Oscar Pistorius Trial Part 8

[Roussette]

here is Number 7.

upnorth iirc Mrs Stipp heard 6 or 7 noises. Nel implied the last 4 noises that the Stipps heard were the shots hence the screaming she heard was before the shots iyswim.

He didn't ever identify the first set of noises. At the start of the trial, he implied the first set of noises the Stipps heard might have been the cricket bat on the door but he didn't expand on that and it isn't in the Heads of Argument. It's one of the problems I have with the State's heads of argument (and even Roux mentioned it iirc) there was no explanation of what caused those first noises.

It could have been the doors banging, the window opening, the cricket bat (although forensics proved that at least one hit of the cricket bat was after the gunshots not before). However Nel doesn't present an explanation for it in the Heads of Argument that have been released to the public.

OP said the light wasn't working. Mrs Stipp thought she saw a light. I don't remember anyone independently verifying if the light was working or not.

Hi, Up

I think we have to be careful about saying that Reeva must have been in the toilet cubicle at any particular time. We simply don't know that. She may have been in there for only seconds before she was shot, or maybe 10 minutes. Impossible to know.

I tend to think that the bulk of the argument the Stipp's heard was in the bathroom. I think OP was going berserk with the cricket bat (dented bath panel, broken tiles etc) and Reeva was trying to scream for help out of the window. He then went for the gun, she locked/shut herself in the toilet and her screams intensified because he was going for the gun. He came back, swore and shouted at her and then shot.

The jeans outside the window are very curious. I don't think they were drying and fell out of the window....there's a fully equipped laundry room downstairs,why would she be hanging jeans outside the bathroom window? I think she said she was leaving and he tried to prevent her.....first by yanking off the jeans she was trying to put on (the inside out pair) and then chucking another pair she grabbed out the window.

Nel hasn't ever explained what the first sounds were and I suspect that's because he's limited to what he can demonstrate with evidence. There's no direct evidence for what they were, and he can't just speculate. Inferences are fine when you have evidence to draw them from, but mere speculation is not.

He did ask Vermulen (bat man) if it's possible that some of the bat marks on the door were caused by OP trying to scare Reeva, and Vermulen said yes. So I suspect that's what the State think.

Thanks for the response HelenaQC

On to another topic. I asked earlier if they had been arguing why didn't Reeva just leave. Perhaps he was preventing her from leaving. So if he was preventing her from leaving why scream "Get the f#@& out of my house"? If he wanted her out of his house why would he be grabbing or ripping jeans from her to prevent her from doing so? If Reeva was in a rush to leave the house why would she take the time to put on jeans if she already had a pair of shorts on? If he had ripped the jeans off her which seems like an incredibly difficult thing to do why was she wearing shorts when she was shot? It seems she would have been in her underwear when she ran to the bathroom but we know she was wearing the shorts she was found in when she was shot as there is a bullet hole in the waste band to prove it. I find it incredibly difficult to believe she had or was attempting to put the jeans on over the shorts. I can't put my hands on the picture of the jeans outside but if memory serves me they were laying more or less flat with the pant legs spread in a split type way with the crotch facing up. It seems like a very odd way from them to land if they had been quickly tossed out the window. It seems like they would be in a heap. They looked to me like they had been laid out that way. This is probably TMI but my thought is that Reeva had started her period and bled thru the jeans. Had spot cleaned the jeans and laid them out to dry as she had just done the laundry and didn't have anything else to wash them with. This too could explain why they didn't have sex that night. Pure speculation on my part of course.

I forgot one more thing. If there was some sort of altercation with the jeans that night why wouldn't Oscar simply fold them up and put them in her bag while he was making up his story? Why keep out and have to make up a story as to why they were out and on the floor if he didn't need to. If he had picked them up and put them in her bag no one would be any the wiser?

Thanks too book very interesting info for me to chew on.

I too think that much of the story was made up to fit what was around the scene and what OP would have worried that neighbours had heard
Clearly he thought that someone would have heard him shout 'get the f out of my house'

The jeans outside and inside are difficult to reconcile.
Maybe they are of no significance. It is difficult to try to look at the evidence and not have your mind clouded by other information that you has seen in the past. So for me I know that many women have been stripped naked during arguments to prevent them from leaving and then have actually been pushed out the door by the person they are arguing with.
I wonder if this was the case and Ms Steenkamp grabbed a pair of OP's shorts and got dressed in the toilet?

