“There is no way anything else could have happened,” said Botha. “It was just them in the house, and according to the security registers she had been staying there for two to three days, so he had to be used to her by that time.... There was no forced entry. The only place there could have been entrance was the open bathroom window, and we did everything we could to see if anyone went through it, and it was impossible. So I thought it was an open-and-closed case. He shot her—that’s it. I was convinced that it was murder, and I told my colonel, ‘You already read him his rights, so you have to arrest him.’ ”

Botha went into the garage, where Pistorius, in a bloody shirt and shorts, wearing his prosthetic legs, was sitting on a gym bench, surrounded by training equipment. “His head was in his hands, and he was crying. There was blood on him, but his hands were clean. We said, ‘Did you wash your hands?’ And he said, ‘Yes, because they were full of blood.’ ”

“Do you remember me?,” Botha asked him, referring to the time four years earlier when he had arrested Pistorius on the assault charge. “Yes,” replied Pistorius.

“What happened?”

“I thought it was a burglar,” said Pistorius.

But the evidence indicated intentional murder, Botha told me. Why would a burglar lock himself in a bathroom cubicle? Why would the victim be shot through her shorts if she was using the toilet in the middle of the night? And why would she have taken her cell phone into the bathroom at three A.M.? (Unsupported media speculation would swirl that Reeva had received a tweet or a text from the South African Rugby star Francois Hougaard, a previous boyfriend, and that that may have ignited Pistorius’s rage.) According to Botha, the bullets had struck her on the right side, which meant that she was not sitting on the toilet but probably crouching behind the locked door. From the location of the bullet casings in the bathroom, the detective believed that Pistorius had fired at the door from less than five feet away. By standing straight and imagining himself pointing a gun at the door, Botha believed that the bullet holes were slanted down, which would indicate that Pistorius had been wearing his prosthetic legs, not, as he would later claim, that he was on his stumps. But why would he enter the very area where he believed the burglar was lurking and begin firing, instead of grabbing his girlfriend and running for cover?

“It can’t be. It’s impossible,” Botha remembered thinking after hearing Oscar’s burglary story. Because of his certainty and his pursuit of evidence to prove it, the detective now feels, blame shifted from Pistorius to him. Botha was soon removed from the case, and shortly after that he resigned from the police force. His professional standing and reputation came under fire, he said, because he had not been able even to consider that Pistorius had thought Steenkamp was a burglar before shooting her down in cold blood.

AGAINST ALL ODDS

Oscar Pistorius overcame a severe disability—he was born without fibula bones, which necessitated the amputation of both of his legs below the knee when he was 11 months old—by ignoring it. “Your brother puts on his shoes, you put on your legs,” his mother repeatedly told him, inspiring him with her insistence that his disability didn’t define him. His parents’ divorce when he was 6, followed by his mother’s death from an adverse drug reaction when he was 15, left Pistorius shattered. Estranged from his father, he and his brother were like “rudderless boats,” he wrote in Blade Runner: My Story, his 2008 memoir. He had the dates of his mother’s birth and death tattooed on his arm, and he turned a message she once sent him into a mantra: “The real loser is never the person who crosses the finishing line last. The real loser is the person who sits on the side, the person who does not even try to compete.” No other woman seemed to measure up to Oscar’s mother; his autobiography recounts romantic disappointments and breakups. His only true love became the running track, on which he became “the fastest man on no legs” and “a symbol, a moment in history, a one-man parade of the human will,” according to published reports. “At first, Oscar Pistorius seems like someone who has stepped out of the future,” wrote NBC’s Brian Brown. “His gait has the quality of a giant cat on the prowl, if such a creature were equipped with flipper-like feet instead of paws As Oscar approaches, model handsome, outfitted in the latest Oakley shades and sleek Nike sportswear, with an admirably sculpted upper body, you can understand why anyone might wonder if this is a peek into our evolutionary future: half man, half machine.”