Witness insists woman’s screams heard – Oscar Trial

“I am absolutely sure it was from a female,” said occupational therapist Annette Stipp in the High Court in Pretoria.

“It was not crying, it was screaming high pitched screaming. It’s not just the pitch, it’s the whole voice… was definitely female.”

After initial first shots she heard a female screaming, then she heard a male screaming before the second set of shots being fired.

“The screaming continued up until that second set of shots,” she said under cross-examination.

The male voice could be also be heard. Both voices stopped after the last shot she heard.

She described the screams as “very terrifying” and did not hear words, just screams.

Pistorius’s lawyers have said they would prove that the screaming was actually the athlete’s, whose voice becomes high pitched when he is anxious.

They also submitted that witnesses heard Pistorius breaking a toilet door down with a cricket bat, and not the shots.

Pistorius’s lawyer Kenny Oldwadge said on Monday that the screaming Stipp heard was actually Pistorius crying.

But she insisted that it was a woman’s voice she heard.

“It’s not just the pitch it’s the whole voice, it was definitely female,” she said.

Earlier she was questioned exhaustively over her evidence that she saw lights on at a house across from hers which she later discovered was Pistorius’s.

She said she saw a light on from the left of the bathroom, at the toilet, as events unfolded, as well as to the right, but Oldwadge submitted that that her husband had testified that he did not think it was on.

“My recollection that evening is that both sets of lights were on,” she said.

Her husband Johan was the first doctor on the scene when he went to Pistorius’s house to investigate.

In the early hours of February 14 last year, Pistorius shot dead his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

The sprinter, nicknamed “Blade Runner”, has denied intending to kill Steenkamp, contending that when he fired four shots into a locked bathroom door. He believed there was an intruder in the toilet cubicle.

The paralympic athlete has pleaded not guilty to charges of the premeditated murder of Steenkamp; as well as contraventions of the Firearms Control Act.

The firearm contraventions are linked to separate incidents in which Pistorius allegedly fired a pistol under a table at a Johannesburg restaurant in January 2013, and allegedly shot through the open sunroof of a car while driving with friends in Modderfontein in September 2012.

– Sapa