looked his inquisitor in the face. ‘But I will not look at a picture where I’m tormented.’
Nel insisted that he should. ‘Take responsibility, Mr Pistorius.’
‘I have been waiting for my time on this stand to tell my story,’ Pistorius cried. ‘I remember! I don’t have to look at a picture where I am tormented by what I saw. I touched her head. I was there!’
Nel was not going to let go. ‘Will you look at the picture?’
Unable to articulate a reply this time, Pistorius wept. Judge Masipa ordered the photograph to be removed and Nel showed some mercy
at last, calling for an adjournment before Roux had time to stand up and do so himself. ‘I’m giving the witness time to console himself,’ Nel said, dryly. ‘He is distressed.’
That first exchange set the tone for the five days of relentless cross-examination that followed. Nel was never quite as confrontational again, but he was rarely less than combative, and always blunt. He had set phrases, which he repeated throughout like jabs to the head.
‘You are deceitful, Mr Pistorius.’ ‘Your version makes no sense.’ ‘You are lying, Mr Pistorius.’ ‘You never take responsibility, do you, Mr Pistorius?’ ‘It’s all about you, isn’t it, Mr Pistorius? It’s all about Oscar.’
In breaks between sessions the Pistorius family expressed growing outrage at Nel, complaining that he was acting as if he had some personal score to settle. But they were mistaken. Nel had come to the Pistorius trial with a well-established reputation for conducting harsh,
ad hominem
cross-examinations – as Jackie Selebi, the former commissioner of police, whom he had sent to jail in 2008, would have been the first to attest. Nel had carried the nickname ‘Pit-Bull’ – some also called him ‘Bulldog’ – for a long time. A lawyer who had known Nel for nearly thirty years said that he had always been like this, even at the start of his career, in the late 1980s, when one of his jobs as a junior prosecutor had been to send stone-throwing anti-apartheid militants to jail. Mike van Aardt, the chief police investigator, said Nel was just doing his job. The accused had pleaded not guilty and so he had to face the music. ‘Gerrie is not a persecutor, as some say he is,’ Van Aardt said. ‘He is a prosecutor.’
Nel, as if he were deploying his tactics as an amateur wrestler in his professional arena, kept his opponent continually off guard, unable to anticipate what his next line of questioning would be. He would shift abruptly from a harrowing examination of the events of February 14 to the relatively trite matter of the firearm Pistorius had discharged
at Tasha’s restaurant and then back again, with no warning, to the fan Pistorius said he had brought in from the terrace before grabbing his gun from his bedside and rushing to the bathroom to fire it. The whole case boiled down to what Pistorius was thinking when he fired the four bullets, and the more contradictions or ambiguities Nel could find in Pistorius’s version of what happened, the greater the chance the judge would find him guilty as charged.
Pistorius, for his part, had understood from his lawyers that the issue was not just whether he had known he was shooting at Reeva, but whether he had knowingly intended to kill a human being – any human being – which would still leave him vulnerable to a
dolus eventualis
murder verdict.
Pistorius was not always distraught during Nel’s cross-examination. Much of the time he was articulate and composed, but Nel caught him in one tangle after another.
‘I didn’t intend to kill Reeva, or anyone else,’ Pistorius said. ‘I never intended to shoot anybody. It was an accident. I shot out of fear. I didn’t want to shoot anyone. I didn’t intend to kill anyone.’