Louis van Schoor was a former policeman and dog handler who ran a private security firm in East London in the Eastern Cape in the last years of apartheid. Businesses paid his company to respond to alarms, and he responded with a pistol.
Between 1986 and 1989 he shot at least a hundred people, and killed at least thirty-nine of them, on business premises at night. Almost all were Black. Many were teenagers. Several were children; the youngest killed was twelve. Most were unarmed, and a substantial number were shot in the back or while attempting to surrender. South African reporting called him the Apartheid Killer, and the Dum-Dum Killer after the ammunition he used.
For years nothing happened. He reported each shooting to the police and each was recorded as a security guard defending property against a burglar, in a jurisdiction and a period in which that account was accepted without inquiry. He was locally popular among white business owners.
He was eventually tried in 1992 on seven counts of murder and two of attempted murder, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years. He served twelve and was released in October 2004. He applied to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for amnesty on the basis that the killings were politically motivated, and was refused, the commission finding that they were not.
His daughter Sabrina made a documentary about him and the case, Shooting Bokkie, and has spoken publicly about the families of the dead, most of whom never received an account of what happened to their sons.