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Police Say They Found Testosterone at Home of Pistorius
Pistorius Defense Rebuts Police Testimony at Bail Hearing
(about 2 hours later)
PRETORIA, South Africa — The South African police said on Wednesday that officers found testosterone and needles at the home of Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee track star accused in the killing of his girlfriend, when they went to his home last week to investigate the shooting.
PRETORIA, South Africa — What began on Wednesday as a day for the prosecution to solidify what it had described as an irrefutable case of premeditated murder against Oscar Pistorius, the Paralympic champion, turned into a near-rout by the defense, which attacked the testimony of the state’s main witness, the chief police investigator.
But Mr. Pistorius’s lawyer, challenging detailed points of the police conduct of the investigation, said the substance was an herbal supplement and was not subject to international prohibitions on doping.
It was the second full day of a hearing to decide whether Mr. Pistorius, the double amputee nicknamed Blade Runner who made Olympic history by running with able-bodied athletes in the 2012 Games in London, should be given bail as he awaits trial for shooting his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in the early morning hours last Thursday. Mr. Pistorius claimed in an affidavit read in court on Tuesday that he had mistaken Ms. Steenkamp for a burglar and had shot her out of fear.
At a bail hearing here in Pretoria, prosecutors have accused Mr. Pistorius, 26, of premeditated murder — a crime he denies.
But what was supposed to be merely a bail hearing took on the proportions of a full-blown trial, with sharp questions from the presiding magistrate, Desmond Nair, and a withering cross-examination that left the prosecution’s main witness, Detective Hilton Botha, grasping for answers that did not contradict his earlier testimony.
But the testimony on the third day of hearings since the shooting last Thursday seemed to introduce fresh accusations relating to Mr. Pistorius’s lifestyle, before the court adjourned until final arguments on the bail issue on Thursday.
At first, Detective Botha’s testimony seemed to go well. He explained how preliminary ballistic evidence supported the prosecution’s assertion that Mr. Pistorius had been wearing prosthetic legs when he shot at the bathroom door, behind which hid Ms. Steenkamp. Mr. Pistorius claimed in his affidavit that he had hobbled over from his bedroom on his stumps, and felt extremely vulnerable to an intruder as a result.
According to Detective Hilton Botha, Mr. Pistorius accidentally fired a weapon at a restaurant in January and persuaded a companion to take responsibility. He had also threatened violence in another incident in an altercation about a woman. In an incident in 2009, Mr. Botha said, an unidentified woman had accused Mr. Pistorius of assault but, as the investigating officer in the episode, he had determined her claim could not be proved and the case was dropped.
As Detective Botha described how bullets had pierced Ms. Steenkamp’s skull and shattered her arm and hip bones, Mr. Pistorius sobbed with his head in his hands.
At the same time, though, the detective acknowledged that nothing in his own testimony over several hours was “inconsistent” with Mr. Pistorius’s version of events, delivered in an affidavit on Tuesday. It was not clear whether that meant the police officer was retreating from some of his testimony, which the defense said had been tilted toward “the most possibly negative connotation.”
“A defenseless woman, unarmed, was gunned down,” Detective Botha said.
For instance, the detective asserted that two boxes of testosterone and needles were found when officers searched Mr. Pistorius’s home in a gated community where his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model and law school graduate, was shot to death with four rounds fired through the closed door of a bathroom.
Using a schematic diagram of the bedroom, the prosecutor, Gerrie Nel, asked Detective Botha to walk Magistrate Nair through the crime scene. The detective explained that Ms. Steenkamp’s slippers and overnight bag were on the left side of the bed, next to the sliding balcony door that Mr. Pistorius claimed he got up in the middle of the night to close. He also said the holster of Mr. Pistorius’s 9-millimeter pistol was found under the left side of the bed, next to where Ms. Steenkamp would have been sleeping. That called into question Mr. Pistorius’s statement that he thought Ms. Steenkamp was still in bed when he heard the sound of a burglar, the detective said.
The prosecution did not accuse Mr. Pistorius of directly using or abusing the substance. Testosterone in various forms is among banned substances on the 2013 list of prohibited drugs for athletes issued by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
“If the girl was on the bed, that is where the holster was found,” Detective Botha said.
But Barry Roux, Mr. Pistorius’s defense lawyer, said the substance found at his client’s home did not figure among banned drugs.
Detective Botha said investigators had found two boxes of testosterone along with syringes and needles in Mr. Pistorius’s bedroom. Testosterone is a banned substance for most professional athletes, and is known to increase aggression in people who take supplements of it.
It was “not a steroid and it is not a banned substance,” Mr. Roux said, accusing the police of taking “every piece of evidence and try to extract the most possibly negative connotation and present it to the court.”
Asked by Mr. Nel what he would have done had he suspected that an intruder was in his bedroom, Detective Botha replied, “I would get my girlfriend and try to get her out of the room.”
The International Paralympic Committee in Bonn, Germany, said on Wednesday that Mr. Pistorius was tested for drugs on Aug. 25 and Sept. 8 last year and both tests were negative.
He said he had interviewed witnesses who said that they heard shouting in the house, and that the lights were on, contradicting Mr. Pistorius’s statement that it had been too dark to see anything in the bedroom.
Mr. Pistorius made sporting history by becoming the first Paralympic sprinter to compete against able-bodied athletes in the 2012 London Olympics held between July 27 and Aug. 12. At the Paralympic Games between Aug. 29 and Sept. 9, he won two gold medals and a silver.
A neighbor, he said, heard “two people talking loud at one another, it sounded like a fight,” between 2 and 3 a.m.
The prosecution called for Mr. Pistorius to be held in custody until his trial — potentially months away — because he might seek to flee.
