Chase Your Shadow

by John Carlin

  And yet, Roux said, the charitable works Pistorius had done showed that he had it in him to be valuable to society. ‘He wants to make good as far as possible,’ Roux concluded. ‘Serious regard should be given to a community-based sentence so something good can come out of this.’

  Nel, replying to Roux, repeated for the third time in the week his charge that house arrest would be a ‘shockingly inappropriate’ response to Pistorius’s crime. Yet he stopped short of asking for the fifteen-year sentence which was typically the maximum available in cases of culpable homicide.

  ‘The minimum term that society will be happy with will be ten years’ imprisonment,’ Nel said. ‘This is a serious matter. The negligence borders on intent. Ten years is the minimum.’

  Once again, Pistorius wept as Nel conjured up a picture of the crime he had committed. ‘The deceased died in a small cubicle behind a closed door,’ Nel said. ‘Three bullets ripped through her body . . . it must have been horrific.’

  Nel noted that some witnesses had said, ‘Please don’t break the accused’; yet what the court should not forget was that Pistorius had broken an entire family. As to Roux’s point that Pistorius had endured excessively negative media coverage, Nel was not sympathetic, offering instead a whining parody of Pistorius’s complaint: ‘I’m a victim, feel sorry for me, the media victimized me. When I wanted the media to capture my brilliant athletic performance, I loved them; when the media write about my trial, it’s unfair.’

  Nel also attacked Pistorius for falling back on his disability as a reason to be spared the punishment he deserved. ‘I find it disturbing,’ Nel said, ‘that a person who fought to compete with able-bodied athletes now shamelessly uses disability in mitigation.’

  Arguing strongly for a jail sentence, confessing that he battled to keep his own emotions in check, Nel declared, ‘We shouldn’t fail the parents. We shouldn’t fail society. Society may lose its trust in the court.’

  Nel ended his appeal to the judge, who adjourned proceedings for four days until Tuesday, October 21, the date on which she would at long last deliver her sentence.

  *

  The Pistorius family arrived in court just after 9 a.m. on what would be the forty-ninth and final day of the trial, with Aimée and Carl telling reporters sitting behind them that they would stand by their brother no matter what – and that whatever punishment he received from the judge, he would never get over what he had done. June and Barry Steenkamp said they would never get over their daughter’s death either. Pistorius walked in wearing his customary dark suit, white shirt and black tie, but this time carrying a bunch of white roses he had received from a supporter outside the court. The green plastic bucket remained at his feet, but this time he looked as if he would not need it. He sat down alone in quiet contemplation, his face revealing nothing, even though he knew the chances were high that he would not be spending that night in his comfortable bed at the plush cottage in the grounds of his uncle Arnold’s large home – that for the first time in twenty months he might be back in a jail cell, to remain there alone with his demons but side by side with other criminals, for who knew how long?

  Judge Masipa walked in, listed Pistorius’s two convictions – culpable homicide and discharging a firearm in a public place – and declared: ‘The decision on sentence is mine, and mine alone.’ The views of the two assessors who had sat next to her during the trial did not come into it. It was up to her to take into account the chief factors determining the appropriate legal response: punishment, retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation. The task she faced in sentencing also concerned finding ‘the right balance’ in the interests of society. But she acknowledged that the process of sentencing was ‘unscientific’, allowing for reasonable people to arrive at different conclusions.

  Pistorius sat bolt upright, staring straight ahead at the judge, still betraying no emotion, as if steeling himself to take on the chin whatever sentence she handed down.

  The further Judge Masipa went into the reading of her judgment, the more it seemed Pistorius should prepare for the worst. Twenty minutes into the court session she delivered what sounded like a terminal blow to the argument made in favor of house arrest by Annette Vergeer. ‘Her evidence,’ the judge said, ‘was slapdash, disappointing and had a negative impact on her credibility as a witness’. By contrast, the evidence put forward by Zach Modise on behalf of the Department of Prisons had been convincing. Modise had been a good witness, the judge said, and while it was evident that the prison system was not perfect, it was ‘progressive and professional’.

