In the late 1980s the businesses of East London, on South Africa's Eastern Cape coast, could pay a private security firm to answer their silent alarms, and one of the men who answered them was Louis van Schoor. When he found someone on the premises, he shot them. Between 1986 and 1989 he shot, by the count usually given, more than a hundred people and killed thirty-nine. Almost all of them were Black; the rest were people the apartheid state classified as colored. Many were teenagers, and the youngest of the dead was twelve. He reported every shooting to the police himself, and the police recorded thirty-two of the deaths as justifiable homicide.
He was born Sybrand Jacobus Lodewikus van Schoor in 1951 and served in the police dog unit before he went into private security. His weapon was a 9mm Parabellum pistol. Decades later, speaking to a BBC reporter, he described creeping up barefoot on the people he found inside the buildings he guarded and then using what he called maximum force, and he referred to Black South Africans as the "opposite" race.
His account never varied: the people he shot were criminals caught in the act, and he was paid to protect property. The survivors told a different story. Some testified that he toyed with them before he opened fire, and reporting in 2024 found that many of those he shot had been unarmed. The BBC set out one case from July 11, 1988, in which a fourteen-year-old boy broke into a restaurant looking for loose change. The boy told police he hid in the toilet when he saw the guard with his gun, and that van Schoor called him out, told him to stand against the wall, and shot him repeatedly. He survived; the BBC did not name him.
For three years none of it reached a courtroom. Each death went to a magistrate, and each time the magistrate found that he had acted within the law; he was not once cautioned by the police or the courts. White business owners in the town regarded him as a protector. What ended the run was not an internal inquiry but the Daily Dispatch, the East London newspaper, whose reporters, together with human rights campaigners, set out the pattern of the shootings as apartheid was coming apart. Andrew Trench, then a young reporter, covered the case through to the conviction.
He was arrested in 1991 and tried in the Supreme Court in 1992. During the trial white residents of the town displayed "I Love Louis" stickers showing three bullet holes through a bleeding heart. Before the verdict he told a journalist that he had shot a hundred people in his years as a guard. The court convicted him in April 1992 of seven murders and two attempted murders, a small share of the deaths recorded, and sentenced him to twenty years.
His family produced a second killing. In 2002 his daughter Sabrina hired a hitman to murder her mother, van Schoor's former wife; she waited in a bedroom with her baby while the man stabbed her mother to death. She was sentenced to twenty-five years, and for a time father and daughter were both held in Fort Glamorgan prison in East London.
On Friday, October 29, 2004, after twelve years of the twenty, he was released on parole, helped by a general reduction of sentences for all prisoners granted during Nelson Mandela's presidency. Warders described him as a model prisoner; he said he had studied agriculture and worked in the prison vegetable garden. At the gate, aged fifty-three, he read a pencil-written statement asking the public to judge him on his future rather than his past, and he apologized to the families "if my action caused any hurt." Most of the South African press ignored the release.
He never accepted that he had done wrong. Interviewed in 2006 and asked whether he had shot more than a hundred people, he answered, "I can't argue with that," and added, "I was doing my job. I was paid to protect property." In the same conversation he said that he had never apologized for what he did.
In July 2024 the BBC released The Apartheid Killer, an Africa Eye documentary, with a companion season of its World of Secrets podcast, the product of four years of reporting by the journalist Isa Jacobson. In the interviews he said that the police had sanctioned the killings and that officers who knew what he was doing should share the blame. "I've got no remorse inside because I don't feel that I was wrong," he told her. South African law sets no time limit on prosecuting murder, and families of the dead used the broadcast to demand that the other deaths be reopened.
He died of sepsis in his leg in East London on July 25, 2024, at the age of seventy-two, days after the documentary was released. None of the thirty-two deaths the police had called justifiable homicide was ever tried.