Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Louis van Schoor: The Deadliest Security Guard in History

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Robert concludes the story of Louis van Schoor and the surprise tale of his daughter, Sabrina.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cool Zone Media Here we go, welcome back, it's a podcast, oh my god! It's your kick. Yeah, I don't know why I opened it that way. Nobody does. Nobody's gonna like that, nobody's gonna be happy with it, Sophie. What am I doing? I think some of the fans really do like it.

I don't know if that's like a Stockholm City or anything. They are sickos. They are sickos. You're right about that, Molly. Did it bring you joy, Robert? No, nothing does anymore. The only thing that brings me joy is the film, Twisters, which I'm still gonna talk about.

I know I talked about it at the Tuesday opening, but you know what I really appreciate about Twisters, Molly, and about Twister. Hopefully some of the fans have had time to see it since they listened to the first episode. So now they're on board. You gotta go watch out and see it. You gotta go watch it.

They're gonna stop making tornado movies if we don't watch them, right? And then what's gonna happen to Oklahoma's tourism? You have to support the tornado-based economy. What I love about these movies is that they all decided, and this is the smart decision from a filmmaking standpoint, the tornadoes had to be sentient. Like these, these are tornadoes that have enemies and that have grudges and that are targeting city centers to do as much damage as possible.

There is a joking about that. That's no, there is a scene where the tornado roars at our main characters and then throws a semi truck at them. roars at our main characters and then throws a semi truck at them. And it fucking owns. Because they're fighting. They're fighting. Like these people are trying to destroy tornadoes.

Yes, yes, yes. They're going to war against the tornadoes. Wasn't the goal to just like learn from, like they were like tornado scientists. They wanted to like learn from it. Yeah, but you've got to escalate. Yeah, the initial movie, but their goal is they want to learn from it

so they can predict them. And so that what's her Name doesn't have her dad sucked out into the sky again. Right, but it was about predicting for evacuation, but this is about physically fighting it. Yes, because no one, so one of the through lines and twisters is that no one who lives in Tornado Alley has ever heard of a tornado or knows what to do.

None of the houses have shelters and the only people, our heroes who are a of like weirdo storm chaser YouTube nerds have to like go into towns and warn everyone to evacuate because Oklahomans just don't know about tornadoes. And nobody believes these out of towners. Well, no, it's always very clear because there's a giant tornado the size of an aircraft carrier in the sky.

Does Glenn Powell just like hip check the size of an aircraft carrier in the sky. Does Glenn Powell just like hip check the tornado in his regular jeans in the movies over? No, he drives a very cool truck and shoots fireworks into it. Well, actually someone else drives the truck. I forgot the ladies name. While wearing no shirt and a regular jeans?

He's wearing, well, I don't think we get a shirt in this scene. His shirt got sucked into the tornado. He's very wet a lot of the time though. So he doesn't get to show off. Yeah. Anyway, I guess should we talk about this racist Molly? I was having more fun talking about a sentient tornado, but I knew that couldn't last.

It's less fun than Glen Powell. I don't think Glen Powell has killed dozens of people. You don't know that. Look what we found out about Army Hammer. But here's what I'll say. If Glen Powell has been killing people, I'm sure they're an even mix of white, black, every color of the rainbow Glen Powell murders.

I just feel confident he didn't use dogs. Definitely not a, not, he would never, never stoop to dogs for his killing. He might use dogs. He might use dogs. That's not a zero percent chance. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly every Thursday.

Each week you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world.

We cloned his voice using AI. In 2001, Police say I killed my family Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. In 2001, police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode before escaping into the wilderness. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me. I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues. I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice? Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys,

a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the Weird Little Guys Trying to

Destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. I hope Glenn Powell is not a listener because we're kind of being needlessly mean to a man as far as I'm aware, hasn't ever done anything bad to anyone. Sorry, I said you were mean with the 3D printer. There's, there's a, yeah. I still don't know who he is. Anything bad to anyone? You are, sorry I said you were made with a 3D printer. There's, yeah. I still don't know who he is.

