One Tragic Night

by Mandy Wiener

  Towards the middle of 2012, Oscar left South Africa for four months to train in Italy and compete in the Olympic and Paralympic Games. He had been dating Taylor for a year and their relationship could not have been better.

  ‘Things were good and I think the first month he was over there things were really good with us. Obviously it’s like dating over Skype and it was quite tough but it was okay, it was working. And then … thereafter … after about a month, I think, I started realising he was acting a bit weird,’ said Taylor.

  Her mother Trish elaborated. ‘Before he went away, everything was fine. He came to stay with us. He used to come stay with us quite often. It was probably the best their relationship was, before he left, it was really, really going well.’

  But then, all of a sudden, everything changed. ‘Early on while he was still in Italy, long before he went to London, he phoned me out of the blue one day. Crying and crying and crying on the phone. And it took me a while to realise like, shit, Oscar’s crying, and then from that phone call onwards it was just ongoing phone calls, SMSes, emails,’ revealed Trish. ‘He was literally crying for help in so many ways.’

  In one of the emails Oscar sent from Italy to ‘Samantha and the Taylor family’ in July 2012, he poured out his heart and apologised for the pain he had caused. He explained that the email was difficult to write as he was confronting issues he had been denying to himself for years:

  Peoples first impression of most often one of 2 ways. It’s what they have heard through friends of friends or what they have read or seen in the media. Both having positive and negative connotations mostly due to my personal actions. In the past when someone [took] me for the positives I was all quick to allow myself to be content. When the negatives came up I put my guard up and tried to defend myself. In my career which was the one I have become accustomed to defending this came naturally. Although I often get sick of it it is something that I have realised that I’ll have to deal with. On a personal front when people have judged me negatively, I haven’t been able to be all so comfortable. Partly due to me not wanting to believe the truth at times, often because I didn’t feel I had to explain myself or my actions as I hadn’t had anyone to answer too from a young age and other times because I saw people’s perceptions of me made up already.

  On 17 July, just a few days after sending the email, Oscar sent an extended BBM message to Taylor, which featured these lines:

  … I have got many flaws. I’m far from perfect. I’m sorry for being a fuck up and for not making you feel appreciated like you deserve. That’s the last thing I would’ve wanted …

  Once he was in London, the situation deteriorated even further. Taylor switched on her phone one morning to see on Twitter that her boyfriend allegedly had a new girlfriend. UK tabloid reports had splashed that the Blade Runner was dating Russian model Anastassia Khozissova. The pair had reportedly met in New York and was spotted holding hands while out and about in Chelsea.

  ‘I saw oh, Oscar has a girlfriend and it wasn’t me. So that was when I ended it with him the first time. I didn’t really want to speak to him because I was angry, so we were emailing each other all the time and … that’s when I started dating Quinton,’ she said, referring to her highly publicised relationship with the TV producer and mining billionaire Quinton van der Burgh.

  ‘It was really tough because, obviously I loved Oscar and I wanted things to work but I knew at that time it just wasn’t going to work for me. So while he was over at the Olympics, he was obviously very upset and he invited me to go over to the Olympics and he wanted to organise me a visa and a flight and everything, but I just felt at that time I definitely wasn’t in the right place to give him a chance.

  ‘We were communicating over email but I was just so angry that I didn’t want to speak to him, so he was phoning my family all the time. He was phoning my sister, probably ten, twenty times a day. He was phoning my mother in the middle of the night and messaging my brothers. He was checking up on me, he was asking my friends where I was and who I’m with. It was really exhausting. We had broken up, but he wouldn’t acknowledge that we had broken up. I think on everyone’s behalf it was very exhausting,’ said Taylor.

  It was around this time, during the Paralympics, that teammate Arnu Fourie moved out of the room they shared. Fourie told broadcaster David O’Sullivan that this was because Oscar was constantly screaming on his phone. Fourie later denied this, but Taylor confirmed that it was indeed her on the other end of Oscar’s telephone tirades.

  Just two days after Oscar’s blowout over the length of Brazilian sprinter Alan Oliveira’s blades at the Paralympics, he sent several more BBMs to Taylor. In the exchange, Oscar appeared to raise his concerns about Taylor seeing Van der Burgh and admitted to cheating on Taylor with Jenna Edkins during their relationship:

  5 September: I know it is unacceptable. I’m sorry I didn’t know what to say when you called and went off at me. I was called Jen last night and spoke for a long time with her. I told her that I had been seeing you since September .. I told her that in the beginning I enjoyed spending time with you and after a couple of months I started falling for you. I know that at times I played with your emotions because I was too scared to let go of Jenna. I’ll be honest with you because you deserve that. The last time I did anything with her was in January. We drifted apart and on her birthday I toke her for dinner, we had had a rough time and I know it wasn’t right but I was a coward and lonely and went running back to her. I tried to make things work …

  The last messages between Oscar and Taylor were sent on the same day that the athlete and his 4 x 100 metres relay teammates, including Arnu Fourie, celebrated winning gold and breaking the world record.

