Reeva: A Mother's Story (20 page)

There was further dispute about whether Oscar was wearing his prosthetic legs or not when he broke down the toilet door and then, after fifteen harrowing days, the prosecution rested its case. The court was adjourned for another four days and when we returned Judge Masipa immediately postponed the trial until 7 April, as one of her assessors was too ill to come to court. We left with the prospect that on our return Oscar Pistorius himself would take the stand as the defence began its case.

On Monday 7 April, Oscar took the witness stand. We’d been warned as a family through the lawyers shortly beforehand that he intended to make a public apology. He turned and faced us for the first time in seventeen days of court proceedings and for the first time in the fourteen months since he took our daughter from us.

‘My lady, may I please start my evidence by tendering an apology,’ he said in a whisper. ‘I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to Mr and Mrs Steenkamp, to Reeva’s family, to those of you who knew her who are here today’ – and he promptly broke down in tears.

I knew it was coming, so I had steeled myself to hold it together, to remain composed. The judge asked him to speak louder. ‘I beg your pardon, my lady, I’ll speak up,’ he continued. ‘I’d like to apologise and say that there’s not a moment, and there hasn’t been a moment, since this tragedy happened that I haven’t thought about your family. I wake up every morning and you’re the first people I think of, the first people I pray for. I can’t imagine the pain and the sorrow and the emptiness that I’ve caused you and your family. I was simply trying to protect Reeva. I can promise that when she went to bed that night she felt loved. I’ve tried to put my words on paper many, many times to write to you, but no words will ever suffice.’

It was an extraordinary moment. You could cut the atmosphere in the courtroom with a knife: silence, but for the sound of journalists tapping on their screens. It put me in an awkward position. Why decide to say sorry to me in a televised trial in front of the whole world? I was unmoved by his apology. I felt if I melted – which would be my nature – and if I appeared to be sorry for him at this stage of his trial on the charge of premeditated murder, it would in the eyes of others lessen the awfulness of what he had done. He was in the box trying to save his own skin after he had killed my daughter and I was sitting in that courtroom waiting to hear factual truth, not to see emotions cloud the truth.

‘Why are you doing this in public?’ Gerrie demanded. ‘It’s not a thing to do in public. You could have approached Mrs Steenkamp privately through lawyers.’ In the break, my advocate Dup told Gerrie that early on his representatives did contact us, but neither Barry nor I were ready. We put that on record in court.

Oscar spent five days giving evidence and, for me, it was the most interesting phase of the trial. I studied him intently and listened to my instinct about whether he was telling the truth. All the time I found myself looking towards him to see his reaction to questions. I couldn’t help myself, even though I didn’t want to fixate on him. He told the court he was on anti-depressants, suffered from terrible nightmares and did not want to ever hold a gun again. But he had to say that, didn’t he? Most of the first day was spent discussing his childhood and school days, a boat accident, and occasions when he had been a victim of crime. It was Barry Roux, his lawyer, trying to make him feel comfortable on the witness stand, building up a sympathetic picture of him for the judge.

We came back to court the next day and sat through Oscar’s explanations of the context of the WhatsApp messages the pair had exchanged which speak of her unhappiness in the relationship. He said Reeva had struggled with the attention that came with dating him, but that they had been making future plans together. What rubbish. Reeva was already a public figure: a model, a TV presenter, a reality TV personality. She wanted attention – in order for her voice to be heard. Her whole ambition in life was to find a platform so that she could have a voice for the causes she cared about. If Joe Bloggs stands up, no one is going to listen, but Reeva always said, If you’re known, you have a voice. That was her plan. To say she struggled with attention was nonsense.

Then the worst bit. I still have nightmares about thinking of her behind the locked toilet door unable to summon help. Here was Oscar, sobbing, describing how he held her body in his arms once he had smashed through the door with his cricket bat. He said he saw the key, took it and unlocked the door, flung it open and sat over Reeva crying. ‘I don’t know how long I was there for,’ he said. ‘She wasn’t breathing.’