Yeah, he's very good looking, Molly, but again, in a way that's kind of off-putting. Yeah. He has to know that, right? I'm sure he knows. Louis Van Schuur, not very good looking, in my opinion. Now, as I noted last episode, it's a little bit hard to triangulate

the precise length of time that Lewis was killing people. But the bulk of his murdering seems to have occurred from around 1986 to 1989. These are the twilight years of the apartheid regime and the anxious business owners and middle-class whites of East London saw Lewis again as a hero. He is their own private Batman

and that is how they look at him. Most of the businesses that contracted with his company had silent alarms. When someone broke in, Van Schuur would be alerted and he would rush to the scene. To surprise the intruder, he always showed up alone in a private vehicle, no sirens. And as was his want, he went barefoot. He later told a reporter, it's quiet. You don't have your shoes squeaking on tiles and stuff. So again, his interest is not to stop robberies or to arrest people. It is to sneak up on them so that he can murder them

very, very brutally. I just don't like the idea that he's not wearing shoes. Yeah, yeah, that's just extra creepy, right? It's like a reverse die hard. Now he claimed to not turn on lights and that he usually avoided flashlights. He's inconsistent on that last point. So I suspect he did use a flashlight

to at least try to shock his targets. But to the press, he would claim that his primary sense for hunting was his sense of smell. Quote- Wait, sense for what now? Hunting? Hunting, yes. That's how he describes this.

Great, great, okay. He's just talking openly about when the press coming like, seems like you're shooting a lot of people who's like, yeah, I love hunting people. I hunt by sense of smell. If somebody breaks in, the adrenaline gives off an odor and you can pick that up. Okay.

I don't know that I think you can't, but that's a very unsettling thing to say. That's something a monster says, Louis. I mean, I guess, you know, like gamblers, you have a system, you have superstitions, you have these beliefs about your craft. Yeah. And some people have better senses than others.

So I'm not gonna say, like, it's definitely true that like fear sweat is different, smells different. You can kind of tell sometimes if somebody's like- But you can't smell a guy in the back of the CBS. You're not, I don't think you're going to, but maybe Lewis is the predator, you know? He is a predator. He spent a long time with dogs,

but he did not develop any dog-like skills. The dogs have taught me their skills, yeah. Now, the adrenaline with Van Schoor were mostly conducted at the start of the 90s, before he was charged with any crimes for his many murders. He was a subject of bemusement for a lot of reporters, and their stories helped build him a legend and earn him the love of many in the local white community. The vast majority of his victims were very poor, the kind of people who often broke into

stores to steal food or cash. And as a result, their deaths made very little impact in the local papers. If they were mentioned, it usually wasn't by name, robbers shot breaking into pharmacy or whatever. White business owners and middle class residents knew of Lewis, at least by reputation, and overwhelmingly considered him a hero. Black residents also knew him. Stories spread in Zosia of a bearded man nicknamed Whiskers

who would stalk men through the streets and make them disappear forever. As journalist Dominic Jones, one of the first to report on Lewis said, Lewis Van Schoor was basically going out and murdering people for sport. Lewis himself would tell the BBC during an investigation decades later, every night is a new adventure if you want to put it that way. I don't. I don you want to put it that way. I don't. I don't want to put it that way. I don't want to put it that way.

Not at all. What do you mean? An adventure. And this is going on for long enough that he's becoming this sort of like real life boogie man in these communities. Like they know. Of course he is, yeah.

And I guess they don't know where he's gonna be or which alarms go to his phone. No, and you probably, because of how it's being reported, some people are probably aware it's all this one guy, but like a lot of locals, both whites and blacks, probably think this is more a bunch of people committing murders, because of how many people he's shooting.

