LATE at night, a burly, bearded security guard is alerted to an intruder at one of the many businesses he ‘protects’ in East London, South Africa.
Barefoot and carrying a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, loaded with hollow-point bullets which are “designed to kill”, he enters the restaurant making barely a sound, using his sense of smell to hone in on his prey.
The intruder, a 14-year-old boy searching for petty change, hides quaking in a toilet but the guard calls him out, tells him to stand next to the wall, then shoots him repeatedly.
“He told me to stand up, but I couldn’t,” says the boy. “While I was lying there, he kicked me in the mouth. He picked me up and propped me against a table and then shot me again.”
The boy, who cannot be named for legal issues, miraculously survived but was charged for breaking into the building while his attacker – who had killed multiple times – walked free.
Over a three year-period in the 1980s, Louis Van Schoor cold-bloodedly shot and killed at least 39 victims, one of whom was just 12 year-old. All were black.
He escaped prosecution for years during an era of a biassed police and judiciary under the racist laws of the Apartheid era, in the 1980s.
Van Schoor ran a private security company that protected 70 per cent of white owned businesses in the town and would “hunt down” any intruders on the property.
He set up a system of silent alarms which would ring in his office – without alerting whoever had entered the premises – and modified the bullets explode on impact, causing maximum damage.
The black community was terrorised as word spread about a tall, bearded man, nicknamed “whiskers” who would quietly appear, bare-foot, out of nowhere with a gun, and show no mercy in using it.
But as Louis van Schoor was striking fear into the hearts of the poverty-stricken black citizens of East London, the white owners of the businesses he patrolled, hailed him as a hero.
One of them even printed bumper stickers with a picture of Van Schoor that said “I love Louis” next to a heart shape formed by bullet holes.
Now, in a chilling interview in the new BBC documentary and podcast series, The Apartheid Killer, evil Van Schoor maintains he is “proud” of the killings and denies they were racially motivated.
“All the people I shot are black but not because of race, that’s because of crime,” he says. “It wasn’t a trivial thing to me. It was fighting crime, I was doing my job and I’m proud of it.”
He adds: “I’m not that monster that people think I am.”
His daughter Sabrina reveals police sanctioned the killings as ‘justified homicide’ and allowed his killing spree to carry on.
“When he shot someone, the business owners would say ‘Well done Louis. Keep up the good work,’” she says. “They wanted to be safe and to feel safe and, once he did it, he kept on doing it.
“My father wasn’t there when I was growing up. I would see him for one or two hours and then he’d leave. We were never told ‘I love you’ or shown any emotion because he doesn’t know how to. He lacks empathy.
“I don’t think he can engage with it emotionally because he doesn’t feel anything. He doesn’t feel the pain. He doesn’t want to feel.”
As well as an incredible interview with Van Schoor himself, the BBC documentary and podcast, recorded over four years, features heartbreaking eye-witness accounts and interviews with relatives of the victims.
“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.”
Marlene Mvubi family know all too well the pain and anger the families of the victims felt after their loved ones were targetted by the silent assassin.
In the winter of 1987, her brother Edward Soenies failed to turn up to see his six-year-old son, Raymond, who waited at the gate for weeks but his father never came home.
It would be two years before they learned he was dead – by reading an article that named him in their local paper.
It was another two years before they found his body in an unmarked grave – where the authorities had dumped him without informing the family he was dead.
Almost 40 years on, she says: “It seems like we are stuck in this phase of being heartbroken, being angry.
“Lots of people are still missing and not even in the graveyard… there is no closure.”
His son Raymond sobs as he recalls the death of Edward, who was a single parent.
“No-one came to support me, hug me,” he says. “I was very scared and didn’t know what to do.”
During the interview, Van Schoor’s casual tone belies startling racism and enthusiasm for what he did.
“Every night is a new adventure and that was exciting,” he says. “If the alarm went off at a factory or shop I’d never drive straight up and stop in front of the place.
“I’d stop two or three businesses away with night binoculars and then walk down. I normally worked barefoot, quiet. I relied a lot on my nose sense.
He was a kind of vigilante killer. He was a Dirty Harry character
Isa Jacobson
“If somebody breaks in, their adrenaline gives off an odour and you can pick that up. You kind of get that feeling that you are hunting a different species.”
Before becoming a security guard, he was a policeman himself for 12 years handling what he calls “attacker dogs” for the feared canine squad which set Alsatians onto protestors and criminals, almost all of whom were black.
After his killing spree began, he claims the police never criticised or warned him but actively supported and encouraged him.
Every killing between 1986 and 1989 was reported to police directly by Van Schoor but, initially, none led to a prosecution.
“Every officer in East London knew what was going on because at every shooting an officer has to attend the scene and not once did anybody say ‘Hey Louis, you’re on the borderline, you should cool it.’
“They all knew what was happening and it was documented. It wasn’t the wild west where you would just go and shoot somebody, put him in a coffin and go and bury him somewhere.”
It was only after the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990, when an air of change swept across South Africa, that pressure from activists and journalists led to the arrest of Van Schoor in 1991. His trial was one of the biggest in South Africa’s history.
If somebody breaks in, their adrenaline gives off an odour and you can pick that up. You kind of get that feeling that you are hunting a different species
Louis Van Schoor
“Due to the shift in the political situation of our country there had to be a scapegoat somewhere and they picked me,” he says. “All of those years it was right and then, all of a sudden, it was wrong.”
Apartheid-era laws gave people the right to use lethal force against intruders if they resisted arrest or fled and Van Schoor relied heavily on this defence, claiming that his victims were running away when he killed them.
He adds: “I used maximum force. They were justifiable homicides. And that’s the bottom line.”
But dozens testified that Van Schoor shot them while their hands were up after they had surrendered.
Others describe him toying with them, asking if they would prefer to be arrested or shot – before shooting them in the chest. One victim described being shot in the abdomen, begging for water, before being kicked in his wound by Van Schoor.
Despite these accounts and a horde of forensic evidence, the shadow of the apartheid system hung over the justice system.
While he killed at least 39 – and many believe the number was closer to 100 – he was convicted of just seven murders and served 12 years in prison, before early release.
Now toothless and missing the bottom half of his legs, which were amputated following a heart attack, leaving him in a wheelchair, Van Schoor spends most of his time watching rugby, smoking and playing with his pet rottweiler, Brutus.
He boasts that he refused a general anaesthetic during his amputations because he wanted to watch doctors saw off his legs.
“I could feel when they sawed through the bone,” he says. “I could feel the jerking as they were cutting but before that they got an electric soldering iron and they burned the main arteries, to stop it bleeding and you could smell the meat burning.”
But when recalling the many men and boys he shot in cold blood he still has no remorse.
“I don’t have sleepless nights. I don’t have things coming up in the past haunting me,” he says calmly.
“Louis van Schoor is a negative figure. He’s brutal, cruel and merciless. A serial killer. But I was a crime fighter. And if you’re successful then you’re going to be called monster, serial killer and whatever, which I don’t agree with.
“I’ve got no remorse inside because I don’t feel that I was wrong.”
Asked how he wants people to remember him, he thinks for a moment and then replies, “As a peaceful, loving, caring person.”
The Apartheid Killer documentary airs on BBC2 tonight and is available on iPlayer. The podcast is now available on BBC Sounds.
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