I couldn’t wait to leave the court after that. It was a terrible night for me, going back to the guest house with that image in my head, and then returning the next morning to hear him continue to give his version of what happened just after he shot Reeva. It was hard to sit there, day in, day out, hearing all the tiny details and all the time to be thinking my baby must have been so scared. That’s what kills me to this day. I had to strain to hear his words through the sobs and sniffles, but he said he had carried her down the stairs and tried to help her breathe and stop the bleeding. ‘Reeva had already died while I was holding her, before the ambulance arrived so I knew there was nothing more I could do for her,’ he said. And that was how my daughter’s life ended.

Gerrie Nel began his cross-examination. This was the crux of the matter and I knew it would be both the worst and the most important part of the trial to sit through. Would Oscar stick to his version? Gerrie’s aim was to try to make him break down and tell the truth, but even before the cross-examination process people had commented about how hard it would be to make Oscar crack. He was a world-class athlete, a winner, they argued. He was self-centred and arrogant, but more relevantly he knew how to get in a zone, put on his sportsman’s blinkers and focus purely on getting himself to a given finish line without distraction. His goal in this case was not to deviate from the version of events he had given in order to leave the judge thinking it could reasonably possibly be true.

Gerrie began in feisty form. The court was shown the so-called ‘zombie stopper’ video of Pistorius at a shooting range using the same Black Talon bullets he fired into Reeva. This was shown, despite Barry Roux’s objections. Oscar had said he didn’t even know what a zombie stopper was and here was a video showing the contrary. It was horrendous, seeing how trigger-happy he was, firing these bullets into a watermelon and laughing at the mess they made on impact. It was Gerrie’s attempt to make Oscar take responsibility for ending Reeva’s life. He made him look at photos of her bloodied head and said, ‘You saw how the bullet made the watermelon explode. You know that the same thing happened to Reeva’s head.’ There were gasps all around the court. I almost forgot to take a breath and appreciated the squeezes on my arm from those sitting on either side of me. Look. Have a look, Gerrie insisted. Take responsibility. What did you do? You killed Reeva, that’s what you did. And still Oscar said he had just made a mistake. He was crying and sobbing… That was the moment I thought he was going to break down and confess. But he never did. And that was a disappointment, because if he had said, ‘This is what happened… and I am so sorry…’ and asked for mercy from everyone who loved Reeva, people might actually have respected him.

Thereafter Nel was out to highlight the numerous inconsistencies in Oscar’s bail hearing and his testimony, such as whether or not he went out onto the balcony before the shooting. He forced Oscar to admit that he had reconstructed some of his evidence. Oh my word Gerrie was tenacious. I felt positive that we seemed to be inching towards some truth when Gerrie informed Oscar, ‘We will have to test what you reconstructed and what you remember.’

To be honest, the level of detail and nuance was too much for me. I’m not a pedantic person by nature; I go on instinct. Over the next few days I listened and watched as Oscar was vague, evasive and shifty by turn. He’d say, I don’t remember. I don’t know. Sometimes he’d even blame his legal team as he resisted Gerrie’s attempts to dismantle his version of events. Nothing added up to a coherent picture. He insisted he did not intend to kill anyone, let alone Reeva. He said pulling the trigger was ‘an accident’. What? Four times an accident? He admitted that ‘objectively’ there was no reason to shoot on that night. Asked why he didn’t just fire a warning shot into the bathroom, he replied ‘because the bullet may have ricocheted and hit me’. He had time to think that through, then. As Gerrie said, ‘It’s all about you. It’s me, myself and I.’ And that was so true. When he was asked why it took him so long to answer the question, he said ‘Because my life is on the line here.’

No matter how he squirmed, Gerrie reminded him that he believed Oscar’s version of events was ‘a lie’ and that he would argue Reeva ‘ran screaming’ from an argument with him. He questioned him about his attitude to security and forced Oscar to admit that he wasn’t concerned about a balcony window that had been left open. I could not help but recall Oscar wasn’t concerned about leaving Reeva alone to house-sit this very same house while he went away for days at a time over Christmas and New Year. He pressed him on why, if he had heard a noise, he had not then asked Reeva if she had heard a noise, too. And why he had not waited for her to respond. He asked why he had moved towards the danger when he heard a noise, rather than go to Reeva in the bedroom. He pointed out that Oscar was changing his defence between saying he thought he was under attack to saying it was an accident. He said Reeva did not scream, but she would definitely have screamed. I know my daughter and she was very vocal. We just hoped the judge would see through his version. We clung to the fact that Judge Masipa is known to be very thorough, very fair.