You wouldn't naturally assume. Why would you assume? Why would you assume one guy? All of these are one guy. It's a lot for one guy, right? That's very upsetting. Now, at the time, things had changed enough in South Africa A lot for one guy, right? That's very upsetting. Now at the time, things had changed enough in South Africa

that Lewis had to claim he never went hunting, quote, with the intention of killing black people. He just found- Then don't call it hunting. He does call it hunting a lot. He says he just found it exciting. And I do think parts of this are true, although not in a way that makes it better.

Lewis Van Schuur to me feels like a guy who would have taken a job that let him hunt and kill humans in any society where that job existed. He's again, definitely racist, but I think that the killing was more the motivation than the racism. The racism provides the opportunity and the legal cover to do the killing, right? This is my take on it. Louis reported every murder to the local police, and when he was criticized for being a serial killer he would defend himself by saying his actions were quote, all within the law.

This was untrue in a strict textual sense, but it was accurate in that the cops supported what he was doing. As Lewis said, every officer in East London knew what was going on. All the police officers knew. Not once did anybody say, hey Lewis, you're on the borderline or you should cool it or whatever. They all knew what was happening.

Right, so you're saying like, not people didn't know it was all one guy, but like whoever's processing the- The cops know, for sure. The cops definitely know, yes. The cops are not, are fully aware because they also are showing up at the scene every time he shoots someone, which is all the time.

He is always shooting people. So it's there. And there's never a conversation about like, did you do a crime? I don't think there's an interest in having that conversation. And obviously as Louis said, I don't think he's lying about this.

I think he, like, he seems to be legitimately frustrated because he does get in trouble eventually where he's like, look, I talked to the cops, none of them said I was like a borderline, right? Nobody ever said to stop shooting people. Why am I in trouble? They never said to shoot less, yeah. They should have told me sooner.

They needed to tell me the exact amount of people I needed to shoot. Now, obviously we shouldn't, I don't necessarily think he's lying there, but we shouldn't take his word for it. That said, one of the local journalists- I mean, they didn't stop him. They didn't stop him.

One of the local journalists who put together a team to start looking into Lewis was, and this is another great South African name, Patrick Goodenough. Literally just the words good enough stuck together. What was going on in that country that that became a last name for you people? Where does that come from?

I just think that's kind of a burden to bear. Right? Yeah, good enough. Oh, cause you just know every year at journalism school, whenever he turns in an assignment, his teachers are making fun of that name one way or the other. Yeah, this is good enough. Not good enough.

Not good enough. Sorry, Patrick. I'm sure you had a tough road to hoe. You seem to have turned into a fine man because he's going to be one of the heroes of this story. Good enough. Good enough, he said of the police in East London, 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. Now, another of the journalists who dug into this story back before it was a story was Issa Jacobson, who I quoted last episode. Here's the BBC discussing her very early efforts to uncover what was going on. In the police records held in public archives, Ms. Jacobson found instances of killings where the officers had been present at the time of the shootings, at no point did they appear

to question Van Schoor as a suspect. In many instances, the police failed to take photos of the deceased at the scenes of the shooting and failed to collect key forensic evidence, such as bullet casings. Van Schuur was often the only witness to his shootings, so this evidence could have been crucial for determining what had actually happened in each case. These were cover-ups. He had the backing from police officers from junior rank and senior rank, said Mr. Goodenough. They wouldn't investigate. They'd sit down with him and have a cigarette

while chatting with bodies lying nearby. Yeah, that's not good. Pretty gross, I think. I mean, I guess the cops are doing some of this too. Cause he was doing it when he was a cop. Like just shooting poor people for sport. These cops are murdering black people too. Yeah, it's just happening.

