When bad things happen to good people we're dumbfounded. We literally "find" ourselves "dumb" in what feels like an alien and unpleasant world. How could this happen? Most of us make throwaway comments without thinking, and go on with our lives. But if gut-wrenching tragedies don't yank us out of business-as-usual or social-media-as-usual, what will? What will get us to have serious conversations about the state of humanity in the world today?
Criminal acts and mass shooting in particular are warning signs that remind us of overall trends stewing and brewing in our communities. Like extreme hurricanes, we need to pay attention to these extremes so that we can adapt, respond to them. In nature, organisms are rewarded for the ability to perceive threats, understand them and respond to them. But it seems human nature, in our wisdom, think it better to not think at all. The screengrab above is but one example of this effort to encourage people to be sheep: please don't think about this, leave it to the experts!
As a student of law and a student on high profile cases, I've seen just the sort of damage that happens when societies, witnesses, victims and even judges and juries are caught napping. Because in the real world, make no mistake, somebody profits from your failure to think for yourself. Someone gets away with something because you wouldn't go further than judging a book by its cover.
PR companies in particular, profit from this cognitive laziness. They press buttons and guide their prey - whole herds at a time - along paths of least emotional resistance. Usually sentiment. There is a lot of science and logic in the world, but just as much tribalism and sentiment. Thinking is hard. Thinking is not escapism, it means we have to confront the world and ourselves. Most of us, most of the time, don't want to. But we should. For the simple reason that most of us are caught up in silly and shallow distraction, when its necessary, when seminal tragedies occur, we need to rouse ourselves and pay attention. Let me say that again: when important disasters befall us or our communities we need to wake the fuck up, get the fuck up, and examine our lives. We need to pay attention. We need to tell stories about real events and real people surrounding us, and make up our minds what we think about them. We need to think and reason, otherwise we are mere dullards mindlessly chewing the cud in fairytale fields, no good to the world, and no good to one another.
Dr. Glass is correct in saying this thin slicing habit of casting our ideas into a hat at the drop of a hat isn't helpful. But she's wrong so say we should stop. It doesn't incite hate if what it does is digs beneath the veneer. That sort of thinking inspires connection and acknowledgement. That sort of confronting of what we don't know is the opposite of escape, it's our homecoming. We should start thinking. I have, and over the course of several true crime cases, very high profile in which there were dozens of investigators, cops and lawyers, I was still able to advance the narrative into new areas and new discoveries simply by having the stamina to pay attention and think about how the pieces fit [or didn't fit] together. It has value! Because ultimately it decides what our world is made of, what we are made of and how it needs to be rearranged so that it fits. If we can't pay attention to someone else, how can we properly attend to ourselves? And if we can't listen to our own thoughts, if we can't abide logic, how can we understand anyone else?
I want to encourage you to think for yourselves too. This shooting in Las Vegas, any crime in fact, is an opportunity to not only confront a stranger's motives, but your own too. You're part of the world, you're part of the human race, aren't you?
Stephen Paddock's motive was revenge. How do we know? Revenge for what? It's not rocket-science, just a tried-and-tested true crime approach - by Nick van der Leek
64 year old Stephen Paddock never left a suicide note, or a declaration of intent. His family don't know why he did it. The police aren't sure. The media have no idea. Does that mean we can't apply our minds and put the psychological puzzle together?
Of course we can! Here's a contemporary clue:
"First principles Clarice. Simplicity....Of each particular thing ask what is it, in itself. What is its nature? What does he do this man you seek?"
By going through a 7 point checklist, we will, by the end of this analysis, have not a rough idea but a clear idea of not only who Paddock was, but of his entire motivational psychology.
Let's begin by entertaining Dr. Lecter's question at face value. What is it, what is Paddock's nature? What does he do?
The answer is not that he's a terrorist, or that he slaughtered a crowd of people from a lofty tower. The answer to who he is is not that Paddock now holds the record for the largest mass-shooting in US history. That is something - one horrible thing - that he did. It doesn't tell us who he is. Lecter would say "that [the mass shooting record] is incidental."
