Chase Your Shadow E-Book

John Carlin

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 629

Beschreibung

Guardian's Best Sports Books SHORTLISTED FOR THE CROSS BRITISH SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2015 LONGLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015 In Chase Your Shadow, journalist and author John Carlin tells the gripping story of Oscar Pistorius's tragic journey from sporting icon to accused murderer. Before Valentine's Day of 2013, Pistorius was best known as an extraordinary athlete, the 'Blade Runner' who became the first amputee in history to compete in the Olympics. Everything changed after he shot his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp dead in the early hours of 14 February. Overnight, the Olympian's status as a role model was replaced by tales of erratic behaviour and a violent dark side. With unique access to Pistorius himself, as well as to his friends and family, Carlin paints a portrait of a complex personality, a man whose heroic rise and even more dramatic fall is one of the most remarkable sports stories ever told.

Leseprobe

CHASE YOUR SHADOW

ALSO BY JOHN CARLIN

Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation

Knowing Mandela

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2014 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © John Carlin, 2014

The moral right of John Carlin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 9781782393269

Trade Paperback ISBN: 9781782393276

E-book ISBN: 9781782393283

Paperback ISBN: 9781782393290

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Acknowledgments

About the Author

1

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong . . . but time and chance happeneth to them all.

ECCLESIASTES 9:11

BALANCING ON the stumps of his amputated legs, gripping a black 9 mm pistol with both hands, he fired four shots through a door in the upstairs bathroom of his home. Behind the door was a small toilet cubicle. A person was inside.

Bewildered and in shock, he staggered towards the door, tried the handle. It was locked. Seconds later, ‘Oh my God! What have I done?’

His ears so deafened by the sound of the gunshots that he could not hear his own screams, he rushed down a narrow corridor to his bedroom, holding onto the sides of the walls to keep himself from falling over. He opened a sliding door in the bedroom that gave onto an outside terrace and shouted, ‘Help! Help! Help!’ At his bedside were his prosthetic legs. He pulled them on, ran back to the bathroom and attempted without success to kick the door down. His screams ever more frantic, he returned to the bedroom, grabbed a cricket bat he kept in case of attack by an intruder, ran back to the bathroom and bashed at the door with desperate fury. A wooden panel gave way, allowing him to reach a hand through and undo the lock. And there he found her, his girlfriend, crumpled on the floor with her face on the toilet seat, her blue eyes vacant, blood pumping from her arm, her hip and her head. She was not moving but maybe, he yearned to believe, she still breathed. Almost fainting from the rotting metal stench of her wounds, battling to get a purchase on her soaked, slippery frame, he eased her off the toilet seat and, with a hand on her head, oozing blood, placed her down on the bathroom’s white marble floor, sobbing and screeching, beseeching God to let her live. He found a towel, knelt over her, tried hopelessly to staunch the blood pouring out of the wound on her hip and stared, howling in despair, at her shattered skull and lifeless eyes as the truth began to sink in that not even God could repair the impact of a bullet to the brain – nothing could amend the irreversible immensity of this horror.

The date was February 14, 2013, Valentine’s Day. The time he fired the shots, between 3.12 and 3.14 in the morning. The place, his home at Silver Woods Estate, a heavily guarded residential compound in the eastern suburbs of Pretoria, the capital of South Africa. He, Oscar Pistorius, the ‘Blade Runner’ – at twenty-six, a world-famous athlete, the first disabled runner to compete in the Olympic Games, ‘the fastest man with no legs’. His victim, Reeva Steenkamp, a twenty-nine-year-old model and aspiring reality TV star, unknown outside South Africa, whom he would propel, in death, to global fame.

At 3.19 he made the first phone call, to his neighbor and friend Johan Stander, the manager of Silver Woods. The phone records would show later that the call lasted twenty-four seconds. ‘Johan, please, please come to my house,’ he cried. ‘I shot Reeva. I thought she was an intruder. Please, please, please come quick.’ Then he phoned the emergency services, but they told him he should try and get her to a hospital himself. And then he phoned the estate’s security guards. He made the three calls in the space of five minutes.

With immense effort, grunting, sobbing and gasping for air, he lifted up her drenched body, carried her out of the bathroom and down a passageway towards a set of grey marble stairs, her head hanging limply on his left shoulder. The gun he had fired did not have normal bullets in the magazine. If they had, she might have survived. But he had used dumdum bullets that, instead of simply penetrating their target, expanded on impact.

When he was halfway down the stairs with the dead or dying woman in his arms a security guard called Pieter Baba came in through the front door, joined moments later by Stander and Stander’s adult daughter, Carice. Standing there too, was a young man from Malawi called Frankie Chiziweni who lived on the premises, downstairs, and worked for Pistorius as a gardener and housekeeper.

Through his tears he saw the four of them staring up at him, their hands covering their faces, muffling their gasps. He howled at them for help, but for a shocked instant they stood rooted where they were, not wanting to believe what their eyes were seeing. But, yes, that was Oscar Pistorius, the national hero, their gentle, well-mannered friend; that was Reeva, the smiling, warm photographic model that all four of them had seen visiting the estate in recent months. She was in T-shirt and shorts, her long legs dangling from his arms. He wore only a pair of shiny basketball shorts which reached down to his knees, covering the tops of his skin-colored prostheses with their plastic calves, feet and toes. Blood trailed behind him on the staircase, trickled down his back. Blood on her clothes, her matted blonde hair, on his shorts, his legs, his bare torso and shoulders – streams of it.

