Truly, this was a year that began on a high for athlete turned killer Oscar Pistorius. January saw the former Olympic hero’s release on parole from prison after serving eight-and-a-half years for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
Now, as 2024 draws to a close, things look set only to get better for Pistorius. For the 38-year-old can look forward to spending his first post-jail Christmas with a glamorous new woman at his side.
It’s an extraordinary twist in a tragic story which – since the horrific day Pistorius shot and killed Reeva at his home nearly 12 years ago – remains firmly fixed in the public imagination.
And this fascination with what Pistorius does will only increase because the double amputee’s new love is 33-year-old Rita Greyling, the stunningly beautiful daughter of one of South Africa‘s wealthiest farmers.
For while Pistorius has struggled to find a professional role for himself since his spectacular fall from grace and release from South Africa’s Atteridgeville Prison, he appears to have had rather more success on the romantic front.
A Steenkamp family source told me this week that hearing of the notorious killer ’embracing life and love again is like a dagger through the heart’, particularly given the striking physical similarities between his Reeva and his latest partner.
Just like murdered Reeva, who worked as a paralegal and a fashion model, Rita also has light blonde hair, blue eyes, the same high forehead and radiant, dimpled smile. She, too, has undertaken modelling work, while holding down a high-flying job as a management consultant.
As Reeva’s 59-year-old sister Simone Cowburn said of Pistorius this week: ‘Is he that sick that he wanted to find a lookalike?’
New girlfriend Rita Greyling is a high-flying management consultant and devout Christian
A friend of Reeva’s UK-based brother, Adam Steenkamp, told the Mail that the family are furious about how easily Pistorius has been able to pick up his life as if nothing had ever happened.
‘The fact that he has taken up with a Reeva lookalike has stirred up all the old emotions and anger [Adam] felt after Pistorius was released on parole in January,’ said the family friend.
‘Privately, he and his family feel very angry that, despite his parole conditions, he’s able to rebuild his life so easily with this new woman. The fact that she looks so much like Reeva is doubly hurtful. Despite the passage of time he can never ever forgive Pistorius.’
The Mail can reveal that the Pistorius and Greyling families, both powerful Afrikaans clans who have been rooted in South Africa for more than a century, have actually been close for years.
And crucially, as we shall see, it’s notable that Rita is a devout Christian, while Pistorius also turned to God in prison.
The Mail can also disclose that Rita appears to have been particularly close to Pistorius’s lookalike cousin, Arnoldus Pistorius.
Indeed, while Pistorius was languishing behind bars for murdering Reeva in the early hours of Valentine’s Day in 2013, fun-loving globe-trotter Rita was enjoying trips abroad with Arnoldus.
In 2019, she and Arnoldus, both graduates of the University of Pretoria, were photographed together in Lijiang – a historic medieval city in China’s Yunnan province, where the Pistorius family are believed to have business links.
On another occasion, months later, they were snapped together, side by side on a small boat, laughing and smiling during a summer fishing trip.
Several images of the pair were shared on social media by Arnoldus’s father – Oscar’s uncle – Leo, and ‘liked’ by Rita’s mother, Karen. In a couple of the photographs, Arnoldus has his arm around Rita and the pair appear rather attached.
Arnoldus – who works for H. Pistorius, the family’s lucrative business and the oldest supplier of agricultural lime in South Africa – was a constant presence at his cousin’s 2014 trial and has since married.
Rita is said to have started seeing Oscar Pistorius romantically two months ago. She did not respond to questions this week about whether or not she was ever in a romantic relationship with his cousin.
Oscar Pistorius with Reeva Steenkamp. January saw the former Olympic hero’s release on parole from prison after serving eight-and-a-half years for the murder of his girlfriend
Reeva was shot by Pistorius on February 14 2013 aged 29 at his home nearly 12 years ago
Few, surely, could now describe the former Olympian as a catch.
Known to his family and friends as ‘Ozzie’, Pistorius is currently living with another of his uncles, Arnold Pistorius, albeit in a luxury cottage in the landscaped grounds of his £2million home in the hills of Pretoria’s upmarket Waterkloof suburb. The property is guarded by armed men and menacing dogs.
Still under the supervision of South Africa’s Department of Correctional Services, Pistorius doesn’t have to wear a tag but faces restrictions on his movements. A parole officer checks on him at random hours of the day or night. He is subject to drug and alcohol testing.
Visits to the nightclubs that he once frequented are also forbidden. Nor can he use social media, give interviews or write an autobiography.
In April this year, a member of the International Paralympic Committee described him as ‘too toxic to work with’ after it emerged that Pistorius – the man once hailed as the ‘Blade Runner’ because of the speed at which he could run on his carbon-fibre prosthetic limbs – had reached out to at least two members to ask if they could find a role for him in the organisation.