  ‘I am satisfied,’ Judge Masipa declared, ‘that the Correctional Services Department is suitably equipped to deal with inmates with special needs.’ Noting that she felt ‘unease’ at what she called ‘the overemphasis’ on Pistorius’s vulnerability in the evidence put forward by the defense, she believed him to have ‘excellent coping skills’. Making it clear that she did not believe Pistorius merited exceptionally lenient treatment, she added, ‘It would be a sad day for this country if an impression was created that there is one law for the poor and disadvantaged and another for the rich and famous.’

  Still more ominously for Pistorius, the judge said that the prosecution had been correct in characterizing his crime on the night he shot Reeva as ‘grossly negligent’, so much so that ‘it bordered on dolus eventualis’. In acknowledging the fine line in this case between manslaughter and murder, the judge was all but pre-empting the nature – if not the length – of the sentence she meant to pass. Pistorius’s facial expression began to alter. Shifting his eyes away from the judge and down onto the floor, he looked anxious and increasingly woebegone.

  Judge Masipa did acknowledge that Pistorius’s remorse was genuine, that his conduct immediately after the incident in particular had shown ‘he wanted the deceased to live’, and she did say that she would take his disability and vulnerability into account. Yet she said that the sentence proposed by Vergeer and the social worker Joel Maringa ‘would not be appropriate in this matter’.

  ‘I am of the view that a non-custodial sentence would send a wrong message to the community,’ the judge said.

  Jail it would be, then, and all that remained to be known was how long the sentence would be. Before getting there, she made a point of addressing the Steenkamp family’s sorrow.

  ‘Young, vivacious and full of life . . . a promising young woman who cared deeply for family, who was full of hope for the future, and lived life to the full. The loss of life cannot be reversed. Nothing I do or say today can reverse what happened to the deceased and to her family. Hopefully this sentence shall provide some sort of closure to the family . . . so they can move on with their lives.’

  Then Judge Masipa instructed Pistorius to stand up and delivered her sentence. On the firearms charge: three years in jail, suspended for five years. On the conviction for culpable homicide: five years in prison.

  There were no gasps, no shaking of heads, no sound or detectable movement at all in the courtroom. Not even from Pistorius himself, who seemed to have turned to stone, his face revealing no emotion at all as the judge left the courtroom, slowly and haltingly, for the last time. He sat down, knowing now that he would not be going back to his safe and comfortable cottage for a long time. He turned and, just before two policemen led him down into a holding cell below the court, he reached out both hands to his uncle Arnold and his aunt Lois, his eyes cast down. All that was left for him now was to do as he would at his mother’s or his older brother’s bidding when he was at school and he was teased by the other children, or when his blisters were so sore when he woke up in the morning that the pain was too great for him to stand up, or when, early on in his time at Pretoria Boys High, he had kept going on that trek across the bush on a blazing summer’s day, even though his legs were chafed and bleeding at the point where the stumps and the prosthetics met – he had to ‘man up’.

  There would be no appeal. Barry Roux, who all in all had done mightily well by his clie
nt, confirmed as much. Pistorius would begin on the long road towards social rehabilitation – if rehabilitation were possible – by sending a message to the public that he accepted his punishment without complaint, Roux said. But, added Roux – who was owed legal fees by his client but, as he had indicated earlier, had little expectation that they would be fully paid – there was some good news for Pistorius. By his estimate, Pistorius would be eligible for release into house arrest after ten months in prison.

  Speaking on the street outside the courtroom, Arnold Pistorius read out a statement expressing his family’s feelings now that the long ordeal was over.

  ‘Today a new season starts for us as a family,’ he said. ‘Not just the Pistorius family alone, but the Steenkamp family. It has been a harrowing twenty months. We are all emotionally drained and exhausted.

  ‘We accept the judgment. Oscar will embrace this opportunity to pay back to society.

