The Apartheid Killer...

PS – This is Part One of a two-part series called “The Murderous Van Schoors” (Skoors)

When I was born, Apartheid was taking its last dying breaths. As such, I can’t really say what life under the Apartheid regime was like, but I do know that Apartheid was the result of over 300 years of systemised racism. I know that the ANC and their allies fought back by staging a number of bombing attacks that targeted white businesses and killed dozens of people. I know that members of the Secret Police were tasked with the capture, torture, and murder of anyone the Apartheid regime considered to be a threat.

And I know that casual violence against black South Africans was an everyday occurrence.

That being said, today’s case is going to be a little different than the cases we usually cover on The Casual Criminalist. The story is relatively unknown. There isn’t a detailed list of known victims that’s readily available. While investigating the murders, the police did the bare minimum, and most of the case files relating to the murders have been lost.

In some cases, the killer stood right next to the police while they were loading up the bodies of his victims, and the public viewed his actions as justified and treated him like a hero. He was supported by a judicial system that saw nothing wrong with what he was doing, and all of it combined enabled him to become one of South Africa’s most controversial serial killers.

This is the story of Louis van Schoor (Skoor) – The Apartheid Killer.

An Afrikaner at Heart

It’s difficult to explain how Louis van Skoor became a serial killer without providing you with a short history lesson on how Apartheid came to be. (Note: I started writing this script before Donald Trump wrote that insane Executive Order inviting Afrikaner refugees to move to the US, so hopefully this’ll also help you to better understand exactly what an Afrikaner is, and why I’ve never identified as one despite being both white and Afrikaans.)

South Africa was originally colonised by the Dutch in 1665. Twenty years later, they were joined by the French Huguenots, or Protestants, who were fleeing religious prosecution in France. They were joined by people from all over Europe and Asia, and when the Cape Colony officially became a British territory in 1814, its population was about as colourful as it is today and was ruled over by Dutch-speaking elites. However, the first ‘Native Laws’ were already in place, and they dictated that black South Africans weren’t allowed to enter the Colony unless they were employed by a white master.

During this time, the white farmers who lived on the outskirts of the Colony regularly fought in skirmishes against both the Khoikoi (koi-koi) and the Xhosa (koh-sa) tribes, who - quite rightly - felt that the Colony was encroaching on their land, which led to several small wars between the farmers and the local tribes.

In response to the constant threat, the farmers established small military groups referred to as ‘commandos’ to help protect their farms, and they were also known to hunt down groups of black tribesmen who they suspected of having stolen their livestock, which often led to casualties on both sides.

After the British took over the Cape Colony in 1814, they scrapped Dutch as the official language, replaced it with English instead, raised the taxes these farmers had to pay, and then had the gall to abolish slavery as well. So just 20 years after the British took over, groups of Dutch-speaking farmers (aka the Boers) decided that they’d had enough of being treated like second-rate citizens in their own Colony, and started to move deeper inland so that they could establish two colonies of their own – the South African Republic or ZAR (the Z stands for Zuid, Simon, since you were too lazy to look it up last time), and the Orange Free State. Along the way, a group of these farmers were involved in a bloody war against the Zulu kingdom that did nothing to help future race relations, and by the time the two new Boer colonies were established, they resented not only the snobby British but all black South Africans as well.

By the time the First Boer War took place in 1880, the ZAR and the Orange Free State were already well on their way to becoming separatist states. “Outlanders” – aka, Europeans who were fresh off the boat – weren’t particularly welcome there, and there were stringent measures in place to keep them from becoming permanent citizens of the two Boer states. Black South Africans were considered to be uneducated barbarians and thieves who were only good for doing the back-breaking labour that their white masters didn’t want to do, and Indian and Chinese labourers also weren’t allowed to settle down in the two Boer states since they were seen as untrustworthy heathens.

Then the Second Boer War broke out, and for a while there, the Boer Commandos were wiping the floor with the British Army. These were men and boys who’d hunted elephants, rhinos, buffalo and antelope, who’d defended their livestock against leopards and lions and cattle thieves since they were old enough to hold a gun, and they were expert marksmen and skilled horse riders. The British Army, on the other hand, were used to battles where they could face off with their enemy and then blast them away with their superior skills and weaponry. But the Boer Commandos relied on stealth and employed guerilla tactics that threw the British Army for a loop, and it soon became clear that if the British wanted to stop the Boer Commandos, they had to cut them down at their knees.

In March 1901, the British started actively hunting down these commandos and sending them off to prisoner-of-war camps. They also employed a “scorched earth” policy to keep the Boer Commandos from being able to access much-needed supplies such as food and medicine. This meant that the British soldiers would raid farms and the villages of black tribes, kill all the animals, and then reduce the farms and villages to ash.

The women, children, and the elderly were then taken to various concentration camps, where they would remain until the war ended in 1902. During that time, an estimated 154,000 people were imprisoned in these camps – which made up 70% of the white population of the Boer republics at the time. Between March 1901 and May 1902, 28,000 white South Africans and at least 20,000 black South Africans died in these concentration camps from starvation and diseases such as measles, typhoid, and dysentery, effectively wiping out more than 12% of the white population of the Boer states.

When the Boers returned home after the war, they had to start rebuilding their lives from scratch, which put them at a significant disadvantage compared to their new British-born countrymen, and out of this economic turmoil, the Afrikaner was born. They were a fiercely proud and God-fearing people who hated the British, and just like the Nazis would do a few years later, they believed that the white ‘Afrikaner Volk’ and traditions should be prioritized above all others, and that –

“the destiny of the Volk was to rule South Africa.”

Afrikaner nationalists steadfastly believed that as an ethnic minority, they could not allow black society to develop to the extent that they became capable of taking control of South Africa and subjugating the Afrikaners once more. The National Party was established in 1914 to promote the interests of the Afrikaans-speaking citizens of South Africa, and when they came to power in 1948, they implemented the Apartheid laws to ensure that no black child would ever be in a position where they could aspire to be better than their white counterparts.

This is the world that Louis van Skoor was born into.

Louis was born in a town called East London in 1951, and as was tradition, he was saddled with a list of inherited family names – in this case: Sybrand Jacobus Lodewikus van Skoor. According to Louis, his father was a typical Afrikaner – stoic, strict, and domineering. His word was law, and Louis and his siblings would be brutally punished whenever they put a foot out of line. According to Louis –

“I was taught from a young age you don’t lie, you don’t steal, and you don’t bugger around with another man’s wife.”

According to John Stolz, who would become Louis’ spiritual advisor later on in life, Louis was “spoon-fed racism with his cornflakes”, and grew up with the need to please his hard-hearted father. In the BBC Africa documentary ‘The Apartheid Killer’, his daughter Sabrina explains that –

“His family, his friends, the people he worked for. They weren’t raised to see a black person as a human being. It’s the same with Hitler, the Nazis. They indoctrinated the children from a young age. If your skin was dark, you’re a criminal.”

By the time he became a teenager, Louis had developed an inferiority complex that led him to always want to show that he was ‘a real man’, and it was a personality trait that he would be stuck with for the rest of his life.

By the time Louis turned 16, the Apartheid laws had already been in place for 20 years. Just two years earlier, the then-president of South Africa and the man known as the “Architect of Apartheid”, Hendrik Verwoerd, had been assassinated during a session of Parliament, and tensions between the different races were running high. According to Louis –

“The blacks were trying to intimidate the whites. And yes, there was fear. Tension was brewing. [The whites] could read the writing on the wall – that the blacks were going to become a part of society. It was something we had to accept and live with. Which I think 99% of your [white] population couldn’t accept. [They] had fear.”

