What happened to Oscar Pistorius? One killing, four court outcomes, a decade of appeals.

Few criminal cases have been dissected in public quite like this one. It was televised almost in full, argued by two of the country's best-known advocates, and followed line by line around the world. And yet, more than a decade on, the plainest way to understand it is not through the drama but through the arithmetic. One man, one weapon, four shots, one death, and then a legal process that could not settle on what any of it meant.

Oscar Pistorius was, at the time, among the most celebrated athletes on earth. Born in Johannesburg in 1986 with a congenital condition, he had both legs amputated below the knee before his first birthday, took up sprinting on carbon-fibre blades, and became the first double amputee to run at an Olympic Games, in London in 2012. The nickname stuck: the Blade Runner. Reeva Steenkamp, 29, was a model and law graduate who had spoken out publicly against violence towards women. They had been together for about three months.

This piece walks through the case in order: what happened that night, why he was charged with murder rather than a lesser offence, the evidence that never quite fit together, and how the outcome changed three times before it finally held. It does not relitigate the verdict. It lays out what the courts found, what remained contested, and what the record actually shows.

A surprising amount is not in dispute. In the early hours of 14 February 2013, inside a gated estate on the eastern edge of Pretoria, Pistorius fired four hollow-point rounds through the closed and locked door of a small toilet cubicle in his bathroom. Reeva Steenkamp was behind that door. Three of the four shots struck her. She died at the scene. He raised the alarm, carried her downstairs, and she could not be saved.

Everything else, the part that decides whether this was a tragedy or a crime, rested on two irreconcilable accounts of the minutes before those shots. There were no eyewitnesses. The entire case had to be reconstructed from forensics, from the neighbours who heard rather than saw, and from Pistorius himself.

Pistorius was charged with premeditated murder. To understand why the case swung back and forth for years, you have to understand a distinction in South African law that turns out to be the hinge of the whole thing. Murder requires intent. Culpable homicide does not; it is an unlawful killing caused by negligence, roughly what other systems call manslaughter.

But intent, in this law, is broader than wanting someone dead. It includes what is called dolus eventualis: acting while foreseeing that your conduct could kill, and going ahead anyway, reconciled to that outcome. You do not have to intend a specific death. You only have to foresee that a death is likely and press on. That single idea is what separated a five-year sentence from a fifteen-year one.

The state's core argument was almost geometric. A person who fires four rounds from a high-calibre pistol into a tiny, enclosed cubicle must foresee that whoever is inside will very probably die. On the intruder story, that logic did not spare him: even if he genuinely thought a stranger was behind the door, firing four times into the cubicle still meant he foresaw and accepted a death. On the argument story, it was worse. Either way, the prosecution said, this reached the threshold of murder.

The trial opened on 3 March 2014 in the High Court in Pretoria, before Judge Thokozile Masipa, and ran for roughly seven months. In an unusual step for the South African courts, much of it was broadcast live. The country watched prosecutor Gerrie Nel, nicknamed the Pit Bull for his cross-examination, spar with defence advocate Barry Roux. Dozens of witnesses were called; the bullet-marked toilet door itself was carried into the courtroom as an exhibit.

On 12 September 2014, Masipa delivered her verdict. She found Pistorius not guilty of murder but guilty of culpable homicide, along with a separate firearm charge for discharging a pistol under a table in a crowded restaurant on another occasion. He was acquitted of two other gun charges. On 21 October she sentenced him to a maximum of five years for the killing. Within a year, having served roughly one sixth of it, he was moved to house arrest.

What made the case so gripping, and so bitterly argued, was that the physical evidence pointed in more than one direction. Experts for both sides looked at the same door, the same wounds, the same autopsy, and reached opposite conclusions. These are the five knots the trial could never fully untie.

The state appealed the culpable homicide finding. In December 2015 the Supreme Court of Appeal held that Judge Masipa had misapplied the law of intent. By firing four shots into the cubicle, the court found, Pistorius must have foreseen that the person behind the door would probably die. It overturned the manslaughter conviction and replaced it with murder. His own attempt to appeal that ruling to the Constitutional Court failed in March 2016.

The case returned to Masipa for re-sentencing, and here it took another strange turn. In July 2016 she imposed six years, well below the fifteen-year minimum the law prescribes for murder. The state appealed again, this time against the sentence itself. In November 2017 a five-judge panel of the Supreme Court of Appeal called the six-year term shockingly lenient, said it trivialised a serious offence, and imposed the statutory fifteen-year minimum less the time already served: thirteen years and five months.

Pistorius served his sentence first at the Kgosi Mampuru II prison and then at the Atteridgeville Correctional Centre outside Pretoria. Under South African law, serious offenders become eligible for parole after serving at least half their term. A first parole bid failed in March 2023 over a dispute about exactly when his eligibility clock had started, a question later clarified in his favour. He was approved in November 2023 and released on 5 January 2024, roughly nine years in, and nearly eleven years after the killing.

Release did not mean freedom. He lives at his uncle's home in the Waterkloof suburb of Pretoria under strict conditions that run until December 2029: anger-management and gender-based-violence programmes, therapy, restricted travel, unannounced compliance visits, and a ban on speaking to the media or publishing any account of the case. Any breach can send him back to prison. In mid-2025 he was granted permission to compete in a triathlon, finishing well down the field, his blades still carrying him across a line even as the rest of his life stays fenced.

For Reeva Steenkamp's family, the ledger never balanced. Her father, Barry, died in 2023, before the release. Her mother, June, accepted the parole as the working of the law rather than as closure, and welcomed that its conditions named gender-based violence directly. As she put it, no amount of time served brings her daughter back, and it is we who remain behind are the ones serving a life sentence.

Strip away the celebrity and one fact remains constant across every verdict: a young woman was shot dead in a home by the man she was seeing. That is why, in a country with some of the world's highest rates of violence against women, the case became a mirror. Reeva Steenkamp had used her own platform to speak against exactly this kind of harm, and the parole conditions eventually imposed on Pistorius, anger management and gender-based-violence programmes, were an implicit acknowledgement of the category the killing fell into.

Legally, the case did leave something durable. The Supreme Court of Appeal's ruling sharpened the doctrine of dolus eventualis and made plain that firing into a space where a person is hiding is murder regardless of who the shooter believes is inside. It is now a reference point in South African criminal law, taught and cited well beyond this one defendant.