It's just understood. He is probably talking shop with a guy who also just killed someone a lot of the time, right? Right, so it's not like they are too stupid to realize he's shot all the kids keep moving the back on the ground. They know. I don't know how much all of the local

like white business owners are aware of the specifics of what Lewis is doing, but the cops are. They don't care to know. They don't give a shit. No, no, no. Except for a good number of journalists actually do. Like there is a, it takes a significant journalistic effort. This is actually a case of a murderer

who is caught by the press and prosecuted. I mean, I guess once a hundred guys are missing. That is funny. You say that Molly, because by 1989, Lewis has been involved in at least a hundred shootings. Probably a lot more. No, no, he is at least a hundred shootings.

And Lewis himself will say like, I have no idea how many people I shot. There were way too many of them to keep track of. So normally I would say like, I don't know how many people I've killed is a very bad thing to say. But I think once you get into a certain number, it's gonna be bad regardless.

Probably better that he doesn't know. Cause if he's keeping meticulous records, that's worse, that's worse. I talked to a drone pilot once who was told at like the end of his time of service by his superior, the number of people that had been killed in drone strikes he participated in.

And it was in the thousands. And he was like, why did you tell me? This has just ruined my life. Like there's no amount of therapy that can undo that moment. You should know, right? It actually, it should be traumatic to blow people up with a drone.

It's better than it's traumatic, right? It just seems like telling him was a rude thing to do. It is kind of a dick move from your boss though, right? Hey! Hey man, good job, good job. Wanted to let you know, you've been responsible for the deaths of thousands. You know, statistically about a third of them

were innocent at least, maybe more like 70% based on a lot of our analyses. Anyway, have a good time as a civilian. We had the McKinsey intern figure out how many of them were kids. Yeah, oh, a bunch. So by 1989, Lewis had been involved in at least 100 shootings.

Now these numbers are not available to anyone, right? They are all buried in a police filing system that doesn't always name Lewis and was designed to frustrate outside observers, like reporters from the East London Daily Dispatch where Patrick Goodenough worked. He'd gotten- Goodenough.

People are gonna be like, no, it's in South African, we pronounce it Goudonweef, dammit. How can you not know that? But we're not doing that. You're maniacs, we're absolutely not doing that. I don't care. We are disrespecting an number. Is Patrick Goodenough and by Godurgist. Is Patrick good enough?

And by God, he is. So Patrick got onto the story when he interviewed one of the men who had survived Lewis, a guy named Siobonga Tom, which is another excellent name. Yeah, seriously. Now, unfortunately, Siobonga Tom is a child when he is shot. I think he's like 14, something like that.

Patrick had also interviewed Lewis, who had bragged. The first time the number comes out is that Patrick is just talking to this guy, he started to think might be a serial killer. Cause Siobanga Tom says, like, I wasn't trying to run, he just kind of tried to execute me, right? So Patrick comes across a couple other cases of shootings this guy's involved in, finds out like,

it seems like there's a lot of bodies tied to this guy. So he sits down with Lewis thinking like, all right, you know, this is gonna be maybe one of the tougher interviews of my life. I've got a man here that I think is a serial murderer. You know, he's probably doing some terrible things and getting away with it. And I'm trying to bring him down.

He's gonna know that, you know, we're gonna be playing this game of cat and mouse, this real like Hannibal Lecter moment with the murderer. And as soon as the interview starts, Lewis is like, yeah, I shot more than like a hundred people in the last couple of years. It's crazy how many guys I'm shooting. Just very funny.

Oh, the vibes in that room must have been insane. It was like, yeah, I reckon I've shot like a hundred people. I don't know, can't really count that high. Anyway, what's this article about? That wasn't even part of the interview. He's just making small talk. No, he just likes killing. He likes talking about killing.