Louis left school at the end of that year and joined the police force. At the time, the police were mostly used to enforce the Apartheid laws, and they could be brutal. They were often sent out to help control riots and protests in the black townships and were allowed to shoot at the protesters with live rounds if and when they felt threatened. They also conducted midnight raids in the townships, arrested people for no reason, and tortured them for information on anti-apartheid movements like the ANC and their military wing.

According to Louis –

“[It was drilled into us] that we were protecting our country. And that’s how we saw it.”

In 1966, a war broke out between South Africa and the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia, who wanted independence from the Apartheid State. They were backed by the Soviet Union, Egypt, Algeria, North Korea, and the People’s Republic of China, and initially, members of the South African police force were sent to defend Namibia’s northern borders against the ‘communist threat’.

Louis would end up volunteering to go and fight on the border for 3 months at a time, and when he returned to East London, he joined the infamous ‘Dog Squad’ of the police force. According to an article by Sandra Swart titled “Apartheid’s Hounds – How South Africa invented the world’s most terrifying police dog” –

“Police dogs were increasingly used in political crowd control, trained to attack and, specifically, to attack Africans.”

“The dogs became a living, snarling display of the power of the state. There are scores of cases of such brutality with Truth and Reconciliation files showing that dogs were also used for interrogation and torture. The Hounds of Apartheid had become an instrument – the iron fist of the white supremacist state.”

Now, we’ve all seen how attack dogs are trained – they’re ordered to attack heavily padded humans, who are then jerked around like oversized chew toys. But this was the Apartheid era, and the Dog Squad had a more ‘effective’ way of training their dogs – by giving them a taste of blood.

They would train their German Shepherds by having them attack unarmed black people. In one of the clips I saw, three black men are barefoot and dressed in torn t-shirts and jeans, and you can hear them scream and beg for mercy as the dogs viciously rip into their arms and legs. In the background, you can hear the white policemen laugh and cheer while a terrified black woman cries, and Louis told the BBC that –

“[Later] I heard that the blacks were more scared of the dogs than they were of a gun.”

Louis and his squad mates would unleash their dogs on black protesters during riots, or use their dogs to hunt down black suspects while they were busy investigating a crime. Louis would later explain that he remembered his time in the Dog Squad as ‘some of the best years of his life’, and he chuckled as he described working with the dogs as –

“like hunting, but a different species”

Louis married his first wife when he was in his early twenties, and his hobbies included running cross-country races barefoot, playing rugby for the police’s rugby team, competing as a part of the Eastern Cape’s tug-of-war squad, competing in 4x4 drive challenges with his Land Rover, and training guard dogs for his friends and neighbours.

Louis is described as being a real ‘man’s man’ who always wore a gun holster at his hip, and enjoyed drinking beer and socialising with his friends. He was tall and well built, had dark, almost black hair, a bushy beard, and clear blue eyes. He also milked the fact that he was both a policeman AND a soldier for all that it was worth because as the saying goes, the ladies love a man in uniform. However, a local newspaper would later explain that –

“Van Schoor is a self-imposed loner – flippantly extrovert on the surface, but guarded on the inside. People who know him speak of him more as a subject than as a person.”

Louis was generally well-liked in his community, but he wasn’t as good at being a husband. He divorced his first wife when he was around 25 years old, and by the time he was forty, he’d already been married four times.

Louis met his second wife, Beverly, at a local church. She’d been married at the time and had three sons with her husband. According to one of his old friends, Louis would invite Beverly’s husband out to go fishing with him, and after the husband fell asleep, Louis would drive back into town to go and keep Beverly company. Remember how Louis talked about being taught ‘not to bugger with another man’s wife’? Looks like he completely forgot to honour that part of his upbringing.

Beverly eventually divorced her first husband and got married to the now 27-year-old Louis in 1978. Beverly, her three sons and Louis then moved to a farm outside of East London, and a year later, their daughter Sabrina was born. Louis’s stepsons would later explain that they got along just fine with Louis. He was firm and strict, but he played with them and spent time with them, and generally, he was a good father to them.

Meanwhile, Louis was fast approaching his 12th anniversary in the police force, but despite his best efforts, he hadn’t been promoted past Constable. According to one of his old colleagues –

“He was not a clever bloke, but he would go to hell and back to get his man. It was his way of proving that he was as good as the others.”

So, in 1980, Louis left the police force and claimed that it was because he was sick of being sent off to fight in the Border War, but Beverly would confide in her friends that she’d found out that he was cheating on her, and she wanted him closer to home where she could keep an eye on him.

Beverly then got him a job working as a Salesman at a company that sold carpets, but according to Heidi Holland, the author of the book “Colour of Murder” –

“…it proved too mundane an occupation for a man who was not only attracted to danger but who enjoyed the adulation bestowed by whites on policemen and soldiers with dangerous reputations.”

Louis didn’t stay there long and tried to reapply to join the police. But when his application was denied, Louis got a call from one of his old superiors, a Major CJH Cloete (Clue-tuh). Major Clue-tuh had recently opened a private security firm called Falcon Security and explained that he needed someone who had some ‘experience’ to help him manage the company.

Back in the day, security firms would install silent alarms in businesses and homes, and if the alarms were triggered, the police would be notified, and they’d then investigate the disturbance. But in the late 1970’s, the police started complaining that it was taking up too much of their time, so people like Major Clue-tuh and Louis van Skoor filled the gap and would go and investigate these disturbances themselves. According to Major Clue-tuh –

“[We] did this work because it paid well.”

Falcon Security had clients all over East London, and Louis would spend his days and nights patrolling the streets and responding to calls whenever they came in. He was usually dressed in just a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and would sneak into the buildings on bare feet. He carried a torch, a walkie-talkie, and a 9mm handgun which was loaded with dum-dum bullets.

These were bullets that had been designed to expand on impact and are similar to hollow-point bullets. Louis took his new job very seriously, and people would later compliment him on the fact that he never seemed to sleep since he was always on patrol – night or day.

Sabrina would later explain that she used to be close to her dad, but that he kind of faded more into the background after he started working for Falcon Security –

“My father wasn’t there. I would see him for one or two hours, and then he would leave.”

Because Louis now spent most of his time patrolling the streets of East London, his marriage to Beverly collapsed, and they were divorced in 1983. Beverly then took her three boys and the 4-year-old Sabrina and moved to Queenstown. She’d later explain that Louis had been abusive towards her and had threatened to kill her and that after their divorce, she had to rebuild their lives from scratch. According to Beverly, Louis also didn’t pay child support, so she did her best to keep Sabrina away from him.

According to Sabrina –

“Seeing I no longer had a father to look after us, my mom took his place and proved to be a much better father in the long run…I just had to adapt to it all.”

Louis enjoyed his time at Falcon Security and quickly made a name for himself. This soon led to the company receiving bigger and more lucrative contracts, and within a year, Louis the security guard became a bit of a legend around town.

That is until rumours started to spread around East London that a bearded white man was stalking black men after dark and that more and more of them were going missing every day.

Bosbefok

(Boss-befock)

Ps. Xhosa (Koh-sah), the main language spoken in the Eastern Cape, is also one of the most difficult languages to pronounce. So Mzanzi, please don’t fault Simon for not being able to pronounce the Xhosa names like a local.

My mother-in-law’s partner, Uncle Johan, is the same age as Louis, and just like Louis, he’d joined the police force when he was young and spent several months fighting on the border. And when I told him about Louis’ crimes, Uncle Johan’s face fell with disappointment, and he shook his head and said ‘Louis was boss-befock’. My dad is also a veteran of the Border Wars, and he explained that being boss-befock was a form of PTSD. Basically, the soldiers would spend two years following rigid guidelines, were sent to destroy rebel camps and kill all the occupants, saw their friends die, and then had to return to civilized society like nothing had happened. My dad explained that some men struggled to adapt, and the ones who lashed out by defying society’s rules and going a little gun-crazy, would be described as being ‘boss-befock’.