Stander, the oldest of the four, was the first to collect himself, calling out that an ambulance was on its way and urging Pistorius to lay Reeva down on a rug by a sofa in the sitting room, near the front door. He dropped to his knees, lowered her delicately onto the ground and screamed that he wanted that ambulance now, as he scrutinized her bruised face for some sign of life. He put a finger between her lips, trying to prise open her mouth, as if that would make her breathe. With his other hand he covered the wound on her crushed right hip, where the bleeding was heaviest. The gestures were as futile as they were desperate. There was no sign of breathing, no end to the haemorrhage. Carice Stander placed a towel on Reeva’s hip, asked him if he had some rope or some tape to staunch the blood in the third wound, on her left arm, conspiring with him in the frantic, make-believe struggle that they could do something, anything, to bring her back to life. Ten minutes had passed since he had fired the shots. Her eyes were closed and she made no sound. He fingered the inside of her wrist, searching for a pulse, finding none. ‘Please, God, please, let her live, she must not die!’ he prayed. ‘Stay with me, my love, stay with me!’

Two minutes after the others a fifth witness entered the house, a doctor called Johan Stipp, who lived a hundred yards away and had been woken by the sound of the shots.

‘What happened?’ the doctor asked.

‘I shot her. I thought she was a burglar. I shot her,’ he cried, still with his fingers in her mouth, trying to force a way in between her teeth, which were clenched shut.

Dr Stipp was a radiologist and no expert in an emergency, but he went through the motions of checking for signs of life, expecting to find none for he saw that the top of her skull had cracked open and brain tissue was leaking out of it. He felt her wrist: no pulse. He opened her right eyelid: no contraction of the pupil. She was brain-dead, mortally wounded.

An ambulance arrived at 3.43. Two paramedics walked into the house and confirmed the doctor’s diagnosis, pronouncing her dead.

Sobbing, beyond hope of God’s mercy now, he retreated up the stairs. Carice Stander panicked. She realized the gun must be up there and feared he would do what she herself might have done in his place. She followed him upstairs, trying to think what she could do to try to stop him from shooting himself – but there was no need. He just stumbled about the corridor that led to his bedroom, in a haze of tears. A part of him longed for death. Whether it came to that or not, he would first need understanding and forgiveness from someone close to him, someone who would spread the word. He sought that now, not in his family, who would be sure to be on his side, but in a friend called Justin Divaris, the person who had introduced him to Reeva. Pistorius went to his bedroom, got his mobile phone and called Divaris. It was five to four in the morning.

‘There has been a terrible accident. I shot Reeva,’ he told Divaris, who could not make out, or could not believe, what he was saying. He asked him to calm down and repeat himself. ‘I shot Reeva. It was an accident.’ How badly had he shot her? ‘I’ve killed her. I’ve killed my baba,’ he wept. ‘God take me away.’

When the call ended the police arrived. A white colonel in plain clothes walked in, accompanied by black uniformed officers, followed at 4.15 by Hilton Botha, a police investigator. Botha took charge of the crime scene, ordered the house to be sealed and instructed a police photographer to get to work. The photographer took pictures of the dead woman, covered in towels, from all angles, then full-body shots of Pistorius in his sodden basketball shorts, the bereft look in his eyes at odds with the muscular power of his blood-smeared shoulders. Botha, more accustomed to visiting crime scenes in poorer neighborhoods, was struck by the marbled spaciousness of his home, the expensive-looking ornaments and paintings, the shelves stacked with athletics trophies, the contrast between the pristine orderliness of Pistorius’s home and the grisly spectacle presented by his victim.

After the photographer had gone upstairs to take pictures of the bedroom and the bathroom where he had shot Reeva, Pistorius slipped off to the kitchen, alone for a moment, to sob and retch and vomit. A policeman followed him and asked him why he was throwing up. It was the smell of the blood on his hands, he replied. Could he wash them? The policeman said he could, and he turned on the tap and washed away for the last time all physical connection with the woman he had loved, gazing at the red liquid swirling down the kitchen sink.

The romance had begun barely three and a half months earlier on a lovely spring day. Justin Divaris, the friend he had phoned forty minutes after the shooting, had introduced them to each other. Divaris owned the South African dealerships for Rolls-Royce, McLaren and Aston Martin. Pistorius and Divaris had struck up a mutually useful relationship. Pistorius was crazy about cars, and Divaris gave him the keys to some of the more extravagant models in his showroom, on one occasion a white Rolls-Royce, to run around in at weekends. In exchange he would play the role of ‘ambassador’ for Divaris’s brands, sprinkling some of his celebrity gold dust over the fashionable events Divaris would host when he launched a new car. The most prized guests were those who were able to pay for an Aston Martin cash-down. The adornments at these feasts were young women in high heels and short dresses, whom Divaris’s people would recruit for the night from Johannesburg and Cape Town model agencies. Reeva was one of those models. She was eye-catchingly beautiful and she inevitably attracted Divaris’s attention. Reeva also liked cars, and it was on November 4, 2012, at the Kyalami motor-racing track, twenty minutes’ drive from Pistorius’s home and halfway between Pretoria and Johannesburg, that Divaris brought the two of them together for the first time.

For Pistorius it was love at first sight. As he would testify in court later, he was ‘bowled over’. Three years older than he, Reeva was strikingly beautiful, lithe and self-confident – worldly in a way that the much younger girlfriend with whom he had broken up with only weeks earlier, after eighteen months together, had not been. She felt an immediate attraction to him too. He had more star quality than anyone in South Africa save for Nelson Mandela, yet he had a winning shyness about him, an old-fashioned courteousness and an unusually soft and gentle voice. And he was handsome. Six-feet tall on the prostheses hidden under his jeans, he had a gymnast’s body, high cheekbones and kind, smiling eyes.

