The Shooting Star and The Model

When Oscar Pistorius—the South African “Blade Runner,” who overcame a double amputation to compete in the Olympics last year—shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on Valentine’s Day, the millions he’d inspired were faced with a shocking possibility: that their hero was also a killer. With Pistorius claiming that Steenkamp’s death was an accident, Mark Seal delves into the murder case that has rocked the country, and the paths the couple took to that fatal night.

From Rex Features/A.P. Images.

Oscar and Reeva at the All White Party at Tashas restaurant.

At four A.M. on February 14, Detective Hilton Botha, a 24-year veteran of the South African Police Service, was awakened by a phone call from his colonel. “Oscar’s shot his girlfriend,” Botha told his wife, Audrey, after hanging up. She didn’t have to ask who that was. “We all know Oscar,” she told me a month later in a Johannesburg café, where we sat with her husband. The whole world knows Oscar Pistorius, who overcame amputation of both legs when he was an infant to become the Blade Runner, competing at the age of 25 against able-bodied runners at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. But Audrey Botha also knew him as the hotheaded youth her husband had arrested for assault in 2009, after he had been accused of slamming a door so hard on a female guest at one of his parties that it caused severe injuries. (Pistorius denied the allegation, and the charge was dropped.)
Fifteen minutes after the call, Hilton Botha was at Pistorius’s home in the gated, high-security community of Silver Woods Country Estate, in Pretoria, one of the country’s three capitals, 30 miles north of Johannesburg. One of the first things he saw when he walked in the door was the body of Reeva Steenkamp, a beautiful, blonde 29-year-old model and reality-TV star, who had been shot three times by Pistorius, her boyfriend of four months. “There was a lot of blood, and I saw the body at the bottom of the staircase covered in towels,” said Botha. Minutes after the shooting, Pistorius had phoned the manager of the gated community, asking him to call an ambulance. Then he carried Steenkamp down the staircase from the bathroom, “her head and arms dangling,” according to a later newspaper report, and laid her on the floor. He reportedly gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and someone attempted to tie a tourniquet around her arm to stop the bleeding from one of the gunshot wounds. “She was still breathing, making a gurgling sound,” Botha recalled a witness saying. But a doctor who had rushed over from his nearby house said, “There’s head wounds—it’s not going to help,” added the detective. “And then she stopped breathing.
“It was a big house and very neat and tidy,” said Botha, “and you could see the money talking, with all the ornaments and portraits and paintings. There were shelves stacked with trophies. There was also one of those big box frames, with a picture of Mike Tyson, along with a signed boxing glove.”
The detective stepped around the corpse and went up the marble staircase to the master bedroom, where the shooting had occurred an hour earlier. The crime scene was actually the bathroom. “It was a large en suite bathroom,” he said, with a shower, two washbasins, and a toilet cubicle, the door of which was riddled with bullet holes. It had been bashed open with a cricket bat by Pistorius, who claimed he had broken it down after realizing that Reeva was locked inside. The bloodied cricket bat was on the bathroom floor, along with two cell phones and a 9-mm. Parabellum pistol.
In the café, Botha crouched down to show me his theory of how Steenkamp may have been cowering in the toilet (a cubicle that measured 4 1/2 by 3 1/2 feet), with her arms crossed, which would account for why one bullet had gone through her fingers before entering her arm. Another bullet struck her above the right ear, and another hit her in the hip. “It does not matter where she was in that toilet, she wouldn’t have had a chance,” said Botha.

Photograph by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson.

Detective Hilton Botha.