He also conceded that it probably didn’t help that Louis would return from the border after a few months, and would then continue to work in an environment where he was expected to be violent towards others. Louis’ daughter, Sabrina, would tell the BBC that her father seemed to lack empathy, that he could come across as being cruel and unfeeling, and that it’s entirely possible that by the time he left the police force, he wasn’t a stranger to killing others.

Major Clue-tuh would later tell Heidi Holland that when he’d hired Louis to work for him –

“I [knew] Van Schoor was the kind of bloke that liked to use his firearm. He had shot two [black men] dead at that stage. That I know because I killed one and he used to say, ‘ha, I’m ahead of you!’”

In or around April 1989 – six years after Louis had started working for Falcon Security – an estate agent in East London named Desmond Nish contacted a local newspaper called Daily Dispatch and spoke to a journalist named Andrew Austin. Nish explained that he’d received a call from a representative of Falcon Security who tried to sell him a burglar alarm system. The salesman then went on to brag about just how effective one of their security guards was, and claimed that –

“Louis van Schoor has killed or wounded up to a hundred burglars!”

Nish told Andrew Austin that he knew it sounded like just another sales pitch, but Nish happened to know that Louis used to be married to a local businesswoman named Beverly. Nish explained that everybody knew that Louis used to beat her and that she’d fled town to get away from him. The idea that this same man was out there with a gun and actively shooting people was keeping Nish awake at night, and he felt that someone had to do something about it.

Andrew then called up a few of his sources and asked if they’d heard of a security guard called Louis van Skoor. They all told him that they knew of him, but no one was willing to tell Andrew anything about Louis.

Thinking that there might be something to the story, Andrew passed it along to one of the junior journalists at the paper, a 24-year-old named Patrick Goodenough. Patrick would later explain that when he first heard the claims that Louis had shot a hundred burglars, he initially thought that it was a bullshit story. But then in May 1989, another newspaper reported that two suspected burglars had been shot dead by a security guard in a local factory, and Patrick decided to investigate further.

Patrick then called the owner of the factory and asked him if he knew who the security guard was. The owner then told him that the guard’s name was Louis van Schoor. Ten days later, local newspapers reported that two more burglars had been shot after they’d broken into a house. This time no one died, but the two burglars appeared in the local magistrate’s court where they were then charged with theft and breaking and entering.

One of Patrick’s colleagues, Sandra Shaw, had been in court that day and had spoken to the security guard who’d apprehended the two burglars. His name was Louis van Skoor, and when she started fishing for a story, Louis bragged that he must have shot around a hundred suspects in the course of his career.

Of course, Sandra also thought that his claims were worth investigating, but when she brought it up in a meeting, the editors of the Daily Dispatch refused to run a story on such flimsy claims. But Patrick then went up to Sandra and told her that this wasn’t the first time he’d heard that Louis van Schoor had shot up to a hundred people. Sandra then told him that the two burglars had claimed in court that they’d been innocent. Louis van Skoor had approached them, offered them jobs, took them to the building in question, and then shot them point blank. But Louis had claimed that they’d ganged up on him and that he’d only been acting in self-defence, so the magistrate had taken his side and sent the two black men off to prison.

Shocked by this new development, Patrick Goodenough started going through past news reports and found around 17 different incidents where Louis van Skoor had either wounded or killed a suspected burglar. All of the burglars were reported to have been black men, and whenever one of them was injured or killed, Louis claimed that he’d only acted in self-defence.

Patrick then contacted Major Hayes, the communications officer at the local police station, and asked him if he knew that Louis van Skoor was out there shooting people. And Major Hayes said that yes, he was, and then he asked Patrick –

“Why are you after this guy? He does a lot of good work.”

Thinking that he might be onto something, Patrick Goodenough contacted several security firms all over South Africa and asked them just how many people their security guards shot in a year. And when he told them that he’d already confirmed that Louis van Skoor had shot at least 17 people, the security firms all agreed that –

“…it was unusual for a guard to shoot that often over a short period.”

Then a local businessman named Ed McFarlane contacted Patrick and told him that he needed help. McFarlane explained that two days earlier, there had been a shooting at a local restaurant called Mike’s Tavern. His domestic worker, a black woman named Grace Sipolo (Si-paw-law), had reason to believe that her 18-year-old son had been one of the victims, but the police were refusing to allow her to view the body.

Patrick called Major Hayes to ask him about the shooting, and he confirmed that yes, a security guard had shot and killed two black suspects at Mike’s Tavern that night, but he refused to name the security guard. Patrick then called the owner of Mike’s Tavern who was only too happy to put Patrick in contact with the ‘hero of the hour’, and just a few minutes later, Louis himself called Patrick and confirmed that yes, he’d been there that night, but if Patrick wanted more information, he should contact the police.

Patrick then found out that there hadn’t been just two suspected burglars that night – there’d been three, and one of them was in hospital. His name was Siyabonga Tom (See-ya-bong-gah), and once he’d recovered from his gunshot wound, he told Patrick that on the night of the shooting, he and two of his friends, Grace’s son Steki (Like stare but without the r + Key) and another young man called Patrick, were looking for food in the rubbish bins outside of Mike’s Tavern.

Then Sta-key told them that the back door was unlocked, so Patrick agreed to keep watch while his friends went to see if there was anything worth taking inside the restaurant. They were still busy looking around the kitchen when they heard the gunshot that killed Patrick. They ducked into hiding places and saw a white man with a beard enter the building. He carried a torch and a pistol, and in less than a minute he found Sta-key hiding behind the fridge.

The bearded man then dragged the 18-year-old boy out from behind the fridge, and See-ya-bong-gah could hear his friend screaming and yelling at the white man, telling him –

“I’m sorry, my boss, please don’t shoot me. Call the police!”

But then two shots rang out, and Sta-key stopped shouting. See-ya-bong-gah had been hiding in a black rubbish bin, and the white man tipped it over and dragged See-ya-bong-gah out. He covered his head with his hands and was lying on his back, begging for his life when the white man shot him in his stomach.

Then the man took out his walkie-talkie and spoke into it as he waltzed out of the restaurant and into the night.

Patrick Goodyear would later tell Heidi Holland that he’d been busy writing a story about the shooting when he was told that See-ya-bong-gah had been charged with housebreaking, and that Patrick couldn’t report on the case until See-ya-bong-gah repeated his story in court.

Angry and frustrated, Patrick decided to do his best to help See-ya-bong-gah, so he approached the local branch of The Black Sash Movement. They were a human rights organisation which was founded in 1955 by six middle-class white women who actively fought against Apartheid laws and human rights violations, and in the 1980’s they were doing a lot of work in the black communities by helping them fight back against the injustices that were being committed against them.

Anyway, Patrick had a meeting with their advice coordinator, Sharlene Craige, and told her all about his suspicions regarding Louis van Skoor. Then Sharlene surprised Patrick by telling him that they already knew about Louis van Skoor, and then handed him a statement they’d received from a 26-year-old man called Vusumzi Gcaza (Kha-zah).

In it, Vusumzi explained that in October 1988, he was approached by a white man in a bucky who asked him if he wanted a job. Vusumzi said that yes, he was interested, and he climbed onto the back of the bucky.