When he invited her to attend a red-carpet South African Sports Awards ceremony that very evening she assented without a second thought, phoning a close woman friend as soon as she could get away, to tell her the mind-boggling news that she had a date with the famous Blade Runner. Just how famous she would find out later that evening when the two of them became the magnet for all the photographers’ attention – she in a short, tasseled, cream dress and high heels; he, celebrated in magazines as South Africa’s best-dressed man, wearing a sharp dark suit, white shirt and black tie. More engrossed in one another than with the crowd attending the glittering event, that night the two of them stayed up talking until three in the morning.

Now, three and a half months later, it was five in the morning on Valentine’s Day, of all days. The ambulance had come and gone, taking Reeva’s body away, and his home, cordoned off with yellow tape, was flooded with police. He was not handcuffed, but there was no possibility of escape. If there was one thing he would not be able to do, given that everyone in South Africa knew his face, it was to slip away unseen. Botha, the policeman in charge, said he should go into the garage and not move from there.

What happened during the next few hours would remain for him a tear-stained blur. His lawyer, a large man called Kenny Oldwadge, arrived. His older brother Carl was the first family member on the scene. Then an uncle, Arnold Pistorius, and then his younger sister, Aimée, appeared at the garage door, his gasping cries like knives to their hearts. Arnold, the stiff-backed family patriarch, stood back as Aimée and Carl wrapped his trembling body in their arms. Pistorius regarded Aimée, who was twenty-four, as his closest friend. Carl was usually more emotionally awkward, the burly, rough and tumble playmate who had watched over him when he was a child in the schoolyard. But they were all broken now, sitting silently by his side, taking turns to put their arms around him as he sobbed.

The policemen let an interval pass, then told Pistorius the time had come to go away with them. He put on a grey tracksuit top with a hood and slid into the back of a police car. They drove him to a nearby precinct and led him into an office where he was informed that criminal procedure dictated he should go to hospital for tests. Then a short, bald man wearing civilian clothes appeared and introduced himself as the head of the South African Police Service’s forensic psychology section.

Colonel Gerard Labuschagne had learned of the shooting from the news broken by a South African paper at 8.03, nearly five hours after it had happened, via Twitter. The post had read: ‘Oscar Pistorius shoots his girlfriend dead in his house.’ Labuschagne responded with the same disbelief and stupefaction as the rest of the public. By 9 a.m. images of the Blade Runner’s home turned into a crime scene, juxtaposed with a photograph of him smiling and arm in arm with Steenkamp, were appearing on TV and computer screens in every corner of the globe. Labuschagne made a call to a superior and received an order to rush to the police station. He had judged, and his superior had agreed, that, in the absence of any eyewitnesses, a reading of Pistorius’s psychological state immediately after the shooting might yield some clue as to what exactly had happened that night. Hilton Botha, a policeman for twenty-four years, had already made up his mind that it was an open and shut case – he had seen dozens like it and was sure it was murder, deliberate murder following a lovers’ argument.

Labuschagne, aware of Pistorius’s claim that he had imagined he was firing at an intruder, anticipated that when the trial came the athlete would lodge what the courts called ‘a psychological defense’. There was always the prospect of a confession. How long could he carry on insisting on the implausible story that he imagined a burglar had locked himself in the toilet? But, short of that, Labuschagne wanted to observe Pistorius as closely as he could in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The news that the suspect was about to be taken to the hospital would give the psychologist the opportunity to observe him over the course of several hours, to try and gain a sense of whether he was telling the truth or not.

Content to watch him out of the corner of his eye, asking nothing, Labuschagne accompanied Pistorius to the police car that would take him to the hospital. He sat in the front next to the driver, Pistorius in the back with another policeman, keeping his head down to avoid being seen. Neither of them spoke, save once when Labuschagne, trying to win his confidence, called out a warning for him to duck down because he had spotted a vehicle in the rear-view mirror that seemed to be carrying news photographers.

The car dropped them off at the hospital that serviced the township of Mamelodi – a place the police would never have taken a white man under apartheid, the system of racial discrimination that had lasted half a century, ending twenty years earlier when Nelson Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president.

Mamelodi was a poor and densely populated residential area on the periphery of Pretoria, which had been blacks-only by law under apartheid and remained blacks-only in practice now. The politics of South Africa had changed utterly since Nelson Mandela’s election as president in 1994 but Mamelodi remained poor, as did hundreds of townships like it. Addressing poverty and inequality was the task of Mandela’s heirs in government now, an incremental exercise plagued by official incompetence and the apparently inevitable corrupting effects on a political party, the African National Congress, that had been in power for twenty consecutive years. The verities of Mandela’s time, when the political and moral questions had been indistinguishable, had given way to the muddle of day-to-day governance in a country whose challenges were no longer unique in the world. But, while dissatisfaction with the party that had liberated black South Africa grew, Mamelodi and places like it had more access to electricity and running water than before. Also, a black middle class, a concept unimaginable in the apartheid days, had emerged and now consisted of some six million people out of a total South African population of fifty million. The power of the apartheid state had been deployed to defend a system in which black people could not vote, in which they were told where they could and could not live and what hospitals, buses, trains, parks, beaches, public toilets or public telephones they could and could not use. The principle had always been to keep the races apart so as to guarantee white people a superior standard of living. But now some members of this new black middle class lived in Silver Woods as neighbors of the country’s most celebrated white man; at least three of them would turn out to have been woken by the sound of gunfire in the dead of night and would later appear as witnesses for Pistorius’s defense at the murder trial. One thing that had changed unambiguously and for the better during the twenty years of democracy had been the racial climate, one example of which had been that the Blade Runner was, or had been, as much of a hero among the people of Mamelodi as anywhere else in South Africa – the greatest national hero for South Africans of all races since Mandela himself.