There were only so many things that OP could have changed/moved in the bedroom bathroom in the time between killing Ms Steenkamp and the point where the police arrived at the house.

I am no more convinced he knew it was Reeva than at the start tbh.
I think Nel suspects he did but hasn't proven it conclusively.
I think it's odd that they had bin bags and things - almost you go down horrific thought pathways with that - but it seems divided between those scornfully rejecting any other theory than argument, murder and others unwilling or unable to accept that. No one utterly convinced by the intruder theory.
There's so much disinformation though, that wading through other forums and online news reports is murky.
I don't see that the neighbour near to him would try to help him; nothing in it for him. Maybe they argued a lot and frank did sleep through. Maybe they didn't argue and frank woke to the gunshots.
I have no idea anymore. It's odd not to call security or an ambulance but the shock must have been absolutely horrific. Who knows what we would think of first?

I'm also thinking of what is true and what is speculation. Several people were disturbed by noise (waking to it rather than listening to an ongoing row for ages) and it all happened quite quickly suggesting something kicking off suddenly.
Maybe it's half true and has been embellished? OP has stuck to the same story throughout - arrogance? Or not lying?
It will be interesting to hear the judges take on it. I hope she isn't anything other than impartial, and that her reported severity re: domestic abusers isn't going to play a part.

UpNorth, I think you might be thinking of the wrong sort of shorts. What Reeva was wearing was a set of sports vest/shorts things - the shorts were referred to as 'pants' by a couple of the witnesses. Think the sort of thing that runners tend to wear in the Olympics these days or for exercise, rather than going-out-in clothes.

So she wasn't naked, she may well have slept in the set she was wearing because it was light, but she may well have wanted to put a pair of shorts in rather than wandering around at night in what was little more than underwear.

As to why she never got out the house - that's complicated. If there was a row, it was very late, so maybe she wanted to wait until morning. Maybe she didn't want to leave him in a row. If it didn't get full on and violent until after OP had locked the bedroom door and set the alarms, that would have made things more tricky - you're asking her to get past an angry OP and a locked door and alarm to do so. It seems to me more likely that she'd run to where-ever was easy and 'safe' until he calmed down.

Nerf, you're right - I am not convinced by either side. I don't believe the intruder, and I'm not sure there is enough evidence for the row either. But then, how much evidence do 'rows' leave?

I think it was murder not because of the row, but because he shot four times with an extremely dangerous bullet. He intended to kill.

It is hard though. I want to be clear minded and stick to the things that we know for sure, but as some of what we know for sure completely relies on OP not lying, that is quite difficult.

If the testimony from Tasha's is to be believed (and I really believed the young boxer), OP lies to get himself out of bad trouble. His immediate reaction was 'say you were holding the gun'. That was his go-to response.

So discounting him for a second, we have a group of witnesses who heard a woman scream. Four of them heard a woman scream and then gunshots. Some heard bangs prior to the gunshots, but they heard a woman scream.

Then we have another set of witnesses who heard nothing at all until OP called for help from the balcony. They heard no screams and they heard no gunshots. They didn't hear much of anything. I assume they had excellent double glazing.

Then we've got character witnesses who say that OP was volatile, difficult, got angry and shot guns. There's no surprise there; I'm pretty sure you could find people who think I'm a terrible, chaotic, incompetent person, when in reality, I'm amazing.

Conversely, there are a set of witnesses who think that OP is the most caring, wonderful, amazing person ever.

All of them saw the Oscar that they saw.

So yeah; it is just really, really hard to know.

What I would really, really like is for Reeva to have been calm, relaxed and happy until the second that the first shot went off. I don't want her to have had such an awful last few hours. That's probably skewing my thoughts. Equally, I really, really don't want OP to get away with murder if it is murder. So that's skewing them in the other direction.

It occurs to me now that I've never actually seen a picture of what she was wearing - so the whole 'sports shorts' thing might be a figment of my imagination.