The man then drove to the Turnbull Bowling Club. When they got there, he introduced himself as Louis van Skoor, led Vusumzi to the side of the building, and asked him to wait there. Louis left, and a few minutes later, he walked around the other side of the building and started shooting at Vusumzi. The bullets entered his chest and left arm. Within ten minutes, the police and an ambulance arrived at the scene. When Vusumzi tried to tell the police what had happened, he was told to shut up, and later he’d be charged with housebreaking. He ended up spending six months in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed.

And Vusumzi wasn’t the only one. The East London branch of the Black Sash Movement had at least three more statements that were almost identical to See-ya-bonga and Vusumzi’s statements, and together Patrick and Sharlene approached a lawyer called David Pitman and asked him if he could help them bring Louis van Skoor to justice.

According to Pitman –

“I drove to East London where I was joined by Sharlene. We were accompanied by a relative of Siyabonga, and went directly to the Frere Hospital where we found him with a bullet wound running from his abdomen clear through to his back…”

“A telling piece of evidence, collected from the custody of the hospital, was the clothing he had been wearing when he was shot, notably a synthetic fibre tracksuit. The tracksuit top had a gaping hole in front, with indications that the fibre had been burned in the vicinity of the hole, which would prove Siyabonga’s allegation that he had been shot at point-blank range.”

Armed with five statements and the evidence they’d collected from the hospital, David Pitman and Sharlene drove to the Fleet Street police station in East London in June 1989 to lay criminal charges against Louis van Skoor, and to start a civil claim for damages against him. But nothing came of it!

Meanwhile, Louis van Skoor had shot another black man. He was the 24-year-old Mntunzima Titi, and he worked as a night watchman at a local business. One morning, he was on his way home when a tall, bearded white man approached him, pulled out a pistol, and shot him in the chest. The man then threw Titi on the back of a bucky, where he passed out.

When he regained consciousness, he was in hospital, and the police told him that he was being charged with breaking and entering. When he protested and told them that he had no idea what they were talking about, they also told him to shut up, and he’d later be sent to prison.

Meanwhile, Patrick Goodyear was making a list of all of Louis van Skoor’s known crimes. By August 1989, he knew of at least five men who’d been killed by Louis, and seven who had been wounded and then ended up in prison. But when he pitched the story to his editor, he told him that they had to wait until the cases went to trial before they could report on it.

In the BBC podcast World of Secrets, journalist Dominic Jones explains that part of the reason why the editors at the Daily Dispatch refused to report on Louis van Skoor’s crimes, was because, at the time, the Apartheid government had censored the media. They had declared that the country was in a State of Emergency, and the government was doing its best not to spook its white citizens. They banned anything related to the various protests, riots and bombing attacks that were taking place all over the country, as well as the truth regarding what the police were getting up to in the townships. And the journalists who doggedly refused to be silenced had a strange habit of walking into knives, jumping off balconies, or dying explosive deaths. The editors of the Daily Dispatch would have been particularly careful since one of their editors, a white anti-apartheid activist named Donald Woods, had been forced to flee the country in 1978 after someone attempted to poison his 6-year-old daughter.

According to Dominic Jones, he had witnessed the bombing of a white-owned restaurant in East London, had seen the bodies and heard the patrons scream in pain, but his editors at the Daily Dispatch refused to report on it.

“We could barely put a story together. Some of the columns that were being written were things like playing bridge, croquet. There wasn’t a lot of coverage about the political situation. I was asked to become the port reporter, to report on the ships that were coming into port, which is rather ridiculous. The country is burning, and I’m being assigned by the editor to be their first port reporter, writing about ships.”

So you can imagine Patrick Goodenough’s frustration when he heard that Louis van Skoor had shot and killed a 12-year-old boy and had wounded another after he’d already tried to sound the alarm multiple times.

Since his editors had repeatedly told him that he couldn’t report on Louis van Schoor’s crimes, Patrick approached Dominic Jones for help. According to Jones –

“[Patrick] had gathered enough for a detailed story, but one crucial aspect remained unsolved: had Van Schoor killed as many as he claimed?”

Dominic Jones needed more information, so he approached a local lawyer and asked her where he could find any information regarding a shooting that had taken place in town. She informed him that there would have been an inquest, and that the files were kept at the local magistrate’s court. Jones managed to gain access to the files, and spent an entire day looking for anything related to Louis van Skoor. But when he found it, he was told that he couldn’t make photocopies of the files, and making detailed handwritten notes would take too long.

Feeling slightly defeated, Jones approached Sharlene Craige at The Black Sash Movement, who explained that their organisation was used to stealing information when they had to, so she agreed to help him. They went back to the magistrate’s court, and Jones started working through the case files from 1987 – four years after Louis had started working at Falcon Securities – and read through them. Each case file listed the name of the victim, the date of death, the cause of death, and who the suspected perpetrator was. On the back of the file was a list of witnesses, and Jones gathered all the case files that listed Louis van Skoor as a witness. According to Sharlene, Jones would set the files aside and -

“My job was to run up and down the staircase and manipulate the lady in the office to let me use the photocopier machine. And that was a full-time job because she was just feeling so uncomfortable, but she knew that it was probably not in her interest to not let me do it.”

“You know at any time that you can be stopped, so you just tried to outwit people around you all the time…and you know that you have limited time, and you have to get that information and get out as quick as you can.”

They went through hundreds of files, all the way back to the early 1980s, and after three days, they had a list of 25 names – all people who’d been killed by Louis van Schoor. According to Dominic Jones -

“The evidence of Van Schoor’s bloody reign had been there all the time, gathering dust. It seemed incredible that so many were dead and yet no one had ever raised the alarm.”

The Vigilante Killer

It is entirely possible that – initially at least - Louis had just been doing his job. That during the early days of his career as a security guard, he had just gone to investigate the scene of a possible break-in. His contracts with his clients stated that he had to do his absolute best to protect their property, and he might have been a little overzealous in his attempts to comply with the conditions set out in these contracts. But when he described his usual modus operandi, he made each incident sound more like a hunt.

Louis explained that whenever a silent alarm would go off on the premises of one of Falcon Security’s clients, he would be called to investigate. He’d get dressed in a pair of rugby shorts and a t-shirt, and then he’d drive down to the property and park his bucky some distance away so that he wouldn’t alert the intruder that he was on his way. He’d collect his 9mm Parabellum pistol, his torchlight, and his handheld radio from the passenger seat, and then he’d make his way to the property in question in the dark.

Louis would then sneak into the building armed with his pistol and a torch, and would later confirm that he didn’t wear shoes during these hunts because he didn’t want to make a sound. He’d claim that he then relied on his senses to hunt down his quarry, explaining that he had pretty good night vision and that due to the high levels of adrenaline in their bodies, the intruders gave off a distinctive ‘odour’ which helped him to ‘sniff’ them out.

Once he tracked the intruder down, Louis would confront them, and when the intruder inevitably tried to run away, Louis would fire several shots at the intruder to keep them from escaping the premises. If he hit his target and they collapsed, Louis would call the police, who would then come to investigate the break-in, process the scene, take Louis’ statement, and bid him a good night. If the intruders were still alive, criminal charges would be laid against them.

If not, an inquest would be opened, and Louis had to stand up in court and explain why his actions led to the death of a suspected criminal, which often led to any charges against him being dismissed. No harm, no foul.

After all, he’d simply been following the law. Section 42 of the Criminal Procedure Act of 1977 gave members of the public the right to carry out a citizen’s arrest if they came across someone who –

“a) commits or attempts to commit…an offence”

and

“b) whom he reasonably believes to have committed any offence and to be escaping from [the arrestee]”

Section 49 then went several steps further by explaining that these private citizens also had the right to use deadly force against a suspected criminal:

“If any arrestor attempts to arrest a suspect and the suspect resists the attempt, or flees, or resists the attempt and flees, when it is clear that an attempt to arrest him or her is being made, and the suspect cannot be arrested without the use of force, the arrestor may, in order to effect the arrest, use such force as may be reasonably necessary…”

And then there was Section 46, which basically absolved the arrestee of any liability should it turn out that they had performed a wrongful arrest. So, in his mind, Louis van Skoor reasoned that he’d acted entirely within the law.

