Louis van Schoor was a white security guard in East London, a port city on South Africa's Eastern Cape coast, who answered silent burglar alarms at local businesses in the late 1980s. When he found people on the premises, he shot them. Between 1986 and 1989 the shootings went on, one after another, while each death was handled as a routine inquest. In 1992 a court convicted him of seven murders and two attempted murders. He had been charged with 19 murders and 21 attempted murders, and reporters in 2004 and 2024 put the number of people he killed at about 39. Before his conviction he told a journalist that he had shot 100 people in his years as a guard.
He was sentenced to an effective 20 years and was released on parole in 2004 after about 12. He never accepted that the killings were wrong, and he described himself as a crime fighter rather than a murderer. He died in July 2024, aged 72, less than a week after the release of a BBC documentary about him. Only the seven murders and two attempted murders of which he was convicted are legal findings; the wider toll has never been tested in a court.
His full first names, as an American newspaper gave them in 1989, were Sybrand Louis; he was known as Louis. He was 53 when he left prison in October 2004, according to IOL.
Before he went into private security he served in the South African Police, in the dog unit, according to IOL's 2004 reports and the Sunday Times in 2024. In a long interview with the journalist Chiara Carter after his release, published by IOL in November 2004, he linked what he had done to that background. He cited his police training and his service on the border, and he said that his police experience had made him "used to shooting and killing."
By the late 1980s he was working as a security guard in East London. Carter reported that his security company policed about seven out of ten businesses in East London, and that he saw deterring intruders as his job. The work was alarm response: he answered silent alarms at business premises.
The shootings happened during the states of emergency of the late 1980s, a time of mass revolt and harsh repression by the white government, as Carter put it. After each shooting he telephoned the police himself. Those who survived were arrested. When the person died, the only legal step was an inquest. Carter noted that the dead were Black and the judicial officers white, and wrote that this went a long way toward explaining how he escaped scrutiny for so long.
The Sunday Times, in 2024, described the people he shot as Black or colored, and said that while some were burglars, others were simply passers-by. Police treated many of the deaths as justifiable homicide, the paper said.
Accounts gathered by reporters over the years said that many of the people he shot were unarmed and offered no threat. Van Schoor denied the most serious of these accusations when Carter put them to him in 2004.
In the early days he talked openly to journalists about the rising number of deaths, according to Carter. In 2004 he said that he could not remember how many people he had shot, and that he did not remember their faces.
Lindile Hilti was 18. The Deseret News reported on November 1, 1989, that van Schoor had shot him dead at a factory in East London on the previous Saturday. The factory's owner reported the shooting on the Tuesday, and police confirmed it and gave the young man's name. The paper reported, citing the police and the businessman, that Hilti was the 27th Black burglary suspect van Schoor had shot dead since 1986. Van Schoor declined to comment.
Edward Soenies was killed by van Schoor, the Sunday Times reported in 2024. He left behind a son who was six years old at the time. The boy waited outside for hours on the day his father did not come home. The family learned only two years later, from a newspaper article, that van Schoor had killed him. The family tried for more than 30 years to give him a proper burial, and with the help of the journalist Isa-Lee Jacobson his son reburied him in 2022. The family was left destitute after his death, the paper said.
The figure of 39 deaths is given by IOL in 2004 as an allegation ("alleged to have killed 39 people") and by the Sunday Times and TimesLIVE in 2024 as an estimate. Carter wrote in 2004 that he may have shot as many as 100 people. These numbers have not been tested in court, and only seven deaths led to murder convictions.
According to Carter, the killings came to wider attention through the work of the journalist Patrick Goodenough and his colleague Dominic Jones. They looked into rumors about the shootings, working through inquest files and court records and interviewing survivors and people in the town. Goodenough had trouble getting the story published, but it was eventually printed on the front page of the Sunday Tribune. Once it appeared, further accounts reached the Black Sash, the anti-apartheid human rights organization.
The Daily Dispatch, the East London daily, said in 2024 that it had first reported on van Schoor in the early 1990s and had covered his crimes in detail, including the testimony of victims.
Van Schoor was arrested in 1991, according to the Daily Dispatch's 2024 report. He was charged with 19 murders and 21 attempted murders, IOL reported in 2004.
