Sins & Survivors: A Las Vegas True Crime Podcast - The Murder of Reeva Steenkamp

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Oscar Pistorius, the 'Blade Runner,' was a national hero—but behind closed doors, his jealousy, abuse, and violence led to the tragic murder of Reeva Steenkamp. This episode examines the chilling events of Valentine’s Day 2013, Reeva’s legacy as an advocate against gender-based violence, and South Africa’s ongoing femicide epidemic.Reeva's story intertwines with that of a celebrated athlete, leading to a series of events that captured global attention. Join Shaun and John as we delve into a case that challenges the perception of Oscar Pistorius and the pursuit of justice.https://sinspod.co/60sourcesDomestic Violence Resourceshttp://sinspod.co/resourcesClick here to become a member of our Patreon!https://sinspod.co/patreonVisit and join our Patreon now and access our ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content & schwag! Get ad-free access for only $1 a month or ad-free and bonus episodes for $3 a monthApple Podcast Subscriptionshttps://sinspod.co/appleWe're now offering premium membership benefits on Apple Podcast Subscriptions! On your mobile deviceLet us know what you think about the episodehttps://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/2248640/open_sms Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/sins-survivors-a-las-vegas-true-crime-podcast--6173686/support.

To listen ad-free, visit Zinspod.co slash subscribe. Starting at $2.99 a month, you'll also get access to our exclusive bonus content episodes when you join through Patreon or Apple subscriptions. Thanks for supporting the show! Oscar Pistorius was well-known by his nickname, The Blade Runner, because of his trademark running blades. He was a national hero in South Africa competing in international competitions in his 20s. He had a much darker side, though. His ex-girlfriends detailed shocking abuse at

the hands of Pistorius over and over and over. His jealousy, insecurity, drinking, and gun ownership were a dangerous mix that eventually cost his girlfriend Reva Steenkamp her life. Hi, and welcome to Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast, where we focus on cases that deal with domestic violence, as well as missing persons and unsolved cases. I'm your host, Sean. And with me, as always, is the one and only John. I am the only John in the room. This season we did two episodes on domestic violence in professional sports. Originally

we picked six cases in six different sports but we realized pretty quickly that we'd need to split that into two episodes. After researching the horrific downfall of Jonathan War Machine Copenhaver we realized we had another very long episode on our hands, so we broke it up again and decided to cover the murder of Reva Steenkamp later in the season. Do you want to get us started? Of course. This week's case might surprise some people. The murder of Reva Steenkamp by her boyfriend and extremely well-known Paralympian Oscar Pistorius. When we were researching this case, as you can probably guess, there was a lot of coverage. There are countless articles and documentaries that aired

on Investigation Discovery, on the BBC, and even books written by the people involved. The Wikipedia entry on Oscar Pistorius has 210 references, and the one on Riva has 43, and there's even a separate entry for the murder case. The thing that you can't get away from in this case is that Oscar Pistorius was, and kind of still is, an A-list celebrity and a national hero in South Africa because of all he achieved in the sports world. And it's obvious that that colored how the court system treated him. No one wanted to believe the truth about him that was right there, but we'll get to that. First, let's talk about Reva Steenkamp. Do you want to tell us about her? Of course. Reva was born on August 19, 1983, in Cape Town, South Africa. Her parents were Barry, who was a horse trainer, and June, who was actually his second wife. Barry had a son, Adam, and June had a

daughter, Simone, last name Calburn. The family lived son, Adam, and June had a daughter, Simone, last name Calburn. The family lived in Port Elizabeth, and Reva went to high school at St. Dominic's Priory School there, and then attended Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University and earned a Bachelor of Laws degree. That's essentially a bachelor's degree that is the first step toward going into the legal profession in quite a few countries outside of the United States, including South Africa. The Bachelor of Laws was the primary law degree here in the US too, until the JD degree replaced it in the 1960s. Reva was more than just a pretty face. She had a beautiful heart and ambition, according to her friend, Carrie Smith. She also loved to read and was an avid horse rider,

