Kerre McIvor: Courtroom caper won't fool anyone

Oscar Pistorius leaves the high court in Pretoria, South Africa. Photo / AP

I can hardly bear to read the reports of the Oscar Pistorius trial.

There are too many similarities to other cases where a beautiful young woman has been killed by yet another narcissistic control freak.

I found Pistorius' explanation of how he came to kill his girlfriend implausible, to say the least - that he woke in the night on Valentine's Day last year, heard noises in the bathroom, thought it was an intruder and shot Reeva Steenkamp by mistake.

But it's the WhatsApp exchanges that really infuriate me. Reading them, you can hear the voice of a young, bubbly woman increasingly doubting herself and her actions because of Pistorius' manipulations.

She tells him he's lovely 90 per cent of the time but sometimes she's scared of him and his moods. She ends the dialogue by telling him she just wants to love and be loved.

And Pistorius responds by blaming her. He's tired and he's sick and he's sorry. All couples have arguments but if my daughter or a friend had shown me these messages I would have told her to get out of that relationship and run as far from the control freak as she could.

He's a nasty piece of work and all the sobbing isn't hiding that.

Whether he's convicted remains to be seen. But one certainty is that his old life of a pampered celebrity is over. He killed that on February 14, 2013, just as surely as he killed Reeva Steenkamp.

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