Andrew Trench, then a young reporter, covered part of the court case. Speaking to Eyewitness News (EWN) in July 2024, he said that van Schoor had shown no remorse at all during the trial and called him a "cold killer." The case gripped the whole Eastern Cape, Trench said, and a support club formed around him; supporters put bumper stickers showing bullet holes on their cars. Carter described the same stickers in 2004: cars in the town carried "I love Louis" stickers with a heart pierced by bullets. Years later, she wrote, he winced at the memory of them.
Before he was convicted, van Schoor told a journalist that he had shot 100 people while working as a security guard from 1986 to 1989, IOL reported in 2004.
In 1992 he was convicted of seven murders and two attempted murders. Reports agree that the sentence came to 20 years. IOL's Barbara Hollands and the Sunday Times give it simply as 20 years; Carter described it as a 91-year sentence that amounted in effect to about 20 years. He went to prison, Carter wrote, around the time Chris Hani was assassinated, when the country's future was uncertain.
The law was later changed to prevent security personnel from carrying out shootings of this kind, according to Carter.
He served his sentence at Fort Glamorgan, the prison in East London. A prison official, Phineas Mouna, described him in 2004 as "a model prisoner" who showed leadership qualities. He studied agriculture while inside and worked in the prison garden, IOL reported. He told Carter that prison had made him "born again" and a changed man, and that it had taught him that "people are people."
Around 2000, he told Carter, he tried to contact victims and their families but could not reach them, and he then made a public apology through the media for the pain he had caused. He said he had meant it sincerely. He had no contact with any of the families after that.
In 2002 his daughter arranged for a hired killer to murder her mother, van Schoor's former wife, a businesswoman in Queenstown (now Komani). IOL reported in 2004 that she was serving a 25-year sentence; she had said in her defense that her mother had kept her from mixing with colored and Black friends, and reports also cited abuse. The Sunday Times in 2024 said she was 22 at the time, and that detectives traced the hired man through the victim's phone, which led to his confession. She was held in the same prison as her father.
At his release he said he would always support his daughter and would try to build a bond with her young child. "The bond between us will not be broken," he said.
Van Schoor was released on parole from Fort Glamorgan on a Friday, IOL reported on October 31, 2004, after serving 12 of his 20 years. Carter put the time served at 12 years, 4 months and 13 days. He walked out to his fiancee, a Cape Town lawyer, who would have been his fifth wife. She had begun writing to him four years earlier after reading about him.
At a media briefing at the prison, wearing a red golf shirt, he read a statement he had written in pencil. He said he was happy to rejoin society and hoped the public would judge him "on my future" and not his past. He thanked his family, his friends and the prison staff, and said he planned to farm and to write a book about his life. At first he said he had "nothing to say" to the families of the people he shot. Then he said he wanted their forgiveness: "To the families and friends of my victims, I apologise if my action caused any hurt and discomfort."
His parole conditions kept him within the East London magisterial district and barred him from discussing his trial or his time at Fort Glamorgan, Carter reported.
In Carter's interview, published on November 6, 2004, van Schoor rejected the labels "mass murderer" and "serial killer." He said he was a "crime fighter," and that the book he planned would set the record straight. "I'm not a serial killer. I called the police after each encounter," he said.
He denied that race had anything to do with the shootings. "It was nothing to do with race. I was purely protecting people's property," he told her. He said that the law of the time allowed a guard to shoot a fleeing suspect in self-defense, and he called the killings "incidents." He said he was doing his job.
Carter observed that his release drew almost no reaction from East London's Black community. The people he shot, she wrote, had been Black, poor and often itinerant, and she asked whether their relatives even knew he was free. In a restaurant in the town, white diners stared at him. He told her he did not want to run from his notoriety and asked again to be judged on his future.
In a 2015 interview, the Sunday Times reported, he did not deny that he had shot at least 100 people. "I can't argue with that. I didn't keep count," he said.
In July 2024 the BBC released The Apartheid Killer, a BBC Africa Eye film by the South African journalist Isa-Lee Jacobson and the BBC journalist Charlie Northcott. The Sunday Times reported that it was filmed over four years, starting in 2020, with work slowed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and that it featured relatives of the people he killed as well as van Schoor himself. The film was made available on the BBC News Africa YouTube channel from July 22, 2024, and a podcast series followed on BBC World Service radio, EWN reported.