  Trish also allegedly bore the brunt of the emotional outpouring over this time, fielding phone calls from Oscar at all hours. ‘He was so emotionally unstable. By this stage I also knew that he had an angry streak in him, I’d seen and heard about things that had gone wrong. He cried continuously. I was worried … I was worried … I thought he was going to commit suicide when he was away, and so often on the phone I’d keep him in the phone until he stopped crying, or … he calmed down and we’d often end up laughing or joking … or I’d say to him, “Your race tomorrow is going to be okay, it’s going to be fine,” and then when I felt he was okay, then the conversations would end.’

  For Trish, it was difficult to reconcile the Oscar who was the face of the Olympics and riding the wave of international celebrity with the man on the other end of the phone.

  ‘I couldn’t speak to anyone about it. If it got into the media, we were just going to be trashed and my daughter would just be so badly trashed by the media. We were trapped in his secret. We were actually trapped. It was terrible – this started before the Olympics and carried on all the way through the Olympics and all the way through the Paralympics. It carried on for months. You know what it’s like, everyone loved Oscar, so we had to keep everything a secret.

  ‘I kept saying, “Oz, you have to see a psychologist, you have to.” He used to promise all the time, “No, I know I need help, I promise you, Trish, I promise you I will go to a psychologist.” He never did. In every conversation, he’d promise me he’d see a psychologist. He did book one in London, but he never went to the appointment.’

  When Oscar returned from the Olympics, he and Samantha got back together again, despite his behaviour while he had been away. ‘Towards the end of his London season, we were contacting each other again and we were just trying to work through issues more than anything, so we were going back and forth speaking to each other about everything, and the both of us decided, if we’re going to make this work, it’s got to work from both sides, so both of us have to put the work into the relationship, and that’s when I decided, you know what, I’m not going to be half-hearted about a relationship, and I had ended things with Quinton,’ explains Taylor.

  It was a few weeks later that the couple went to the Seychelles to be featured on Top Billing.
Despite presenting a picture of happiness, Taylor and her mother were still terribly concerned. Trish said the phone calls continued and Oscar’s behaviour became increasingly volatile. She thought Oscar was going to combust.

  ‘What would happen is he would cry, cry, cry for like a week and then out of the blue, when things went well, he would go on an absolute high and then suddenly he’d be with women, drinking, fast cars, and then a few days later he would go on with this crying – it was too extreme. His emotions were too extreme,’ said Trish, completely identifying with the defence concept of the ‘Two Oscars’.

  Towards the end of October, the relationship between Taylor and Oscar was on the skids. It was around this time that the now infamous confrontation between Oscar and Van der Burgh took place. As Taylor explained, it was on the morning before the couple went to Sun City for a weekend during which the relationship really fell apart.

  ‘The altercation had happened that day that we had left for Sun City. I was actually, I was at his house, I was packing for the both of us to leave for Sun City for the weekend, and he told me he would be home by about three o’clock. I think it was about four o’clock and we had to be in Sun City by six o’clock. So by four o’clock I had phoned him and his phone was off and then I got a phone call from a friend of mine who was at the race track, and he said to me, “Do you know what happened with Quinton and Oscar?”

  ‘I sent Oscar a message and I said to him, “Why are you causing shit in our relationship. Why … why did you feel the need to confront Quinton?” He went crazy, you know, he told me, “I’m your boyfriend, you should have been sticking up for me but you turn around and you’re sticking up for Quinton.” It definitely caused another issue and that’s why Sun City was just a rough ride for the both of us because all those past issues came up again.’

  Although Oscar later testified in court they broke up that weekend, Taylor believed they formally remained a couple. ‘I think we both just had a very rough weekend and he flew back with me to Cape Town because he had a meeting in Cape Town and I came to see my family in the winelands. I think we were emailing back and forth up until that night of the Sports Awards, so I think in our minds we both kind of knew the relationship was over, but there was no … there was no confirmation because our emails were so back and forth.’

  But Taylor knew it was over once and for all when she switched on the TV and saw Oscar and Reeva on the red carpet at the awards. ‘I was so heartbroken. I mean, obviously in my mind, we were fighting and I think we both knew the relationship was coming to an end again, but I never knew he would go to that extreme to spite me and take another girl to the awards, so I think at that moment I knew I never wanted to see him again.’

  It was then that she also claimed to have received a phone call from Darren Fresco, ‘threatening’ her and warning her to stay out of Oscar’s space.

  This infuriated and terrified Taylor’s mother. ‘I said to him, “Something is going to go wrong before the end of this year.” And that was already, I think it was already October or November,’ recalls Trish.

  ‘I said, “Something is going to go wrong and it’s going to go wrong soon.” In my mind I thought he’s either going to commit suicide or he’s going to have a car accident, because he was speeding everywhere. And I said to him, “It’s going to go wrong soon and I can’t see a way out for you because you are sitting in the middle of your own web of lies, and everything around you is collapsing.”’

  Trish’s forecast, of course, proved to be prophetic. Something terrible did go wrong. And when she heard the news on Valentine’s Day, she said it broke her heart.

  ‘I thought he had committed suicide. Then when we found out that he had shot someone, I was just … I was so sad. I just thought, why did no one … why didn’t his family stop this? Why did no one – I couldn’t have been the only person that knew that things were so bad. His family must have known. His coach must have known. His manager must have known. Why was no one getting him help? People must have known.’