Other witnesses spoke about hearing two or three shots, then a woman’s scream, followed by more shots, Detective Botha said.
But Desmond Nair, the magistrate who is to rule on Mr. Pistorius’s bail application, asked prosecutors whether they really believed Mr. Pistorius would try to abscond. Mr. Pistorius was born without fibula bones in both legs and underwent amputation below the knee while still in his infancy.
He also described previous violent incidents involving Mr. Pistorius. He had threatened to assault a man in an altercation about a woman at a racetrack, Detective Botha said. He told another man that he would “break his legs,” Detective Botha testified.
Mr. Pistorius arrived early at a courthouse here in a police car, his head covered by a blue blanket, to press his case to be released on bail pending trial.
Detective Botha also testified that Mr. Pistorius had foreign bank accounts and a house in Italy, which made him a flight risk.
The prosecution opened its arguments on Wednesday by citing a statement from a witness saying there had been “nonstop talking, like fighting” from 2 to 3 a.m. at the Pistorius home on the morning of the shooting. The prosecutors are seeking to depict the killing as happening after an argument.
“I believe he knew that she was in the bathroom,” said Detective Botha. “And that he shot four shots through the door.”
As a police investigator described Ms. Steenkamp’s wounds to the right side of her head, arm and hip, Mr. Pistorius broke down in tears.
Barry Roux, a lawyer for Mr. Pistorius, cross-examined Detective Botha, seeking to poke holes in his account.
The police said two smartphones were discovered but neither had been used to make a call that morning. The police had also retrieved unlicensed .38-caliber ammunition from the house and Mr. Pistorius’s lawyer and brother were accused of removing documents relating to offshore bank accounts from a safe in the house, according to the prosecution testimony.
The substance found, Mr. Roux said, was not testosterone at all but a herbal supplement called testocomposutim coenzyme, which is used by many athletes and not banned by anti-doping agencies. Asked if the substance had been tested, Detective Botha said tests had not yet been completed.
Mr. Pistorius told the court on Tuesday that on the day of the shooting he heard a strange noise coming from inside his bathroom, climbed out of bed, grabbed his 9-millimeter pistol, hobbled on his stumps to the door and fired four shots.
“I didn’t read the whole name” on the container, Detective Botha admitted.
“I fail to understand how I could be charged with murder, let alone premeditated,” Mr. Pistorius said in an affidavit read by Mr. Roux, his defense lawyer. “I had no intention to kill my girlfriend.” Prosecutors painted a far different picture, one of a calculated killer, a world-renowned athlete who had the presence of mind to strap on his prosthetic legs, walk 20 feet to the bathroom door and open fire as Ms. Steenkamp cowered inside, behind a locked door.
He acknowledged that the witness who claimed to have heard the two arguing, he said, had lived almost 2,000 feet away, possibly out of earshot. Under questioning by the prosecutor, he later revised the estimate to 1,000 feet.
“The applicant shot and killed an unarmed, innocent woman,” Gerrie Nel, the chief prosecutor, said in court on Tuesday. That, Mr. Nel argued, amounted to premeditated murder, a charge that could send Mr. Pistorius to prison for life and, according to the magistrate hearing the case, make it more difficult for Mr. Pistorius to be released on bail.
Detective Botha also acknowledged that there were no signs that Ms. Steenkamp had defended herself against an assailant, and that the police had no evidence that the couple’s relationship was anything but loving.
The prosecution repeated its accusation on Wednesday, saying Mr. Pistorius knew Ms. Steenkamp was in the bathroom but fired anyhow.
Mr. Roux accused the prosecution of selectively taking “every piece of evidence and try to extract the most possibly negative connotation and present it to the court.”
While Mr. Pistorius had said the house was dark when he heard what he thought was an intruder, the prosecution cited a witness as saying a light had been switched on when the first shot was fired.
Detective Botha was forced to admit that the police forensic team had missed a shell casing that the defense lawyers later found in the toilet bowl, and that he had entered the crime scene without covering his shoes because the police had run out of shoe covers.
A witness heard a gunshot, then the sound of a woman screaming, then more shots, the prosecution said. But the defense disputed the prosecution testimony, saying the neighbor who claimed to have overheard an argument in Mr. Pistorius’s home in fact lived 600 yards away.
Eventually, Detective Botha conceded that he could not rule out Mr. Pistorius’s version of events based on the existing evidence.
Mr. Roux, the defense lawyer, said it was possible that Ms. Steenkamp had locked herself in the bathroom when she heard Mr. Pistorius shout at an intruder.
Magistrate Nair seemed skeptical that Mr. Pistorius was a flight risk.
The prosecution on Wednesday challenged Mr. Pistorius’s assertion that he did not realize that Ms. Steenkamp was no longer in bed when he got up to confront what he thought was an intruder.
“Do you subjectively believe that he would take the option, being who he is, using prostheses to get around, familiar as he is, to flee South Africa if he were granted bail?” Magistrate Nair asked Detective Botha.
Mr. Nel projected a floor plan of the bedroom and bathroom area, which, he said, showed that Mr. Pistorius would have walked past the bed to reach the bathroom where she was shot. “There’s no other way of getting there,” he said.
“Yes,” he replied.
Detective Botha also said the holster for Mr. Pistorius’s handgun was found under the bed on the side where Ms. Steenkamp slept, along with her bag and slippers. Mr. Pistorius’s appearance in court on Wednesday was his third since the shooting.
The court was adjourned, and final arguments in the bail hearing are to be heard Thursday morning.
Ms. Steenkamp’s funeral was held on Tuesday at a crematorium in the southern coastal city of Port Elizabeth, her hometown.
Alan
Cowell contributed reporting from London.
Lydia Polgreen reported from Pretoria, and Alan Cowell from London.