HOWEVER, section 49 of the Criminal Procedure Act also pointed out that deadly force may only be used if –

“a) the suspect poses a threat of serious violence to the arrestor or any other person; or

(b) the suspect is suspected on reasonable grounds of having committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious bodily harm and there are no other reasonable means of effecting the arrest, whether at that time or later.”

And to get past that unfortunate part of the law, all Louis van Skoor had to do was to claim that the intruders had ganged up on him, or had threatened his life with a deadly weapon – hence his use of deadly force. And because Louis was white and could prove that an alarm had gone off at the premises, the white magistrate would then take his side, and the suspected intruder would be charged with breaking and entering and be sent off to prison – despite their claims that they’d done nothing wrong, had been unarmed at the time, or had already surrendered when Louis shot them.

The case files relating to his killings all noted that something had always been stolen at one of the premises Louis had been guarding – small things like clothes, food, or money. Louis’ statements were also always extremely vague in detail, and he always claimed that he fired warning shots at the fleeing intruders before he aimed his weapon “in their general direction”.

Yet he didn’t take a baton or handcuffs with him, and when he shot at the intruders, he never missed, always aimed for their torsos instead of their legs or arms, and in the years he worked as a security guard, the number of shots he’d fired at the intruders went up from just two to twelve.

In at least one case, the magistrate who heard an inquest into the deaths of one of these intruders realised that Louis’ version of events didn’t quite match the scant evidence that the police had collected, and he tasked the police with investigating the incident further. But of course, they all knew Louis. They knew that he was a good guy. They knew that he’d only been doing his job.

He’d only done what most of them would have done if they were in his shoes, and they’d been covering for him for years, so that one incident was never fully investigated.

In the BBC Documentary The Apartheid Killer, Louis bragged that when he started patrolling the streets of East London, the number of crimes that took place all over the city started going down. People took notice, and before long, Louis became a legend around town, and East London’s white community started praising him for protecting them against the dangerous blacks. According to his daughter Sabrina -

“My father was very well known for protecting people. They enjoyed what he was doing. When he shot someone, they would say ‘well done Louis! Good job! Keep up the good work!’”

“His friends, his family, the people he worked for, the people he was trying to protect – they all had one thing in common. They wanted to be safe. They wanted to feel safe. They wanted to be protected. And once he [shot an intruder] once, he continued to do it. He had a mindset that said ‘I have to do this. This is what is right.”

Cry, the Beloved Country

Armed with the list of 25 possible victims and the reports from the inquest files, Patrick Goodenough and Dominic Jones approached the editors at the Daily Dispatch and once again asked for permission to write a story about Louis van Skoor’s crimes. But again, the editors refused to publish the story, insisted that Louis had only been doing his job, that the local magistrates had all found that the burglars he’d shot had been in the process of committing a crime, and that there wasn’t a story to write about. What’s more, they were funded by the very businesses that Louis van Skoor was protecting, so they told Patrick and Dominic to drop the story and return to writing about lawn bowl tournaments and bridge championships.

So Dominic Jones approached the editors at The Sunday Tribune instead. Because the newspaper was based in Durban, they didn’t know Louis, and they felt no loyalty towards him. They also realised that both Patrick and Dominic were onto something big, so they ran a full-front page story on Louis van Skoor’s alleged crimes. It included the names of his victims, his modus operandi, the claims that he’d been dragging innocent black men into buildings to frame them for crimes they hadn’t committed, and all hell broke loose.

Within a few days, the story made news all over the country, and even though this was Apartheid South Africa, it turned out that not everyone thought that Louis’ actions were justified, and it sparked a heated debate within all circles of society.

People called the police headquarters in Pretoria to scold the police for letting something like that happen, while others pointed out that according to Section 49 of the Criminal Procedure act, Louis had acted within the law. Lawyers then started calling for the Criminal Procedure Act to be changed and pointed out that the same laws were being used to justify the killing of a 12-year-old black boy who’d been caught stealing apples and was then shot in the back when he ran away.

Investigations into Louis’ shootings were launched, the case files were reviewed, and the debate then made its way to Parliament, where, according to Heidi Holland –

“…an opposition Member of Parliament demanded to know from the Minister of Justice how it was possible for the inquest magistrate in East London to summarily close 35 inquest dockets, in which one man had been implicated in each killing, without a single hearing taking place.”

Dozens of people then approached the Black Sash Movement’s offices in East London and declared that they too, had been victims of Louis van Skoor, a menace the black community had nicknamed “Whiskers” due to his habit of sneaking up on unsuspecting black people before he attacked. Louis van Skoor’s list of suspected victims continued to grow, and at one point, investigators confirmed in a news report that Louis van Skoor had shot and killed at least 34 black men and teenagers – most of whom had been buried in unmarked graves. According to Sharlene –

“My office was flooded by [black] families who had discovered for the first time what had happened to their child maybe two years ago. And these children had all been buried in mass graves, pauper’s graves, on the edge of town. And there was never any attempt [by the police] to contact the families. And so none of them knew what had happened to their children.”

But Louis was unrepentant, and worst still, HE KEPT ON SHOOTING PEOPLE, killing at least one black man every three weeks. According to Dominic Jones, shortly after he heard that the vigilante security guard had killed yet another unarmed black man, Louis himself gave Jones a call and said –

“Number 39, pal.”

By November 1989, a full investigation into Louis van Skoor’s crimes was ordered, and it became ‘the biggest murder investigation the country had ever seen’. The investigation lasted up to two years, and it soon became clear to the investigators that the police in East London had done the bare minimum when they’d investigated Louis’ crime scenes. They didn’t take photos of the victims, didn’t record the scenes properly, and didn’t collect crucial bits of physical evidence, which left gaping holes in the State’s case against Louis van Skoor.

Meanwhile, Louis was forced to retire, and for two years, Louis lived the Afrikaner’s version of the American Dream – he bought himself a dairy farm, a few dozen dairy cows, and then became a respected farmer. Then one day in 1990, four police vehicles arrived on the farm, informed Louis van Skoor that he was under arrest, and that he was charged with 19 counts of murder, 21 counts of attempted murder, and 3 counts of assault.

When the black community heard that Whiskers had finally been arrested, someone threw a petrol bomb through one of the windows in Louis van Skoor’s home. The entire building burned down, taking all of Louis’ possessions with it, and Louis was forced to sell his dairy cows and the farm to settle his debts, which crippled him financially.

Still, Louis insisted that he was innocent, and his supporters in East London continued to insist that he was a local hero. They even went so far as to have a car sticker printed that read “I Love Louis”, and drove around town with the sticker proudly displayed on their car bumpers. On the one side of the slogan was a picture of a smiling Louis, and on the other, a red heart with three bullet holes in it.

The day after Louis’ arrest, Dominic Jones wrote another article about East London’s Killer Security Guard, explaining that –

“This behaviour…is indicative of the extreme confidence and bravado that dominate his outward persona. To his everyday acquaintances – policemen, court officials and local businessmen, many of whom hold him in awe – he plays constantly on the role of protector. Every action, from the striding walk to the macho grip on his Chesterfield cigarette, exudes absolute sureness. At times it is almost condescending.”