It's just it fitted in my head to the people calling them 'pants' and the fact that Nel referred to her as fully dressed (technically, yes) and Roux argues that she wasn't fully dressed for going out (also technically yes).

Some of OP's story has changed which might or might not mean anything

The explanation is that he didn't need to fill in the blanks at his bail hearing but that doesn't sound or feel true to me.

I feel that I have no clear idea what happened that night and never will. The only thing I know is that in a house with a broken bedroom door and in a bashed up bathroom, he fired four bullets into a locked toilet.

I still think we want him not to be guilty.

I think it all comes down to the screams...the row, the timeline, bat vs gun all side issues IMO.

That two couples made the identical mistake about what they heard stretches all credibility for me.

One person mistaking a man yelling for a woman screaming in terror, OK. People make mistakes.

Four?

They also all managed to mistake a cricket bat smacking a door for gunshots. Two identical mistakes made by four people at the same time?

Sorry....three mistakes. They were also adamant they all heard TWO voices, a man and a woman.

Nah.

And it is far too neat that they thought they heard a terrified woman get shot just at the moment a terrified woman got shot.

The chances of all of these coincidences colliding in that few minutes is highly improbable, as far as I'm concerned. Highly.

And if just one of those screams was Reeva, he's guilty.

So, for me, personally, this has always been about the screams. They are devastating for OP. The disarray in the bedroom and the stomach contents don't help either.

I agree Helena but I think we want him to be innocent

We are trying to look beyond evidence to stretch what we would usually see as conclusive to try to find an element of doubt to find him innocent

I have wondered how much attention will be given to ear witness testimony or if some will be seen to cancel other out

Whatever happens he isn't innocent. He took someone's life and for that he should be punished. I think it is intent that matters.. did he mean to kill who was behind the door whether he thought it was Reeva or a burglar? Yes he did. One shot might be 'an involuntary reaction'. 4 shots just cannot be. The noise in that corridor from that first shot must have been deafening and that first shot should have been enough to bring him to his senses if it was that involuntary reaction.

Why didn't OP fire a warning shot up at the ceiling? Surely if he thought it was an intruder that would have been enough to scare the bejus out of anyone in there, they would have climbed back out the window whilst OP called security knowing they'd scarpered. It can only be shooting with intent to kill AFAIC.

Maybe some good can come out of televising OP's trial here

*scare the bejesus out of anyone in there

I don't think any of it cancels anything out.

It's conclusive:

Pre 3.15, a man and a woman screaming and shouting

Bangs at 3.15

After 3.15, the woman is not heard anymore, and a man is heard crying loudly.

Roux has played silly buggers with the timeline, reliant on the fact that the only solid timings come from the security landline number. Johnson's 3.16 call is unverified and came from his own call log taken off his handset. He even asked Roux on the stand if they'd verified the time with a central server. No answer, so I suspect not.

It's also worth noting that an incoming call will only show up on the log if a connection is made. Stipp's first call rang and rang....that's not going to show up on the security landline log. The call he made just AFTER the second bangs did because he spoke to them for 16 seconds. His third call, while he was standing on the forecourt with Stander, must have been a misdial that briefly connected either because it was picked up, or the answer phone got it. But there's no way he deliberately called security given that they were standing right there with him. It's notable that he made that call just about the time he was calling an ambulance, so he probably accidentally pressed redial.

If this isn't the case, then we have to believe that Dr Stipp perjured himself on the stand, risking his reputation, a criminal record and probably his job in order to help the State convict Oscar Pistorius.

I think this is somewhat unlikely. Roux had no option but to suggest this because Dr Stipp's 3.15 call proves that the shots were at 3.14/3.15. And this, in turn, proves that Oscar Pistorius is a liar.

There's no conflict between the ear witnesses, IMO. They corroborate each other fairly precisely. But Roux has done a masterful job in making it look as if they don't - and given that OP had to sell his house to pay for his defence, we should expect no less.

The first four ear witnesses have been central to this case...without them, OP would probably not have faced a murder charge (CH at the most).