He's just a big fan of it. You will not be surprised to hear that this convinced Patrick he was onto a big story. Now he had nearly finished an article on the shooting, but unfortunately the article was centered because the first survivor he's talked to is Siobanga Tom, right? So his article is centered on Tom's experience because Tom also gives him an eyewitness account

of Lewis breaking the law, right? Him execute, you know, just shooting people, right? The problem is that like all of Lewis's victims, Siobonga Tom gets charged with breaking and entering. And in South Africa, they have this thing where if someone gets charged, the case is now what they called sub justice, which meant you're not allowed to report on it

until the accused gives a statement in court. Oh. I can see why you would have a rule like this. I can understand how like, even theoretically, it could develop out of good intentions, right? You don't want yellow press tabloid journalism or whatever affecting how a court case goes, right? So you want-

And a lot of countries have pretty strict laws about how the press is allowed to report on crime. Yes, so I do understand why, some of why this may have came into place, but in the case, like you really see the weakness of that here because every time Patrick gets close to being able to report on Lewis actively shooting people, that person will get charged

and he can't publish the article, right? So it's this kind of maddening state of affairs for him. So furious, Patrick decides that the story he has is not good enough and he contacts a local legal aid charity called Black Sash to try to get Ceabonga a lawyer. He talked with their coordinator, Charlene Craig, about Louis who he'd interviewed and let her know, hey, there's this like white former cop security guard

who just told me he shot a hundred people. You guys are like dealing with, you know, legal justice issues in our town. Have you looked into this at all? And it turns out that Charlene had. She hands him a copy of a statement that she had taken a month earlier from a local man named Vazumzi.

Quote, and this is from the book, The Color of Violence. In it, he said he was on his way home in October 1988 after trying to get work at a bakery when a man in a backy, it's a kind of vehicle, asked him if he wanted a job. He said he climbed into the vehicle and the two drove a short way to the Turnbull bowling club where the man who said his name was Van Schuur told him to wait outside the window

on the left of the building. According to the statement, Van Schoor then disappeared and returned holding a gun. Without warning, he shot Vazumzi twice in the chest and in his left arm. And it's from this statement that we get our most conclusive answer to the overzealous racist security guard

or serial killer question. Because that is not a story of a random bigot. That is a story of a man who was hunting and entrapping people and using the Imperio, like that's a serial killer hunting people, right? And maybe racism plays a big role, obviously in getting away with it, but like- He didn't need to do that.

That's, I mean, he didn't need to, he wanted to shoot this man. He entrapped the man by telling him, I have a job for you. And then he shot him. And then he threw his body on a crime scene. But even his like sort of fake justified shootings that he's doing once a week at work,

like, is that not enough? Well, these are what a lot of those shootings are. Those shootings always get marked down as he was responding to a break-in. What's actually happening a lot of the time is he is hunting random black men in the street and throwing their bodies into a crime scene, right? Yeah, like he will fake a break-in.

There will always be something stolen, but it's usually a low value item, right? He's also just stealing. I'm sure some of this is him responding to B&E's, but most of this is him fucking hunting people and faking it. Oh, that's worse. Yeah, it's much, I don't know.

That's very sick. They're both bad, but yeah, I think this is- But there's not a good. I think this is the worst version of this story is the one that happened. I'll say that. So he really is just a regular old serial killer, but existing within a system that allowed him

to behave that way. Yes. And congratulated him for behaving that way. Yes, yes. I think that is the most accurate way I can describe this. I don't feel good, Robert. It's neither too high. But it's time for ads, so that'll be nice.

That will soothe my soul. Yeah, our spirits will be lifted immediately. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week you'll hear brand new stories,

firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals. flipped upside down from unbelievable romantic betrayals, the love that was so real for me was always just a game for him,

to betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal. This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona.

And I'm Robert Fischer, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the valley. Before escaping into the wilderness.

There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is him to sniper me out of some tree. But not me. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years.

They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm going to call the police and have you removed.

Searching for Robert Fischer. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house. The Hunt. Family annihilation. Today. And a disappearing act.

Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, or wherever you get your favorite shows. It's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs. From the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to.

Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Oh man, having a great time. So this guy, Vazumzi, was like all the others,

charged with breaking and entering. So his case could not be reported on, right? So again, our boy GoodEnough keeps getting these really important stories and then as he writes it up and is ready to hand it to an editor, gets the notice that like, oh, this guy's been charged, can't say shit now, you know, gotta wait.

So the good news is that Shailene and her colleagues are now on the case as well and as a legal aid charity, they have none of the same restrictions as the press. They have collected at this point, three other identical accounts nearly from men who had been hunted, shot and survived, right? So this is four cases Shailene brings to him of like, yeah, these guys all said that he literally

just grabbed them off the street, right? That's a strong pattern at this point. That's a pattern. That's a pretty good pattern, I would say. Because you gotta figure a lot of them don't live. So if you have four guys who lived, he's probably done this a lot. There's a lot of, and also one of the things

that starts to come out is there's a lot of families asking like, my son or my husband just disappeared. Where are they? And in a lot of cases, the police are just throwing these dead people into unmarked graves and never telling anyone. So again, we have no idea how many people he actually killed. Some of these people do find out

like that their son was thrown into an unmarked grave, but the cops are working to cover up a serial killer's murders. Can I ask a stupid question that's also really abhorrent? Yeah. Why does so many of them live? Well, it's because it's a handgun. So this is a, so the gun stuff,

a lot of people don't know. Handguns are handguns and rifles are rifles, right? A handgun is a terrible weapon to kill someone with. It's just the most convenient, right? It's easy to have one on you. They are not very powerful. It is extremely common for people to be shot. I have read of cases, there's one particular case

of a couple of bank robbers that the FBI ambushed and the FBI shot one man 50 times and the other like 47 times and both men not just lived, but were walked off the scene. Like it's wild how many bullets people can take if they're handgun bullets and survive. Rifles are a bit of a different case. You know, not that people don't survive shots from rifles,

but it is a very different kind of injury you're looking at. Whereas- I feel like if I had 40 paper cuts, I might not, I might ask to be put on a stretcher, but 40 bullet holes. It's a lot, it's a lot. I mean, you also have to note that like the nine millimeter of the day is a weaker round than the same bullet now

because there have been advances in ballistics and like just how we make bullets, right? I just feel like if he's that interested in killing, like, I don't know, is it just the activity? I think these guys are grievously injured. No, I just feel like is it the activity that he is interested in? And it doesn't matter to him how it ends.

I think he's trying to kill them, but I also think he's probably not like checking for a pulse. A lot of times it's hard to, it's not actually, if you ever tried to take the pulse of an injury, it's like not always easy. He's not smart. I don't credit him with being a great planner. I think he's just shooting guys.

He just doesn't really care. They lose consciousness because they've been shot repeatedly and some of them wake up, some of them don't, you know? That's kind of the deal. So one of the, Heidi, the person who wrote that book makes a big deal about the fact that he used hollow points and how this is like evidence of his murderous intent.

I actually disagree with that. Hollow points are just kind of like, it's what everyone who carries a handgun in a city is going, like anywhere is gonna use because they are better at stopping people, but they also penetrate less. So if you are someone like a copper security guard and you think you might be shooting at someone

in an urban environment, you want a bullet that is less likely to go through them and then hit someone else, right? Like it's just what everyone does. Or damage the merchandise, yeah. Or damage the merchandise. But anyway, whatever, it doesn't really matter. So Shailene and her colleagues collect

like four accounts of guys who have been hunted and shot and survived. And they reach out to a legal aid lawyer, Dave Pittman, who suggests getting victim statements so that they can file for criminal charges. And I'm gonna quote next from Heidi Hollins, The Color of Murder. And this is her talking to Pittman.