In a country plagued by police corruption, where eight officers were recently charged with murder for allegedly tying a man’s hands to the back of a police van and dragging him down the street (he was later found dead in his cell), Botha is proud of his record. “I try to investigate every case as if it were one of my own who was murdered,” he told me. A veteran of countless homicide investigations, he said he had immediately seen the Pistorius case as a simple one. A woman is killed by her husband, her boyfriend, or her same-sex partner. It happens every eight hours in South Africa, where “intimate femicide” is the country’s leading cause of violent deaths of women.
“There is no way anything else could have happened,” said Botha. “It was just them in the house, and according to the security registers she had been staying there for two to three days, so he had to be used to her by that time.... There was no forced entry. The only place there could have been entrance was the open bathroom window, and we did everything we could to see if anyone went through it, and it was impossible. So I thought it was an open-and-closed case. He shot her—that’s it. I was convinced that it was murder, and I told my colonel, ‘You already read him his rights, so you have to arrest him.’ ”
Botha went into the garage, where Pistorius, in a bloody shirt and shorts, wearing his prosthetic legs, was sitting on a gym bench, surrounded by training equipment. “His head was in his hands, and he was crying. There was blood on him, but his hands were clean. We said, ‘Did you wash your hands?’ And he said, ‘Yes, because they were full of blood.’ ”
“Do you remember me?,” Botha asked him, referring to the time four years earlier when he had arrested Pistorius on the assault charge. “Yes,” replied Pistorius.
“What happened?”
“I thought it was a burglar,” said Pistorius.
But the evidence indicated intentional murder, Botha told me. Why would a burglar lock himself in a bathroom cubicle? Why would the victim be shot through her shorts if she was using the toilet in the middle of the night? And why would she have taken her cell phone into the bathroom at three A.M.? (Unsupported media speculation would swirl that Reeva had received a tweet or a text from the South African Rugby star Francois Hougaard, a previous boyfriend, and that that may have ignited Pistorius’s rage.) According to Botha, the bullets had struck her on the right side, which meant that she was not sitting on the toilet but probably crouching behind the locked door. From the location of the bullet casings in the bathroom, the detective believed that Pistorius had fired at the door from less than five feet away. By standing straight and imagining himself pointing a gun at the door, Botha believed that the bullet holes were slanted down, which would indicate that Pistorius had been wearing his prosthetic legs, not, as he would later claim, that he was on his stumps. But why would he enter the very area where he believed the burglar was lurking and begin firing, instead of grabbing his girlfriend and running for cover?
“It can’t be. It’s impossible,” Botha remembered thinking after hearing Oscar’s burglary story. Because of his certainty and his pursuit of evidence to prove it, the detective now feels, blame shifted from Pistorius to him. Botha was soon removed from the case, and shortly after that he resigned from the police force. His professional standing and reputation came under fire, he said, because he had not been able even to consider that Pistorius had thought Steenkamp was a burglar before shooting her down in cold blood.

Against All Odds

Oscar Pistorius overcame a severe disability—he was born without fibula bones, which necessitated the amputation of both of his legs below the knee when he was 11 months old—by ignoring it. “Your brother puts on his shoes, you put on your legs,” his mother repeatedly told him, inspiring him with her insistence that his disability didn’t define him. His parents’ divorce when he was 6, followed by his mother’s death from an adverse drug reaction when he was 15, left Pistorius shattered. Estranged from his father, he and his brother were like “rudderless boats,” he wrote in Blade Runner: My Story, his 2008 memoir. He had the dates of his mother’s birth and death tattooed on his arm, and he turned a message she once sent him into a mantra: “The real loser is never the person who crosses the finishing line last. The real loser is the person who sits on the side, the person who does not even try to compete.” No other woman seemed to measure up to Oscar’s mother; his autobiography recounts romantic disappointments and breakups. His only true love became the running track, on which he became “the fastest man on no legs” and “a symbol, a moment in history, a one-man parade of the human will,” according to published reports. “At first, Oscar Pistorius seems like someone who has stepped out of the future,” wrote NBC’s Brian Brown. “His gait has the quality of a giant cat on the prowl, if such a creature were equipped with flipper-like feet instead of paws As Oscar approaches, model handsome, outfitted in the latest Oakley shades and sleek Nike sportswear, with an admirably sculpted upper body, you can understand why anyone might wonder if this is a peek into our evolutionary future: half man, half machine.” ------------------------- Vanity Fair