He was the Blade Runner, the South African double amputee who defied the odds to become an Olympic athlete — as admired for his physical feats as his attitude.
Oscar Pistorius has only ever wanted to be regarded as equal, as strong and capable as any other 27-year-old man.
One of his favorite anecdotes epitomized the philosophy Pistorius was raised to have: When he was a little boy, his mother was helping him and his older brother get ready to go outside and play.
“You put your shoes on,” she said to Pistorius’ brother, “and you” — to Oscar — “put your legs on. And that’s the last I want to hear of it.”
How interesting, then, to watch as Pistorius, on trial for the murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, has displayed none of that quiet, dignified strength in court: Here he is broken and pitiful, weeping so hard he heaves, slumped over with head in hands, repeatedly vomiting into a bucket left by his side. His displays led to one report — denied by his team — that Pistorius had taken acting lessons.
A verdict is expected next month; the prosecution and defense will present their final arguments beginning Aug. 7. The Pistorius trial, with its brew of sex, celebrity, violence and class, is the OJ trial for the 21st century; in South Africa, two channels are dedicated solely to its coverage.
Pistorius faces up to 25 years if convicted of murder, and his narrative — he did shoot Reeva, but it was all an accident — has, to most observers and reporters, been less than convincing.
“A lot of the question revolves around Oscar’s credibility, and I don’t think he did himself any favors with the legal strategies he adopted,” criminologist Antony Altbeker told Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “The judge has to believe Oscar has taken her into his confidence. He’s done the exact opposite, and I think he’ll live to regret that.”
Pushed to succeed
Oscar Pistorius was born on Nov. 22, 1986, in Johannesburg, South Africa, the middle of three children. He had a congenital defect called fibular hemimelia — the lack of fibula bones — resulting in a double amputation below the knee when he was just 11 months old. The doctors pushed for the operation to be done early, so that Oscar would never know what life was like otherwise.
According to the complete forensic psychological report ordered by the judge in this case — a copy of which was leaked to South Africa’s City Press — his parents reacted differently: His father, Henke, was furious that the abnormality hadn’t been detected while the baby was still in the womb, while his mother, Sheila, was saddened. She rebounded quickly, determined to raise a capable, independent son.
“Fortunately,” the report reads, Pistorius “was born with a strong (fighting) temperament. He was a happy, contented baby [and] instead of whining and crying, he reached all his milestones normally.” The word “disabled” was banned in the house.
In 2012, Pistorius told one reporter that he came from a middle-class background, yet the larger Pistorius family is quite wealthy and well-known. His father was described, vaguely, as “running various businesses,” while his mother worked as a guidance counselor. When he was 6, Oscar’s parents divorced, and his father — a failed professional athlete who had harbored dreams of becoming an Olympic wrestler — became a rare and largely disinterested presence in his life.
According to the psychological report, Pistorius’ older brother, Carl, became a surrogate father: “This role included handling difficult situations with their mother, like when she had been anxious and drank a few glasses of wine too many or not waking up at night when the younger children cried out.”
During the trial, Pistorius testified that his mother, petrified of South Africa’s high crime rate, slept with a gun under her pillow. “More often than not,” Pistorius said, “it was just her being scared.”
At school, Pistorius was a high achiever, especially athletically. He played rugby, tennis and water polo. At 6 years old, he said, he won a trophy for Greco-Roman wrestling; at 9, he took boxing lessons. The report notes that key motivators were overcompensation and the admiration of those in authority — yet no amount of tangible accomplishments could allay his profound insecurity.
Pistorius’ elementary-school years, the report finds, were “probably also the consolidation of a split in his personality . . . ‘the two Oscars’: the one a vulnerable, scared disabled person, the other a strong physical person achieving beyond expectation.”
When Pistorius was 15, he suffered the defining trauma of his life: His beloved mother died unexpectedly. — though the details vary. The Financial Times and others reported it was a bad reaction to medication following a hysterectomy, though Yahoo! News South Africa reported she was taking medication for malaria.
He tattooed the dates of her birth and death on his right arm, and he has since gone on to credit his mother for his physical and emotional fortitude. “The real loser is never the person who crosses the finish line last,” Sheila once told him. “The real loser is the person who sits on the side, the person who does not even try to compete.”
He never got to say goodbye: he and his brother were at boarding school when they finally got word something was wrong. “My brother and I didn’t know she was sick,” he testified. “By the time [we were told], she was already in a coma.”
This became Oscar Pistorius’ foundational belief. When he suffered a knee injury while playing rugby in June 2003, he took up running as part of his rehab. As he later said, “[I] never looked back.”
The superstar
By the time Pistorius met South African model and reality-TV star Reeva Steenkamp in November 2012, he was a national hero and an international icon. He had just competed in the 2012 Summer Olympics, and though he didn’t win a medal, he had been the first double amputee ever to compete, running on a pair of carbon-fiber prosthetics. She was a rising star, a beauty with a law degree who also worked to raise awareness about domestic violence.
“I woke up in a happy, safe home this morning,” Steenkamp tweeted on Feb. 9, 2013, five days before her death. “Not everyone did. Speak out against the rape of individuals.”
Pistorius and Steenkamp were South Africa’s premier glamour couple. His endorsements with companies including Thierry Mugler, Oakley and Nike earned Pistorius $2 million a year. The most recent Nike campaign featured stop-motion images of Pistorius sprinting with the tagline: “I am the bullet in the chamber.” He was so proud that he posted it on his web site.
