Convicted Mass Murderer Claims Police Encouraged His Racist Killings

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Louis van Schoor, a South African security guard and convicted murderer, has confessed to the BBC that his killing spree, which targeted dozens of black men during apartheid, was sanctioned by the police. Van Schoor, who has been interviewed by BBC Africa Eye over the past four years, insists that others should share the blame for his actions. Yet, in his conversations with the BBC, he has revealed chilling details that raise serious questions about his early release from prison.

 

The stark reality of standing in the bedroom of a convicted killer is unsettling. Van Schoor’s room is meticulously kept, with an immaculately neat bed and the heavy odor of cigarettes lingering in the air, their stubs piled high in an ashtray. Strips of sticky paper hang from the ceiling, writhing with trapped and dying flies. Known as the “Apartheid Killer,” van Schoor has lost his teeth and suffers from poor health.

 

 

After a heart attack, both his legs were amputated, leaving him in a wheelchair with painful scars. Remarkably, during the procedure, he requested an epidural instead of general anesthesia so he could watch his legs being removed. "I was curious," he said, chuckling. "I saw them cutting… they sawed through the bone."

 

In his discussions with the BBC, van Schoor sought to convince the public that he is "not the monster that people say I am." However, his detailed and enthusiastic description of his legs being amputated did little to soften his image. Between 1986 and 1989, under South Africa's racist apartheid system, van Schoor shot and killed at least 39 people, all of whom were black. The youngest victim was just 12 years old. These killings occurred in East London, a city in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, where van Schoor was employed as a security guard with a contract to protect up to 70% of white-owned businesses, including restaurants, shops, factories, and schools. He has long maintained that every person he killed was a "criminal" caught red-handed while breaking into these buildings.

 

"He was a kind of vigilante killer. He was a Dirty Harry character," says Isa Jacobson, a South African journalist and filmmaker who has spent 20 years investigating van Schoor’s case. "These were intruders who were, in a lot of cases, pretty desperate. Digging through bins, maybe stealing some food… petty criminals." Van Schoor’s killings, sometimes several in a single night, struck terror into the black community of East London. Stories spread of a bearded man—nicknamed "whiskers" in the Xhosa language—who made people disappear at night. However, his shootings were not clandestine. Every killing between 1986 and 1989 was reported to the police by van Schoor himself.

 

 

The release of anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela in 1990 marked the beginning of the end for van Schoor’s impunity. As South Africa underwent significant changes, pressure from activists and journalists led to van Schoor’s arrest in 1991. His trial, one of the largest murder trials in South African history, involved dozens of witnesses and thousands of pages of forensic evidence. Despite killing at least 39 people, van Schoor was only convicted of seven murders due to the collapse of much of the case against him in court. He served just 12 years in prison.

 

 

The other 32 killings remain classified as "justifiable homicides" by the police. Apartheid-era laws permitted the use of lethal force against intruders if they resisted arrest or fled. Van Schoor relied heavily on this defense to maintain his innocence, claiming his victims were running away when he shot them. The BBC’s investigation into van Schoor scrutinized evidence underlying these "justifiable" shootings, delving deep into police reports, autopsies, and witness statements. Jacobson’s research uncovered witness statements from people who survived van Schoor’s attacks, contradicting his claims that they were fleeing when shot. Multiple accounts described being shot with their hands up or being toyed with by van Schoor, who would ask if they preferred to be arrested or shot before shooting them.

 

 

Armed with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol loaded with hollow-point bullets, van Schoor caused severe internal injuries to his victims. In one case, he fired eight shots into an unarmed man. On July 11, 1988, he shot a 14-year-old boy who had broken into a restaurant searching for petty change. The boy, hiding in the toilet, was called out by van Schoor, told to stand next to a wall, and then shot repeatedly. "He told me to stand up, but I couldn’t," the boy said in his testimony. "While I was lying there, he kicked me in the mouth. He picked me up and propped me up against a table and then he shot me again." The boy survived but was not believed and was charged with breaking into the building.

