by Mandy Wiener
Like other luxury residential complexes in the area, the Silver Stream estate on which Burger and Johnson live featured high walls topped with electrified fences, 24-hour security patrols and a guarded, access-controlled entrance. These enclaves for the new-rich and privileged provided sanctuary from crime as well as added privacy. A neighbour’s house, an electric security fence, a scattering of poplar trees and open stands separate them from Oscar’s dwelling and they have direct line of sight of his house. The prosecuting team believed the witnesses would be crucial pillars in their case, a strong opening hand to play. Only two people were present when Oscar shot Reeva. One of them was dead and only one person’s version existed, that of the accused.
Of the dozens of houses dotted around the crime scene, in the same plush estate as well as in neighbouring complexes, the state relied on only five people to testify. Their testimony challenged Oscar’s claim of mistaken identity, and submitted to the court the story of a fight that started at least two hours before the athlete used his firearm to shoot and kill his girlfriend.
The two men and three women were the closest Nel had to eyewitnesses – they could provide timelines and a recollection of the noises that roused them from their sleep. While one couple attests to the noises at 177 metres from the crime scene, neighbours who live right next door to Oscar, whom the state did not call to testify, were unable to support their claims. Burger and Johnson, the couple who live in a neighbouring estate; Dr Johan Stipp and his wife Annette who live in Silver Woods, with their bedroom overlooking the back of Oscar’s house where his bathroom windows are located; and Estelle van der Merwe, who lives with her husband diagonally across the road from the athlete, and was woken up two hours before the shooting to the sounds of a woman arguing.
From the evidence of these five witnesses, the state built a timeline of events that it believed reaffirmed the claim of an argument leading up to the shooting. This was, however, contested by the defence, casting doubt on, firstly, the order of the events that morning and, secondly, the interpretation of the sounds heard by the neighbours.
Michelle Burger was given the unenviable task of opening the state’s case as its first witness – media attention was peaking, the public gallery packed. In the chronology of events on the morning of the shooting, she wasn’t the first person to hear something suspicious, but on her strength of character and conviction, she was Nel’s strongest witness. Burger is a petite woman who arrived at court in an all-black outfit, with her brown hair neatly pinned back. Fastidious and well-prepared, the lecturer at the University of Pretoria had visited the courtroom a week earlier to familiarise herself with the surroundings. Like all the other neighbours who testified, she opted not to have footage of herself testifying broadcast – the world only heard her voice.
Burger described to the court being wrenched from her sleep by the distinct blood-curdling screams of a woman in desperate distress, which wafted across the open stands and through the wide open windows of her house, 177 metres from the crime scene. The same noises roused her husband, Charl Johnson, who immediately rushed to the balcony to better hear the commotion in the distance. In the still of the early morning, Burger could hear not only the screams of a woman calling for help, but then also a man calling for assistance, which immediately brought her to the conclusion that there was an armed robbery underway. Nel used this claim to argue that this was, in fact, Reeva calling out for help as she fled from her enraged boyfriend, who was pursuing her with his firearm.
In her scramble to summon help, Burger incorrectly called the security of the estate where she had previously lived, before handing the phone to her husband. The call was made at 3:16am and lasted 58 seconds. Johnson realised his wife’s mistake and cut the call. He returned to the balcony where the screams continued, but were soon snuffed out by what Burger described as the distinct cracks of four gunshots. As the shots came to an end, so did the woman’s screams. Feeling helpless, but believing neighbours closer to the source of the incident would help, the couple went back to bed but had a restless night.
Burger told the court that it was only days later that they decided to approach the police and offer their story because they had heard Oscar’s claim in the bail application that he had mistaken Reeva for an intruder. This did not correlate with their experience. Burger sobbed in court when Nel asked her about how she felt giving that statement to Van Aardt. ‘It was quite raw still. It was awful to hear her shout before the shots. It’s very difficult for me. When I’m in the shower I relive her shouts,’ she said emotionally.
Burger’s evidence showed that, crucially, there were screams before the gunshots. She had heard a female and a male before the four shots were fired – a claim that buttressed the state’s suggestion of a fight before the shooting.
Like an opening batsman to face a new bowler, Burger was the first to experience Barry Roux’s cross-examination. She proved to be resilient and firm on the stand, refusing to concede under intense questioning from the defence advocate. It was crucial for Roux to cast doubt on Burger’s version of what she had heard and the order in which she had heard it. The defence needed to show that what Burger and her husband thought were gunshots were, in fact, the sounds of Oscar breaking down the door with a cricket bat.
So it was that Roux introduced the court to the defence’s explanation for what witnesses had heard that morning. There had been two sets of sounds – the first volley being the gunshots, followed by a pause and screaming, and then the second set of noises being the cricket bat as it struck the wooden door. What Burger had thought to be gunshots were in fact the cricket bat.