The Fall Guy

Louis van Skoor’s murder trial kicked off at 9 am on the 19th of August 1991. It was held at the East London Supreme Court and was heard by Justice Lionel Melunsky. Louis’ supporters had offered to pay his legal fees, so he was represented by the two most well-respected defense lawyers in the Cape province at the time – defense attorney Johan Wessels, who had the nickname “The Bulldog”, and defense attorney Peter Daubermann.

During the trial, Louis’ defense team argued that Louis had only been doing his job. The black men he’d shot had all been in the process of committing a crime. The laws in place permitted him to stop them by any means necessary, which included using deadly force if they attempted to attack him. He always fired warning shots, always took care to shoot in the direction of the burglars instead of shooting at them, and all of his shootings were investigated by the police.

But the prosecution argued that according to the police files and the witness statements, most of Louis’ victims had already surrendered when they’d been shot. That in at least 15 cases, his version of events didn’t match the witness statements or the evidence collected, and that in at least three cases, he’d used ‘excessive and unjustifiable force’.

As proof, prosecuting attorney Alfonso Hatting called almost a hundred witnesses who testified against Louis van Schoor. One of them, Leo van der Schyff (like scythe but skyth) was an alarm technician, and he testified that back in 1986, he’d met Louis after the latter had been called to investigate a break-in at a local butchery.

The burglar had managed to escape, but Louis had been injured in the process, and he told van der Skyth that he was –

“not going to try and arrest them anymore”

The black men who’d survived their confrontations with Louis van Skoor told their versions of events to the court, explaining that Louis would tell them to surrender, and after they did, he’d still shoot them, then kick them in their wounds when they begged him to call for help. Some told the court that they’d been lured to the buildings where they’d been shot, that he’d toy with them before he shot them, and all of their stories contained obvious similarities. But prosecutor Hatting’s star witness was John, who’d been just 15-years-old when Louis van Skoor had shot him and murdered his friend, the 12-year-old Liefie Peters, back in June 1988.

According to Louis, he’d received a call from the control room that night to let him know that someone had broken into a local burger restaurant called Wimpy Bar, which was located on the rocky seashore. Louis made his way to the restaurant and parked some distance away so that the lights from his vehicle wouldn’t alert the intruders. He then made his way to the building on foot, and entered the restaurant via the back door.

There was a panel next to the door that told him exactly where the intruders were, so he took out his pistol and made his way towards the restroom. And that is when the two intruders ran out of their hiding spot.

According to Louis, one of the intruders ran towards the windows that faced the ocean, and the other charged him. He was armed with a knife, and was aiming it at Louis, intent on stabbing him. So Louis shot him, and then turned his weapon on the second intruder, who jumped through the shattered window.

When Louis turned on the lights, the first intruder’s body was lying in-between some tables, and the second intruder’s body was lying on the rocks outside the restaurant. Louis then called the police, who arrived within minutes and started processing the scene. The magistrate would later declare that it had been a justifiable homicide.

But that’s not how John remembered that night.

According to John, he and Liefie had planned on robbing the Wimpy Bar. They arrived late at night, and made their way to the back of the building, which faced the ocean. Liefie used a rock to break one of the windows, and the pair quietly made their way into the dark restaurant.

They were going through the tills looking for money when they noticed someone walking past one of the windows. The two boys ran towards the restrooms where they hid in a toilet stall, and they listened as someone entered the building. Within just a few minutes, a large white man entered the bathroom and pointed his weapon at them. John would testify in court that -

“The white man stood outside the toilet and he said that we must come out.”

Liefie left the stall first and was heading towards the restaurant when Louis shot him in the back, killing the 12-year-old boy.

“I saw

Liefie

fall. I turned and looked at the white man. I was scared that he would shoot me. I went towards him to be close to him and hold on to him, so that he wouldn’t be able to shoot me. He held the gun not far from me, and then I was also shot.”

The first bullet entered John’s leg, and he fell onto the floor. Louis ordered him to stand up, and when he did, Louis shot him again, this time hitting his left buttock.

“He told me to stand up again, but I couldn’t. I was lying there, and he kicked me in the mouth. He told me again to stand up, but I couldn’t. So he picked me up and he propped me against a table, and he shot me again in the shoulder, from the front, and I fell down.”

John’s body ended up on the rocks outside the restaurant. He had no recollection of how his body had ended up there, but when the police found him, he was busy bleeding out and was rushed to the hospital. His injury reports matched his version of events, and not the statement provided by Louis van Skoor.

When defense attorney Wessels accused John of fabricating his version of events, John insisted that he was speaking the truth. They’d been hiding in the restroom when Louis van Skoor came across them. He’d ordered them to leave the stall, and they did. They hadn’t been armed. They hadn’t tried to defend themselves. And yet Louis van Skoor had still murdered Liefie before using John’s body as a prop to stage a scene that matched his version of events.

According to Dominic Jones –

“No matter what was thrown at him, [John] stuck to his story. And Van Schoor’s legal team actually filed perjury charges against him.”

To counter the dozens of witness statements, Louis van Skoor’s legal team did their best to prove that the witnesses were unreliable by pointing out that many of them were unsophisticated, unemployed, uneducated criminals from poor black communities. They were dressed in cheap suits, or torn and dirty clothes, barely spoke English, and according to Dominic Jones –

“Some were prisoners, others experienced criminals. They admitted lying under oath at previous court cases, saying they had done so to avoid imprisonment. For many, it was the first time they had told their stories to anyone in authority. And the obvious question was why they had not spoken up earlier.

A subliminal case was being made for their part in some underhand and sinister plot, a malicious vendetta instigated by the slimy liberal press. But the fact was that they came and told their stories – and all were so similar.”

Compared to them, Louis van Schoor was an impressive figure. His greying hair was combed back, his beard was neatly trimmed, and he wore a new suit. When he addressed the all-white court, he started and ended each statement with “my lord”, and was able to converse in both Afrikaans and English. He showed the required amount of respect and came across as humble and intelligent, and a psychologist would even testify that Louis van Skoor wasn’t a psychopath, but a God-fearing, family-oriented father who’d just been doing his best to protect his community.

But when the prosecution started questioning him, the holes in the statements that Louis had made to the police became glaringly obvious. In one particular case, Louis had shot and killed a man called Edward Soenies. Louis claimed that he’d caught Soenies in the process of stealing a car battery, and when he confronted him, Edward had turned around and started running away from him, prompting Louis to chase him down. He claimed that he’d fired a warning shot, then fired another one in the direction of Soenies, who collapsed onto the ground.

By the time the police arrived, Soenies was dead.

But according to the autopsy report, Edward had been facing Louis van Skoor when he’d been shot. The first bullet entered his stomach, and the second first entered the palm of his left hand, then made its way into Soenies’ heart, killing him. That’s two bullet wounds, not one, and both were located in the front of his body, not his back. The prosecution then argued that Soenies had already surrendered when he’d been shot, proving that Louis’ statement to the police was false. But Louis denied this and changed his statement in the court, explaining that as he was chasing Edward down –

“I lifted up my firearm and was in the process of firing a shot at this person, when this person turned around completely as he was turning around the corner.”

Which suggested that Edward Soenies had been running backwards when Louis had fired those two shots at him. Which of course made total sense. Not to mention the fact that firing that second shot was overkill. As Justice Melunsky would later point out –

“[Edward Soenies had] already had been wounded, and had no reasonable prospect of escaping. [Louis] had no right to kill him, and [his] behaviour was deplorable.”

Then the prosecution told the court that the police had turned a blind eye to the fact that Louis’ version of events didn’t match the forensic evidence they’d gathered. When they’d investigated Edward Soenies’ death, the police hadn’t taken any photos of the location of his body, the car he’d reportedly been breaking into, or the crime scene itself. They hadn’t taken his fingerprints to confirm Louis’ claims that Edward Soenies had been trying to steal a car battery when he’d been shot.

