Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen

by Melinda Ferguson

  Looking at the way he approached his relationships with women it was almost as though he had read some cheesy “how to date a girl” book and followed instructions step by step, or watched those American pseudo-romantic, date-night movies, and tried to emulate them: flowers, Valentine’s messages, great professions of love.

  But there was something very disconnected in it all, almost as though he was imitating someone in love, rather than actually feeling or experiencing it himself: and as soon as his lover made any demands or showed signs of disinterest or disenchantment, he either backed away and disappeared or got hyper-obsessive.

  After countless break-ups and make-ups, the two-year relationship with Vicky finally ended in December 2007, after what he describes as a bad fight on New Year’s Eve. Things had been building up over that year while Vicky had been studying at UCT and was not as available to Oscar as she had been previously. She had been growing up, making new friends and hanging out with people Oscar didn’t approve of.

  Knowing what I know now about Oscar, it was probably a case of Oscar not being able to control Vicky in the way he would have liked that caused the relationship to end. He said they had not had any contact since their big fight. Who knows what actually happened. In my opinion, Vicky was definitely one of the lucky ones who got away relatively unscathed.

  Although Oscar has repeatedly said how heartbroken and devastated he was by the ending of this relationship, it would seem that less than four weeks passed before he started seeing his next blonde, straight-haired girlfriend, Jenna Edkins, in early 2008.

  I am always amazed by the way Oscar dealt with pain. It seemed like he believed that by blotting hurt out and ricocheting into a new relationship, he would somehow escape the heartbreak. Then he would never have to address or own up to the difficult and hurtful issues that needed to be dealt with. It was a pattern of denial that I believe Oscar was constantly trapped in.

  So straight after Vicky, Oscar began dating pretty, blonde, straight-haired Jenna. Like Sam, she was 18 when they began seeing each other. In his book, Oscar described her as “delightful” and “sweet natured”. Of course she was postcard perfect. Just like all the others. It really was fascinating how strongly attracted Oscar was to a type.

  It seems from what Oscar later told us in a letter, Jenna had first appeared in his life when his mom was still alive, although they only actually met in 2008, after his mom had been dead for a few years. Jenna’s mom and his mom Sheila were friends and on the weekends when Oscar and his siblings went to stay with their dad, Henke, the two women would take Jenna along with them to church. Knowing that Jenna had spent time with his beloved mother seemed to create some bond between the two of them that he said he found hard to ignore, even during the times when they were not seeing each other. He admitted to us later that this might have in fact kept them together “long after it should have ended”.

  With Jenna, as with all his relationships, at the beginning, their romance was blissful. Then Oscar went off to compete at the Paralympic Games in Beijing and came back on a total high, having broken a world record in the 400 metres and won three highly coveted gold medals. He was the star of the Games. He later told us that this was when he started having problems with the relationship as he was struggling to come to terms with his new success and almost overnight fame. “Some of it went to my head,” he said in a letter to us. He complained of Jenna not understanding what he was going through. “I often found myself having to explain situations I was in – many highs and under a lot of pressure, many lows.” Who knows whether anyone would have been able to keep up with Oscar’s ever-changing demands.

  With so much travelling, training and taking part in competitions overseas – in the past few years he would often spend as much as eight months out of the country – the relationship came under all the usual long-distance pressures. In Blade Runner he describes how, along the way he met someone else but soon realised she was not “the one”. Jenna and Oscar then got back together later that year. But soon problems re-emerged. Oscar met another woman, possibly Melissa Rom, with whom he started a relationship.

  His pattern of moving from one girl to another and overlapping in between was becoming a permanent part of his behaviour. And whenever things didn’t seem to work out with the new relationship he would revert back to Jenna. This went on for over three years until, he claimed, he started getting serious about Sam, in mid-2011. Jenna began trying to live her own life and they broke up. To this day I am unsure what that actually meant and whether he was even telling us the truth. Possibly she was just exhausted by the on-and-off nature of the relationship. Or maybe she was so in love with Oscar that she was prepared to put up with anything. The one thing that was clear was that throughout all his “difficult” times, Jenna appeared to be the one who didn’t disappear, who was a presence in his life right through good and bad times. He definitely continued seeing her, on and off, during his relationship with Sammy. He later admitted as much. After Sam and Oscar broke up and he began seeing Reeva, there were pictures of Jenna and Oscar together on social media in December 2012 in Cape Town, that were later deleted, after Oscar and Reeva were already a couple.

  After the death of Reeva, Jenna came out in strong support of Oscar and the Pistorius family on Twitter, offering them “love and support”. She tweeted: “I have dated Oscar on and off for 5 YEARS, NOT ONCE has he EVER lifted a finger to me or made me fear for my life.”

  It appears that Jenna has continued to remain fiercely loyal to Oscar.

  It breaks my heart when I think of all these beautiful young women who were enthralled by Oscar’s world, and the chaos and the danger that my daughter and some of the others had to endure. Sam was so young and trusting when she met him. There was a time that she loved him so much she would have done anything for him. She was prepared to give him so much love and support, right through to the end of their relationship.