Not surprisingly, Roux’s suggestion immediately sparked public debate: could the sound of a cricket bat striking a door be as loud as and so similar to a gunshot that the sounds could be confused? The state was dealing with witnesses woken up in the dead night in a panic, who claimed to have heard shots, but could they have been mistaken?
‘Could there have been four shots when you were still asleep and you heard the screaming afterwards?’ asked Roux, as he proposed this new timeline to the witness – that it was the gunshots that, unbeknown to her, had roused her. Burger maintained that what she had heard was screams.
On the face of it, Roux’s timeline seemed to make sense – it would later explain how some witnesses heard two sets of bangs – but could he convincingly explain how a cricket bat striking a door could be confused for a gunshot?
Roux’s focus turned to what Burger had heard. She had claimed that the woman was screaming during the four shots and that the voice faded away after the final shot. Could this have been Reeva inside the toilet cubicle, wounded and in pain from the first shot to her hip before being killed by the final three shots? Burger said that the last she heard of the petrified woman’s screams that woke her was briefly after the final shot rang out. The defence, however, worked at dismantling this claim by making yet another startling revelation: the screams were not Reeva’s – rather they were the accused’s.
‘If Mr Pistorius is really anxious and he screams,’ said Roux, ‘it sounds like a woman.’
He was suggesting that the noises the neighbours had heard that morning were not Reeva screaming for help, but Oscar shouting in desperation as he attempted to break down the door to get to his girlfriend. This would become a point of ridicule in the public debate of the trial – Oscar screamed like a girl.
Roux continued: ‘He was beyond himself, he was screaming after that [the shots], higher and lower and that is why you hear what you, that time of the morning, associate with a very anxious woman screaming and a man screaming, you heard both,’ said Roux. ‘It was the same person.’
The defence advocate also went on to question how the witness could testify with such certainty about the facts – at 177 metres away from the house, with a man who sounded like a woman when he was anxious, not hearing the voices simultaneously, and the cricket bat striking a door from inside the bathroom. Burger’s only experience with firea
rms was hearing shots on the odd occasion at night, and visiting a shooting range twice in her life when she personally shot a firearm. Roux referred to the statements made by neighbours who lived considerably closer to his client who had heard only the sounds of a man crying – Burger did not hear these. The advocate was determined to drive home the point: there were at least four more witnesses that the state did not include in its case who do not corroborate what a witness living in a neighbouring estate claimed to have heard. It was the probability of her claims that he was testing.
While Burger could not say what an English willow bat striking a meranti door sounded like, she was adamant that what she had heard that morning were gunshots. Roux was trying to show the court that Burger was unable to rule out this possibility because she was unfamiliar with the sound of the bat striking the door. But Michelle Burger wasn’t biting.
Burger also could not confirm or deny the claim that Oscar screams like a woman when he is anxious, and yet persisted with her evidence that it was a woman she had heard screaming that morning. She further denied the suggestion that it was the gunshots, on Oscar’s version of events, that could have woken her up.
Roux also suggested that it would make no sense for a man who is about to shoot his girlfriend to have called for help – hearing the man scream for help is inconsistent with the version of a man about to kill his girlfriend. Roux, of course, was pushing for the concession but Burger remained resilient, refusing to budge.
She remained convinced that what she heard were the desperate screams of a woman shortly before her death. No matter how many times Roux put it to her that what she had heard was Oscar shouting and a cricket bat hammering the door, there was no persuading her that anything other than her own version was the truth. Burger would not make even the slightest of concessions to Roux. So moved was she by the sound of the blood-curdling screams that what she heard that morning still haunts her. The trauma of the experience seeped through on the stand when her guard dropped momentarily, and she cried as she spoke of how the screams have stayed with her.
The prosecution was satisfied that it had played a strong opening hand with Burger testifying first. The evidence of her husband Charl Johnson and other neighbours would, they hoped, cement this.
Charl Johnson picked up his camera fitted with a zoom lens, fetched a step ladder and made the precarious ascent to the roof of his double-storey house in the Silver Stream estate. It offered him an unobscured, 360-degree view of the houses and gardens of the people living around him, but more importantly, he could see over the tops of his neighbour’s poplar trees to the grey-coloured house where Oscar had shot and killed his girlfriend – the source of the screams that had woken him up barely 12 hours earlier.
Johnson had told friends and colleagues of the horror he and his wife experienced, and had seen aerial footage on 24-hour news channels of the neighbouring estate. Still believing that what he had heard was an armed robbery – contrary to what was emerging as a case of Oscar mistaking Reeva for an intruder – he had to check for himself how close he was to the crime scene. Once he was finished on the roof, Johnson used a measuring tool on Google Maps to establish that he was about 150 metres from Oscar’s house. It all became clear to him – he believed it was Reeva’s last screams that woke him.
The IT project manager is a soft-spoken man. Unlike his wife, who exudes confidence and asserted her position in the witness box, he appeared timid and very uncomfortable on the stand. In the opening minutes of his evidence, he was asked to speak up several times by Nel, Roux and even the judge. Johnson recalled the events of 14 February as his wife did: waking up to the screams of a woman, standing on the balcony hearing both a man and woman calling for help, a failed attempt at calling security, and then hearing gunshots that brought the screaming to an end.