First and foremost Paddock was a gambler. This is not incidental. Paddock had worked as an accountant. This too, is not incidental. Paddock liked to play with money, so much so he had developed an obsession with it. This obsession became an addiction which alienated him from his own family, effectively turning him into a "lone wolf." What happens to a lone wolf when a big gamble goes bad? Well, he loses - in a real sense - everything he has, everything he is.
We'll come back to the gambling theme, but for now, bear in mind the generic definition of the word:
...the wagering of money or something of value (referred to as "the stakes") on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning money or material goods. Gambling thus requires three elements be present: consideration, chance and prize.
For a gambler the primary intent [or motive] then is winning. The worst case scenario is for a gambler to lose, because his identity is thus instantly recast from winner to loser, with either identification related to the fate of stakes. The fate of stakes is the fate of the gambler.
7 Point Psychological Checklist
1. Operative Emotion
The operative emotion is loneliness. It is the unpleasant emotional response to isolation. In the schema of the crime, we see the symbology of that loneliness writ large. We see a 64 year old suspended 32 storeys high in a hotel room, while at ground level, 32 000 revellers are having fun. He's not part of it - he's apart from it.
Unlike typical crimes, where there is a specific and identifiable victim, in Paddock's case the victim is the anonymous group, the community, which he is not part of. As such there is a vast vertical and horizontal distance between the criminal and his victims, far more than in conventiuonal crimes, and what's more, he has to smash through a layer of transparent glass, a barrier, in order to make lethal contact with the crowd. I'll expand in a moment on the symbolism of the see-through glass barrier.
For now it suffices to note that Paddock's execution is not simply firing an automatic weapon from a building, it's a way of being heard by the crowd, being heard over the noise, a way of crying out from the rooftops. In making himself apparent Paddock was also, simultaneously, crafting his own destruction. Social death transacted for social death.
In this sense Paddock's loneliness had given him a sense of emptiness, meaninglessness and above all, insignificance. This inferiority complex also haunted Hitler, who gratified his interior insufficiency through the liquidation of six million lives. Each life taken was a tiny notch in their effort to rebuild a rickety identity, and some identities can not stand no matter how many lives are taken.
If the operative emotion is loneliness, it is also a combination of other bristling resentments, bitternesses, and despair - all of which finally manifests as anger. Anger is an activating emotion, loneliness and despair are a kind of paralysing emotion. The man on the 32nd floor didn't fire one short burst and then recover himself. It was a sustained barrage because the loneliness and pain fuelling that anger was bottomless. Each bullet fired felt like relief, like he was transacting the same pain he felt had been inflicted on him by an uncaring society, and so no amount of death and carnage was going to be enough. Another word for "transacting the same pain he felt" is revenge.
2. Identity
It may seem simple and easy to simply associate Paddock with his work and his addiction. He was an accountant and a gambler. He worked in real estate. He'd worked for one of the world's largest defense companies, Lockheed Martin. But though these play into the identity, they're not the core. The core is Paddock's father.Benjamin Hoskins Paddock was a significant person. Wanted by the FBI for robbing banks, for stealing money, he was nevertheless a somebody. He mattered. He changed things.
Paddock learned from his father that human beings were secondary to money. All things, were secondary to money.
...the wagering of money or something of value (referred to as "the stakes") on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning money or material goods. Gambling thus requires three elements be present: consideration, chance and prize.
And in making bets, Paddock discovered a twitching fish that told him he was alive. Otherwise being alive was lonely, empty, insignificant, unfulfilling. For some people solo rock climbing brings that visceral sense of being alive back. For Paddock it was betting large amounts of money.
Money was how Paddock measured his value. But that kind of transactional attitude has a dark side. If money maketh the man, man can also be unmade at the snap of a finger. One can lose one's money, or one can have money and be rejected anyway. Or one's own fixation on money can turn others off, who want and need something beyond bling to stitch into the fabric of their lives.
Back in the retirement community of Mesquite, this was Paddock's home. Ordinary, dull, insignificant. Like him. Nothing to look forward to. His father had achieved significance by stealing. Society had locked him away and deprived him of a father. Now he could deprive them of fathers and family. Now he could steal their joy...
"What need did he serve by killing? Was it anger? No, he covets."