  If Oscar was looking for the perfect, loyal and giving partner, in so many ways Sammy ticked all of the boxes. Unlike his first girlfriend Vicky, who according to Oscar challenged him and pursued her own path despite his protests, Sammy met Oscar at a time when she did not as yet have a clear agenda about her future and was happy to watch him training, and to go to the gym with him, and travel on the underground public train system, the Gautrain, to visit him. Sammy was that dream girlfriend – beautiful, loving, supportive.

  For the most part she was able to slot into Oscar’s needs perfectly; she was quiet, undemanding, demure and gentle, obedient when he needed her to be, always there for him, helping him take his prosthetics on and off, a girlfriend who never pressed the Oscar Danger Button.

  But as time went on, like Vicky, Sammy grew up and developed more of a sense of herself. Being both bright and stubborn, she began to develop her own agenda, her own life. Once she began to put all the pieces together of what she experienced to be the recurrent incidents of duplicity and disrespect, she began to withdraw, put up boundaries, and grow increasingly intolerant of Oscar.

  When she started to pull away, get a job, a life and new friendships, it seemed like Oscar became more and more threatened, critical and controlling of Sam. When she eventually tried to end the relationship, Oscar grew obsessive, desperate and emotional. It felt as if we were all drawn into his world and manipulated to act solely on his behalf.

  Like the responses to Vicky that he describes in Blade Runner, when she formed friendships at university, outside of her relationship with him, Oscar felt hugely compromised; when Sam began to get work that threatened to take her away from him, make her more independent and shift her focus off his needs, he freaked out. While he was travelling he would often insist that Sammy Skyped him in her pyjamas, to show him she wasn’t planning to go out anywhere.

  It worried me a lot but it was hard to criticise Oscar to Sammy, especially in the early days as she was a young girl, a teenager who was deeply in love. She was also someone who always saw the good in people, so it was very painfu
l for her to come to terms with the real, darker truth about Oscar. She loved Oscar unreservedly and found it almost impossible to completely shut the door on him, constantly forgiving him and continuing to be taken in by his promises to change, and being wounded by his subsequent failures to do so.

  The one thing though, over time, that became too obvious to ignore, was evidence that Oscar was two-timing her with other women.

  There was an occasion when I happened to spend some time with Jenna’s aunt, who I had been at school with, and somehow Oscar’s name came up. Jenna’s aunt seemed surprised, almost shocked, when I mentioned that Sam was dating Oscar. I said, yes, they are actually at our house right now. She looked confused and then said perhaps Jenna hadn’t told her that they had broken up. My suspicions were suddenly on high alert. Later that day when I got home Oscar was there and I made a point of “casually” telling him that I had run into an old school acquaintance. I kept saying the surname Edkins… repeating it a number of times. I even sat next to him on the couch and showed him pictures. Oscar didn’t blink an eye, he didn’t show a single sign of recognition or discomfort.

  From then on I had very strong suspicions around his infidelity.

  I think one of the possible signs of evidence of cheating in a relationship is when someone misses appointments or dates or is late without any good reason. I can’t count the number of times he was supposed to pick Sam up for dinner or go out somewhere when he didn’t pitch up, without as much as a phone call or an apology. I hated seeing her like that, all dressed up and waiting and waiting for hours, then deflated and deeply disappointed as time ticked by. That really infuriated me. My daughter deserved so much more.

  After a while, with all the broken promises, the hours spent waiting, you stop trusting the person, and more than that, you stop believing in normal things, you start doubting yourself, you lose both your faith in others and your self-esteem.

  Over time all your trust in others is eaten away…

  I have often wondered what caused Oscar to be like this: incapable of being transparent and unable to commit to people who loved and cared about him. Perhaps the early and shocking loss of his mom shook him so badly that he was too terrified to connect and bond with someone in case they let him down, or went away or, even worse, died… Maybe his trust in life and love was broken so badly that it became impossible for him to form healthy and lasting bonds with women. Maybe as soon as he felt safe and in love, he had to find a backup or a replacement in case the one he loved disappeared or let him down.

  He could not seem to commit to anything besides his running and racing because that was the one thing that he had completely in his control.

  Looking back I am always amazed with what ease he could look us all in the eye and claim undying love for Sammy, while doing the same with at least one other woman at the same time. This, of course, made me wonder whether many of the things he had told us were true.

  Samantha Taylor and Oscar Pistorius, Seychelles, September 2012.

  Samantha Taylor Seychelles, September 2012.

  Somerset West, sunset.

  Samantha and Oscar, Seychelles, September 2012.

  Oscar on cheetah shoot with Daily Mail, Pretoria, 2012.

  Samantha with cheetah, Farm Inn Wildlife Sanctuary, Pretoria, 2012.

  Henry Taylor and Oscar, Dainfern Valley, November 2011.

  Samantha, Oscar and Greg, beach in Strand, 2012.

  Samantha and Oscar, Samantha’s 18th birthday, Dainfern Valley, November 2011.

  Samantha and Oscar share the love cup, Warwick Wine Estate, March 2012.