likely because her dad was a horse trainer. In her final year at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, she broke her back in a horse riding accident and she was confined to bed for two months and had to completely relearn how to walk. Her friends said that it was a life-changing thing for Reva saying, I think it made her realize that things can happen so quickly. She finished her degree and applied to the bar in 2011 and planned to be working as a legal advocate by 2013. Her career is listed as paralegal, indicating she was doing some legal work in addition to her modeling while living in Johannesburg. It feels like we say this a lot, but her career was taking off, specifically her modeling career. Looking back at her early experiences, it seems pretty obvious she was going to be a successful model. She entered a beauty contest at age 15, where she was discovered by a local journalist

who described her as having the it factor and compared her to a young Kate Moss. She won the Miss Port Elizabeth contest in 2005, put on by the local paper, the Port Elizabeth Herald, at the age of 22. She also appeared in FHM Magazine as a cover girl and model. She ranked number 40 in the top 40 sexiest women in the world in FHM Magazine, and appeared in shows on the BBC like Baking Made Easy, as well as being a live roaming presenter for fashion TV in South Africa, as well as countless ads for cars, perfumes, and things like that. She had also signed a contract to do a reality show in South Africa called Tropica Island of Treasure, which ended up airing after her death and they dedicated their first season to her. As a model and celebrity and socialite A-lister in

the Johannesburg modeling and fashion scene, she was incredibly well-known and regarded. She was a celebrity face of the Spirit Day anti-bullying campaign in 2012 also. Spirit Day is an annual holiday for LGBTQ awareness, and she often spoke about gender-based violence and femicide, which we will talk about later. She started dating Pistorius in December of 2012. In the earlier articles that were written, there were few mentions of anything being wrong in their relationship. After all, Oscar was a national hero who overcame so much and achieved amazing things,

which is all true, of course. Oscar Pistorius was born November 22nd, 1986 in Johannesburg. He was born with a congenital defect called fibular hemimelia, meaning he was missing the outside of both feet and both fibulas, which resulted in both of his legs being amputated below the knees at a very young age. His native language is Afrikaans, but he's also fluent in English. For his whole life, he was very active in sports, including water polo, tennis, boxing, and rugby, despite his disability, which is undeniably impressive. When he sustained a serious knee injury playing rugby, he was introduced to running, and he really never looked back. He was fitted with his famous running blades by a South African prostheticist, which led him to getting the nickname Blade Runner. You can see how his

legend would grow from there. He graduated from the University of Pretoria in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in business management with sports science. Pistorius' career in track and field is well known, so we won't go into a lot of detail there, but we will say that he competed as a Paralympian and also competed in non-disabled sports events, winning quite a few medals in both areas, and even competing in the 2012 Summer Olympics against non-disabled athletes. There was some controversy about his running blades and whether they gave him an unfair advantage in competition. The German Sports University at Cologne asserted that he used 25% less energy, with 30% less mechanical work needed to run when compared to athletes with natural legs and ankles, but that was overruled and he was allowed to compete.

If you watch the footage of the 2012 Olympics, you can see he is just shockingly fast. He could run on a treadmill at 25 miles per hour and completed the 100 meter in 10.91 seconds, which is a world record. He was fast. Enough about that. You aren't going to be shocked by this, but Oscar Pistorius had a well-documented dark side. A former girlfriend detailed some of the abuse she endured from him. He allegedly locked her in the house with no food for hours at a time, called her parents to track her movement, physically abused her and threatened her to such a degree that she feared for her life. She described him as angry and possessive, and she said she was left with scars where he bit and pinched her while they were together for 18 months. Her relationship sounds honestly terrifying. She related stories during the trial about how he consistently carried his gun with him,

drank excessively, and got enraged while drinking. At one point, she said that she hid his gun from him because she was afraid he'd use it on her. About Riva, she said, What happened to Riva Steenkamp could so easily have happened to me. I definitely think that could have been me, without a doubt, many, many times. On the occasion she described, he got so drunk that he fell down and injured his face, but thought she beat him up and started calling her a B-word and looking for his hidden gun. In another case with another woman named Cassidy Taylor Memory, according to a 2014 CBS News report, Pistorius

allegedly broke her leg at a party in 2009 after slamming into a door and punching it, causing a large panel to fall on her. Taylor, who was a South African blogger, reached an out-of-court settlement with Pistorius in late 2013, as reported by The Independent in 2014. Pistorius's decision to settle was reportedly based on his lawyer's advice that he couldn't handle both a civil and criminal legal battle simultaneously, so that would be the murder and also this assault. That brings us back to Riva dating Pistorius starting in December of 2012. Oscar Pistorius was a jealous, insecure, unstable person who was a gun collector and had a well-known short temper.