UPDATE: Some have reported in the media about a "white man's privilege". Although most of that reportage is noise, it's not irrelevant. The fact that Paddock was a privileged white guy [in the sense of his wealth] and yet seemed to conduct himself like a rude, mean, scruffy loser on the fringes of society, I think plays into the idea that he resented white people. He resented their happiness and belonging, he resented that he wasn't afforded a "proper" place in that society, specifically by white women. This is why he was with a Filipina woman. I have been to the Philippines myself; many old, ugly wealthy white men travel there in search of young prey because they are romantic failures in their own communities, rejected by the women of their tribe for whatever reason. They travel to a poor country to "escape" the mores and confines in their own.
Perhaps he felt he could buy and own them [women, relationships], but when he found he couldn't keep them [he was twice divorced], his bankruptcy as a person was revealed. We can see that he was an odd looking guy, and his partner was only hip high, meaning the pair even looked like a pair of misfits, a regular Laurel and Hardy. The inability to fit into society, and not coincidentally, white society, is a real factor here.
3. Routine Reinforcers
I've made an assumption that Paddock was addicted to gambling. This is based on:
1. the crime scene [He was staying in a casino hotel and fired from his room in the Mandalay Bay hotel]
2. the intuitive sense that regular gambling is founded on inner emptiness [Paddock lacked strong family relationships, significant societal investment or regular work commitments]
3. the age of the perpetrator [His relatively old age made him more susceptible to gambling addiction and loneliness than a younger, more attractive person with future prospects]
4. the fact that Paddock booked himself into casinos for weeks at a time [this exposes just how rootless and disconnected and empty his life was, along with the fact that he wasn't even on social media, though his Filipina girlfriend was].
5. the fact that Paddock was using Marilou Danley's identification to enable access to hotel facilities on a regular and long term basis [did that mean his own access had been revoked?]
The use of access cards provides us with a unique insight. Paddock's unusual need to be in a casino as much as he did meant his significant other was actually a casino employee. Naturally he would meet someone where he was routinely spending his time. The question is, did Danley offer her access card to him or did he steal it off her? Since Danley has been cleared as a suspect, one can assume that it was stolen, but with more information, this assumption is likely to change.
UPDATE #1: Marilou Danley has just flown into Los Angeles, where she was met by the FBI. Images of Paddock visiting Danley's family in the Philippines have emerged, along with evidence Paddock made $100 000 transfers to her/her family in the Philippines.
UPDATE #2:
From this we're left with an impression that Paddock lacked social graces. His brother Eric appears to reinforce this impression based on his first television appearances. This is more than an impression however, from photos Paddock doesn't look well groomed, he appears scruffy and neglectful of himself. Were his family, his brother Eric who claimed he loved him, aware of this? The repeated use of the word "cheat" here is significant. Previously Eric refers to "liars". It suggests an awareness for circumventing responsibility in a regular sense, beyond Paddock taking his own life. And we see that mirrored in Danley, who was married to two men at the same time, and also appeared to have something of a cavalier approach to the law and to casino rules.
Thanks to CNN we can also see Danley's movements, which seem beyond erratic, as if purposefully trying to disorientate anyone tracking her...
The idea of a "weak person" is also hugely significant. We intuit the same weakness, at least socially, in Paddock. I have already mentioned his beef is with society, and for his being an outsider to society, and so a lack of social intelligence, and social currency, and social credit, would manifest as a weak personality seeking to align itself with someone else that is weak, someone he could buy and bully, and he did. This profile is a huge mismatch to the manner in which both Danley and his brother Eric have described Stephen.
How likely is it that Danley would "more shocked" by his actions than her siblings who lived somewhere else? Danley knew him, lived with him, knew he had weapons. When he instructed her to leave for the Philippines, did she simply take the ticket and run, not knowing why? This was a guy who was almost too stingy to buy her a cup of coffee [see below], and here he'd bought her a "cheap" air ticket without her even asking...
This ragged appearance, the impression that Paddock never slept is vital. It shows he suffered anxiety and was stimulated in some way that actually impacted his ability to soothe himself. We know that ultimately he lost that battle. He decided instead of soothing, he would allow his boiling anger to take over, his stewing resentments to be heard rattling above Las Vegas.