  Words of Wisdom, Trish Taylor.

  Oscar and Samantha, Johannesburg, 2012.

  Samantha, Henry and Kerri-Lee, Somerset West, 2012.

  Trish, Samantha and Kerri-Lee, Camps Bay, 2014.

  Samantha on the beach, Western Cape, 2012.

  Samantha and Kerri-Lee, Samantha’s 18th birthday party, Dainfern Valley, 2011.

  Samantha, beach yoga, Somerset West, 2012.

  CHAPTER 8

  Trigger Happy

  Guns, Fast Cars and Speedboats

  * * *

  When Sammy told me how Oscar had fired his gun out of the sunroof of a moving vehicle, a car in which she was a passenger, I can’t even begin to describe how angry I was with him. It was sometime in October 2012, just after he came back to South Africa from the Olympics. His friend Darren Fresco was in the car with them. They were on their way back from the Vaal River, an out-of-town resort area near Johannesburg, having been out with “the boys”, in high-end luxury cars lent to them by Justin Divaris, the chief executive of the Daytona group. After a day of racing around and testosterone-injected fun in the sun, returning home, the cops had pulled them over for exceeding the speed limit. Speeds in excess of 200 kilometres were recorded on Fresco’s phone. After they drove off, Oscar laughingly fired his 9mm gun up into the air through the open sunroof, the same weapon he allegedly used later to kill Reeva Steenkamp. In court Fresco gave evidence that after Oscar fired the shot he immediately said, “Are you fucking mad?” Perhaps for Oscar, seeing himself over the previous year, plastered all over billboards, in magazines, on television as Nike’s “I am the Bullet in the Chamber”, had got to him. It may have made him think he was invincible, untouchable.

  My mind went into overdrive when I thought of what might have happened as a result of his actions. It’s a myth that “shooting upward” is in any way safe. I became quite obsessed reading about similar incidents around the world. I found out that in almost all the states in the US it is illegal to do this as there is a high possibility that a bullet fired up will maintain its spin and retain enough energy to be lethal on impact coming back down. I found it interesting that between 1985 and 1992, a US study found that 118 people were treated for random “falling-bullet injuries” at one single Los Angeles medical centre, resulting in 38 deaths. And those are statistics from just one place.

  On the day Oscar is alleged to have recklessly fired the gun, anything could have happened; a stray bullet, as with a number of gun accidents, could have landed back in the car, injuring or, God forbid, killing any one of them or, for that matter, killing or injuring any other innocent person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  It was for this incident, as well as an additional shooting incident, that two new charges were added to the premeditated murder charge sheet for Oscar’s trial that began in early March 2014. The state alleged that Oscar contravened the Firearms Act twice by firing off a gun recklessly in public, once through his car’s sunroof and earlier in January 2013 at Tasha’s, a busy restaurant in the palazzo area of upmarket shopping estate, Melrose Arch, where over 200 people were enjoying lunch at the time.

  Apparently, according to boxer Kevin Lerena, a friend of Oscar, the loaded weapon was allegedly passed under the table to Oscar by his friend Darren Fresco, during which time a shot was fired. It missed Lerena’s foot by just centimetres. He was lucky; it could easily have severely injured him, never mind any of the others at the table, let alone the other customers seated nearby. When Oscar’s group was questioned by the manager as to what the huge noise was, the owner of the gun, Darren Fresco, took the fall. The police were never called. Once again Oscar refrained from taking responsibility just as he had failed to do when he hid behind the counter after driving recklessly in the streets around our home in Dainfern in the Nissan GTR, back in 2011.

  Although our whole family had been uncomfortable with guns before Oscar came into our lives in 2011, over time we began to have more conversations at home around his guns, and slowly we became less and less shocked by them, which is strange for a family who was strongly against violence and guns.

  It’s strange to think, after Oscar entered our world, how calm I became with all the gun talk and the growing number of incidents in which Sammy was exposed to them.

  After all, I had only ever shot a gun once, when my husband convinced me to go to a shooting range. At the r
ange, I hated holding it and I hated shooting it; I vowed never to touch one again. At the time my husband had been trying to convince me that we needed to own two guns. I finally relented but I was very uncomfortable having guns in the home, despite them being locked up in the safe.

  So when there was a government announcement that gun owners had five years, from January 2005, to re-license or surrender their guns, I was very happy to be part of the initiative to surrender them. I convinced Henry and we handed our guns in and became enthusiastic supporters of a gun-free South Africa. By the end of 2009, police said, 180 000 guns had been surrendered. I was delighted to know that ours, along with thousands of others, would be destroyed.

  From what I gathered, in Oscar’s world, guns were often around – in the car, on his person, under or next to his bed.

  One of the things about being in Oscar’s circle is that in some way we all became complicit in his misdemeanours. Because he was so paranoid about getting bad press and having the media find out certain uncomfortable truths about his life, we all ended up keeping secrets for him. Once he asked Sammy to carry his gun in her bag and forgot about it. When they got to the airport she almost walked through airport security with it in her bag. Before boarding he had to run back and put the weapon in the car.