  Reasonably, Possibly True

  ‘Your version is so improbable that nobody would ever think it is reasonably possibly true.’

  This became the state’s dictum when attacking Oscar’s version of events, and was repeated by prosecutor Gerrie Nel when he questioned elements of the timeline of events on the morning of Valentine’s Day. Nel cross-examined Oscar for nearly five days and jumped around to the various themes and topics raised in Oscar’s evidence-in-chief; it was never chronological or tackled in the manner it was presented by the accused.

  In one session Nel would question Oscar on the moments in the bathroom just before the shooting, and then jump to the scene at Tashas; on another occasion he would quiz Oscar on the dinner he said he had with Reeva the night before the shooting, and then switch to dealing with crime in the area. The technique was designed to throw the witness off, to test his memory.

  Nel was clear about what he thought of Oscar’s version of events. ‘I am saying that your version of events is in fact untrue. Mr Pistorius, I say that you have a concocted version, which you have tailored to fit the state’s case and you are tailoring your version as you are sitting there.’

  Amongst the difficulties Nel had with Oscar’s version was how he was able to recall fine detail about everything he did leading up to the shooting – what he saw and heard, how quickly or slowly he was moving, where his hands were placed – yet when it came to that critical moment in the bathroom when he pulled the trigger, his memory wasn’t nearly as reliable.

  Nel argued that to believe Oscar, one would have to accept that Reeva got out of bed without saying a word to the accused; that she slipped down the passage without him seeing her; that she took her phone with her; and that she never once screamed when he shouted at intruders.

  The prosecutor seemed puzzled that the couple who had allegedly just spoken to each other about their sleep troubles did not communicate further. In answering Nel’s persistent questions, Oscar asserted that Reeva never asked where he was going when he got out of bed, or why he was getting out of bed, and he never told her he was going to collect the fans. Perhaps most importantly, he says Reeva did not say she was going to the toilet.

  Nel: Would you have expected that kind of conversation between the two of you? Why would she not, why would she not ask you where you were going?

  Accused: I do not know, M’Lady.

  Nel: It is because your version is improbable. One would expect her to say, ask where you are going. Would you not expect her saying that?

  Accused: I do not think so, M’Lady.

  Nel: Why? Would you expect her not to say a thing when you get up in the middle of the night, if she is awake?

  Accused: I do not know what I would expect, M’Lady. I do not know …

  Nel did not believe Oscar’s explanation that fetching his firearm and confronting the threat was the only option available to him. Nel suggested that Oscar could have called Reeva and then fled the bedroom, or even hidden from the intruder.

  Nel: You both could have been on her side of the bed, with your view on the passage.

  Accused: My Lady, I did not want harm to come to Reeva. So I wanted to put myself, as I said, between the harm and Reeva. If I had stuck next to Reeva, it would have put her in harm My Lady. So I did not think of … I told her to get down and call the police. I could have done a host of things. But at that time, that was the decision that I made.

  Nel: You see, I am … Mister, you know that it is my view that your version is not correct and it is improbable that you would act in that way …

  Nel explored what had often been the topic of public debate – why would Oscar believe that an intruder who had just broken in to his house would hide inside his toilet?

  Nel: If there is an intruder, do you think he would go into the toilet and close the door?

  Accused: I am not sure what an intruder would do, My Lady, if he was caught off guard. I do not know … I cannot be expected to answer tha
t question.

  Nel: Standing, now you are standing there, you, Mr Oscar Pistorius standing there, thinking: he came through that window, he went into that toilet. That is what you thought.

  Accused: That is correct. It was a possibility, My Lady.

  Nel: No, it cannot, it is so far-fetched that it would happen, Mr Pistorius. It is improbable that you would even think that an intruder would run into my toilet and lock the door and close the door.

  Nel did not believe for one minute that Reeva had remained silent throughout the time the accused said he was calling out to her to warn her about the intruder and to call the police. Oscar recalled standing at the entrance to the bathroom shortly after peering inside to check whether he could see anyone. With his firearm out in front of him, he said he again screamed for Reeva to call the police and kept on shouting.

  Nel: Just a moment. Of your whole version, Mr Pistorius, this is the most improbable. Reeva at that stage is three metres away from you in a toilet.

  Accused: I did not know that, My Lady. I thought that she was in the bedroom.

  Nel: No, no. In fact, I am talking about the fact. At that stage when you shouted and screamed at Reeva to phone the police, she is three metres away from you in a toilet.

  Accused: That is correct, My Lady.

  Nel: And she never uttered a word.

  Accused: That is correct, My Lady.

  Nel: It is not probable. She would be scared. She would shout out and talk to you. You are in the same room.

  Accused: My Lady, I agree with Mr Nel. She would have been terrified, My Lady, but I do not think that would have [led] her to scream out. I think that she would have kept quiet for that reason … I was shouting and I was approaching the toilet and she was in the, I was approaching the bathroom and she was in the toilet. Then I presume that she would think that the danger is coming closer to her. So why will she shout out?