It's also clear that Paddock was a mean bastard from ordinary observations made by those around him. So why do his family insist he was a harmless sweetheart? What are they hiding other than how they have been bought and sold with his money?
A final observation from the Starbucks crew:
This regimented consumption suggests there was a similar empty, repetitive existence gambling. Paddock's life lacked real variety and real diversity. Instead it was 20 years floating zombie-like through a sterile wasteland filled with casino chips and winking, clattering jackpot machines that took more than they gave. It was a cruel, unloving world and Paddock wanted that world to feel his wrath...
6. if Paddock was addicted to gambling, was he addicted to anything else? If he was lonely and hanging out in casinos, wouldn't he be likely to hang out at bars and drink? Was he promiscuous? if he was that would feed into the idea of people as expendable and disposable things. Wasn't this why he'd lost touch with his family, and they with him?
"And how do we begin to covet, Clarice?...We begin by coveting what we see everyday..."
4. Background Reinforcement
Paddock earned an income off properties he owned, and this business may have reinforced this sense of the world as a transactional [in other words Trumpian] win/lose environment. The symbology of infrastructure is important, however. Think about the high rise hotel rising above the concert. Although paddock is there he doesn't live there, he doesn't live anywhere. He is floating around, he is wealthy in a sense, but his wealth is eroding and he doesn't belong. Even though he feels superior to the ordinary folks milling on the ground, he's envious of them. He's envious of the community and its easy joy, and regular happiness. It burns him to see it. And he can see it all from his perch, a nondescript hotel room in a honeycomb of similarly anonymous accommodations, where he finds himself facing the hours alone, filling up on a toxic brew of quiet desperation. He's a man with no future, no children, nothing to look forward to.
He has lost himself for years in gambling, but he's seen what he's become: nothing. An empty husk. A nobody. A loser.
The casino environment is, in itself, a disorientating maze. It's difficult to orientate oneself because casinos are purposefully designed without anchoring reference points, such as visuals or time. No casino will have a clock visible because it does not wish to remind its patrons of reality; that it might be getting late. The casino is designed to snare its patron so they can lose themselves in fantasies of greed and reward. At the end of a gambling spree, a gambler may feel exhilarated but also hollowed out and unfulfilled, especially if the dizzy heights have culminated in enormous losses.
We know that recently Paddock began gambling with sizable amounts of $30 000. Going through $10 000 and $30 000 a day over a period of weeks can turn a rich man poor in a relatively short time. 100 days gambling with $30 000 is $3 million.
5. Significant Environmental Factors
If Paddock got his kicks from gambling, he also got his kicks out of guns. Money and guns gave an immediate sense of personal power. By gambling more and getting his hands on more guns, and more powerful weapons, this imbued sense of power seemed to increase.
At the same time, environmental factors were circling which no doubt impacted on Paddock's psyche. His mother and brother living in Florida had just experienced Hurricane Irma, and power outages. From a distance Paddock observed how the community dealt with that crisis, and what's more, how his brother and mother were able to take care of each other without him. In this crisis scenario he discovered himself to be unnecessary, unneeded, ancillary, insignificant. He found himself living outside the reality of community, and family, even the weather. Instead he was occupying the surreal world of air conditioned casinos and sterile hotel rooms, a world in which nothing was real, nothing mattered and no one was connected to one another.
Paddock differs from Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs in that what he coveted, in a central sense, was meaning. He coveted connection to community. Connection to family. Connection, relationships with another. Gambling had effectively replaced genuine interactions with real people, and Paddock was starting to feel the excruciating reality of it. He was feeling invalidated as a person. He was increasingly feeling invalidated by the easy happiness, the light levity of those entering and leaving Vegas. But unlike them, he stayed in that cigarette smelling, whiskey reeking party-pooped reality.
What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas...
Well, so did Paddock. he stayed in Vegas. He saw the shallowness. He felt it accumulating inside him.
6. Contributing Cultural Forces
President Donald Trump's divisive remarks, and in particular the flaring up of white supremacist rhetoric in Charlottesville, may have reinforced the idea of lashing out against the oppressor. If you feel insignificant, lash out at immigrants, or blacks, or Democrats. If you feel threatened, make your feelings manifest [as Trump did with North Korea]. In other words, if you're unhappy, don't use diplomacy, use might. Use force. Don't wait, don't hold back, exact revenge!