Jacobson told the Sunday Times that she had first met van Schoor about 20 years earlier, when he was still in prison in an orange jumpsuit, and that she had found him a powerful and frightening figure. She began looking into the case in Qonce (formerly King William's Town), where she met several people whose relatives had been shot. As the scale became clear, she said, she felt it was her duty to find out how many more there had been, and she argued that many apartheid-era killers were still free and would die with their secrets unless someone spoke to them. She also reported that some white people had boasted about the shootings and that some security companies had used them in their sales pitch. Northcott told the paper that one of the most striking things about van Schoor was his total lack of remorse.
The film set off a public debate in South Africa. The former Democratic Alliance MP Phumzile Van Damme called it very hard to watch and urged every South African to see it, saying that apartheid must never be forgotten, TimesLIVE reported on July 23, 2024. The same report noted that his 12 years in prison were widely seen as an inadequate punishment. The ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba said that South Africans had to accept their past to build their future.
The documentary was screened for the community at a Methodist church in East London, the Daily Dispatch reported on July 27, 2024. People who had been harmed by him spoke to the paper without giving their names. One said the film had brought back painful memories but had made them feel heard; another said, "We need justice, not just for us, but for all those who suffered."
Van Schoor died in hospital in July 2024, aged 72, less than a week after the documentary was released, the Daily Dispatch reported on July 27, 2024. For some of those affected, his death ended any chance of further legal accountability. "We wanted him to face the consequences of his actions," one of them told the paper.
Carter wrote in 2004 that the law on the use of lethal force by security personnel was later changed. In 2024 people harmed by him and relatives of the dead were still calling for justice, and rights groups were calling for a review of apartheid-era cases and for more support for victims, the Daily Dispatch reported in 2024.
The number of dead. Van Schoor was convicted of seven murders. He was charged with 19. A count reported in 1989, attributed to police and a businessman, gave 27 deaths by November of that year. Reports from 2004 onward give 39, as an allegation (IOL, 2004) or an estimate (Sunday Times and TimesLIVE, 2024). None of the deaths beyond the seven convictions was tried. No court has found them to be murders.
The number shot. He told a journalist before his conviction that he had shot 100 people, according to IOL; in 2004 he said he could not remember how many; and in 2015 he said he could not argue with a figure of at least 100 because he had not kept count. These are his own statements and have not been tested in court.
How the shootings happened. Survivors and others told reporters that many of those he shot were unarmed and posed no threat. He denied the most serious accusations.
Race. He told IOL in 2004 that race had nothing to do with the shootings. The Sunday Times reported in 2024 that all of the people he shot were Black or colored.
His parole date. IOL reported his release on October 31, 2004. A 2024 Daily Dispatch report gave the year as 2003, but the 2004 reports were written at the time of his release.
1986: Start of the period, 1986 to 1989, in which he said he shot 100 people as a security guard in East London; the 1989 police count of deaths runs from this year.
1989: Shoots dead Lindile Hilti, 18, at a factory in East London; on November 1 the Deseret News reports, citing police and a businessman, that Hilti is the 27th burglary suspect he has shot dead since 1986.
Early 1990s: The Daily Dispatch reports on the case, by its own later account.
1991: Arrested.
1992: Convicted of seven murders and two attempted murders, out of 19 murder and 21 attempted murder charges; sentenced to an effective 20 years.
About 2000: Makes a public apology through the media, by his own account.
2002: His daughter arranges the murder of her mother, his former wife, and is later sentenced to 25 years.
October 2004: Paroled from Fort Glamorgan prison, East London, after 12 years, 4 months and 13 days.
November 6, 2004: IOL publishes Chiara Carter's interview, in which he calls himself a "crime fighter."
2015: In an interview, does not deny having shot at least 100 people.
2020: Isa-Lee Jacobson and Charlie Northcott begin filming The Apartheid Killer.
2022: Edward Soenies is reburied by his son.
July 22, 2024: The Apartheid Killer is released on the BBC News Africa YouTube channel.
July 2024: Dies in hospital, aged 72.