  ‘I want to say something as an uncle. I hope Oscar will start his own healing process as we walk down the path of restoration. As a family we are ready to support and guide Oscar as he serves his sentence.’

  The question now remaining was how the Steenkamps would react. If they reacted as negatively as they had to the culpable homicide verdict six weeks earlier, public controversy would continue to rage on their behalf, and Nel might find himself under pressure to lodge an appeal

  As the courtroom emptied, and all that remained of Pistorius’s presence were the white roses on the bench where he had sat and the empty green bucket beneath it, the Steenkamps’ lawyer, Dup de Bruyn, provided reporters with an answer. Reeva’s parents, he said, were ‘satisfied’ with the sentence. Barry Steenkamp then confirmed what De Bruyn had said, declaring himself to be ‘very satisfied’. June Steenkamp, smiling wanly, said, ‘It’s right.’ She added that the sentence had given her ‘a sort of closure’, but there would be no final closure without Reeva, ‘unless you can magic her back’.

  Possible further cause for satisfaction, if not comfort, for the Steenkamp family came later in the day in the form of a statement from the International Paralympic Committee saying that Pistorius would not be allowed to return to competition until 2019, the year his sentence would officially end. By that time he would be thirty-three years old, which meant that his athletics career was well and truly over. Over, too, was any possibility that his contracts with Nike and other commercial sponsors would ever be resumed. The punishment he had received in court could have been much worse – and it was certainly far more benign than he had feared, or than most people had expected when the trial had begun seven months and eighteen days earlier – yet Barry Roux had been right in his closing arguments the Friday before when he had said that Pistorius was ‘broke and broken’, that there was ‘nothing left’ of the icon he had once been.

  An hour after Judge Masipa had passed her sentence Pistorius was seen exiting the court building by a side entrance, surrounded by police, before being led into a yellow and white armored vehicle and taken away to begin his new life at Kgosi Mampuru prison – twenty minutes’ drive from the house he no longer owned at Silver Woods Estate, where, in the early morning of Valentine’s Day 2013, in a moment of criminal recklessness, he had sealed his own and Reeva Steenkamp’s fates.

  Millions of people had been gripped by the case from the morning the shooting happened. Most had made up their minds from the beginning as to why Pistorius did it, and then proceeded to follow the trial having taken one side or the other. A very few had personal reasons for wanting to believe one version or another. Among these were Pistorius’s family and friends like Ebba Guðmundsdóttir and her mother, Sigga Hanna Jóhannesdóttir. On the other side were the Steenkamp family and friends of Reeva’s, whose understandable need it was to seek comfort for their loss in the punishment of the individual who had occasioned it. For the majority who had no personal stake in the trial’s outcome, each chose to believe the version that best accommodated their need to find some justice and sense in the chaos of life. For some, making sense of Reeva Steenkamp’s death meant seeing Pistorius as a murderer; for others, it meant seeing him as a hero who had succumbed to one tragic error of judgment.

  South Africa itself provokes similarly contradictory responses. It is a country that many people around the world have watched with interest, seeing in its political evolution an experiment with lessons and repercussions for humanity as a whole. During apartheid, the South African drama was regarded as a morality play in which the parties representing good and evil were clearly defined. Even the opposing sides in the Cold War were in agreement that apartheid was ‘a crime against humanity’. In that morality play Mandela had played the role of the prince-redeemer. He was the larger-than-life figure who had set up the expectation when he assumed power in 1994 that South Africa would live happily ever after, overcoming the legacy of racial injustice and building the foundations of an exemplary democracy. But that was South Africa’s heroic age, a time of forgiveness and reconciliation the likes of which the world had rarely seen. Mandela’s successors did not live up to his exalted image. Corruption set in, both moral and financial. People of meaner minds took power. The old idealism gave way to self-interest and greed. And thus for many people, inside South Africa and beyond, the experiment had failed. It turned out to be a great disappointment.

