Reeva: A Mother's Story (19 page)

By this stage Jennifer and I had got into a routine. We shared a suite at the guest house, waking up early every morning to have coffee on the balcony and let Jennifer have a smoke. The guest house was located in a beautiful area with jacaranda-lined streets and lush gardens where birdsong and the sound of barking dogs fills the air. Sometimes I’d wake to find a white feather on the balcony. ‘Reeva’s here,’ I’d call to Jennifer. It always cheered me to receive a little sign from her in heaven.

It was killing Barry to stay at home. He was watching every minute on TV but I was comforted to think that he could get up and walk out of the room when it all became too much for him. Simone decided not to come again after the first day. I wouldn’t let her. She’s not strong enough for this sort of ordeal. Dup came as often as he could with his wife Truia. They’re very warm and loving people. Kim came when she could too, with her husband Dion, but she has a growing family, one daughter doing matriculation and stuff, but I appreciated her support so much. She and Reeva were very close. She told me she just looked at her one day and realised there was something special about her, like she was an angel – she was so sensitive to other people’s needs. Jacqui Mofokeng and the four ladies from the Women’s League maintained a permanent vigil with me too.

I was warned that the next tranche of evidence would come with a reconstruction in the courtroom of the bathroom where Reeva was shot. Colonel Vermeulen, a forensic investigator who examined the scene, was due to answer questions on his findings. The bathroom was a huge construction, almost blocking our view of the witness stand, but it was heartbreaking to see the size of the toilet cubicle. She had no space that night, nowhere to go. How he could say the person inside the toilet was the aggressor, opening the door to come and get him, I don’t know. Whoever was in that space was at a disadvantage, as good as cornered. It was the actual door and right there in front of me were the four bullet holes labelled A B C and D. Oh, it was horrendous to see that and I slightly lost track of what was being debated about whether Oscar was wearing his prosthetic legs, or not, when he broke down the toilet door.

The week continued to be hard to endure. Day 9 ushered in the testimony of the first police officer to arrive at Oscar’s house and he described in detail the crime scene. I was extremely disturbed by the graphic nature of some of the court images of the crime scene – guns, bullet casings, pools of blood and phones strewn on the floor. Of course I was. I felt utterly sick. This was my daughter’s blood, her life-sapping injuries. Sitting through this part of the testimony was the hardest part. It sapped my strength. I couldn’t look. I would have to be sub-human to look at my child’s injuries. It was horrendous because it brought back the agony of knowing what a horrible, painful death she suffered. And then there was Oscar, sobbing uncontrollably and throwing up in his green plastic bucket. Jacqui Mofokeng complained to Gerrie Nel and insisted that I must have some warning before these images were projected on the screen. He agreed to turn his head and give me a signal so that I could leave the court or take off my glasses or lower my eyes. I understood people must see the injuries and horrific bloodshed he caused, but if it’s your daughter, you don’t want to see it. Colonel Vermeulen was grilled by Barry Roux, who was intent on questioning police procedures in the handling of evidence.

Gerrie Nel was concerned about me during this stage of the trial and I duly developed a tactic of lowering my eyes on his signal. Unfortunately, I did actually see one gruesome image by mistake – Oscar standing on his prosthetic legs, with no top on, drenched in Reeva’s blood. It was spooky, macabre. He was standing there looking like a mad person. That image will never go away. That was when he lifted her down the stairs. Why did he do that? Why did he move her when she was so grievously injured?