Had he visited the township twenty-four hours earlier it would have been cause for exuberant celebration. But the police kept his visit to the hospital at Mamelodi quiet, sparing themselves the commotion and him the distress of a potentially mixed welcome.

Labuschagne and the man who, like Mandela in his day, had suddenly become South Africa’s most famous prisoner spent nearly three hours together at the hospital, most of the time alone – the police colonel on a chair, the prisoner on a medical bed – in a small consulting room. A doctor eventually came in and took scrapes from under Pistorius’s nails, examined his body for scratches and bruises. Then more waiting for blood and urine tests, to all of which he numbly succumbed. As it turned out, all the tests drew blanks. No alcohol, no illegal drugs, no physical evidence of a fight. Nothing here that could be used in court against him, making it all the more urgent that while Pistorius’s state of mind was still raw from the shooting, Labuschagne should try and identify something of value for the prosecution case. Labuschagne’s problem was that the lawyers had already intervened to the point of forbidding the police from asking him anything about the events of the night. In fact, apart from the first fraught exchanges with the police at dawn, never at any point did he submit to police interrogation of any kind.

Labuschagne, casting about for a way to break the ice, mentioned that they had both happened to go to the same high school in Pretoria. He spoke about sport, asked him about his running in what turned out to be a vain effort to stem his weeping. But the attempt at conversation yielded, at best, monosyllabic replies, until one question elicited a burst of anger. Labuschagne asked him if he wanted anything to eat.

‘How do you expect me to eat now?’ he shouted back. Pleased with the outburst, eager to elicit more of the same, Labuschagne repeated the question moments later. Was he sure he did not want to eat something? Back came the same exasperated response, followed by wails that echoed down the hospital corridors, reaching the ears of his family members Aimée and Arnold who were on their way to the room where he was being held. Escorted by uniformed police who had warned them they could not have any physical contact with him, they had come to bring him some fresh clothing. The police were opposing bail and he would need clothes for the following night, which he would be spending in a cell, and for the next morning when he would appear before a magistrate to be formally charged. The encounter with his relatives was as brief as it was sombre, their faces funereal. The three of them left and he returned to his bed, more shattered than before.

Towards 4 p.m. Labuschagne and two other policemen drove him back to the police station. There he had his first meeting with his attorney, Brian Webber, whom he had known since the age of thirteen, having gone to school with Webber’s son. He had stayed overnight at the Webbers on various occasions and the two boys had remained close friends throughout their teens. Webber had always been fond of Pistorius and, in later years, had taken pride in his athletic achievements. For the lawyer, fighting a losing battle to preserve some modicum of professional detachment, this first encounter was heartbreaking, all the more so once he took in the tiny holding cell, reeking of urine, where his son’s old pal would have to spend his first night of captivity.

Labuschagne went to bed that night in some frustration, having derived little of value for the prosecution case. The suspect’s emotional state was entirely consistent, he concluded, with that of someone whose life had abruptly gone to pieces. Nothing he had said or done had offered any clue as to whether he had knowingly murdered Reeva Steenkamp, as the police contended, or whether the shooting had been, as Pistorius had claimed in the very first phone call he had made, a terrible accident.

2

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

SIGMUND FREUD

OSCAR PISTORIUS was born on November 22, 1986 with a condition called fibular hemimelia. As mysterious as it was rare, the disease had no traceable genetic link to his parents. The fibula, the thin bone that runs between the knee and the ankle alongside the more prominent tibia, was missing in each of his legs, which were consequently unusually short. The ankles were only half formed; the heels faced not down but sideways, parallel to the Achilles tendons; the insteps were not convex but concave, in the shape not of an arch, but of a boat. Instead of five toes, he had two. His devastated parents saw right away that no human being could ever stand, let alone walk, on feet as narrow and twisted as these.

Sheila Pistorius was born Sheila Bekker, a fairly common surname among the 40 or so per cent of the white South African population who defined themselves – in a country where everyone felt historically compelled to have some sort of tribal affiliation – as ‘English-speakers’. Sheila did not work outside the home. Henke Pistorius, her husband, was a businessman, an erratic one prone to dramatic ups and downs, but at the time of Oscar’s birth he was doing well, providing his family with the abundant material comforts of white, upper middle-class life in apartheid South Africa. They lived in a large home, high up on a ridge in the suburb of Constantia Kloof, in rich, dynamic Johannesburg, forty miles south of Pretoria, the South African capital.

Henke belonged to the majority white grouping in South Africa, the Afrikaners, who had their own language derived from the Dutch colonists who had begun settling in the Cape in the seventeenth century. He took pride in his people’s history. He liked guns, as many Afrikaners did, and was given to making solemn pronouncements before his Calvinist God. A defining moment in Afrikaner history, as every Afrikaner child learned at school, was the Day of the Vow. On December 16, 1838, Afrikaner trekkers who had emigrated from the Cape, outraged, among other things, by the British colonial rulers’ abolition of slavery, had fought a decisive battle against a large army of Zulu warriors. Vastly outnumbered, the trekkers had made a vow that, in return for God’s help in obtaining victory, that date would be honored by them and their descendants as a holy day of worship. The trekkers were victorious, 470 of them armed with guns defeating a Zulu army of ten thousand, armed only with spears.

It was in the spirit of that historic vow that Henke made a vow of his own within minutes of his son’s birth. Just prior to the birth he had told the obstetrician that he did not mind if it was a boy or a girl so long as the child had ten fingers and ten toes. Now, having been the first to identify the feet’s deformity, Henke ceremonially held up the infant with both hands and declared, before mother, doctor and nurses: ‘This is my son Oscar and I declare before God that I shall love him and stand by him for the rest of my days.’