  Just like Pistorius. He had been a fairy-tale prince, handsome and charming. His story was one of the most unlikely in the history of sport. He had had his legs amputated at eleven months old and had run in the Olympic Games. South Africans of all races, weary of their political leaders, sought in him a hero to fill Mandela’s boots. Feted around the globe, he made them proud to be South African once again, as they had been proud when Mandela was head of state.

  After Pistorius killed Reeva Steenkamp, it became tempting to see him as a symbol not of South Africa at its best but at its violent, criminal, worst. That, as Judge Masipa’s verdict helped indicate, was to oversimplify. Pistorius did remain a symbol of South Africa, but of a South Africa that was complex, ambiguous and could no longer claim to play a heroic role on the world stage. In 2014, Pistorius offered a more faithful mirror of the country than did Mandela.

  The trial had heard from a defense witnesses that there were ‘two Oscars’. There were two South Africas. One was uplifting; the other was frightening. One was made up of people who were unusually polite, who were generous, indomitable, forgiving and brave; the other, of people who were reckless, volatile, violent and hot-headed. South Africans’ politeness towards strangers was in part a self-defense mechanism, a response to an awareness that people might turn angry without obvious provocation.

  But if Pistorius were to have offered only a portrait of the country in which he was born, the story of his rise and fall would not have proved so compelling to the rest of the world. As hero and anti-hero, he offers an archetype to which all people can relate. He is an extreme case of an individual who has made the best of the cards that life has dealt him, but he has revealed himself to possess to an equally extreme degree the insecurities that all are prey to.

  His life story is archetypal, too, in its striking vulnerability to the random and the haphazard. He was cursed with cruel luck, but also blessed with immense good luck. His destiny at birth was never to be able to walk, or to do so haltingly at best. But because of a decision by his parents, which they might easily not have taken, and because of the uniquely driven mother it fell upon him to have, and because one day his grandmother dialed a number that led him to meet a young prosthetics specialist – who should have been a farmer – Pistorius ended up becoming one of the most celebrated athletes in the world. On the other hand, after his mother died there was no one around in his life with the authority or the wisdom to ground him, to see that he was a victim of his own success and that he needed help to come to terms honestly with his disability, with the limitations his mother had taught him to deny. He remained trapped in a floundering adolescence, too unfinished to stop the fame and
the money from going to his head. He was a teenager in an adult’s body, prone to foolish infatuations with women in whom he imagined he saw the image of his mother, irresponsibly susceptible to the allure of guns and fast cars.

  Yet that was not the whole story either, for he was impressively polished in his public presentation of himself and he could also be extraordinarily kind, considerate and empathetic – as the little Icelandic boy Haflidi, the Paralympic swimmer Tadhg Slattery, Samkelo Radebe, and his friends and admirers in Gemona del Friuli would attest.

  Early on in the Pistorius trial, a talk-show host on a Johannesburg radio station said he had recently talked to a retired judge who had told him there were two kinds of truth: ‘Legal truth, and truth truth’. The legal truth was narrow, selective and exclusive of both the good and the bad in Pistorius. Samkelo, who phoned Pistorius to congratulate him on the day he was acquitted of murder, was the one who said it was unjust to define his whole life in terms of the legal truth of the fatal crime he had committed in a few seconds of delirium. The ‘truth truth’ was that Pistorius was an enigma, a man of many masks. Jail, as one of his teenage fans had scrawled on the bus shelter outside the Pretoria High Court, did not have to be the end. In the silence of his cell he might find the time and mental space to ponder at last who he was, who he wanted to be and which mask fitted him best.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is the outcome of many people’s time, effort and kindness. So many individuals have I talked to in the task of assembling Chase Your Shadow that it would be an impossible act of memory to recall every single one. Thank you to all and apologies to those I omit to mention here.

  First, I must express my gratitude to my old friend Paul Greengrass. It was Paul who suggested to me the idea of writing this book in the first place and it was he who coached and encouraged me along the way, offering invaluable input on structure, point of view and what he calls ‘narrative pulse’. I cannot thank him enough.