It was a gruelling week, totally wearing. Each day I’d emerge from court and it felt as if I’d been running on a treadmill for four days. Every three days or so it would catch up with me. I’d be drained. It was the concentration and the struggle to remain composed in the emotional spotlight that took so much out of me. I would get quite nervous about how I would cope each day. The eleventh day – when police photographer Bennie van Staden was due to show more graphic images of blood stains and firearms trainer Sean Rens testified that Oscar had a thorough knowledge of laws detailing when someone can draw a gun on an intruder – started very stressfully. We had to park quite a way from the court and walk in past all the media tents with whirring generators and cables and wires lying across the pavement. Whenever the photographers saw me, they’d go mad and on this particular morning I was so distracted, lost in my thoughts, that I tripped over some wires and fell flat on the ground. And then Jennifer fell on top of me. We laughed about it later, but can you imagine the indignity? The TV people came out and apologised profusely. They were very nice and assured us they hadn’t taken any photographs or filmed the fall. I’d grazed my hands and knees on the cement and I was quite badly shaken. A toilet roll was produced to help me clean up and then of course we had to walk across the road as cool as cucumbers to approach the main entrance and the full throng of reporters. Luckily, none of them had seen our fall. By the time I took up my place on the bench in court, I was finished. And then Oscar walked past and, on this day of all days, he stopped and said, ‘Good morning, Mrs Steenkamp’. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t say a word. I was even more in shock. I wasn’t ready to be on jolly terms with him. My way of coping was to cut myself off from him.

The firearms trainer’s evidence shocked me. Oscar had four guns, he said, and at least a further six on order, including a machine gun type of weapon. What do you need a cache of guns like that for? He wasn’t a dealer. That is somebody who is obsessed with guns. Then I saw pictures of him, sitting in front of a carcass of an elephant, with his uncle and grandfather holding guns. So that’s how he’s been brought up, killing animals. It made me even more dismayed that Reeva was with him because when Warren, her ex, began to organise shooting trips for tourists, she was horrified.

I managed to return to court the next day. During one short adjournment, Jennifer went out for a smoke and Oscar’s uncle, Arnold Pistorius – in whose house he stays while on bail – came over and spoke to me. He said something about being sorry for my loss and then said, indicating his own family, ‘We’re just fighting for a life here,’ meaning Oscar’s life. And that seemed so tactless. I mean, what about Reeva’s life? It’s gone already. I was so shocked I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t give him any warmth or anything.

A room was made available to us upstairs next to Gerrie Nel’s chamber where we could go for tea and coffee during the short adjournments. We learnt to take a packed lunch to eat there, too, during the break because it proved impossible to go out for a bite and escape the court environment. We tried early on to pop out for lunch, but Jennifer and I got smacked in the face with a camera. It was a frenzy out there, you know, and they’d go mad when they spotted Oscar and his family, or us, coming in or out of court. So every day we had to remember to take in our picnic of crackers, made up by the guest-house kitchen. The trial did not allow for comfort eating. You’re not very active when you’re sitting all day in court. Jennifer and I had to go on a diet – or else it would have to be five times around the shopping mall for exercise!

One day Jennifer and I found all these little white feathers under the open window in our room next to Gerrie’s. A white dove came and sat on the windowsill. It was breathtaking. I felt it had flown there just for us; it was a sign from Reeva and I took a photograph of it to keep. I couldn’t tell everyone because they’d think I was going mad – in fact I did tell Jacqui Mofokeng and she was quite shocked. When we left court that day, the dove was still sitting there peacefully. Quite often, though, our room was locked and we ended up in Gerrie’s room with his team and the investigating officers. They would offer us tea and coffee. By this stage Gerrie had become a media star. At the beginning it was Barry Roux who had all the attention, women asking for his autograph and so on, but now everyone was in love with Gerrie, even though he didn’t court the limelight. Every time we saw him in his office he was busy at his desk, preparing papers and tactics for the next session in court.

On 19 March, Day 13 of the trial, I arrived as usual just before 9 a.m. and sat in between Jennifer and one of the lovely ANC Women’s League ladies. Shortly before the proceedings got under way, the ANCWL lady passed me a handwritten note from Aimee Pistorius, Oscar’s sister. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen her standing with her brother, writing something down shortly after they arrived, but I didn’t imagine it was for me. It was so amusing because, of course, all the journalists sitting behind me picked up on it. Everyone wanted to know what the letter said. I refused to disclose its contents and it became this big mystery.
The letter. The letter.
I’d hear the whispers of the press people speculating on it. The saga went on for days afterwards. What Aimee actually wrote was that she had wanted to say hello to me early in the morning but that the court was already busy and she couldn’t come and talk to me privately. She wanted to know if we needed anything and she included her phone number. She said the offer came from her heart. It seemed a sweet gesture, but it would not have been proper to accept their family’s show of concern. I asked my niece Kim to call Aimee and explain I couldn’t enter into conversation with her because it could be interpreted by others as a tactic from the Pistorius side. It was nothing personal. A law trial is an adversarial exercise susceptible to tactical game-playing. She didn’t approach me again.

