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In his low-key new world, Oscar Pistorius is trying to live up to the message his back tattoo conveys: “I do not run like a man running aimlessly”.
There have been caretaking shifts volunteering at a local church and the launch of a new charity as he seeks a sense of purpose on parole.
But Pistorius feels most like his old self when the blades are up and running again, pounding the track at his uncle’s multimillion-pound South African mansion.
“He’s working hard physically at the moment – running, in the gym and trying to get his body back into shape,” explains Mark Williams-Thomas, a detective-turned-broadcaster who remains in regular contact with Pistorius.
“Exercise has always been so important to Oscar. He knows how important it is to keep fit and stay healthy. When he came out [of prison], he was a shadow of himself. In the first early days, I would speak to him and he was just profoundly exhausted, mentally and physically.
It’s been 13 months since Pistorius’s release on parole from Atteridgeville Correctional Centre and now exactly 12 years since he killed Reeva Steenkamp, who was his girlfriend of three months, at his house in Pretoria.
To this day, Pistorius claims the four hollow-point bullets he shot through a bathroom door in the early hours were aimed at a possible intruder. Nevertheless, an initial conviction of culpable homicide was overturned in favour of a verdict of murder by the Supreme Court in 2015.
Now there is plenty of time to reflect for Pistorius. There is volunteering work to be done sweeping floors at a nearby church, but a vast amount of time is spent behind the 15ft walls of the luxurious home in Waterkloof owned by his uncle Albert.
Pistorius Sr, a Donald Trump-supporting businessman, is fiercely protective, claiming before Pistorius’ release his nephew had “matured”.
This Valentine’s Day, there is said to be a new blonde girlfriend – Rita Greyling, a business management consultant from a millionaire family who lives near Pistorius’s base.
The relationship has been met with shock by the Steenkamp family. Older sister Simone Cowburn reportedly said: “Is she nuts?” Steenkamp’s mother, June, has consistently said she would be “concerned for the safety of any woman” who comes into contact with him.
But Williams-Thomas, a former Surrey police detective who remains the only broadcaster to interrogate Pistorius on camera, refuses to condemn his 2016 interviewee. As the family attempt to map out his next move, Williams-Thomas offers the minority view that he deserves a chance at a “second life”.
“He will forever live with what happened to him, and he’s never shied away from that,” says Williams-Thomas. “He’s always accepted the responsibility for what he did. He took someone’s life, and he’ll live with that for the whole of his life. He remains at his uncle’s house and he’s trying to work and provide for society.”
“I have got to know Oscar and his family and friends and he is kind and genuine. He is not this dangerous, arrogant man as painted by so many, and I think we, as a society, have a duty to allow him to move on and try and live his second life as it were.”
‘No South African prisons are easy – he had a tough life’
Williams-Thomas had visited Pistorius multiple times at both Kgosi Mampuru II jail and Atteridgeville, where he spent the majority of his prison term.
“There were floods in one of the prisons he was at,” he adds. “They weren’t clean. You had to watch your back the whole time and look out for other people. There was a hierarchy system within jails and he was a part of all of that.”
“He ended his sentence in a prison which was gentler than his original prison. The original one was really nasty. But no South African prisons are easy. People say, ‘Oh, he had a cushy life because of who he was’. I saw first-hand he had a tough life in prison. There was no benefit for him because of who he was at all. He literally was a prisoner like everybody else.”
Others close to the case will argue this was the least Pistorius deserved. Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model and face of an anti-bullying campaign, was about to return to her old school to talk to girls about gender-based violence when she was killed. Pistorius, meanwhile, stood accused of having a history of controlling and abusing women. Text messages between the couple were particularly damning. One former girlfriend, Samantha Taylor, also said she feared he would kill her, saying in one interview she once hid his gun after he flew into a rage at her.
Those who had previously cheered the sporting feats of disability sport’s first millionaire celebrity felt betrayed. Six gold medals over three Paralympic Games and his history-making appearance at the Olympics in London 2012 made him the second most talked-about athlete that year behind Usain Bolt.
Oscar Pistorious at the London Olympics. Photo / AP
A picture painted in his trial of a volatile, hot-tempered and aggressive enigma with an appetite for fast cars, beautiful women and guns left only his inner circle still convinced Reeva’s death was a mistake.
‘I can still smell the blood’
In 2016, between jail stints and house arrest while awaiting a new sentence, he agreed to give Williams-Thomas his only television interview.
“I did take Reeva’s life and I have to live with that,” Pistorius told Williams-Thomas as they sat down at the same property he now lives in under his five-year parole terms. “I can smell the blood. I can feel the warmness of it on my hands. And to know that that’s your fault, that that’s what you’ve done.”
Williams-Thomas, who also fronted the ITV Exposure series that first named Jimmy Savile as a prolific paedophile, now says of his time with Pistorius: “It was a mad time. We did it all covertly. I spent a lot of time with him and spent hours and hours sitting talking to him. He was really worried about the film going out and how it would come across, and how he would be portrayed. We just said, ‘Look, just be yourself’.”
Pistorius pledged at the time: “If I was afforded the opportunity of redemption, I would like to help the less fortunate.” Over the past year, he has been given a chance to live up to that pledge. His parole terms have banned him from speaking to the press. Instead, his activities on LinkedIn offer the only available direct clues around his next moves. He appears to have attempted to launch a charity called ReAble, although it is unclear what has happened to the organisation after he stood down as chief executive in November.
However, he remains active on LinkedIn, and three weeks ago “liked” a post from Greyling stating she was starting a new position as head of business development for the region at Dutch consultancy firm Inlumi.
Williams-Thomas, who maintains he still believes Pistorius’s version of events, suggests the “redemption” Pistorius craved in his conversation with him eight years ago is now within sight. “I would like to believe that if Reeva could look down on me, then she would want me to live that life,” Pistorius had told him. But there is much work to be done before the Steenkamp family start believing him.