I lost count of the temporary adjournments the judge allowed for Oscar to recover his composure. He was crying and sobbing, puking into his green bucket, hysterical. Gerrie slowed down a bit. He did not want to be a bully. He got the message that he could only go so far. He wanted to show the pictures of Reeva again but decided against it, because it would be too much for Oscar, and then the judge would have sympathy for Oscar.

When they went through the injuries and stuff, maybe he did feel sick about what he’d done. Apparently he has an anxiety condition where he vomits when he’s emotional. To look at him now, he’s a pathetic figure. He looks as if his insides are shrivelled up. He looks haunted. He’s already been punished in a way. You can never get away from your head, you know. Whatever is in his head is in his head forever. He will have to live with that.

Gerrie ended his five-day cross-examination with a stark summary of what we all believe happened. ‘You fired four shots through the door whilst knowing that she was standing behind the door… She was locked into the bathroom and you armed yourself with the sole purpose of shooting and killing her.’

‘That is not true,’ Oscar maintained.

After seeing the protagonist centre stage, it was back to the bit-part players in the drama: the witnesses called by the defence. Roger Dixon testified on more forensic debates, ballistics evidence, the depth of darkness in the bedroom, the comparative sounds of a cricket bat hitting wood and a gun being fired. Gerrie Nel grilled Dixon, asserting the fact that he was trained as a geologist and had not been part of the police forensics department for several years. When we adjourned for coffee, Jennifer and I could hear the detectives laughing in their room next door. They thought Gerrie had annihilated that Dixon guy. The prosecuting team updated me constantly. They told me what was going on and told me not to worry because they had lots up their sleeve.

We needed those breaks for coffee, lunch and tea. The formality of sitting in a court is exhausting You need to let off steam and stretch your legs. It becomes very uncomfortable sitting for hours on the hard bench. You sit in the same position. One of your legs goes dead so you cross them the other way, and back again, and then sit up a little bit straighter to let another side of your bottom take the strain. I was grateful Barry was watching on the couch at home. He could never sit like that. All that detail. All that nit-picking. That verbal war of attrition between the legal teams. I just tried to keep my shoulders up straight and show dignity. The press referred to me as Stoneface, but a lot of people said they admired my composure. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t give anything away. I listened to every word. I was told that, when this was over, I might be able to say something to him. They may give me a chance to speak to him in the event of a sentencing. They may. I didn’t know. What unsettled me was the way he seemed so protected. He has had special treatment, but he is not vulnerable. It was Reeva’s bad luck that she met him, because sooner or later he would have killed someone. I do believe that. The previous girlfriend, Samantha Taylor, had the gun waved in her face a few times. She was only seventeen and she said he threw tantrums and dictated to her and she was probably so young that she just took it. But Reeva was a woman who would stand her own ground.

On the final day before the trial adjourned for a two-week break over Easter, Judge Thokozile Masipa reprimanded the ‘unruly’ behaviour in the overflow room adjacent to the main courtroom where more media follow the proceedings via a giant TV screen. I was petrified of the judge, she was a real stickler. If you came in late, you had to stand by the door and bow to her. If a cellphone went off, she would turn to the culprit and say, ‘
What
is going on over there?’ I didn’t just switch my phone off, I took it to pieces. The battery was out. One day I woke up with a tickly cough and stayed at the guest house because I wouldn’t have dared cough in court. One of the detectives’ phones went off and he went various shades of red and purple like a naughty schoolboy and didn’t know where to look. She said to him, ‘You will leave the court immediately. I’m not listening to this.’ One of the ANC ladies phones went off with a ringtone that sounded like a car firing up and I was so glad I wasn’t her! Another day she had to give a lecture forbidding eating and drinking in court and asking members of the press to stop jumping over the benches. There must be respect for the court, she said.