In practical terms, standing by their son meant Sheila and Henke Pistorius had to make a choice between amputation of his legs and corrective surgery. They consulted eleven doctors in South Africa and overseas. Some argued for surgery on both legs; some proposed amputation of the right foot and surgery on the left. It was the advice of one particular South African doctor that tipped the balance in favor of double amputation below the knee.

The doctor’s name was Gerry Versfeld. Had Henke and Sheila Pistorius not chanced upon Dr Versfeld, a white man who at the time worked in a hospital in Soweto where only black patients were admitted, they might have lacked the confidence to go along with the most drastic option of all. Had the paths of Dr Versfeld and his infant self never crossed, the chances were that Pistorius would never have known what it is to run, would never have found fame, wealth and glory, and would never have met Reeva Steenkamp. The choice the parents made would plot the course of his life.

Pistorius had always been grateful to Dr Versfeld, the orthopaedic surgeon who carried out the operation. He had climbed so high thanks to him, and for all the head-turning acclaim he received he never forgot the man whose appearance in his life a few months after he was born had compensated so amply for the freak deficiency of his genes, directing him towards global stardom when he achieved the miracle of running in the Olympic Games.

He had had a lucky escape. If his two lower limbs had not been removed when he was very young he would have had to suffer a multitude of surgical procedures during his childhood, through to his late teens. Doctors would have had to lengthen his legs and subject him to a series of delicate and complex procedures to try and remold the mangled mess of his feet. He would have been looking at eight to ten operations over a period of sixteen to eighteen years. Even then, the finished product would have been well short of perfection. The surgeons would never have been able to re-create the arch of the feet, or do much to diminish their clawed rigidity. The sinewy energy of his youth would have been trapped inside a severely impaired body. He would have moved about the home as old people do – able to get up to go to the bathroom, to fetch things from the kitchen, and little more. He would never have been able to run. Covering 200 meters, the distance at which he won his first gold medal in 21.97 seconds, would have taken an age. His legs would have had no spring, no push-off, as Dr Versfeld put it, when he hit the ground. All his concentrated effort would have been invested in laboriously lifting up one foot, then the other. When he was older he was able to picture it. He had come across individuals born with conditions similar to his in just one leg. They had been visibly, inescapably handicapped. He, on the other hand, had always been secure in the knowledge that when he wore long trousers few could guess that there was anything wrong with him.

His gratitude towards Dr Versfeld was enriched by mutual affection. The professional relationship between the doctor and the Pistorius family grew into a close friendship. He and his wife became regular dinner guests at the Pistorius home, where they never ceased to celebrate the choice they had made.

The alternatives had been limited and the implications lifelong. Taking the surgical route would have let his parents cling to the hope that future advances in medicine would one day yield a wonder remedy or, failing that, would at least allow the possibility of deferring amputation to a later date. Opting for amputation right away meant forcing themselves to visualize their child pinned to an operating table to have his tiny limbs sawn off. They would be condemning him to the status of an amputee, dependent on artificial legs, for the rest of his days. They might one day be held to account by a mutilated son who might never forgive them for what they had done.

The choice was between letting the surgeons play God and playing God themselves.

Dr Versfeld never wished to claim any credit for the choice Pistorius’s parents made. Whenever they thanked him, he always insisted that all he had done was to provide information; responsibility for the final decision had rested with them. Dr Versfeld was a mild, self-deprecating man, tall and slender, serenely confident in his professional abilities. The young Pistorius would have heard him scoff over dinner at his family home at the notion that he had become a surgeon out of some solemn sense of vocation. ‘It’s all because as a boy my hobby was woodwork,’ Dr Versfeld would smile. ‘At school my best subject was geometry. And then I did medicine, so it was almost a natural consequence that I should become an orthopaedic surgeon. In my woodwork I had to drill holes and cut things very accurately, measuring angles. And now that’s what I do for a living.’

But his face would turn grim as he recalled his feelings when the time came to operate on the eleven-month-old infant. He would confess later that he had struggled to preserve the mechanical detachment his profession required.

‘Keeping my emotions in check was not an easy job. It was not nice at all, but your head told you it was the right thing and you had to ensure the head won. But even so, it was a wrenching experience to chop off the limbs of a very little boy.’

Nor was his job technically easy. It was not a question simply of sawing through a bone and discarding everything below it. Dr Versfeld judged that one part of the damaged foot had to be preserved in order to help the boy retain some degree of mobility when he was not wearing the prosthetic legs on which he would depend for most, but not all, of his waking moments for the rest of his life. That part was the heel pad, ‘nature’s cushion’, as Dr Versfeld described it, ‘very specialized tissue consisting of compact fat globules’. The objective was to salvage both heel pads – weight-bearers, like the knee – and attach them to the bottom of the truncated tibia so that, rather than being dependent solely on his prosthetics for movement, he would be able to walk short distances on his stumps. A clean cut at the bottom of the tibia without the heel pad would have made it impossible for him to get about – the skin there, lacking those fatty globules, is very fine and would have torn too easily. Lacking that support, it would have been impossible for him even to stand up without losing his balance.

In order to be able to retain those fatty skin flaps, Dr Versfeld had to cut very close to the heel bone. Using only hand instruments and the naked eye, it required all his concentrated expertise to get the whole heel out, free it from the Achilles tendon, disarticulate the ankle, remove the ligaments, and then join the heel flaps to the bottom of the tibia. The procedure – an agony for the waiting parents – lasted four hours, two for each leg. And though the ligaments, the ankle, the entirety of the tiny, twisted, concave foot were thrown, as Henke Pistorius would indelicately put it afterwards, ‘into the dustbin’, he would be able to move nimbly enough about the home on the stumpy ends of his short, thin, tapered legs.