They didn’t question Louis’ use of deadly force despite his claims that Edward Soenies had been running away from him when he’d fired two shots at him. And they didn’t question the autopsy results when they so obviously disproved Louis’ version of what had happened that night.

In fact, the prosecution argued that the police in East London had been complicit in Louis van Skoor’s crimes by turning a blind eye whenever he shot black intruder. When discussing the claims of one of the witnesses that he’d been shot at a different location and had then been dumped somewhere else by Louis, the prosecution asked one of the police officers why they hadn’t collected bullet casings on the scene or made an effort to find any. According to the investigative officer -

“At that stage, I didn’t care because the person was involved in a crime. I was convinced that the man was shot on the scene. After that I didn’t look for any casings or investigated the scene as thoroughly as I should have.”

And despite the fact that their reports stated that they’d been on the scene when Louis had shot his victims, or that they’d arrived on the scene mere minutes after the shootings had taken place, the police officers claimed that they couldn’t remember what had happened that night, and insisted that – in their opinion – Louis van Skoor had done nothing wrong.

But at the end of the trial, Justice Lionel Melunsky explained that he couldn’t ignore the evidence that had been placed in front of him. When he read his judgement, he told the court that –

“I am satisfied that you showed no compassion or concern for your victims. That you’d gunned them down with a dispassionate disregard for their lives. That you needlessly resorted to the use of a firearm with an appalling frequency.”

Initially, there had been a possibility that Louis van Skoor could have received the death penalty, but the prosecution had to drop several of the charges against Louis van Skoor due to a lack of evidence. And in the end, Justice Melunsky found that Louis was only guilty of seven murders. The rest of the charges against him were dropped, and in the end, Louis was sentenced to 91 years in prison. However, Justice Melunsky declared that he would serve them simultaneously, which meant that Louis received an effective prison term of just 20 years.

According to Dominic Jones –

“The Judgement was so disappointing because the judge had decided to look at cases individually, and not the big picture of Louis van Schoor basically going out and murdering people for sport. But even the judge said in his judgement that there were many cases that were borderline, yet he still gave him a very lenient sentence.”

The End of Apartheid

Following Louis van Schoor’s sentence, the public had mixed reactions. The white community in East London still believed that Louis was innocent. Louis himself believed that he’d been selected to be the fall guy, that the Apartheid government and the police force in East London in particular had just needed someone to blame for everything that had happened under their rule. But according to Dominic Jones, it was East London’s black community who’d really been failed by the justice system in East London.

“The Van Schoor killings made me feel like we were in Nazi Germany. It was obvious that there was a problem with Louis van Schoor, but many people just went along with it. That included the police, the magistrates and the courts, and even the business community who bought Louis van Schoor’s services. And it made me think, you know, this is how Nazi Germany happened.

This is how they exterminated people. And ordinary, right-thinking people went along with it, because no one cared about the victims because they were a different colour and not of the same social class. They were poor and were seen as scum who deserved to die.”

In an article he published not long after Louis van Skoor was sent to prison, Dominic Jones made no secret of his feelings regarding the police and justice system’s role in Louis’s crimes, stating that –

“How is it possible that a ruthless, cold-blooded murderer can commit his deeds without fear of prosecution for almost three years? Why did none of the police or court officials who knew Van Schoor say anything? How is it possible that 39 people were dead by the hand of one man and the only concern came from a handful of private citizens?”

“The police and Department of Justice continue to sidestep the issue. How do they explain it? They can’t. Not unless they’re prepared to admit that certain of their members and officials were guilty of racism; that prejudice from years under Apartheid so clouded their judgement that they were unable to distinguish right from wrong.”

Then South Africa had its very first democratic elections on the 27th of April 1994, and Apartheid ended. A year later, then President Nelson Mandela issued a ‘partial amnesty for deserving prisoners’, which stated that prisoners who’d already served half their prison sentence and had a proven track record of good behaviour, would qualify for a reduction in their prison sentences. This was done in an effort to ease overcrowding in South Africa’s prisons, but it also meant that in October 2004, Louis van Schoor was released from prison after serving only 12 years of his 20-year sentence.

His release wasn’t widely reported on, and Louis told local journalists that he planned on getting married to wife number 5, who was a lawyer from Cape Town. He claimed that he was “happy that the time has come to join society again”, and claimed that he was moving to the Western Cape Province, where he would run the farm his new lady love had bought for the two of them.

From what I’ve read, that never happened. Louis wasn’t allowed to leave the Eastern Cape province, and I’m not sure whether he did end up marrying the lawyer from Cape Town. What I do know, is that in May 2016, Louis van Schoor was a part owner of a multimillion-rand dairy farm in East London called Kingsdale Dairy Farm.

In 2011, the farm had been awarded to three black persons as a part of a Black Economic Empowerment scheme, and Louis was then appointed as their farm manager and mentor. He eventually became a part owner, but then someone recognised him, and the news got out that he had been suspected of murdering more than 39 black people for sport. It brought up a lot of questions like HOW a convicted killer had managed to be approved to act as a mentor to previously disadvantaged black farmers, and the Department of Agriculture and Land Reform had to scramble to explain themselves to an angry public.

He was eventually forced to leave the farm and ended up hiding away in a hovel on a small-holding in the middle of nowhere. When the BBC released their documentary on him in July 2024, they reported that he’d suffered a heart attack in 2021 and that he’d lost both of his legs as a result. He was confined to a wheelchair and lived an unremarkable, lonely, sad little life.

He died just days after the documentary was released, during which time his story once again made news headlines, but once again it went mostly unnoticed by the majority of South Africans. In the BBC Africa Documentary, The Apartheid Killer, the 72-year-old Louis van Schoor had insisted that he wasn’t a serial killer, and told journalist Charlie Northcott that he just wanted to be remembered as –

“A peaceful, loving, caring person. I want to be remembered as Louis van Schoor.”

And he partly got his wish. But instead of being remembered as a peaceful and caring person, he’s now remembered as Louis van Skoor, the Apartheid Killer. The man who brutally murdered over 39 men and boys, and needlessly shot over 100 black men for sport.

That is his legacy.

Dismembered Appendices

According to archived documents, Louis van Schoor murdered an estimated 41 people in total, yet till the day he died, Louis kept on insisting that he hadn’t killed them because he was a racist, and that at the time, he’d simply been doing his job.

Section 49 of South Africa’s Criminal Procedure Act has since been amended multiple times, and arrestors are no longer allowed to shoot at suspects who are fleeing the scene of a crime. But our self-defence laws have also been adapted so that you now have to be able to prove that you’d been in imminent danger when you’d fatally shot an intruder. The reason for the change is because of people like Louis van Skoor.

I often like to point out that South Africa’s investigative journalists are a different breed. They are fearless when it comes to exposing fraud and corruption, and have been responsible for uncovering some of the biggest news stories in South Africa’s recent history – like discovering that Thabo Bester was still alive, and shedding light on the Gupta family’s shady business deals and their mind-boggling influence on South Africa’s then-president, Jacob Zuma. I like to believe that it is because they were forged in the fires of Apartheid, and that the older generation have handed that determination and grit down to the younger ones.

I recommend that you go and watch the BBC Africa documentary The Apartheid Killer on YouTube. You can also find the BBC podcast World of Secrets on your favourite podcast service. The documentary especially focuses a lot more on the effect that Louis’ crimes had on the family of Edward Soenies – the man whose murder case helped to send Louis to prison.