I am not saying that Trump's politics, or US politics or racism had any relevance to Paddock. I am saying in a more general sense, the highly reactive and reactionary politics [including the Steve Calise shooting in June, just three months earlier] would have triggered the same psychological sense of taking exception to one's perceived insufficiencies, and taking up arms to defend oneself, especially if one had an arsenal at the ready.
An FBI "expert" I happened to catch on CNN pontificating on the fact that there was nothing abnormal about Paddock owning an arsenal is what's wrong with the world today. There are none so blind as those who cannot see. My response to anyone who thinks owning a 42 weapon arsenal is normal is this:
7. Analogous Cases
If the above still seems like wishy-washy shot-in-the-dark speculation, then we need to ground this analysis in the annuls of true crime. Well, is there an analogous case? There always is!
With Ted Kaczynski, the same broad markers are there. Isolation, an obsessive pre-occupation [in his case with self-sufficiency or survival rather than gambling], and out of this environment, where the lone wolf broods on his own unadulterated thoughts, the bitterness turns to anger, and angry thoughts are converted into obsessions revolving around payback and revenge.
Another example of a far more targeted attempt to exact revenge on an uncaring society was the murder of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman. After shooting Lennon five times, four times in the back, Chapman remained at the scene while reading from The Catcher in the Rye. Unlike Paddock, Chapman repeatedly made his declaration of intent clear to the cops as they arrested him: he said the novel was his statement. He had murdered Lennon as a sort of protest against the phoniness of the world.
But it was also because Lennon had invalidated Chapman. Chapman had become a born again Christian and idolised Lennon, but that changed when Lennon claimed to be more popular than Jesus. Chapman's anger escalated as the sense of invalidation escalated. Chapman had been bullied at school and so the invalidation played deeply into his fragile sense of identity, and an imputed sense of insignificance.
8. Conclusion
We get a sense of Paddock's instability from his own brother. When Eric has fielded interviews he makes odd statements very much lacking in empathy or sensitivity. It's interesting that Paddock's sibling doesn't acknowledge the eccentricity running through the family, in effect, the instability.
It's likely that we will soon discover the full story behind how and why Paddock felt emasculated. He'd likely recently lost a small [or large] fortune gambling, and lost out in love, thus creating a kind of identity crisis. In a world where nothing seemed real, nothing had meaning, where he'd discovered himself bankrupt [emotionally, in a relationship sense, and in terms of society], he simply cycled back to the same destructive backstory of his own father.
We get an added sense, from the fact that Paddock took his own life, that he knew what he was doing was wrong, and was willing to pay a price for it. But he felt justified, if he was going to lose in the gamble of life and love, then someone else [it didn't matter who] also had to pay the price. Who? The society that had rejected him. The breaking of the glass of the Mandalay Hotel is symbolic of the transparency not only into the room of Paddock's broken world, but also into the world itself. We live in a world of broken people, and when we discover the world to be empty and meaningless we're devastated. We have no idea how to put the pieces of ourselves back together again. That is an indictment not only of disconnected, addicted individuals, but of a society so disconnected from itself that it has begun to elect madmen to tell it what it wants to hear, and reality be damned.
In such a world, where there is no meaning, no significance and no consequence, where money maketh and unmaketh the man, where money is the sole arbiter of value....in such a world, make no mistake, madmen will continue to come out of the woodwork. One mad act inspires another. One fragile identity seeds more fragile identities. A world where lives are reduced to money and violence isn't a world that respects life. It's a world that respects madness. Until further notice, this is the world we find ourselves in. When we're asked what the motive is of madmen, we can't see them not because they're obscure, but because we've succumbed to the madness as well. It's a madness composed of the inability to think for ourselves.