They have been so central to this case that the defence had to factor them in and create a narrative around them. It's basically been, "We accept you heard screaming when you say you did, and we accept that it sounded like a terrified woman. But it was Oscar Pistorius screaming and sounding like a terrified woman. We have evidence that he sounds like a woman when he's anxious". This evidence was notable by it's total absence and this is a huge problem, IMO.

All my own opinion & just sticking it in to add to the possibilities.

And explaining why I personally am convinced of his guilt beyond any reasonable doubt.

:)

I am not sure firing a warning shot into the ceiling would have been a good idea. If the intruder on the other side of the door had a gun which is pretty likely in a home invasion they probably would have started shooting back and then had a shoot out in the bathroom.

Ronald there was a legal expert quoted in The Telegraph who said the ear witnesses didn't cancel each other out. He explained that the next door neighbours not hearing an argument didn't discredit that people further away did hear an argument.

In a way it's interesting that we've all spent a lot of time considering OP's explanation and his version of events. Of course he is the only person who was there which is why we've relied upon his explanation (whether arguing for or against it) but in reality he has a very definite agenda. He is, as he said on the stand, fighting for his life.

I've tried to take a step back and look at what's left if we just use evidence from sources that (arguably) shouldn't have a particular agenda. Then we're left with:
ear witnesses who heard arguing, shouting, bangs, screaming and shots
Reeva shot 4 times in an enclosed space with no hope of escape
a damaged bedroom door, bath panel and toilet door

And if we turn to OP's intruder explanation then imo it's what is missing that's significant : no alarm going off; no panic button used; no calls to the police about the intruder; no rush to fix the broken window (prior to that night).

I really didn't want it to be that OP had shot Reeva deliberately - it made her last evening too horrific to contemplate and I didn't want to think that anyone could so carelessly take a life or throw away the life they had so carefully built against incredible odds but I do now think that it was an argument and OP shot deliberately.

(Although a teeny part of me is still hoping the Judge will find differently as I do trust her decision will be the correct one, and I would much, much prefer that this had all been a tragic accident).

I was talking to someone today who was saying that she thought murder - could have been a child etc but not Reeva deliberately - based in experiences living in Johannesburg.

I do trust her decision will be the correct one

I also trust her completely. What worries me more is that she will be strict unto the law. What it hangs on as well as the argument, is whether there is reasonable doubt.

My gut feeling is she will find him guilty and he will instantly put in an appeal. I couldn't say on what grounds, but things Roux has already mentioned are; couldn't get the witnesses to speak, the appeal cases cited where they were acquitted because they didn't have the intent to kill the person they killed.

Possibly more.

I don't know about the judge tbh - all I've seen is the court room and she is silent and asks a few questions. Originally I felt she was really good but since the sky programme where they were saying she and the assessors didn't ask enough questions I've been swayed that way. I'm so easily influenced in my thinking!

I am not sure firing a warning shot into the ceiling would have been a good idea. If the intruder on the other side of the door had a gun which is pretty likely in a home invasion they probably would have started shooting back and then had a shoot out in the bathroom.

But we don't know do we upnorth, maybe it would have been enough to scare an intruder off. OP could have rung security, OP could have fired a warning shot, OP could have gone downstairs with Reeva and got help... I know his Defence have pushed the 'fight not flight' because of his disability, but he wasn't on his own was he... if he wanted to protect her like he says, he could have told Reeva to RUN and get security.. It's very much what BookABoo says which I agree with.. there's too many anomalies for me for his version of that night to stand up.

And if we turn to OP's intruder explanation then imo it's what is missing that's significant : no alarm going off; no panic button used; no calls to the police about the intruder; no rush to fix the broken window (prior to that night).

Wow, after reading and listening to the arguments I am really interested in Mr Roux's detailed time line. I noticed in a post by HelenaQC that she had a suspicion Mr Roux was blowing smoke with the time line. If you are out there HelenaQC could you please give me an idea of how you think he is misleading the Court. I have been churning it over and over in my mind and before I go sit in my brother's dentist chair tomorrow for 2 1/2 hours I would like to have both thoughts in my mind. Thanks in advance for your help if you happen to see this post.

Just reading the last bbc article about the case, which was written when the final arguments finished. They seem to be saying that a sentence of between 10 - 20 years is likely.

m.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-28724230