Pistorius’s childhood would have been very different had it been decided to delay the amputation. Eleven months was the age chosen because it is around this stage that a child typically begins to take its first steps. Three months afterwards, the Pistorius parents took their son to the consulting room of Trevor Brauckmann, the prosthetics specialist in Pretoria who built and fitted his first artificial legs. The child studied the wooden pair that Brauckmann gave him with curiosity, submitted with still keener interest to seeing his stumps fitted into the legs’ deep sockets, steadied himself by holding onto a set of parallel bars, then let go and started stumbling delightedly around the room, reveling in his new-found self-sufficiency, like any infant taking its first steps. His parents had arrived for the appointment with confused feelings of hope and self-accusation, but left overjoyed at the cheerful abandon with which their child had taken to these strange new appendages.

In the coming years he learnt to run and to play outdoor games side by side with his boisterous older brother, Carl, encouraged always by his mother who taught him to refuse to behave as if he were in any way impaired. It served him well. Had she not instilled in him this mental habit he would have lacked the gumption to imagine himself competing against the world’s fastest runners. Looking back on his childhood, he vividly recalled playing soccer on stony fields, riding mountain bikes with his big brother, climbing trees and falling off them battered and bruised, a proud little tearaway – but he tried to repress the memory of the painful sores and blisters on his stumps, so painful that there were stretches of several months when he could barely move, let alone walk, and had to stay quietly at home under his mother’s care, unable to join his friends at school.

Those unhappy episodes gave steel to his character, injected a resilience in him that Dr Versfeld celebrated when he traveled to Athens in 2004 to see him run in his first Paralympics race, cheering him on when he won that first gold medal, taking pride in the seventeen-year-old prodigy’s achievement, deriving satisfaction from the modesty with which he responded to his triumph and to the many more that would follow.

Nothing prepared the doctor for what was to happen nine years later. Never had he detected a suggestion in anything his most famous patient had said or done during the twenty-six years he had known him that could have predicted a moment of such lethal loss of control. That person, he would tell friends, was a stranger to him. It made no sense at all.

Opting for amputation over surgery had made sense at the time, but it would turn out to be a sort of Faustian pact. Pistorius would achieve all his heart desired, but there would be a price to pay. Had Sheila and Henke Pistorius taken the route that some other doctors had suggested he would have become an entirely different person, his life would have taken an entirely different course, what happened would not have happened. Wheelchair-bound, the recurrent operations he would have been subjected to as he grew up would have meant far longer absences from school, drastically altering his personality. His mother would have struggled to persuade him that he was just another normal boy. She might have had to give up on the attempt altogether, resorting to more painstaking, less convincing means to build up his sense of self-worth. His schoolmates, seeing him wheeled into class, or at best limping badly, would have responded to him with pity, if he was lucky, or with sniggering contempt if he was not. He might have had the fortitude finally to emerge strong and wise from his predicament, but the chances are that along the way he would have felt himself to be a scorned outsider; his impulse, to hide away from the world.

That was his impulse now, after the shooting. All the misery and shame he had been spared as he grew up hit him in one concentrated bolt, at the age of twenty-six, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day in 2013. His love affair with the beautiful and worldly Reeva Steenkamp, in whose fashionable circles he would have been unlikely to have moved had he not found fame and fortune, was an achievement that told the world he had won life’s race. Ending Reeva’s life, and in the same instant annihilating his own, had condemned him to the shadow existence he had fought so hard to avoid – inspiring compassion in some, derision in others, and ripping forever from his grasp all that he had striven with such fierce resolve to win.

3

One that loved not wisely but too well.

SHAKESPEARE, OTHELLO

HIS BED in the police cell was a blanket on a cement floor. Not that it mattered very much. He would not have slept that first night on any surface. Ever since he was a little boy he had lived in fear of criminals, now he knew what it felt like to be one. Worse was to come the next morning, Friday, February 15, when he was driven in a police convoy to a court in the center of Pretoria where he appeared before a magistrate who confirmed what he knew was coming. It took no more than five minutes for the magistrate to announce that the state would be charging him with premeditated murder. At the word ‘murder’, he broke into wild sobs. His sister, Aimée, who was sitting directly behind him with his uncle and other family members, put her hands to her face and wept. As for bail, the state opposed it and a hearing would be held at which a different magistrate would decide the matter the following Tuesday.

The name of the bail magistrate was Desmond Nair. Of Indian descent, which would have precluded him from occupying any judicial post under apartheid, he was highly experienced and respected. Magistrates and judges possess enormous power in South Africa, where the jury system does not exist. In theory they are supposed to perform their roles with the coldest impartiality, but that does not stop both defense and prosecution lawyers from paying close scrutiny to their backgrounds in the hope of finding some vulnerability that might help swing a verdict. Pistorius’s defense lawyers clutched at what they thought might be grounds for optimism in a remarkable case from 2011 in which Nair had presided over the bail hearing.

At the center of that case was an Afrikaner rugby player called ‘Bees’ Roux, who was arrested and charged with murder for beating a black policeman to death. At a pre-trial meeting, attended by Roux and his lawyer, as well as the state prosecutor and the brother and wife of the victim, Roux expressed sincerest regret and explained what had happened. He had imagined that the policeman, whom he had encountered at night, had planned to rob him, possibly kill him. An exceptionally large man, Roux struck the policeman with force, knocking him unconscious. He sought to revive him, Roux said, but it was too late. In tears, Roux apologized to the policeman’s relatives and implored their forgiveness. They granted it. First the brother, also weeping, embraced Roux; then the policeman’s widow made a short dignified speech in which she thanked Roux for his candor and said that she did indeed forgive him. The prosecutor proposed a deal. Roux would plead guilty to culpable homicide, the South African legal term for unpremeditated manslaughter, he would pay the family of the dead policeman compensation and receive a suspended sentence of five years in jail. The presiding magistrate concurred, and Roux was a free man.