By MCD I have read these books out of order, starting with 'Reeva in her own words' and then jumping ahead to 'Resurrection'. Ultimately, this is an interrogation of the Oscar Pistorius story, addressing the issues of authenticity, as well as 'could he?' (Pistorius) or 'should he?' be resurrected? The paradox of a world renowned Paralympian athlete is highlighted: a Paralympian who has admitted he wouldn't be doing athletics i[f] he was able-bodied. A number of questions are posed: -should Oscar Pistorius have been allowed to compete in able-bodied athletics? -does he, in fact, have an advantage when he runs with is blades? -does he steer attention away from other able-bodies athletes when he is in the same arena? There are a few surprises that I did not expect, including a plausible motive, or at least context, which may have led to the tragic shooting on Valentines Day 2013. The author picks away at the tapestry of the Oscar Pistorius Brand, posing interesting questions. Although some statements are controversial and the reader may not always agree, this is a well researched and cleverly written comment on Oscar's narrative that will get one thinking outside the box.
Prosecutors have not disclosed a motive for the alleged murder, but one of their witnesses may testify that Pistorius had a temper. - NBC
With Oscar refusing to admit that he intended to kill an intruder, he is trying to stop the state’s attempt to get him on grounds of dolus eventualis. Gerrie Nel has pointed out on many occasions that it is inconceivable for someone to fire four shots at a possible intruder without foreseeing the possible outcome or consequences of this action, a form of intention with knowledge of possible outcomes i.e. dolus eventualis. - TwoOceansvibe
The athlete was evaluated by four specialists as a day-patient to determine if he was, “at the time of the commission of the offence criminally responsible” and if he could appreciate the “wrongfulness of his actions and act according to that appreciation”. Judge Thokozile Masipa ordered the three psychiatrists and one clinical psychologist to evaluate Pistorius to determine whether his general anxiety disorder and his disability would have had any significant effect on him when he killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine’s Day last year. - DestinyMan
These are all questions Nel put to Pistorius, who contested that “nothing was normal about that night.”“I have difficulty with the huge leap from shooting an intruder to shooting at Reeva,” Nel said of Pistorius’s testimony that it immediately dawned on him that it was Steenkamp in the bathroom.“I understand that it doesn’t sound rational, but I didn’t have a rational state of mind,” Pistorius responded. - TheDailyBeast
Nel began by pointing out that Pistorius had heard the first noise, then got his gun before advancing cautiously down the passage towards the bathroom. The prosecutor was trying to show that Pistorius had time for conscious thought after he was first frightened and before shooting, but a concession along these lines proved difficult to obtain from the witness. At one point, Derman complained that he didn’t understand the “point” Nel was making or the “sequencing of the questions”. Judge Thokozile Masipa replied: “I’m not sure that it should be your concern, counsel decides how he is going to ask his questions. If you cannot assist because you don’t know, you simply say you don’t know.” Nel repeated: “In an incident like this where there’s a startle, with accused finding a gun, knowing where it is, getting a gun ready to fire, going to the bathroom, killing someone, would that still make sense to you if there was just one startle?” “No, there would need to be more startles,” replied Derman. Nel later moved on to Pistorius’ potential motives at the time of the shooting. “If I put it to you that … he heard a sound and he fired at the sound to kill the person inside the toilet, you cannot say it’s not so?” Derman cautiously conceded: “He fired at the sound and I’m sure that was to nullify any threat.” - CityPress
What's interesting, also is the near-deafening silence of those in Oscar Pistorius inner circle. His family, his agents, mutual friends, his sponsors, the fawning media. Is the media and are the schlebs still invested to the hilt in [and here's a HINT] protecting their BRANDS? Like this guy:
Note: The CityPress article quoted in bold above wrongly suggests that a sound and motive are linked. A sound may (or may not) bring about an instinctual response, which would show intent, or lack of intentional action. This line of thought is used not to show motive, but to show an ABSENCE of either intent or motive or both.
No one is seriously interrogating the possibility of an INTENTIONAL act, and a MOTIVE to murder. We have a door, and four bullets fired through it. Two people in a house. One disabled, the other dead. Similar to the Griekwastad case you have:
1) large amounts of money involved (and imminently even larger amounts about to be involved)
2) a sexual element (unbalanced)
3) an accused who does not see, hear or do anything
4) the potential for access (or the security, or maintenance) to these resources - mostly financial - severely threatened by...an incident with cataclysmic consequences in terms of reputational damage.