I drove to East London where I was joined by Charlene Craig, recalls Pittman. Accompanied by a relative of Cea Bongo, we went directly to Frary Hospital where we found the victim with a bullet wound running from his abdomen clear through his back. A telling piece of evidence collected from the custody of the hospital was the clothing he had been wearing when he was shot, notably a synthetic fiber tracksuit. The tracksuit top had a gaping hole in front with indications that the fiber had been burned in the vicinity of the hole,

which would prove Siobanga's allegation that he had been shot at point blank range. Armed with Siobanga's statement and his clothes in a plastic bag, we drove jauntily to the Fleet Street Police Station. I don't know why we needed to know how jauntily that you drove. They were just having a good time.

But Heidi knows these kinds of details are important to really make a story come alive. I feel like I'm there. Yeah. Now, no sooner had they taken a statement from Siam Banga than there was another shooting in East London. Police noted a security guard had been involved but refused to name him.

Obviously at this point, everyone involved in this case, the journalists and Blacksash are like, well, it must have been Lewis, right? Probably was the guy who shoots someone every day. We all know it's the shooting guy. It's the guy who only shoots people. It's the human hunter. Yeah, yeah.

Now the victim in this shooting was Montezuma Titi, 24, a night watchman, so a security guard himself who had been walking home from a late shift when a white stranger ran up to him in the night, shot him and tossed him in the back of his car. When he woke up in the hospital, police charged him with breaking and entering. That sucks.

Such a nightmare. That fucking sucks. Just a horrible, horrible situation. Also, how much blood is in this man's car? Yeah, you're literally a security guard. How much blood is in this man's car if he's routinely putting shooting victims in his car? I think he's got like a flatbed

and he's just kind of throwing them in there and then hosing it off. Just hosing it out. That's the way I do it. Jesus. That's the way I've done it. I mean, Wood haven't killed anyone in my truck. Molly, what do you drive?

I'm not giving out that kind of personal information to your hordes of deranged fans. Yeah, Robert, what? One of them could be like this guy, yeah. You were just complaining about people texting you instead of messaging on signal and you're like, hey Molly, what kind of car do you drive? What kind of car do you drive?

Who do you think you are? I just wanna know, I just wanna know, is it a good one? My last car got totaled while I was covering, it was a post J6, like, you know, free the insurrection boys rally. My car got totaled while I was parked. You know, there was a police chase in DC.

Oh man. And they totaled my parked car. Anyway, but before that, so now I have a car that has no giant key scrapes on it, Robert, and that is very precious to me because my last car got keyed up by some sort of neo-confederate weirdo pissed on my great grandfather's grave. Oh.

So no, I'm not telling you why I drive. Very specific. It's very specific. I have a car with no blood stains in the bed. You know? Congrats. I don't think there's any blood in my car. Actually, there's kind of a lot of blood in the back.

Anyway, whatever. It's roadkill. It's fine. So by this point- Why did you put it in the car? Because it's a truck. What else do you put your roadkill? Is this because you read too much about RFK?

I'm not gonna put it in the cab. You read too much about RFK and now you're interested. I like fresh roadkill, Molly. I would not feed it to a hawk. I feed it to people. All right, can we move on? Anyway. You're being a little weird now, Robert.

Patrick good enough by what? So there's a lot of blood in the car. Okay, moving on. There's probably a lot of blood in his car. But there's a lot of normal reasons why there might be. Yeah, sure, of course. Well, no, he's just abducting security guards and throwing them in the bed of a truck.

He's just a serial killer. Yeah, he's just a serial killer. By this point, Patrick Goodenough had tied Lewis to five fatal shootings, which was good, but not good enough. He had also found seven wounded victims. In June of 1989, Pittman good enough. He had also found seven wounded victims. In June of 1989, Pittman had enough to file attempted murder

and civil damages against Lewis. This gave good enough public victim damage statements that he could use in his reporting, right? At this point, the victims have put out a public damage statement so he can like theoretically write an article. So they're filing a civil suit. So they're not.

Yeah, there's filing criminal charges and a civil suit. His attitude is we should charge this guy with murder and like with everything we can, we need to get him off the street, right? That's what Pittman is trying to do, right? He wants to stop this guy from being able to shoot people. I didn't realize you got the prosecutor to agree to this. Well, he files the charges, right?