Would Nair, seeing the possible parallels between the two cases, show similar leniency over Pistorius’s bail application? His lawyers tended to think so. There was another, more personal, reason that might help their cause, too. Research by the defense had revealed that Nair was in the midst of his own family tragedy. His first cousin had recently killed her two children, then herself, with poison. Pistorius’s team hoped that at the Tuesday hearing Nair’s private suffering would sharpen his compassion for the fellow sufferer who stood before him with sorrow written all over his face, and that Nair might rule in his favor.

But Tuesday was still several days off, and as Pistorius was led out of the courtroom where he had just been charged with murder and into the police car that would take him to another police station, in the middle-class and previously all-white Pretoria suburb of Brooklyn, his thoughts dwelt on the horror of what he had done, but also on those that might lie ahead. He would be spending at least the next four nights in a cell; if he were denied bail, it would be for every night until the trial was over, whenever that might be; and if in the end he were found guilty, he would be spending much of the rest of his life in a dank and dangerous prison with some of the worst criminals in the world for company. Should he be found guilty as charged, of premeditated murder, the sentence would be twenty-five years, minimum.

The scrum of TV cameras outside the courtroom, mobbing the car that drove him back to his police cell, brought home to him how fascinated the world was with the prospect of a figure as heroic as he had been falling so low. The mystery behind Reeva’s death made the drama all the more compelling. Had the story of what happened at his home in the early hours of Valentine’s Day been cut and dried, had it been beyond dispute from the beginning that he had killed Reeva Steenkamp either deliberately or accidentally, interest in the case would not have been so great or so enduring. What was to keep the story bubbling, month after month, all the way through to the eventual verdict, was that the events of that night remained so open to speculation. Endless debates would be held at dinner tables across the globe on the question of whether he had wanted to kill her or not.

His fame and her beauty – but especially his fame, because people felt they knew enough about him to venture informed opinions – enlivened the debate. But the fact that two other contemporary cases had whipped up the public imagination to a similar degree, even though the protagonists had been unknown when their stories broke, revealed the powerful attraction that unresolved mysteries exerted, with or without the celebrity factor. One was the case of Madeleine McCann, the little British girl abducted in Portugal in 2007, never to be seen again. The other was that of Amanda Knox, the American accused by the Italian authorities of the murder of a British woman, Meredith Kercher, also in 2007. In both instances, millions of people felt entitled to pronounce with assurance about what had happened on the nights in question.

One camp in the McCann case held that the parents, both of them doctors, had accidentally killed their child by giving her an overdose of sleeping pills, then disposed of the body and pretended to the world that she had been abducted by a criminal. Similarly, some observers of the Knox case said that the American woman, far from being innocent as she claimed, had participated in a satanic game of group sex that had led to her friend Meredith’s grisly death. Others maintained with equal conviction that the McCanns and Knox were telling the truth and had been grievously traduced.

Carefully selecting the copious evidence provided by the news media to corroborate their views, what people on each side were doing would reveal more about themselves, their prejudices and motivations, than about what really happened, the truth of which was known only to the strangers in whose personal dramas they chose to involve themselves.

Another controversial case with which analogies were drawn was the celebrated O. J. Simpson murder trial in America. Global interest was also enormous, and the core allegation in both stories was a riveting one: famous athlete kills beautiful woman he loved. The majority view in the US, even before the trial began in Los Angeles in 1995, was that Simpson was guilty of the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown. But there the similarities ended. The Simpson case followed the classic lines of a whodunit. A body had been found and it was up to the cops to discover the identity of the killer. Simpson was accused of murdering his ex-wife; the job of the police and prosecution was to prove he had done it.

In Pistorius’s case the who, the when, the where and the how were not in dispute. And, thankfully for South Africa – even if it were no consolation for him – there was no racial element involved. In the Simpson case the accused had been black, the victim white, and American opinion divided accordingly. In the Pistorius case there was no clear division of opinion or splitting of sympathies along racial lines. As Justice Malala, a well-known black political commentator wrote, ‘For us South Africans, it is impossible to watch Oscar Pistorius run without wanting to break down and cry and shout with joy.’ Knowing this used to fill Pistorius with joy too.

One thing he had been proud of as a South African was that admiration for successful national sportsmen, not just for him, was color-blind. Blacks and whites and all shades in between had taken the rugby players Francois Pienaar (white) and Bryan Habana (mixed-race), and the cricketers Hashim Amla (Indian and Muslim) and Makhaya Ntini (black), to their collective hearts. Sport, as Pistorius recalled Mandela saying, was a great breaker of racial barriers. No one wished to be cut out of the celebrations when the national team won. All those sportsmen had inspired all their compatriots, just as he had done.

What made Pistorius stand out from all the others was that because of his unique physical condition he exemplified the country’s continuing task of overcoming the hard legacy of the past. Every South African shared in his triumphs, seeing them as occasions to applaud what all races liked to see as the indomitable national spirit. Everyone had wanted to identify with him because he fed South Africans’ self-image as a never-say-die people. The Afrikaners, whose forebears had ridden north from the Cape in the early nineteenth century to conquer a hostile land, never ceased to remind themselves and anyone else who would listen that the word ‘survivors’ best defined who they were. But the truth was that all South Africans were survivors. Survivors are, by definition, pragmatists. This shared characteristic was the chief reason why, unlike other warring peoples who had proved unable to rise above past grievances, black and white South Africans were able to agree to abolish apartheid and to make peace. They see themselves as problem-solving people, and it was this can-do attitude that gave rise to a uniquely South African expression, which the Afrikaners invented but all other races incorporate into daily conversation, ‘We’ll make a plan.’ Pistorius, whose life story it seemed to sum up, used it all the time. It meant, ‘We’ll overcome this obstacle. We’ll think of something. We’ll get to our destination.’

