Part 2.
Are they exploiting Reeva’s death?
“I think she would have wanted us to have some money,” her mother says. “Imagine going through this and you are having no money for anything. Imagine going through this trauma, suffering, pain and having no money. Sometimes not even for food or anything. Struggling.”
The monthly stipends from Pistorius were supposed to be offset against any civil claim for compensation the Steenkamps might choose to make, but the court was told the couple have no plans to sue. Reeva’s mother suggests that’s because they don’t need to any more.
“Well, how long do you think we’re going to live?” she asks. “I’m 68 and Barry’s 71. How long do we have? Without money, how would we have done that? How would we have survived? It was a matter of survival at that stage.”
The money they’ve made is theirs, but once the trial is over they hope to start fundraising for the Reeva Steenkamp Foundation. She bangs the table in excitement at its very mention. “That’s gonna be …” she says, before she seems to catch herself. They hope to run two women’s shelters, in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town – in South Africa a woman is killed by a partner every six hours. “There are very poor areas and they have got very little help for anything in that direction and I want to do it properly, you know,” she says.
At times the memoir reads like a scrapbook of doting memories. It draws on letters, school reports and keepsakes. Sometimes it’s Reeva’s CV. But in some way it is an attempt to redress the balance. Not only did they lose their daughter in a horrific, violent way, they had to watch her reduced to “Oscar Pistorius’s girlfriend” in the deluge of coverage that followed. During the trial, her mother notes how Reeva was referred to as “the deceased” in the sterile language of the court.
“Reeva has become sort of invisible,” she says. “She’s a person. She’s somebody who’s loved and somebody who’s going to be missed for ever and ever.”
Yet what June hid in court, behind her stoic mask, she reveals in print with abundant frankness. In her view, Pistorius is “arrogant”, “moody”, “volatile” and “combustible”. He is “gun-toting”, “trigger-happy”, “possessive”, “vague”, “evasive” and “shifty”. She does not believe his story. “It was Reeva’s bad luck that she met him, because sooner or later he would have killed someone. I do believe that.”
Judge Masipa, a former crime reporter who became the second woman appointed to the High Court in South Africa, said Pistorius had been a “poor witness”. But she concluded that he gave a version that “could reasonably, possibly be true … In criminal law that is all that is required for an acquittal,” as she acquitted him of the murder charge with its mandatory life sentence.
“I wasn’t happy with it at all,” June says. Her voice seems more measured than her words deserve. “I don’t think that was justice for Reeva at all.”
According to the athlete’s version of events, he was in love with Reeva. On the night she died, she came to his house in Pretoria’s exclusive Silver Woods estate and cooked him a meal of chicken and vegetables before they went upstairs. She did some yoga on the bedroom floor, while he lay on the bed browsing the internet and making phone calls. They fell asleep together sometime after 10pm.
It was a hot summer evening and the balcony doors were open, where two fans blew air across the bed. Oscar said he woke around 3am and Reeva asked him, “Can’t you sleep, Baba?”
He went to the balcony, on his stumps, to move the fans and close the doors, then went towards a chest of drawers to obscure a light glowing on his hi-fi, which he told the court had been disturbing him, but before he could drape her jeans across the light he heard the sound of a window sliding open in the bathroom. “That’s the moment that everything changed,” he said.
Afraid it was an intruder who had scaled a ladder to break in and harm them, he scrambled back to his side of the bed, grabbed his Taurus 9mm pistol and hobbled to the bathroom, screaming at the intruder, “Get the
* out of my house!”
He saw the bathroom window was open. The toilet door was shut. Then he heard a noise, coming from the toilet cubicle, which he believed was the intruder coming out to attack him. He fired four shots “without thinking”.
The screams the neighbours heard were his, his lawyers said, once he realised his mistake. The other “gunshots,” which came later, were the sounds of a cricket bat as he battered down the door to try to save Reeva’s life.
Reeva’s parents are unconvinced. “He’s the only one who knows the truth,” June says.
__________
In the three months that they knew each other, Reeva and Pistorius had become South Africa’s red-carpet couple. She had broken up with her long-term boyfriend Warren Lahoud, the man her parents thought she’d marry, a few months earlier. There was a short-lived dalliance with Francois Hougaard, the South Africa scrum half. When she appeared at the South African Sports Awards on Pistorius’s arm in November 2012, her friends feared she had become a “trophy girlfriend”.
The athlete told his trial that she struggled with the press scrutiny that came with the relationship. June scoffs that this is “rubbish”. On the contrary, Reeva enjoyed the attention, and perhaps it clouded her judgment. “How much of an unattractive attitude did she dismiss because he was a golden boy,” June wonders in the book. “How much was she flattered to have won his heart?”
Pistorius told the court they were planning a life together, but June thinks Reeva had “nagging doubts about their compatibility”. “She had confided to me that she hadn’t slept with him. They’d shared a bed, but she was scared to take the relationship to that level … She wouldn’t want to sleep with Oscar if she wasn’t sure. I believe their relationship was coming to an end. In her heart of hearts, she didn’t think it was making either of them happy.”
The pathologist, Professor Gert Saayman, who carried out Reeva’s autopsy said food in her stomach suggested she had eaten around 1am, when Pistorius said they were both asleep. Her mother is also troubled by the photographs that showed Reeva’s jeans strewn across the bedroom floor, because Reeva was a “neat freak”. “She would never leave them on the floor. She was tidy to the extreme.”
In the book, Reeva’s mother dissects every text, every tweet, every email, for hidden meaning in the brief relationship. She concludes that it was volatile, unpredictable. Barry recalls that when the police read out messages from the WhatsApp messaging service, it was as though their daughter was “talking in court”. Reeva said Pistorius scared her, and that he picked on her “incessantly”. In her parents’ version of events, their daughter was gradually being ground down by Pistorius’s demands.
Reeva, her parents say, was unhappy when she arrived at Oscar’s house. CCTV footage, according to her mother, shows her looking miserable as she approaches the compound. Something was brewing. By 1am, when Reeva ate, the couple were fighting, which is backed up by a neighbour who heard two people arguing from 1.56am. “There is no doubt in our minds that something went horribly wrong, something upset her so terribly that she hid behind a locked door with two mobile phones,” June writes.
Reeva was shot wearing a sleeveless black top and grey tracksuit shorts, “clothes for a summer’s day, not her night clothes”. She was facing the door when the first bullet struck her hip, “probably pleading”.