Not everyone in Steenkamp’s life was impressed with her new boyfriend. Cecil Myers, a second father to Steenkamp, told the Telegraph that Pistorius was “very moody.”
Steenkamp stayed with Myers’ family when she was in Johannesburg, and Cecil said that after their first date, Pistorius became obsessed. “[He] would not leave her alone,” Myers said. “He kept pestering her, phoning and phoning and phoning her. Oscar was hasty and impatient.”
Such behavior wasn’t unprecedented; in fact, Pistorius had a history of impulsive, aggressive, self-destructive behavior.
In March 2009, Pistorius smashed his speedboat into a pier on the Vaal River; he was airlifted to the hospital, where he spent three days in a coma. He broke his jaw, several ribs, and an eye socket. His nasal cavity was shattered, skin sheared off his nose. The extensive facial reconstruction he underwent left him with 180 stitches.
Pistorius claimed he’d just had the bad luck to hit a hidden pier. “We weren’t going too quickly, probably no more than 18 mph,” he told the Mirror. The South African newspaper Beeld reported that cops found empty bottles of booze on the boat, but Pistorius’ blood wasn’t tested.
Not long after his recovery, Pistorius was seen keeping the press away from a car accident involving a friend who had hit a pedestrian; the victim died. When photographers asked why they couldn’t shoot, he reportedly said, “Because I’m Oscar Pistorius.”
That September, Pistorius was arrested after slamming a door in the face of a 19-year-old girl Casseby Taylor-Memory — the force, she claimed, caused serious injury, and she pressed charges. He spent the night in jail, signing autographs and taking pictures with starstruck police officers. Prosecutors dropped the case, claiming insufficient evidence.
“I should never have been arrested,” Pistorius said.
None of the trials of 2009 humbled him. In 2011, when asked by a BBC reporter if he might be “an inconvenient embarrassment to the South African authorities,” Pistorius stormed out of the interview.
Something terrible was happening in that house.
- Oscar Pistorius' neighbor about hearing screams
Other reporters sent to profile Pistorius returned with disturbing stories: he was driving 150 mph while texting; after accidentally running over a dog and watching its distraught owner approach the scene, Pistorius took out his gun, shot the dog in the head, and drove away; he took another to a favorite shooting range, saying that he liked to fire rounds there “sometimes when I can’t sleep.”
In January 2013, Pistorius fired a gun at a restaurant, under the table, and begged his friend Darren Fresco to take the fall. According to boxer Kevin Larena, who was at the lunch, Fresco agreed. According to Larena, “Oscar said, ‘I apologize . . . I don’t know how the gun went off.’ ”
Yet the public didn’t see this Oscar Pistorius. They saw the humanitarian who worked to eradicate land mines, the humble superstar who visited sick kids in the hospital. “A lot of them don’t know who I am,” Pistorius told the Daily Mail in 2012. “They just like the fact that someone has come to visit them other than their parents.”
This is who Steenkamp thought she was dating, but she was quickly disabused of that notion. A series of text messages read at trial depicts a woman struggling to understand why the man she loves treats her so poorly.
“I’m scared of you sometimes and how you snap at me and how you act at me,” she wrote. In another: “I can’t be attacked by outsiders for dating u AND be attacked by you, the one person I deserve protection from.”
The shooting
Pistorius doesn’t deny shooting Steenkamp to death on the night of Feb. 14, 2013. What he does deny is that he meant to shoot her; all along, he has claimed that it was pitch-black, he thought he heard an intruder in the bathroom, he reached for his gun and shot four times before he realized it was Reeva cowering in the toilet cubicle.
The prosecution called five witnesses, neighbors of Pistorius, who all testified to hearing a woman’s screams that night. Michelle Burger said she was awakened at 3 a.m. by a woman’s “terrible, terrifying screams,” and then, through four gunshots, continued screaming.
“Something terrible was happening in that house,” she said.
In May, Pistorius’ defense team called forensic psychiatrist Dr. Meryl Vorster to the stand; she testified that Pistorius suffered from Generalized Anxiety Disorder. The prosecution, leery of a possible insanity defense, pushed back and demanded a full, 30-day psychiatric evaluation; the judge ruled in their favor.
That report found that Pistorius does not suffer from GAD, did not suffer from any kind of mental illness or impairment the night of the shooting, and “was capable of appreciating the wrongness of his act.”
What remains most fascinating about this case is that no one can pinpoint a motive: While his behavior indicated escalating problems with rage and impulse control, how did he seemingly leap so quickly to possible homicide?
If found guilty of murder, Pistorius faces 25 years; if found guilty of the lesser charge, culpable homicide, he faces 15. His fate will be decided by Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa, a 66-year-old woman with a history of advocating for women’s causes.
Even if he is found guilty, it is believed Pistorius’ team is planning an appeal, claiming that 24-hour television coverage is negatively impacting their case. Oscar Pistorius could conceivably be on trial for years to come, for something he has partly admitted to.
“We know he shot Reeva,” criminologist Altbeker told the Guardian.
“The question is why. The only person who can answer that is Oscar himself. He’s left room for doubt about whether he’ll tell the whole truth. I think the default conviction is murder. It takes a lot of imagination to see things Oscar’s way.”