We talked recently about the lethality assessment in a bonus episode, but briefly, the lethality assessment can help offer guidance as to what degree of mortal danger a domestic violence victim is in based on 20 key factors. Things like controlling behavior, gun ownership, and jealousy are all on that list, and Pistorius exhibited all of these. They had only been dating for three months, but text messages extracted from Reva's phone show a great many text messages describing

Pistorius's petulant, petty, mean, jealous behavior toward her. In one example, Reva says, you have picked on me excessively. I do everything to make you happy and you do everything to throw tantrums. She also called Pistorius out for being jealous over past relationships and went as far as to say, I'm scared of you sometimes, of how you snap at me. In the early morning hours of February 14th, Valentine's Day, 2013, Oscar Pistorius shot Reva three times, killing her almost instantly. At the time, she was hiding in a small toilet cubicle in his apartment. When the police arrived, he admitted to having shot her and told them he'd

mistaken her for an intruder. More on this in a minute. His murder trial began on March 3rd, 2014 in Pretoria and was compared to the trial of OJ Simpson. It was huge news in South Africa and everywhere really, that such a well-known and previously beloved figure, a sports hero, had been accused of such a horrific crime. No one wanted to believe that he was capable of this, but as we mentioned before, his ex-girlfriends knew and this didn't shock them at all. His defense was based on his version of events, of course. We obtained a copy of the affidavit Pistorius used to attempt to obtain bail, and it has his full account of what he claims happened.

It's long, so we took the liberty of shortening it, but you can read the full affidavit in the show notes. But here's his version. On the 13th of February 2013, Reva and I had planned to go out with friends, but she called and asked if we could spend the evening at home instead. I agreed, and we enjoyed a quiet dinner. By around 10 p.m., we were in the bedroom. She was doing yoga while I watched TV without my prosthetic legs on. We were deeply in love, and she had given me a Valentine's Day gift, which she asked me to open the next day.

After her yoga, we both went to sleep. In the early hours of February 14th, I woke up and went to the balcony to bring the fan inside and close the sliding doors. I then heard a noise in the bathroom and felt a sudden sense of terror. I knew there were no burglar bars on the bathroom window, and with ladders left outside because of construction, I feared an intruder had entered. Without my prosthetic legs, I still had some mobility, but I felt very vulnerable. He goes on, I grabbed my pistol from under the bed and shouted for the intruder to leave while asking Reva to call the police. The room was dark and I assumed she was still in bed. I noticed the bathroom window was open and the toilet door was closed.

I heard movement inside and believed the intruder was in there. Fearful for our safety, I fired shots at the door. When I returned to bed, I realized Reva wasn't there. It struck me that she could have been in the toilet. I rushed to the balcony and screamed for help, then I tried to break down the door. After finding the key, I opened the door and saw Reva, still alive but slumped over. I called a friend to get help and contacted NetCare for an ambulance. I rushed downstairs to open the front door and then carried Reva downstairs. My friend and a doctor entered, and though I tried to help her, Reva died in my arms. The prosecution, however, had built its case on a few key points, saying that this was an intentional act after an argument. Neighbors testified that they heard loud voices and what

sounded like an argument coming from Pistorius's home on the night of the shooting. They said they heard screaming before the four gunshots. They also pointed out that there was no evidence of an intruder, and that the security system was working, and there was also no evidence that Pistorius mistook her for an intruder. They also point out the fact that he kept a loaded 9mm pistol under his bed, meaning that he just always had access to this weapon, not that he was armed because of fear of an intruder. After firing the shots, Pistorius took several minutes before realizing that Steenkamp was the one he had shot, suggesting premeditation. They also contested his claim that he wasn't wearing his prosthetics, because of the angle and the direction of the bullet holes. They said that if he had time to put on his prosthetic legs, this looked less like a man panicking, thinking there was an intruder,