According to the source he was quickly rebuffed.
That leaves Pistorius, who had both feet amputated at 11 months old as a result of a congenital defect, working as a volunteer at NG Kerk Waterkloof, the church attended by his uncle. He sweeps floors, performs light maintenance and janitorial work and has been spotted quietly attending services.
He was said to have put on weight and become a chain smoker while in prison.
Earlier this year, a fellow parishioner said he was ‘a shadow of what he once was’ and hardly ever even cracked a smile.
What Pistorius and Rita certainly have in common is their shared religious faith. After his mother’s death in 2002, he was raised by his deeply religious uncle Arnold, said to be like a second father to him. Before meals, the family are said to hold hands and thank God for their food. Each Christmas, a large crucifix and festive decorations are placed on the gates of the family home.
In prison, Pistorius’s faith is said to have deepened. He became a spiritual guide to other convicts, encouraging them to read the Bible and to worship Jesus. He even converted some hardened inmates to Christianity, and there was talk he might dedicate his life to God full time as a preacher.
Rita Greyling also frequently demonstrates her own devotion to Christianity, listing ‘God. Family. Fashion,’ on Twitter as among the things that ‘excite’ her, and regularly quotes scripture on her social media.
Reeva’s parents Barry and June Steenkamp during Pistorius’s sentencing hearing in Pretoria in 2014
‘The Holy Spirit is God’s alternative to fear,’ she wrote in February last year. ‘His answer to the ego. His guidance to a new perception of reality. One that is based on LOVE.’
She comes, like Pistorius, from a close-knit, traditional Afrikaans family. Her father is Barend Petrus Greyling, known as BP, whose family fought in South Africa’s Boer War. The family home is a 17,500-hectare farm in Wakkerstroom, Mpumalanga, largely devoted to sheep and cattle.
Father-of-three BP, a former special force officer who was voted South Africa farmer of the year in 2011, is a senior member of the ‘Wakkerstroom Commando’, a reserve army unit operating under control of the country’s National Defence Force used to stamp out rural crime.
The farm is also guarded from natural predators by a pack of 45 hounds and hunters using camouflaged vehicles equipped with rifles and spotlights.
Rita’s family was thrust into the spotlight in November 2022 following the disappearance of a guest at her brother Ghini’s bachelor party. Willem Kruger, who was due to be a groomsman at Ghini’s wedding, was found dead nine days later inside his white Toyota truck which was submerged in a river.
A year on, in December 2023, police said their investigation, which is ongoing, had become a murder inquiry. Rita must have known that when word got out she was dating Pistorius that the eyes of the world would be upon them both – particularly given that he has always refused to admit deliberately shooting Reeva.
He has obstinately clung to the claim that when he fired his 9mm Parabellum pistol four times through a locked toilet door at his luxury in 2013 – just six months after becoming the first double amputee to run in the Olympics – he had no idea that 29-year-old Reeva was cowering on the other side of it.
He claimed to have mistaken her for an intruder when he shot her with ammunition designed to inflict maximum damage to the body.
A month earlier, while dining with friends, he had fired a gun into the floor of a crowded restaurant.
Reeva’s family have always believed her death was the result of trigger-happy Pistorius’s violent temper.
This tendency to anger is something her British-born mother, 78-year-old June Steenkamp – who campaigns for women’s safety via the Reeva Steenkamp Foundation – worries still afflicts the shamed star. She believes her daughter had told Pistorius she was leaving him in the hours before he killed her and that the news sent him into a terrible rage.
‘I don’t understand how she doesn’t see the red flags,’ she said of Rita this week. ‘He was supposed to undergo anger management while in prison and at one stage I pushed back against his release when I learnt he wasn’t receiving treatment.
‘It’s not about him being happy or in a relationship – it’s about the danger he might still pose to women. Abuse in this country is out of control, and we must protect women from harm.’
The new development in Pistorius’s romantic life is undoubtedly a cruel blow for the Steenkamps.
Back in 2022, Reeva’s father Barry visited the fallen sporting idol in prison as part of Pistorius’s rehabilitation programme. He read him a letter written by June in which she described the agony of life without her daughter; the wedding dress they would never buy together, the grandchildren they would never have.
Barry walked out of that meeting with Pistorius after the former sports star refused to tell him what happened the night he killed Reeva. He died in his sleep, aged 80, in September last year after a decade of ill health in the wake of Reeva’s death. He never got the answers he wanted and, today, his widow June believes he died of a broken heart.
Pistorius’s supporters argue he has done his time and deserves the chance to redeem himself and to find love again.
But for those who loved Reeva, there are no second chances, no opportunities to turn back the clock and resume anything resembling a normal life. Not without their beloved daughter and sister who, had she been allowed to live, would have turned 41 this year.