by John Carlin
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 th
e 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.
The prosecution’s hope was that a message from Reeva would be found that could have caused Pistorius to fly into a murderous rage before shooting her. Along with the prosecution, a large part of the general public had suspected from the start that the motive for the killing was jealousy. The most widespread version of the Othello theory was that the man with whom Reeva had had a relationship prior to Pistorius, the famous South African rugby player Francois Hougaard, had sent her a provocative or salacious Valentine’s message – or perhaps some joke about her boyfriend’s missing legs – to which she had replied with enthusiasm. Those who chose to believe in Pistorius’s guilt invariably chose also to regard Reeva in a saintly light, but this inconsistency did not appear to loom large in their thinking. The unsubstantiated gossip surrounding Reeva and Hougaard, which only made a wide public impact after her death, was sufficient to persuade those who chose to believe it, that Hougaard was the reason behind the supposed argument that had led to her fleeing into the bathroom, locking herself inside the toilet cubicle, and dying in a blaze of gunfire. It was pure hypothesis, rendered all the more implausible by Hougaard himself having stated publicly before the trial that there had been no such messages between him and Reeva.
When the WhatsApp evidence was revealed in court, however, the phone messages did not turn out to be the smoking gun the prosecution was looking for. Their chief impact was on Pistorius himself, who found the experience of listening to them being read out to a worldwide audience of millions excruciatingly embarrassing.
Had he been on the outside looking in, he might have seen something funny in the spectacle. The person reading out the messages from the witness stand was a large, bluff police captain called Francois Moller who had accessed 1,709 communications between the couple. Captain Moller solemnly recited the love burblings that they contained.
The single incriminating shadow in the entire collection appeared in that line where Reeva had said, ‘I’m scared of u sometimes and how u snap at me and of how u will react to me.’ But then Barry Roux asked the captain to read the line that immediately followed. The captain duly did: ‘You make me happy 90% of the time and I think we are amazing together.’
Roux maintained – and Nel did not contradict him – that close to 98 per cent of the messages the prosecution had unearthed contained not recriminations but endearments. To prove it, he asked Captain Moller to read out a representative, and lengthy, sample of messages Reeva had sent to his client. Moller duly deadpanned, ‘I love sleeping next to you and never want to cramp your style’, ‘you are an amazing person and you are more than cared for . . . blessings’, and – the final WhatsApp exchange between them on the afternoon before he shot her – ‘Baby can I cook for you on Thursday?’ ‘I’d love that,’ was the reply.
If Captain Moller felt some discomfort himself at being obliged to continue reciting a long and numbing litany of the ‘my boos’, ‘my babas’, ‘my angels’, ‘babycakes’, and variations on ‘I miss you’ and ‘I miss you 1 more’, contained in the lovers’ exchanges, he did not show it, remaining gamely professional all the way through. But even he might have wondered what use this could be for the prosecution. Shedding all this light on the cooing intimacies between the man the prosecution was seeking to convict of premeditated murder and the victim he had evidently been besotted with, seemed unlikely, on balance, to lend much weight to their case. And less so when it emerged that not only had she not received any Valentine’s messages from any previous lovers on the night she died, but that the last Twitter message she wrote, on the evening of February 13, read, ‘What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow?’
More worthy of the judge’s consideration in her duty to arrive at the most ‘reasonably possible’ interpretation of what happened on the night Steenkamp died was the evidence of the sounds heard by the neighbors, three of whom would be produced by the defense team after the end of the prosecution case, which lasted fifteen days.
These three witnesses had been interviewed by the police, but Nel had chosen not to call them. The five he had called were all white; the three whom the defense would call were all black. They were Pistorius’s next-door neighbors, living either side of his home.
The first was Michael Nhlengethwa, whose balcony was 11 meters (36 feet) from the bathroom where Reeva Steenkamp was shot. Nhlengethwa told Roux, who led his evidence, that he had been friendly with Pistorius, although they did not socialize, and had met Reeva, whom Pistorius had introduced to him as ‘my fiancée’. Nhlengethwa, who worked in the construction business, said he had been very taken with the couple.
‘Oscar is the type of person who if he sees me, he will stop, get out of his car and greet me.’ As for Reeva, the first time Nhlengethwa met her, he recalled, he had stretched out a hand in greeting. ‘But she just opened her arms, she came to hug me. I could see the person that she was.’ Nhlengethwa said he had advised Pistorius not to let her go; she should be ‘for keeps’.
Nhlengethwa testified that on the night of the incident he was woken by his wife, who had heard a loud noise. He worried at first that it might have come from inside his house and rushed to check on his daughter, whom he found to be asleep and safe. He realized the sound must have come from outside.
‘Then we started hearing a man crying very loud . . . Something was wrong. We started panicking,’ Nhlengethwa said. ‘There is a difference between normal crying and crying when you are in danger, when you need help. We felt probably he was in danger. It was very loud.’
Roux asked him to describe the pitch of the voice. He replied that it was ‘very high’. He said he could hear the man shouting, ‘Please, please, no!’
Nhlengethwa rang the estate security guards at 3.16, he said, and the c
rying went on during the call and after. Suddenly he realized that the sounds were coming from his neighbor’s house. ‘The question for me was, is Oscar okay?’ he said.
Gerrie Nel began his cross-examination of Nhlengethwa in a vein similar to the one Roux had pursued with Michelle Burger, suggesting his evidence had been contaminated by his reading of the news about the crime and, in particular, by following the trial on TV. Nhlengethwa did not deny he was taking a keen interest in the action in court. ‘Oscar is my neighbor,’ he said. ‘There’s no way I would turn a blind eye to the case.’
Nel, citing the evidence of the neighbors who had appeared for the prosecution, asked him if he had heard gunshots, or the sound of a cricket bat breaking down a door, or a woman’s screams. ‘I did not hear those things,’ Nhlengethwa said, adding that it surprised him that neighbors much further away had heard both shots and screams.
Nel asked him if he had talked to the accused since the incident. He replied that he had not. With that, and with surprising swiftness, Nel announced that he had no further questions.
The next witness Roux presented was Nhlengethwa’s wife, Eontle Nhlengethwa. She said she was awoken by ‘a bang . . . a very loud sound’. Then she heard somebody crying, ‘Help, help, help.’ It was a male person’s voice, she said. Roux asked her if she could make a sound that resembled the crying she had heard. Mrs Nhlengethwa obliged with a high-pitched wail and then immediately clarified, ‘But it was in the voice of a man.’
Nel took over and asked if she had heard a woman screaming. She insisted that she had not and, without much further ado, Nel said he had nothing more to ask.