It does not end the issue for me. The way I have put things together now is that Mr Myers identified the body as being Reeva but that does not mean that he could see if her skull was fractured or not. They probably did not want him to know before they told Reeva's parents. Reeva's parents never saw the body but were shown photos of it and then told that she was hit with a cricket bat.
So what was the sequence of events?
While Pistorius is asleep, Reeva on iPad gets message after midnight from Hougaard to wish her Happy Valentine's Day
Pistorius wakes up and sees Reeva on iPad and gets iPad from her to invade her privacy by looking at messages.
2-3am He goes into a jealous rage. They argue. She says she is leaving him. He locks bedroom door so she cannot escape and hides key from her.
Argument escalates and he hits her on head with cricket bat. She screams. Her skull is fractured. He reaches for gun and shoots her in the hip as she is running into the bathroom. She locks door of toilet. He realises he has overstepped the mark and he does not want anyone to know how violent he was with her. She has to die.
He waits 17 minutes while concocting his intruder story.
He has legs on. He goes to toilet and fires 3 shots.
Let me just get this straight. I'm not denying the possibility it
COULD have gone down like this, but there are one or two stumbling-blocks unless of course you have an a priori conviction that the perp is a premeditated killer.
In the first place, having been beaten about the head with 3lb (1.4 kg) of willow wood swung at you with criminal intent to harm you, and to the point where you not only have a fractured skull but your skull is "crushed" (sic), and THEN having been shot in the hip, how do you run to the bathroom?
A blow sufficient to fracture a person's skull (let alone crush it) is also quite likely to lay them out or at least make them sufficiently groggy that they wouldn't be running anywhere in a hurry.
Furthermore, since to the best of my understanding all the bullets and casings discovered have been determined to be in the area of the bathroom itself (down a corridor with a right-angle bend in it, thus making it a little more difficult for the casings to be accidentally kicked into the bedroom), where is the evidence for an earlier shot at Reeva in the bedroom? I haven't seen this theory of one shot followed by three more put forward in open court - in fact it's sort of died the death ever since about February 18th/19th, when a few newspapers ran with it.
Has a shell casing been found in the bedroom?
Has a bullet been dug out of the bedroom wall?
If I have understood correctly all the material that has been made public in a court of law so far (thus discounting rumour and speculation and salacious tabloid gossip), there are four bullets accounted for, either found inside Reeva, in walls after having passed through her, or that one found subsequently by the defence forensics team (where precisely that was, I'm not sure, except it was in the WC - bowl, floor, wall, your guess is as good as mine... - and it's still unclear by all accounts whether that was a
bullet or a
casing - the terminology fluctuates from one article to the next).
Nothing I have read so far, save in the very early stages before the court hearing began, has firmed up the story of a first "wounding" shot in the bedroom. Or have I missed something vital here?
As for the locked bedroom door, mentioned specifically in the affadavit, where is the bit about "he locks the door and takes away the key"?
Perhaps I am here giving the perp the benefit of too much doubt, but my understanding of this - in the context of all we have to go on - is that the door to "the rest of the house" was routinely locked at night by folks in scary bits of SA in order to stave off the countless hostile intruders/rapists/murderers found there. It's sometimes even called by the grisly term "rape door" (see some earlier posts on here or in the earlier thread), and it is NOT to facilitate rape by the bedroom's occupant.
I'm by no means certain these intruders are as common as that, and certainly the Silver Lakes complex seems to have been well enough protected, but there is no accounting for some people's turbo-charged paranoia.
All the same, have I missed something here? Has "the key" ever been mentioned in court?
Indeed,
IS there a key as such, or is this a bedroom door that is unlockable by turning a latch from the inside of the bedroom (more logical) but that offers privacy from without?
I am in the happy position of never having had to look at the exit wound of a 9mm slug shot through somebody's head, but I would imagine the skull on that side is a bit of an ugly mess. If I were a beat copper or paramedic giving a breathless report to a mate that was then picked up by the newspapers in the hours after the shooting, I might well say her skull was "crushed". I bet it wasn't a pretty sight.
Having a "bloodied cricket bat" on the scene and presumably taken away as evidence also offers plenty of scope for media speculation. One hopes that in due course we shall get a satisfactory resolution of this, with either woodchips from the toilet door or fibres from Reeva being found embedded in it. Until that time, I'd prefer to keep an open mind.
Reeva's half-brother
Adam Steenkamp, by the way, has already firmly scotched the claims that police ever told the family she'd been bludgeoned with a bat. Why he would do that is up to you, but if it's all a clever ruse to get the defence thinking they've won, well, I think we're in the realm of reaching a bit.
EDIT: Here's a link, too.
http://www.anorak.co.uk/349029/sports/oscar-pistorius-did-the-daily-mail-lie-about-the-bloody-cricket-bat-and-reevas-head-injuries.html/
To some extent I'm sceptical about all this stuff simply BECAUSE of the utterly dire quality of the publications it keeps popping to the surface in... The
Daily Mail is not much more nourishing than a Corn Flakes packet, and is mainly aimed at people who like to read their news off Corn Flakes packets. By the same token, of course, I should be sceptical of
The Sun's reporting of Adam's denial, but the difference is that that is a deliberately NON-sensational claim - it plays DOWN the story rather than fanning the flames... That's not normally
The Sun's style.