If you you're getting excited and you're thinking I'm talking about motive here, no, I'm still in the realms of INTENT, but not quite there. I'm not going to reveal motive here [in a blog post]. What I will say...is it's easier for an accused to rationalise their own motive/s when they have massive vested interests in terms of enormous amounts of money (property etc) and these resources - they believe, are also at their disposal - and can be used to mount the best defence money can buy.
And we're not even going to interrogate motive?
Are we afraid we won't find something, or are we afraid that we might?
Are we hypnotised by a version to such a degree that we can't think critically and intuit something more rational, and realistic.
It was Valentine's Day. [Griekwastad - it was Good Friday]. Did these days have no significance whatsoever?
And are we afraid that after a year and a half we may finally realise the full extent of the 'accident'. Accident is another word for mistake. It's the word you use to say you didn't do it on purpose, ie. that you had no motive.
But what if the assertion isn't true to begin with? IOW what if I say it was an accident when really I did act on purpose, I did have very good (?) reason to do what I did (or thought I did in the heat of the moment) but after I did it...and took stock...I realised I'd made a terrible mistake. But that's a different kind of mistake altogether, isn't it?
Motive is an entirely different narrative. When you are dealing with re-framing a narrative you have to be prepared to accept that you may have made some mistakes...you believed certain things about yourself/others that weren't/aren't true. That's not always a good experience, because it means we've been kidding ourselves. No one likes to admit they've duped, or been duped.
Mistakes are one thing, but evidence tends to leave a trail that asks questions beyond mistakes. If you fire 4 shots, and 3/4 are on target, and you need to balance against a wall (which he did), then you have intent, but what is the motive? No one is asking this question at face value because they believe it is:
a) too speculative
b) in addition to a) no supporting evidence
c) there's still an implicit sympathy for the fallen hero (in other words, we still accept his own narrative, and we still accept that as a hero he was incapable of murder - same as OJ Simpson)
4) we are afraid to challenge the presiding narrative because to do so causes us uncertainty. If this guy isn't who he says he is, what does that say about me, and my world?
And we don't take any of this further for the same reason no one bothered to check whether it was actually, scientifically fair if Oscar competed with able-bodied runners. This is the underlying narrative in RESURRECTION which flowed into the motive narrative (though I didn't realise it at the time). No one bothered to check, to measure if Oscar had an advantage on his artificial legs over able-bodied runners.
Except that's not true.
There were tests.
There were measurements.
There was a scientific finding. [Read Resurrection to explore all that].
And in this case, do we have any evidence to support an assumption of guilt Is there any evidence of a motive. No. If there was the state would have found it. Because they haven't, there can't be a motive. Because there is no obvious evidence, there is no motive.
But.
Actually.
There is.
You may think no evidence is no evidence, but consider Oscar's cellphone (whose PIN he couldn't remember). We now know he was ALWAYS on his phone. We see him on his phone (presumably a new phone) even in court.
We know he had his phone on him when he carried Reeva's body downstairs, he had it with him downstairs in the kitchen while the police were running around upstairs.
We even know, by his own admission that immediately after shooting Reeva, while she was alive but bleeding to death, he was fiddling with his phone [to call for an ambulance...oh yes, I'd use someone else's phone to do that...never-mind we all know cellphone handsets are universally access-controlled.]
It's also unfortunate that Nel didn't call Gina Myers to ask whether Reeva had a PIN on her phone. It's possible Myers would never have noticed, but someone might have, and an audit of the phone would have proved this [PIN protection] in any case.
It's interesting that the police, and Oscar's sister, and Aimee Pistorius, and the neighbour's would have been aware at the time or subsequently, that all handsets had been seized as evidence. But not Oscar's.
And that's okay?
Did he give it to his sister? Did the police not find it, or was he able to persuade them to let him hold onto it for a few days. Did he conceal the fact that he had his phone, or did he use it and sit simply [incredibly] didn't come up in the conversation.
Here's the kicker. If Oscar wiped the memory of his phone, he would have needed time to do so. He could have done it in public or in private, but given how crucial cellphone evidence is, Oscar is likely to have realised what he needed to do, and so would have methodically wiped the iPhone 5's memory in private. In secret.