Judge Masipa adjourned the case until the following Monday, 24 March, in the middle of testimony about Reeva’s position when she was shot. I flew home to Port Elizabeth with the very image Reeva painted on her teenage canvas whirling in my head: of herself in a defensive position with her hands over her head. According to ballistics expert, Captain Christian Mangena, this was her stance when hit by the third and fourth bullets.

This unexpected adjournment prolonged the awfulness – and it was the first of what would turn out to be six adjournments during the trial, not including the break between Closing Arguments and Delivery of Verdict, and the further four weeks until sentencing. Logistically this was also a nightmare for Jacqui Mofokeng, who insisted on sorting the flight, accommodation and car details for me each time I had to travel between Port Elizabeth and Pretoria. Those ANCWL ladies were amazing. I genuinely appreciated their warm-hearted support and presence in court. There was one lady so old her hair was almost totally grey and she’d sit there sometimes and nod off to sleep. I was thinking, ‘Ooh, that’s not right in court’, but then I pictured her life as a granny, as the head of a family, and realised she’d probably walked a long way each morning just to be in court. She would have got up very early to feed her extended family and pack their lunches; after she’d walked home she’d have to cook supper, do the washing by hand, clean, look after her children and grandchildren. She had a hard life. Of course she was exhausted, but still she came to support me, a fellow woman, and add her presence to the numbers opposing gun violence in South Africa.

Jacqui introduced me to quite a sisterhood of bereaved mothers whom she supports, particularly Busi Khumalo, the mother of Zanele Khumalo, a pregnant teenager who was raped and murdered by her boyfriend, and Sharon Saincic, the mother of Chanelle Henning, a nursery school teacher who was executed in front of her young son by two hitmen while she was in the middle of a custody battle with her ex-husband. Both understand the agony of losing a daughter in violent circumstances, how you carry a crushing ache deep in your chest that never lifts. I appreciated how both came to sit in court to support me during the case. We all felt for each other in a way only we could understand. One day, Jacqui wanted me to console Busi Khumalo, who was somewhere else in the High Court building. She led me to meet her in a private chamber, but news of this was leaked. Cameras followed us, burst into the room and took photographs. Jennifer had to run from court to court, looking for the reporters who had snatched photographs. She found the lady from
Pretoria News
who was very nice but said she’d already put it out on Twitter. I understood the media’s job was to add resonance to the story, but that kind of frenzy and drama was emotionally exhausting.

For me, the most heart-wrenching day was when Captain Francois Moller, the police mobile phone expert, read out text messages between Reeva and Oscar. It was like Reeva had walked into the court. I could hear her voice and her emotional dismay so clearly in the message she sent to Oscar on 19 January 2013:
I am scared of you sometimes and how u snap at me and of how you will react to me.
It was like she was there giving evidence herself. I felt her presence so strongly. Another from Oscar to Reeva was about the shooting at Tasha’s restaurant – a charge he had denied – and revealed his overriding concern for his image:
Angel please don’t say a thing to anyone. Darren told everyone it was his fault. I can’t afford for that to come out. The guys promised not to say a thing.

The next day, the seesaw tipped the other way again. Barry Roux argued that only several of the hundreds of messages showed evidence of arguing. I wanted to stand up and say, but it is not the number of messages that are important, it is the weight of the words within them:
Right now I know u aren’t happy and I am certainly very unhappy and sad,
she had written. More little snippets came back to me:
I get snapped at and told my accents and voices are annoying. I touch your neck to show u I care and you tell me to stop. Stop chewing gum. Do this don’t do that.
And again:
I am trying my best to make you happy and I feel as though you sometimes never are, no matter the effort I put in. I can’t be attacked by outsiders for dating you and be attacked by you – the one person I deserve protection from.
These messages did not come in one ‘bad phase’ of their relationship; they punctuated their relationship, and had increased in frequency towards the end.