At the beginning of this script, I mentioned that this is only part one of a two-part series on The Murderous Van Schoors. Louis’ story is finished, but he’s not the only killer in his family, and their crimes were also racially motivated – but not in the way you’d think.

Key Takeaways

• Louis van Schoor, a white security guard in Apartheid-era East London, killed at least 39 black men and boys between 1983 and 1989 while claiming self-defense.
• Police, magistrates, and white communities actively enabled van Schoor’s crimes by failing to investigate shootings and treating him as a local hero.
• Journalists Patrick Goodenough and Dominic Jones exposed van Schoor after local editors refused, finding 25 victims in court files with help from the Black Sash Movement.
• Van Schoor was convicted of only seven murders in 1991 and sentenced to 20 years, but was released after 12 years under Nelson Mandela’s prison amnesty.
• South Africa’s self-defense laws were later amended specifically because of cases like van Schoor’s, requiring proof of imminent danger before lethal force is permitted.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Louis van Schoor and why was he called ‘The Apartheid Killer’?

Louis van Schoor (also spelled van Skoor) was a white South African security guard and former police officer who operated in East London during the Apartheid era. He was called ‘The Apartheid Killer’ because he shot and killed at least 39 black men and teenagers, and wounded over 100 others, while working as a security guard between 1983 and 1989. He targeted black people under the guise of protecting property, and his actions were enabled and supported by the Apartheid-era police, judicial system, and white community who viewed him as a hero.

What was Louis van Schoor’s background before becoming a security guard?

Louis van Schoor was born in East London in 1951 into an Afrikaner family. His father was described as stoic, strict, and domineering. He joined the police force at age 16 in 1967, where he enforced Apartheid laws.

He volunteered to fight in the Border War against Namibia’s People’s Liberation Army, and upon returning to East London, he joined the infamous ‘Dog Squad’—a police unit that used attack dogs trained on unarmed black people for crowd control and torture. He left the police force in 1980 after failing to be promoted past Constable, then briefly worked as a carpet salesman before joining Falcon Security in 1983.

How did Louis van Schoor typically carry out his killings?

Louis van Schoor’s modus operandi involved responding to silent alarms at businesses, sneaking into buildings barefoot wearing only a t-shirt and shorts, armed with a 9mm pistol loaded with dum-dum bullets, a torch, and a walkie-talkie. He would park his vehicle some distance away to avoid alerting intruders, then hunt them down in the dark. He claimed to use his night vision and ability to smell adrenaline to locate victims.

After confronting them, he would shoot them as they tried to flee, often firing multiple shots at their torsos. He sometimes lured innocent black men to buildings with offers of jobs before shooting them, then claimed self-defense.

How did the police and justice system enable Louis van Schoor’s crimes?

The police and justice system enabled Louis van Schoor in multiple ways: police officers did minimal investigations at crime scenes, failed to take photos or collect crucial evidence, and often stood by while he loaded bodies. They accepted his vague self-defense claims without question. Magistrates, who were white, consistently sided with van Schoor and dismissed charges against him. When one magistrate did question his version of events and ordered further investigation, police ignored it.

Officers admitted they ‘didn’t care’ about investigating thoroughly because the victims were black people involved in alleged crimes. The system effectively granted him immunity for years.

Who were the journalists who exposed Louis van Schoor’s crimes, and what obstacles did they face?

Patrick Goodenough, a 24-year-old junior journalist at the Daily Dispatch, first investigated Louis van Schoor in 1989 after receiving a tip. He was joined by Dominic Jones and Sandra Shaw. They faced significant obstacles: their editors at the Daily Dispatch repeatedly refused to publish their findings, claiming van Schoor was just doing his job and citing fear of government censorship during the State of Emergency. The newspaper was also funded by businesses that van Schoor protected.

They eventually got their story published in The Sunday Tribune, a Durban-based newspaper with no local loyalty to van Schoor. They also worked with Sharlene Craige of the Black Sash Movement to gather evidence and steal court files.

What was the outcome of Louis van Schoor’s trial in 1991?

Louis van Schoor’s trial began on August 19, 1991, at the East London Supreme Court before Justice Lionel Melunsky. He was initially charged with 19 counts of murder, 21 counts of attempted murder, and 3 counts of assault. Despite overwhelming evidence and nearly 100 witnesses testifying against him, including survivors who described being shot after surrendering, Justice Melunsky found him guilty of only seven murders.

The other charges were dropped due to lack of evidence (much of which police had failed to collect). He was sentenced to 91 years in prison, but the sentences were ordered to run concurrently, resulting in an effective 20-year sentence. The judge criticized his ‘dispassionate disregard’ for victims’ lives but gave what many considered a lenient sentence.

How long did Louis van Schoor actually serve in prison, and what happened to him after his release?

Louis van Schoor served only 12 years of his 20-year sentence. He was released in October 2004 under a partial amnesty issued by President Nelson Mandela in 1995, which allowed prisoners who had served half their sentences with good behavior to qualify for reduced sentences. After release, he claimed he would marry a lawyer and move to the Western Cape, but he was not allowed to leave the Eastern Cape.

In 2016, it was revealed he had become part-owner of Kingsdale Dairy Farm in East London, which had been awarded to three black persons under a Black Economic Empowerment scheme where he was appointed as farm manager and mentor. After public outrage, he was forced to leave. He suffered a heart attack in 2021, lost both legs, and died in 2024 shortly after a BBC documentary about him was released.

What role did the Black Sash Movement play in bringing Louis van Schoor to justice?

The Black Sash Movement, a human rights organization founded in 1955 by white women to fight Apartheid, played a crucial role in exposing Louis van Schoor. Their East London advice coordinator, Sharlene Craige, had already received multiple statements from van Schoor’s victims before journalist Patrick Goodenough approached them in 1989. They provided statements from survivors like Vusumzi Gcaza and Siyabonga Tom, helped gather medical evidence (including a tracksuit with point-blank burn marks), and connected Goodenough with lawyer David Pitman.

Sharlene Craige also helped Dominic Jones steal and photocopy court files from the magistrate’s office, leading to the discovery of 25 confirmed killings. After the story broke, their office was flooded with families seeking information about missing relatives.

What was the white community’s reaction to Louis van Schoor’s crimes and eventual arrest?

The white community in East London largely supported Louis van Schoor throughout his killing spree and beyond. They viewed him as a hero and protector, praising him with comments like ‘well done Louis! Good job! Keep up the good work!’

When he shot people, they saw it as justified. After his arrest, supporters paid his legal fees, and some displayed car stickers reading ‘I Love Louis’ with his smiling face and a heart with three bullet holes. Even after his conviction, many white residents continued to believe he was innocent and that he had been selected as a ‘fall guy’ for the Apartheid government. This support was rooted in the racist attitudes of the era, where black lives were devalued and white safety was prioritized.

What legal provisions allowed Louis van Schoor to claim his killings were justified?

Louis van Schoor relied primarily on Section 49 of South Africa’s Criminal Procedure Act of 1977, which allowed private citizens to use deadly force against suspected criminals who resisted arrest or fled, if the force was ‘reasonably necessary.’ Section 42 gave citizens the right to perform citizen’s arrests, and Section 46 absolved them of liability for wrongful arrests. Van Schoor exploited these laws by always claiming his victims had attacked him or threatened him with weapons, justifying his use of deadly force.

However, Section 49 also required that suspects pose ‘a threat of serious violence’ or be suspected of crimes involving ‘serious bodily harm’ with no other means of arrest available—conditions van Schoor’s victims typically did not meet. These laws were later amended multiple times specifically because of cases like his.

Sources

• Original Casual Criminalist video: The Apartheid Killer…
• Hero image source by kitmasterbloke / openverse, by.

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