But there was one major difference between his evidence and that of his wife: Johnson remembers hearing about five or six gunshots. Nel had told the court early on in the trial that he would deal with discrepancies in witness statements – this was one of them. But for Nel, Johnson’s second set of ears simply confirmed what Burger had heard and thus bolstered his case that there had been a fight before Oscar shot Reeva.
The main thrust of Roux’s cross-examination was, by contrast, that this was not in fact a corroboration of the facts, but rather collusion between the couple in order to incriminate his client. Johnson said he had done his utmost to ensure he was not exposed to any reporting or information about the trial prior to his testimony, even telling friends that once the trial started, he would only speak to them after he had testified. He also told the court that he had not read the statement his wife had given to the police, nor had she seen his; they’d spoken to each other about the incident after the fact as a means of supporting each other, he said; and that he had avoided media reports, TV and newspapers in order to block out the trial while Burger was testifying.
Roux argued that the couple had discussed Burger’s evidence, and that it was just too remarkable for it to be mere coincidence for there to be so many similarities. Johnson was shaking his head in disapproval of the advocate’s claims, but also in apparent disbelief that Roux would accuse him of being part of such an elaborate plan to frame his client.
But Roux came down hard on Johnson, stating that the court deserved witnesses who were uncontaminated and could provide independent versions of events to allow the court to make a decision.
‘Witnesses are not always reliable,’ said Roux, sounding genuinely affronted that the witness would mislead the court. ‘Sometimes they are not lying, but many times, many times the only way to satisfy yourself about reliability is to maintain a strong independence in versions.
‘You have not favoured the court with that, Mr Johnson. You and your wife. I am sorry, I put it to you. You could just as well [have] stood together in the witness box.’
Here the judge intervened before Johnson could respond. ‘Are you not going a bit too far, Mr Roux?’ asked Masipa. The advocate withdrew his question.
Roux then introduced the defence team’s timeline to Johnson, suggesting again that the sounds he heard were in fact Oscar hitting the cricket bat against the door. Using as reference points the 3:16am call Johnson made to security shortly before hearing what he believed were gunshots and Oscar’s 3:19am call to Johan Stander, Roux stated that the only sound Johnson could have heard was the cricket bat striking the door because it perfectly coincides. But like his wife, Johnson wasn’t moved: he was adamant that the sounds he heard were gunshots – later adding that he owned a firearm himself, had shot at firing ranges and was familiar with the sound of a handgun discharging.
The advocate finally narrowed his argument down to three main facts that he felt did not fit in to Johnson’s version: the man screaming for help; the timeline, which according to Roux, indicates that the noises Johnson heard could only have been the cricket bat striking the door; and that Johnson did not hear the bashing of a door after the shots.
Johnson, however, dismissed Roux’s suggestion that the voices he had heard were only of Oscar, adding that it had been easy for him to distinguish the male from the female voice that morning. He also challenged the claim that what he believed were gunshots were the bat hitting the door because of how quickly the shots were in succession, far quicker than someone was able to wield a bat.
Wrapping up his questioning, Roux stated that with Reeva locked in the toilet cubicle with the window closed, there was no way Johnson could have heard her screams, even if he was closer to the house. Johnson disagreed, and explained how it could have been possible. ‘One of the, let us call it scars that my wife and I have after witnessing this incident is, often we hear jackal calls from the veld in Farm Inn – a neighbouring small wildlife reserve – and it reminds us of the screams that we heard.
‘So it also reminds us how far and how clearly the sound travels in our area, and when it is deathly quiet at three o’clock in the morning, I do believe that I heard a lady s
creaming and that it is possible for the sound to travel that far,’ said Johnson.
The state would have been satisfied with Charl Johnson’s performance in the witness box. Despite Roux’s best efforts to force concessions on the timeline of events and the possibility that the screams he had heard were those of his client, the witness held out and supported his understanding of what had happened with rational arguments.
The last place Estelle van der Merwe wanted to be was in court, in front of the packed gallery and the world’s cameras. She’d dressed for the occasion in a brown jacket and matching top, and sported white highlights down the length of her long brown hair. Van der Merwe had waited anxiously in the witness holding room for her turn, even being allowed to testify earlier than planned – ahead of Johnson. In the first few minutes she was asked several times to slow down and relax. Her nerves were showing.
Van der Merwe lives diagonally across the road from Oscar and her balcony, as measured by the police, is 98 metres from the house. She told the court about waking up just before 2am on the morning of Valentine’s Day to a woman’s voice. It sounded as if the person was having an argument, she said – the only witness to have heard what sounded like a person having a fight, her testimony thus bolstered the state’s case, especially when weighed up against other evidence. Annoyed at the disturbance, she said she looked out of the windows to see if she could see anything, but eventually went back to bed without having identified the source.
