10 YEARS ON: REMEMBERING REEVA

ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF HER MURDER, THE MODELS KILLER PLEADS FOR FREEDOM

Of all the evidence stacked against former Paralympic champion runner Oscar Pistorius in the fatal shooting of his girlfriend, one thing stood out for investigative author Calvin Mollett. Pistorius, then 26, claimed he thought he was firing at an intruder in his home in Pretoria, South Africa, when he killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in the early hours of February 14, 2013. But for Mollett, it was the screams heard by nearby residents before the shooting that told a disturbingly different story.

“Four separate people were consistent in what they heard – the screaming of a woman,” Mollett, who co-wrote a forensics book on the case, told WHO from his home in Toronto, Canada. “And that doesn’t fit with Oscar’s narrative.”

It was a narrative that obsessed the world. Six months after making history as the first Paralympian to compete at an Olympic Games, Pistorius was arrested over the fatal shooting of Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model and law graduate. First found guilty of culpable homicide (manslaughter) and sentenced to six years’ prison, an appeal saw Pistorius later convicted of murder with a new prison term of 13 years. “Reeva was such an inspiring person,” said Steenkamp’s devastated mother, June, after the trial. “She was a perfect child. We were always proud of her.”

Pistorius, who is expected to be freed on parole this year, maintains the shooting was an accident. “There’s no way anything else could have happened,” Detective Hilton Botha, the initial lead investigator on the case, told Vanity Fair in 2013. “There was no forced entry. He shot her – that’s it.”