Seeing how excerpts have been posted here from books, I don't see an issue with posting the entire article from The Times. There's not much there that we don't already know anyway.
Part 1.
They waited 20 months for justice. This week, Oscar Pistorius was sentenced to five years in prison for killing their daughter, Reeva. In an exclusive interview, June and Barry Steenkamp talk about how theyve coped and why they fear they may never know what really happened
This is the first time I have seen June Steenkamp smile. She is sitting at the far side of a long wooden table overlooking a swimming pool in the shady courtyard of a guesthouse, which has become her second home in Pretoria.
The avenues outside are flush with jacaranda blossoms. Pupils from Pretoria Boys High School, which is just across the road, are trickling through the gates in their old-fashioned uniforms: short-sleeved khaki shirts and ties, matching khaki shorts and tan socks pulled up to their knees.
It was as a pupil there that her daughters killer, Oscar Pistorius, first discovered he could run.
June Steenkamp has stayed in this small, discreet guesthouse many times since March, when South Africas national hero went on trial for murder. It was here that shed wake up at dawn every morning during the trial and steel herself to face the worlds media and the double amputee, known as the Blade Runner, accused of shooting dead her daughter, Reeva, a model, in the early hours of Valentines Day last year.
For much of the past seven months I have sat one row behind June and the entourage of relatives, friends and womens league supporters, in the North Guateng High Court, as we heard, in unsparing detail, how four hollow-tipped bullets tore into Reevas body and blew the brains out of her skull. The courtroom gasped as one when pictures flashed up on television screens of Reevas broken head. We watched Pistorius sob and vomit. Yet we were spared the burden of being the victims mother.
Five hundred and seventy four days after that night, and following a trial that lasted six months, Pistorius was acquitted of premeditated murder but convicted on the lesser charge of culpable homicide, the South African term for manslaughter. In a tense courtroom, Judge Thokozile Masipa ruled the state had failed to prove Pistorius knew it was Reeva when he opened fire through the locked toilet door of his apartment in an exclusive gated community in Pretoria. Throughout the trial, he said he mistook his girlfriend of three months for an intruder.
He said pulling the trigger was an accident. What? Four times an accident? June rails in her book, Reeva: a Mothers Story. He said Reeva did not scream, but she would definitely have screamed. I know my daughter and she was very vocal.
In court, Junes lips were always pursed. Her eyes gazed inscrutably at whoever addressed the judge. Sometimes it seemed as if she had been sedated, but tells me now she only took tranquillisers to help her through the funeral, which she can barely remember. The press referred to me as Stoneface, she recalls. But a lot of people said they admired my composure. When the pictorial evidence was too graphic to bear, the states lawyers would throw her a glance to warn her to look away or take off her glasses. Just once, she didnt turn in time and saw a picture of Pistorius, topless, standing on his prosthetic legs, drenched in Reevas blood.
Hi, is all she says by way of greeting, but her eyes light up and her lips part into a smile. Shes just being polite, but it casts away the death mask she has donned in public. Suddenly, after all these months, she seems more human and her grief more real. I think I have a way of coping and keeping things in; thats the only way I have survived this, she explains. But I think once all this is over its going to ... Its all going to come rushing back and things are going to be even harder. She lets out a sigh as her voice trails off and she contemplates the future.
You can laugh about some things, the 68-year-old says. Its not like you are miserable all the time. Its just this wrenching pain that you get in your heart. She pauses. And your soul. Thats what it is.
At times her pain was so intense, she thought she might be going insane.
This is going to sit with us for the rest of our life. Its never going to be right. Because shes not with us. Its always there. The minute your eyes open in the morning, or if you wake up in the middle of the night, there it is. She often wakes at around 3am, the time when Reeva died.
Almost 50 years after June left Lancashire, theres no trace of Blackburn in her accent. She moved to Cape Town, aged 19, and has never been back. It was Cape Town where she met her second husband, Barry, Reevas father. He is sitting at the table, leaning on his forearms as he does in court. With a bushy white beard and a publicans gut (they run a working-class restaurant in Port Elizabeth called the Barking Spider), the retired racehorse trainer looks a little like Father Christmas. He heaves himself round to greet me.
Barry, 71, has suffered two strokes since his daughter died and he was only well enough to attend the trial in time for the closing arguments in August, six months after it first started. As soon as he gets cross or upset about anything, he has to put these tablets under his tongue so he wont have a heart attack, June explains to me, as if he isnt here. The first day he attended court he took three, she says.
They lived apart for 14 years, but never got divorced and moved back in together in 2008, after burglars broke into Junes home on a night when Reeva had been visiting from Johannesburg. Reeva said it wasnt safe and forced her parents back together. Fragile marriages might have cracked under the trauma theyve endured, but she says they have grown closer. Barry sits smoking and only chimes in occasionally. We are happy. We are very close, his wife says.
Both have children from their previous marriages who live in England. Reeva, their only child together, was born 18 years after Junes first daughter, Simone. Barry has a son, Adam. Reeva was unexpected, June admits. I think she was a gift from God.
They have a recurring image of Reeva, who was 29 when she died. It is the thought of her terrified and alone in the small toilet cubicle, pleading for her life or screaming in agony once she had been shot. June: Both of us are haunted by the same nightmare. The vision of Reeva suffering this terrible trauma. Her terror and helplessness. Her yells for help piercing the silent night air.
Her husband imagines her begging for her life. He agonises over what was going through her mind: Where is anyone? Who is going to save me? 
There are two lawyers at the table with their laptops out: Dup de Bruyn and Tania Koen, who have acted as spokesmen, gatekeepers and pseudo-celebrity agents since these grieving parents were thrust into the limelight last year. Were here to talk about her book, de Bruyn reminds us. Weve got a contract on the financials so you cant touch on that.
In the last days of the sentencing, the Steenkamps were again in the headlines. Gerrie Nel, the prosecutor known as Pit bull, revealed Pistorius had paid the Steenkamps 6,000 rand a month (£340) since March 2013. He also offered Reevas parents a one-off payment of 375,000 rand (£21,000) from the sale of his car, which Nel denounced as blood money. De Bruyn says the Steenkamps rejected the second offer and plan to repay the monthly stipends, because their circumstances had changed.
June admits in the book they always had money worries and that was stressful and draining. At the point when Reeva was murdered they were penniless. They were indigent, de Bruyn says. Throughout Reevas childhood, when Barry ran a livery stable, the family was poor. As long as I can remember, they really battled, Reevas cousin Kim Martin told the sentencing hearing. People tend not to pay you, and Barry would never turn a horse away. They had moved from Cape Town to the Eastern Cape where Barry was bankrupted and forced to close his stables. After the funeral, when it was revealed in the press that the couple were broke, their landlady served them with two months notice for fear that her rent would not be paid.
Reeva was their pension. She used to say that she was working to look after us in our old age, recalls her mother.
In their last conversation, the night before she died, Reeva told her mother she had sent them money to pay for cable television, because she wanted them to see her in a reality TV show, Tropika Island of Treasure, which had been filmed in Jamaica and was just about to air.
Eighteen months on, as the trial of the century draws to a close, the Steenkamps are no longer poor. I have done some deals, says de Bruyn, in a thinly veiled reference to the book and the lucrative television interviews hes arranged on their behalf. Every time they have an interview they must go and live through the trauma of what they have experienced, and they suffer, says the lawyer in their defence.
And they need the money, so what is wrong in asking for something for that suffering?