By triumphing on the world stage he had shown people everywhere that South Africans were indeed made of sterner stuff. He had set an example to all: if he could make a plan, if he could soar in the face of the cards life had dealt him, anybody could. He held up a flattering mirror to South Africans, reflecting back the image they wished to see of themselves at their best.

Not anymore. Now he reflected South Africa at its worst. Though people knew him only through the media, and knew less of Reeva Steenkamp and nothing at all of what had passed between them on the night she died, many had made up their minds that he was a monster who had killed her knowingly, not in a panic but in a rage, and they clamored for a punishment to fit the crime, one that would send a message that women had endured enough.

The figures showed how much. South Africa was tenth in the world murder rankings by country, with forty-five killings a day on average in 2013, and undisputed global champion when it came to violence against women. Every four minutes a South African woman or girl – often a teenager, sometimes a child – was reported raped, and every eight hours a woman was killed by her male partner. (The phenomenon has a name in South Africa: ‘intimate femicide’.) On the face of it, as many South Africans saw it, Pistorius had swelled those statistics. There was no shortage of opinion pieces in the press during the weeks and months that followed the shooting framing his case in the context of generalized gender violence.

He hated that. He hated the unfairness of people assuming he was guilty before he had had a chance to tell his story in court, and it mortified him that they were choosing to portray him as a woman-hater. All the more so as Reeva herself had been an advocate for women’s rights, speaking out against abusers and rapists. He had always supported her – had shared in her outrage and horror at one very recent crime, one so savage that it was singled out by the president, Jacob Zuma, in his annual state of the nation address.

On February 3, 2013 a seventeen-year-old girl called Anene Booysen from a poor rural township near Cape Town was raped, mutilated and left for dead at a construction site near a bar where she had spent much of the night with friends. A doctor who had tried to save her life was quoted in the press as saying that after raping her the attacker had opened up her stomach and ripped out her intestines. Pistorius and Reeva had discussed the case, the two of them as appalled as anybody else in South Africa. Reeva was moved to make her feelings public on Instagram. ‘I woke up in a happy safe home this morning,’ she wrote. ‘Not everyone did. Speak out against the rape of individuals in SA. RIP Anene Booysen. #rape #crime #sayNO.’ She had spent part of February 13 polishing up a speech she was due to give two days later to students at a school in Johannesburg in memory of Anene Booysen and in honor of the ‘Black Friday Campaign for Rape Awareness’.

It might have seemed hard to square the idea of a woman with this kind of social conscience planning to share a bed with a monster that very night. Yet that was how many people chose to view it – most vocally the Women’s League of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, Mandela’s party. Pistorius had spotted members of the League outside the magistrate’s court where his bail application was being heard, calling for his head. ‘Real Men Don’t Rape And Kill Women’, one placard read; ‘Pistorius Must Rot In Jail’, another. Lulama Xingwana, South Africa’s Minister for Women, Children and People with Disabilities, joined the campaigners, stridently declaring that he should be denied bail.

The same government minister went so far as to blame Reeva’s death on the culture of the Afrikaners, ‘Young Afrikaner men’, she said, were ‘brought up in the Calvinist religion believing that they own a woman, they own a child, they own everything and therefore they can take that life because they own it’. She did apologize and retract her remarks afterwards, having perhaps understood, as other black women might have reminded her, that it was a shared problem, that no male sector of any racial group in South Africa could claim a monopoly on virtue in the treatment of women.

Some comments by Henke Pistorius did not help the cause very much either. Speaking to the press the day after his son shot Reeva Steenkamp, he said that the African National Congress had failed to protect white people from crime, hence the need for people like him to arm themselves. The racist undertones, revealed in the insensitivity shown by his failure to realize that black people suffered more from crime than white, caused a public furor – and still more embarrassment, if that were possible, for his son. Henke then made matters worse by stating, with ludicrously bad judgment in the circumstances, ‘As a family, we value life much too much to produce guns at every opportunity we can use them. I have been in positions where I could use a gun but we have been brought up in a way that we value the lives of others very highly.’

The snorts of those who had made up their minds that Henke’s son had attached so little value to Reeva’s life that he had deliberately killed her resounded across the land. They may not have known Reeva, but they took her death personally. Her fate symbolized everything that South African women found terrifying about the country they lived in – a culture of violence where men were desensitized to the harm they caused others, even if those others were supposedly their friends or loved ones; where notions of masculinity were so perverted that hitting and raping women was seen almost as a cultural norm, not least by members of the police force; and where guns and other lethal weapons were favored instruments of everyday persuasion. Men seemed to get away with murder in South Africa, and now this high-profile case offered an opportunity not to be missed to send a message to male society at large. The women who thought this way wanted revenge; they wanted Pistorius to burn on the pyre as an example to all men with misogynist malice in their hearts.

Yet the truth was that long before prosecutors pushed for the state’s revenge in the murder trial, even before the bail hearing, Pistorius’s punishment had already begun. In the cell at Brooklyn police station where he was locked up after his first court appearance he slept once again on the floor. Aimée, Carl and his uncle Arnold came to offer their moral support, but their visits were cause for grief as well as comfort. The contrast between the carefree times they had shared a few days before and his circumstances now brought home how completely the landscape of their lives had changed.