June Steenkamp interview: ‘Now it’s crystal clear Reeva is never coming back’
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Version 0 of 1. June Steenkamp is posing for photographs. She wears a denim jacket and jeans, white blouse and brown high-heeled shoes. “This was my daughter’s jacket,” she says. “I love wearing it because I feel maybe her DNA’s still on it … But I’ll have to wash it one of these days.” Reeva Steenkamp juggled competing identities before she was shot dead by Oscar Pistorius on Valentine’s Day 2013 – one of more than 1,000 women killed by her partner in South Africa that year. There was Reeva the brunette law graduate, linguist and feminist, a devout Christian due to deliver a speech against gender violence on the day she died. Then there was Reeva the blonde model, a cover girl for lads’ mag FHM who shared Pistorius’s love of fast cars and cultivated celebrity on a reality TV show. On Twitter she described herself as “SA Model, Cover Girl, Tropika Island of Treasure Celeb Contestant, Law Graduate, Child of God”. Now June, 68, is juggling identities of her own. She is a grieving mother. Her pain is unfathomable to anyone who has not lost a child. Yet she also has a story to sell, and an interview is a transaction between willing parties. June has now done several for those willing to pay, including with Hello! magazine (she was not paid for this one). Her decision to publish a book, in which two sentences refer to her daughter’s sex life with Pistorius, has also earned opprobrium. Beneath all this, there are glimpses of a bedrock June, a warm and humorous grandmother, laughing about her squabbling dogs, recalling her upbringing in Lancashire. She, too, is deeply religious, and it is impossible to understand either family’s handling of the tragedy outside this prism. Pistorius, 27, a double amputee known as the “Blade Runner” because of his prosthetic limbs, has been described as one of the most famous athletes in the world, but June had never heard of him until he started dating her daughter in November 2012. Nor did she meet him before the shooting, though she says that one day Reeva, 29, called her from Pistorius’s car and said she was “scared” because he was driving at 260kph. It was early on the morning of 14 February 2013 when June received a call at her home in the sleepy industrial city of Port Elizabeth, where she and her husband run a pub. “A voice introduces himself as detective Hilton Botha,” she writes in her book. “‘Hello, is that June Steenkamp?’ “Yes.” “Do you have a daughter, Reeva?” “Yes.” “There has been a terrible accident.” “What kind of accident?” “Your daughter has been shot.” Pause. “You’d better tell me RIGHT NOW if she’s dead or alive.” “I’m sorry. I’m afraid she has passed on.” The detective says it appears to be an “open-and-shut case”, adding: “‘There were only two people present – your daughter and Oscar with the gun.’” June became hysterical. Her husband, Barry, cried and cried, and would some weeks later have a stroke. The world soon learned that just after 3am Pistorius had armed himself, walked down a corridor and shot four times through a locked toilet door. Reeva was hit in the hip, arm and head, and died almost instantly. Twenty months later, June is still tortured by that moment. “Imagine what she went through in that toilet, petrified, waiting for God to save her,” she says. “That’s the worst part. Barry and I both have nightmares and it’s always about that, because we always protected her.” Reeva, the couple’s only child together, came as a surprise, when June was in her late 30s. “This is the child I gave birth to, this adorable, wonderful child who worked hard at school, straight to varsity [university], did brilliantly. She was working hard at her career. I can’t even remember one argument that we ever had because she was so good. She was a perfect child and lovable. She loved us and we loved her.” “We would have loved to have had a little grandchild from her,” she says sadly. “We’d love to have had a wedding, her father would love to have taken her down the aisle. And all the great things she was going to do. She could have changed the world. She could have changed South Africa, the way she was going. She had a voice.” What was in Pistorius’s mind when he pulled the trigger? It was a question the prosecution put to him repeatedly during five days of cross-examination, eliciting multiple answers, none of them entirely satisfactory. But the court did accept Pistorius’s central explanation: that he had been startled by a noise and had mistaken Steenkamp for a burglar, believing, in the dark, that his girlfriend was still in bed and therefore in danger. It is a narrative June can never accept. “I don’t believe it at all,” she insists. “She told me they were fighting a lot. She’d only known him a short time and was beginning to think they were incompatible, and I think that night she was going to leave. They had a fight, something went horribly wrong. I don’t know what it was; I can’t possibly know. Only Oscar knows, and Reeva knows, and she’s not here any more. But there’s a missing piece. This is not the whole story. I just wish he could have stood up and said exactly what happened.” The first witness in the trial, a neighbour, described hearing a woman’s blood-curdling screams, but the judge dismissed her evidence as unreliable. June believes it was Reeva’s voice and that Pistorius was unable to control his temper: “I think it was an argument about something and she ran away. She was afraid and locked herself in the toilet. You don’t normally lock the door in the company of someone you trust.” When Pistorius took the witness stand, he turned to June and gave a faltering, tearful public apology. She remained implacable. “You’ve murdered my daughter,” she says. “Sorry’s not good enough. Even if it was true he made a mistake, he made an unbelievably horrendous mistake. He can’t just say sorry. What does it mean? Nothing. It could be also tactics.” Nor did she have any sympathy for his sobs and moans and vomiting fits in the courtroom. “I think when he was crying, it was for himself because he realised that he may have to go to jail. I did feel sad when they made him take his legs off. It was distasteful to me. It was almost like humiliation for him and I did feel sorry for him then. I’ve got no vengeance in my body. I didn’t want him to be hurt in jail. That’s not me or Barry.” But when the judgment came, it was a crushing blow. Judge Thokozile Masipa found no reason to disbelieve Pistorius’s story and convicted him of culpable homicide, the South African equivalent of manslaughter. This week prosecutors said they will appeal the verdict. “I had a lot of trust in her,” says June, “but I think she did make a mistake.” One of the unintended consequences of the historic decision to televise the trial, but to allow witnesses to remain off screen, was that the cameras often settled on the public gallery, where June sat, lips perpetually pursed. “‘Stonefaced’, they said,” she laughs. “I must admit that when I saw myself in some of the newspapers, I thought, ‘That is very stonefaced.’ I looked like I’d just been sentenced to jail myself!” Every day, the Pistorius and Steenkamp families sat on either side of the public gallery. Interaction was minimal. “The Pistoriuses all wanted to talk to me. His uncle Arnold was sitting next to me and he said: ‘I’m only trying to save a life.’ I didn’t answer, but I thought: the audacity of trying to save a life! My daughter’s life has gone now.” And June found herself caught in the media headlights. “We’re just ordinary people. We’ve had an ordinary life, a lovely life with the horses and the animals we love, and we’ve got lovely friends. Then all of a sudden you’re under the microscope. It can be scary, and you have to be careful what you say.” The press made much of the fact that, 20 years after the demise of apartheid, a black woman was sitting in judgment on a privileged white man. “I didn’t even think of that,” says June. “We’re in the new South Africa now and one thing about Reeva was that she didn’t see any colour in anyone, she just saw the person.” June points out with pride that Reeva scored 94% in a Xhosa language exam (South Africa’s white minority are often criticised for a lack of interest in its 11 official tongues other than their own). But in the next breath she sounds like someone from another era by referring to a “garden boy” – now widely seen as a derogatory term for a male gardener – who used to converse with Reeva. June had wanted to take the witness stand and testify, but her lawyers talked her out of it. “I would have just gone to pieces anyway.” She says she will be content if Pistorius serves his full five-year sentence and not, as predicted, 10 months behind bars followed by house arrest and community service. Has she felt any sense of closure? No. “I’ve actually been feeling much worse than at the beginning. It’s like a realisation that she’s not there any more. I sat there every day and I always had things to do, and now it’s crystal clear that she’s never coming back.” Now, like a witness under cross-examination, she is reliving events again and again, in interviews to promote the book, which she hopes to launch in Britain next week if she can get a passport in time. It will be her first time back for 40 years. Some have accused June and Barry of exploiting the tragedy for commercial gain. Their response is that they needed every rand to make ends meet. “When this happened we were bankrupt,” June admits. “My mother always told me: think about those people criticising you – will they support you, will they clothe you and feed you and give you a roof over your head?” She is also setting up a trust fund in her daughter’s name to create shelters for abused women. Reeva had posted statistics on Twitter showing that in South Africa a woman is raped every four minutes and a woman is killed by her partner every eight hours. On the day she died, she had been due to give a speech at a school in Johannesburg, revealing that she had previously been in an abusive relationship and urging girls not to put up with mistreatment. The country’s rates of sexual violence remain appalling: this week Ntokozo Hadebe, who raped and killed girls aged five, three and two, was give nine life sentences at the high court in Pretoria. “It’s unbelievable,” says June. “There’s some shock news every day. Most times it’s the partner who kills. It is definitely a cultural thing, an attitude towards women. So it is a big issue, and who’s doing anything? I’m going to try. Even if I can save one little girl, I will.” Was Reeva a victim of this attitude when she died? “Definitely.” Reeva understood the trade-off whereby celebrity wins attention for a cause, June says, and so was happy to appear in the reality TV show Tropika Island of Treasure. “She wanted a platform where people listened to her, and after Tropika she had that, because everybody knew her.” Reeva was also a Christian, and Pistorius told the court that faith was crucial to their relationship. His Twitter feed, and those of his siblings Aimee and Carl, are replete with biblical quotations. June’s own faith in God was tested by the tragedy. “Why did He take Reeva? She was good and kind to other people and doing good in the world. But He didn’t actually take her – Oscar took her. And then her injuries were so bad He couldn’t save her. Even her brain wasn’t in her body.” Christianity has enabled her to forgive Pistorius, at least intellectually. “You have to move forward with forgiveness, otherwise you carry all that hate in your heart. So I have forgiven. It’s got nothing to do with how I feel about the case, it’s just something I’m compelled to do.” June Steenkamp, who once shunned the media, is now courting it. She will do what it takes to survive and keep her daughter’s name alive. But the question remains: why did Oscar Pistorius pull the trigger that night? She and Barry would like to meet him to finally get to the heart of the mystery. “He asked if he could see us, but at that stage we weren’t ready to speak to him. What can he say? Sorry is not enough. What can he say and what would we want to talk to him about? I don’t know. But one day that confrontation will come. Altercation? Maybe. Violence? No, I don’t think so. But that day has to come.” • Reeva: A Mother’s Story by June Steenkamp is published by Sphere on 6 November. Buy it for £12.74 from bookshop.theguardian.com |