 

During van Schoor’s trial, such testimonies were heard but repeatedly dismissed by the judge as "unsophisticated" and "unreliable." Without jury trials in South Africa, the judge's opinion is final. Many in East London’s white community supported van Schoor at the time. Bumper stickers proclaiming "I Love Louis" with a heart full of bullet holes were distributed. Patrick Goodenough, a journalist who investigated van Schoor in the 1980s, noted the racial bias in the legal system. "The support for him was massive… He would not have been able to get away with a fraction of what he got away with without it."

 

In South Africa, there is no statute of limitations for murder or attempted murder, meaning the police could theoretically reopen van Schoor’s case. "Louis van Schoor was basically going out and murdering people for sport," says Dominic Jones, a journalist who raised awareness of van Schoor’s spree. Interviews with van Schoor himself suggest he derived pleasure from his actions. "Every night is a new adventure, if you want to put it that way," he told the BBC, describing how he used silent alarms to track intruders and always went alone, barefoot, to avoid making noise. He even claimed to rely on his sense of smell to detect intruders’ adrenaline-induced odor.

 

Van Schoor denies being a racist or a serial killer, insisting he never went out with the intention of killing black people. However, he admits he found the act of stalking them in the dark "exciting." Before becoming a security guard, van Schoor spent 12 years in the East London police force, using attack dogs to track down and catch protesters and criminals, almost all of whom were black. He compared this to "hunting, but a different species." Tetinene "Joe" Jordan, a former anti-apartheid activist, recalls this grimly. "He was hunting, literally hunting people," he says.

 

Van Schoor strongly denies being a "serial killer," maintaining that his actions were legal and sanctioned by the police. He claims the police never criticized or warned him, but instead actively encouraged him. "Every officer in East London knew what was going on… all the police officers knew," he said. "Not once did anybody say ‘Hey Louis, you’re on the borderline or you should cool it or whatever’… they all knew what was happening."

 

Jacobson found police records indicating officers were often present during the shootings but never questioned van Schoor. The police frequently failed to collect crucial forensic evidence, such as bullet casings, and neglected to take photos of the deceased at the scenes. "These were cover-ups… He had the backing from police officers from junior rank and senior rank," said Goodenough. "They wouldn’t investigate. They’d sit down with him and have a cigarette while chatting, with bodies lying nearby."

 

Van Schoor’s actions were facilitated by a society that allowed him to operate with impunity. "Van Schoor was a serial killer because there was a society that allowed him to be one," says Jacobson. For the relatives of van Schoor’s victims, his freedom and the state’s failure to investigate his killings are sources of enduring pain. Some families never recovered their loved ones’ bodies. "It seems like we are stuck in this phase of being heartbroken, being angry," says Marlene Mvumbi, whose brother Edward was murdered by van Schoor in 1987 and whose remains were dumped in an unmarked grave without the family’s consent. "Lots of people are still missing and not even in the graveyard… there is no closure."

 

Van Schoor’s case predates South Africa’s 1995 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which provided compensation to many victims of apartheid-era crimes. Sharlene Crage, a former activist who pushed for van Schoor’s prosecution, is outraged that he was ever allowed to walk free. "It’s a shocking miscarriage of justice," she said. "There is no reason his case shouldn’t be reopened." Despite being sentenced to over 90 years in prison in 1992, van Schoor was allowed to serve his terms concurrently and was freed on parole in 2004.

 

The early release of apartheid-era killers from prison remains a contentious issue in South Africa. In 2022, protests erupted in Johannesburg over the parole of Janusz Walus, who killed anti-apartheid politician Chris Hani. A few years earlier, Eugene de Kock, responsible for a death squad that abducted, tortured, and murdered dozens of black activists, was also freed.

 

Today, van Schoor spends most of his time watching rugby, smoking, and playing with his pet rottweiler, Brutus. He claims to have no memory of many of his killings and denies having shot as many as 100 people, as some reports suggest. "I honestly don’t know how many I shot. Some say over a 100.

 

 

Credit: BBC 2024-07-23

 

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