Chase Your Shadow by John Carlin Read Free Book Online Page A

substance to the evidence the magistrate would need to consider.
    Everyone in the room heard his sobs as Oldwadge began reading the affidavit.
    ‘By about 10 p.m. on 13 February 2013 we were in our bedroom. She was doing her yoga exercises and I was in bed watching television. My prosthetic legs were off. After Reeva finished her yoga exercises she got into bed and we both fell asleep. We were deeply in love and I could not have been happier.
    ‘I am acutely aware of violent crime being committed by intruders entering the home with a view to commit crime, including violent crime. I have received death threats before. I have also been a victim of violence and of burglaries before. For that reason I kept my firearm, a 9 mm Parabellum, underneath my bed when I went to bed at night.’
    He said he woke up in the early hours of February 14, remembered he had left a fan outside on a balcony next to his bedroom and went tofetch it, walking on his stumps. On closing the sliding doors behind him he heard ‘movement’ in the bathroom, down a corridor from the bedroom.
    ‘I felt a sense of terror rushing over me. There are no burglar bars across the bathroom window and I knew that contractors who worked at my house had left the ladders outside. Although I did not have my prosthetic legs on I have mobility on my stumps. I believed that someone had entered my house. I was too scared to switch on a light. I grabbed my 9 mm pistol from underneath my bed. On my way to the bathroom I screamed for him/them to get out of my house and for Reeva to phone the police.
    ‘I fired shots at the toilet door and shouted to Reeva to phone the police. She did not respond and I moved backwards out of the bathroom, keeping my eyes on the bathroom entrance. It was pitch dark in the bedroom and I thought Reeva was in bed. When I reached the bed, I realized Reeva was not in bed. That is when it dawned on me that it could have been Reeva who was in the toilet.’
    Had he been an ordinary member of the public, had he been able to put some distance between himself and his predicament, he might have considered his story – as so many did – hard to believe. Quite apart from his failure to register whether his girlfriend was lying next to him when he rushed from his bed, gun in hand, to the bathroom, who could possibly believe that he had imagined a burglar would choose to hide in a toilet? What would a burglar have hoped to find in a toilet that was worth stealing? It was surely ridiculous to expect people to believe that he could have been so stupid – and the jokes, mostly of the ‘he hasn’t a leg to stand on’ variety, came thick and fast. A photograph posted on social media of a bathroom door with the message ‘Using toilet – Please don’t shoot’ scrawled on it went viral. It was the kind of thing he too would have laughed about, and maybeeven sent out on his Twitter account, had it been some other celebrity at the center of the drama.
    His lawyers, though, were not amused at the obligation to set out the core elements of their case at the bail hearing. Pistorius’s desperation to avoid spending the months – or, as it turned out, one year – prior to the trial behind bars forced them to come up with a vividly detailed description of what he said had happened that night. That included the irreversible acknowledgment that he had indeed fired the bullets that killed Reeva, leaving his defense no option but to acknowledge that he had meant to shoot someone, while arguing that he had not meant to shoot her. He was locked into that version, with little room for maneuver once the trial began, and with ample time for the prosecution to deploy police detectives to pick holes in it. Barry Roux, the veteran trial lawyer who led his defense team at the bail hearing and would do so again at the murder trial, lamented the necessity of showing his hand so early on, but recognized there was no choice.
    What Pistorius did not know was that South African