Screams from Oscar's house would have been difficult to hear - expert

It would have been extremely difficult for Oscar Pistorius' neighbours Michelle Burger and her husband Charl Johnson to have heard screams in the early hours of February 14 last year if those screams originated from Pistorius' bathroom 177-metres away, defence acoustic expert Ivan Lin said on Monday (30/06/2014).

Testifying on Day 34 of the Blade Runner’s murder trial in the High Court in Pretoria, Lin said that the couple would also not have been able to interpret the emotion of those screams or whether they were made by a male or female.

Pistorius is standing trial for the murder of his model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp who he shot and killed early on Valentine’s Day last year.

Steenkamp was locked in the toilet of the Paralympian’s en-suite bathroom at the time of her death and his defence team have argued that screams heard by neighbours were not that of the model’s, but in fact, those of a scared Pistorius who believed there was an intruder in his home on the Silver Woods Estate near Pretoria.

Lin told the court that while it was generally possible to differentiate between the sounds of male and female screams this was not always the case.

He added that replicating sounds for the purposes of testing was an inexact science as these could be altered by several factors including weather conditions and the hearing abilities of individual listeners.

However Lin's report indicated that screams originating from the toilet and heard from 80-metres away, the distance between Pistorius' residence and that of Silverwoods Estate residents Dr Stipp and his wife, would have been audible and intelligible.

The trial will resume tomorrow when Gerrie Nel will begin his cross-examination of Lin. - Tymon Smith