and much more like a premeditated murder. Also, in the South African legal system, they have a principle called dolus eventualis, which means that he must have understood the possibility that his actions could have resulted in someone's death, and he proceeded regardless, pointing toward intent to murder. The closest analog to that in the U.S. legal system is reckless disregard, or the depraved heart murder concept, in which a person exhibits cold disregard for human life. The trial system in South Africa is very different than in the U.S. There is no jury whatsoever. The trial is led by a single judge or by a judge and two assessors. The jury system was abolished in

1969 in the apartheid era because of concerns over bias in the jury pool due to racism. The judge determined that Pistorius was guilty only of culpable homicide, which is similar to manslaughter in the U.S., and he was sentenced to five years in prison. He was released on October 19, 2015, after serving the minimum of one-sixth of his sentence. The state appealed the original conviction in December of 2015, and the South African Supreme Court of Appeal overturned Pistorius' conviction and replaced it with a murder conviction. He was then sentenced to six years, again shock shockingly short. But after another appeal by the state, the sentence was increased to 15 years, which tacked on another 13 years and five months to

his time already served. Vistorius was denied parole on March 31st, 2023, but on January 5th, 2024, he was paroled after only having served nine years for the murder of Riva Steenkamp. In South Africa, violence against women is an epidemic. In 2020, one woman died at the hands of an intimate partner every six to eight minutes, as reported in a study done at the University of Free State. In 2019, South Africa ranked in the top five countries with the highest rates of murder of women. Riva's last Instagram post reads, I woke up in a happy, safe home this morning. Not everyone did. Speak out against the rape of individuals in South Africa. R.I.P. Anine Boussen. The post referred to the murder of an 18-year-old who had been raped by multiple assailants, brutally mutilated, and left at a construction site in the Western Cape in February of 2013. She died a few days later as a result of the severity of the sexual assault. Riva was a passionate activist

in the fight against gender-based violence in South Africa. She was set to deliver a speech to her high school on the topic the day after she was murdered. And in her honor, her mother June delivered that speech. In South Africa, they use the term femicide, referring to the intentional killing of women or girls because of their gender. It's not an official legal term, but it is widely recognized and discussed as part of the wider topic of gender-based violence. Femicide is, no surprise, often linked to domestic abuse, sexual violence, and the government has tried to address it by implementing laws such as the Domestic Violence Act and Criminal Law Amendment Act, which aim to ensure justice for victims of gender-based violence and femicide, by having specific courts that deal with gender-based violence cases,

by implementing a national strategic plan to address the problem, and by allowing aggravated sentencing. Courts can impose different penalties if a crime is motivated by gender-based violence or is characterized as femicide. Unfortunately, though, the trend has continued, with South Africa still having some of the worst rates of violence against women in the world. Given all of that, it's even more shocking that Oscar Pistorius is now out of prison, walking among the population, free to date and abuse more women, and could even compete in track and field again, while those who loved Riva are left without any real justice. Next week, we'll be back to talking about a more local case, but it's so important to

keep these stories in mind, talk about them, remember the victims, and to work toward a world where this isn't allowed to happen. With these stories especially, it's a harsh reminder that while we focus on domestic violence crimes in Las Vegas, what happens here happens everywhere. To be continued... Remember to like and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Threads at Sins and Survivors. If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice. You can contact us at questions at sinsandsurvivors.com. If you or someone you know is affected by domestic violence or needs support, please reach out to local resources or the National Domestic Violence Hotline. A list of resources is available on our website, sinsandsurvivors.com. Sins and Survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast,

is research written and produced by your hosts, Sean and John. The information shared in this podcast is accurate at the time of recording. If you have questions, concerns, or corrections, please email us. Links to source material for this episode can be found on our website, sinsandsurvivors.com. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast creators, hosts, and their guests. All individuals are innocent until proven guilty. This content does not constitute legal advice. Listeners are encouraged to consult with legal professionals for guidance.