Let's reflect for a moment that it is cellphone data that ultimately locked in the timeline for the Griekwastad murders. A final sms by the boy's mother along with his ETA at the police station was what finally exposed his version as both improbable and highly unlikely.
Ironically, we have similar timelines in this case, where neighbour's calls to security and Oscar's own calls provide a fairly narrow timeline. In other words, within the irrefutable facts of these cellphone records, let's call it scientific data (ie verifiable information), a narrative has to be placed that makes sense. Oscar's doesn't. Time is simply one aspect that is out of sync. Also the time that Reeva ate, and Reeva smsed to say she wasn't coming 'home' to the Myers that night.
Here's why the evidence on gastric emptying is so crucial to determining what happened on the night Reeva Steenkamp was shot.
The defence says Steenkamp ate around 7pm, and she and Pistorius went to sleep at 10pm.
The prosecution says the stomach contents indicate she ate around 2am. They say this suggests the couple were awake – and arguing – before the shooting.
It's not disputed that Steenkamp was shot at around 3am
Even if a cellphone isn't used on the day of a crime, it can fully contextualize behaviour, showing movements, showing communications, showing, in other words, general intent. A single Valentine's Day message to Oscar from one of his masses of adoring female fans - just one - would have called into question his narrative of devotion and dedication to Reeva.
So it is pertinent that NO DATA was retrieved. As such we have to wonder, what might this data have revealed? Why would Oscar wipe its memory if he did (and yes, he very likely did).
The phone would have been crucial to supporting a possible motive, and so without the phone, we have a setback. We have to forget about motive. Right? Wrong. That's not my argument. It's Oscar's and I think the state have accepted it too.
That's a mistake.
I know why. Well, I'm 99% certain.
I've pieced it all together.
Have a look at RESURRECTION Book #3 in my Oscar Pistorius Trial 5 part series. It interrogates Oscar's chances of competing in able-bodied sport, it investigates his chances at winning an appeal and the final three chapters provide the first compelling case for MOTIVE.
- The Media are not mentioning it because they believe it is unknown and unknowable (or perhaps they want to draw this story out for as long as they can before bringing it to resolution.)
- The State are not mentioning it because if they are wrong on any detail, they can throw away their case. In other words, the State are taking a conservative approach.
- RESURRECTION for the first time provides context, intent and motive.It provides a new, alternative narrative to the one sold to and leveraged by the media. In other words, it's not Oscar's narrative of who Oscar is, it's an updated version made by a third party. Is it accurate? Is it more accurate than Oscar's version? Well, you have to check one set of facts to another. And a good practice exercise for this is the able-bodied/disabled narrative. That was a false narrative, and Oscar's entire persona was based on it. So what does that tell us about his relationships with facts, reality, science and rationalising.
I have used all of these to piece together a new narrative. I believe this one is better, and more authentic. They're closer to the real Oscar than the original narrative. The original asks us to make assumptions and take beliefs on face value. We do because they are positive and seem to inspire us, but are they true?
Using dates, the stated intentions of Oscar Pistorius, his agent Peet Van Zyl, Capacity Relations (Reeva Steenkamp's PR company) and crucially the social media evidence in the public domain, I've pieced together a new narrative. I've also interrogated the media's narrative in this regard.
Bluster? One prominent journalist who I provided the original word.docx of the final three chapters said the following:
Hi, die redakteurs wil nie nou iets doen nie. Ek verskil obviously van hulle. Gee vir ander journos, asb. Dit moet gekskryf word.
As of right now, I have motive. Nobody else does, not the media, nor the state, nor any of the so-called scrum of expert commentators on Carte Blanche's Oscar Trial Channel. There may be one other person in the world right now who knows the same thing I do. I'll give you one guess who that might be...
RESURRECTIONS (Amazon Kindle Bestseller Rank #24 on 5/07/2014) is currently available as part of a 207 page eBook here. You don't need a Kindle or specific eBook reader. All you need is a computer, laptop, smartphone + internet connection + download this free app. The first few pages are free, otherwise you can purchase the entire eBook, 207 pages for $3.41. That's about R34, the price of a magazine.
If you do read it, be sure to let me know what you thought @HiRezlife or email me at nickvanderleek[at][gmail][dot][com].
