I know we’re past the super-sleuths stage and into the gory blood-soaked rags crime-scene pictures, but:
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
Holmes (Sherlock, no less!): To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
Holmes:
That was the curious incident.
(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
Silver Blaze, 1892)
It is with this in mind that I wonder - more in hope than expectation - whether we will soon be moving from "B is for Blood" and “C is for Cricket Bat” to “D is for Dog” in this rather strange trial.
As many will know, Oscar had/has two large and probably quite ferocious dogs (whom we shall hereinafter refer to as “Rover” and “Bruno” in order to preserve their privacy under South African Animal Rights legislation), which were allegedly loose in the Chateau Pistorius yard on the night of the unfortunate demise of Miss Steenkamp.
Since most of the prosecution witnesses so far have been pretty damned useless and have folded up under even gentle questioning from the defence counsel, I feel it is time to up the stakes and bring in the canine witnesses to tell us:
a) what they heard,
b) whether they barked during the night,
c) whether either one of them has a high-pitched bark that could have been construed to be a female yelp,
and
d) whether they have a history of being silenced by ladder-carrying burglars bribing them with large pieces of sirloin steak.
I ask this not out of flippancy, but for a pertinent reason.
Whilst I think Oscar is clearly a gung-ho, arrogant a-s-hole and also an extraordinarily troubled young man, I’m not 100% convinced he is guilty of premeditated murder. Pathological stupidity, possibly.
Right now, even if he
WERE guilty, the amateurish bungling of the police investigation, the shoddy forensics, and the apathetic pleading of the State’s case by the lead counsel for the prosecution makes me think Oscar may nevertheless very well get a culpable homicide sentence and nothing more.
Now like I said, I don’t know whether this result might be exactly what
SHOULD happen, but I would nonetheless very much like to see Oscar Pistorius provide a full and frank explanation of why he imagined a burglar could be climbing up to his open bathroom window under the eyes of two fiercely loyal attack dogs in his garden, without the dogs notifying him – and the entire gated community and most of Pretoria – of the burglar’s presence.
That is what guard dogs
DO.
Often they will also bark at squirrels, cats, raccoons, and the paper-boy, but I’m pretty sure they’d bark vigorously at a shifty dude carrying a ladder round to the back of the house at 3 a.m. On the OTHER hand, I’m not quite so convinced they’d react the same way to shouting or an argument going on in the house.
It has already been established, I believe, that Pistorius was not really in a “just-woken-from-deep-sleep, woozy, and massively paranoid” state at this moment, for he has affirmed in his original bail affidavit that in the early morning hours, he “
woke up to move a fan from the balcony and to close the sliding doors in the bedroom”.
It was only after performing this action, which to my mind requires the person be pretty much what we humans generally refer to as “awake”, that he says he heard a noise from his bathroom.
Assuming - as we must - that he was more or less compos mentis, why on earth did he immediately believe his dogs had failed him so badly that he needed to go to the bathroom armed with a 9mm?
Did he forget he had two dogs?
Were they in fact (unbeknown to all but Oscar) less-than-useless guard dogs, able to be seduced by any Tom, Dick, and Harry with a lump of red meat or a friendly Labrador b*t*h in heat?
Did he think they had (both) been killed by the alleged shifty intruder (poisoned, perhaps)?
Or is this just a fundamental weakness in Oscar’s narrative of his trotting off and blowing away whatever “bad guy” was lurking in the bathroom?
Because nobody but a complete klutz – or alternatively someone out of their skull on coke, ‘roids, and bad mescaline (do we have tox screens on OP and RS, by the way?) - would have believed anyone could
really be climbing in that window.
So why the hell should WE believe it? At least the story should be examined under the microscope.
I say, put the boerboel* and the bull terrier on the stand!!!!!
P.S. I did actually bring this subject up just over a year ago, HERE:
Oscar Pistorius shoots and kills his girlfriend, charged with murder - Page 51 - Websleuths Crime Sleuthing Community
But it’s probably never going to go anywhere.
*”A large, mastiff dog breed from South Africa, bred for the purpose of guarding the homestead” (so you’d kind of expect it to…well…guard, wouldn’t you?)