I just think they just have a different system, because you can't do that here. Yeah, I mean, I don't know the South African apartheid era. I don't know how that worked, right? I'm just reading what the reporting on it said. Right, right, right. But Pittman has these public victim damage statements, which now theoretically Patrick Goodenough can report on.

But when he gets an article together, his editor, they have an editorial meeting that Goodenough isn't allowed in, but it's like very frantic. He can see people arguing and yelling, and then his editor says, no, you can't publish anything. So Patrick puts together a stripped down version

of the article, one in which he does not name any names, but just notes that charges have been brought against a security guard who was shooting a lot of local people. This too is refused from publication. During a phone call with Lewis, the killer boasted to the journalist, I'm in full production, full production.

Basically, I'm still working. Nothing about this has hurt me yet. Okay. And so as all of this kind of like start keeps winding its way through the courts, there's very little interest in the story when a week later, Van Schoor attends an inquest for a shooting the year before in June of 1988.

Okay, so we're getting an inquest. Yes, he is occasionally involved in inquests. And in this particular shooting, he had arrived on scene to the site of a wimpy bar, which is a chain of restaurants, I think. And this one is by the beach. And a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old have broken into it searching for cash.

Lewis had arrived and both kids had fled terrified from the bearded demon now hunting them. Lewis caught the boys hiding in a bathroom, unable to run away. He opened fire, hitting the two kids seven times and killing one of them. I think he killed the 13 year old. This is what really lights a fire under Patrick's ass

because he's like, this guy's murdered children. And he confirms, he starts like doing police, he like goes physically on site and combs through records of every police shooting for the last couple of years. And he's able to confirm that Lewis has been on the site of more than 270 silent alarm calls in recent years. That's a lot.

He enlists other colleagues and they start trolling through inquest records, and one by one they find more Lewis Van Schoor killings. Zola Sotafia, 27, had been killed on November 15, 1987. Sidwell Bomba-Kubaka, 37, gut shot in June of 1987. Kukile Nekso, shot in the head and stomach. By the time he was done on his first day, Patrick had confirmed 22 murders committed by Louis Van Schoor. The cases all had chilling similarities. At each break-in, a single low-value item had been removed. Van Schoor was never questioned at court, just asked to submit statements that he had

crafted to comply with the letter of the law. He always asserted he'd shouted a warning and claimed that he had fired in the direction of the suspects rather than at them. This was thin stuff to defend a man who had shot so many people, but South African judges had the right to close an inquest if they concluded there were no life witnesses who could provide added context. And since Lewis was usually-

Great way to get out of murder. It's a real hole, yeah. To make sure there's no one else. I mean, murder can never really be prosecuted as long as you kill everybody who's there. Well, we got all the context. The guy who did the murder told us everything. So there's really nothing else to gain by a trial

or by a court case. Cool, good system. As it became clear, one of the modern era's most prolific serial killers lived in their town, the Black Sash and Goodenough's reporters were inundated suddenly with information. Heidi Holland writes, "'A massive dossier began to grow against the man

"'whose callous exploits read like a scene "'from a Dirty Harry script.'" She really likes comparing this to Dirty Harry. I don't think it's very similar. He ran it- I don't think he could do it more than once or twice. No, because also Dirty Harry specifically doesn't shoot people running away.

Well, I guess he probably does. I need to rewatch that movie to say that. I've never seen a movie. Oh, it's been a long time. Maybe he does shoot some people in the back. I wouldn't be surprised if he did. Anyway, I'm gonna continue that quote. He ran across roofs, entered dark buildings alone

and unafraid with his gun clasped in both hands, arrogantly admitting in court documents that he fired seven, eight, or even 10 shots at a time. To everyone's surprise, Van Schoor himself contributed to the dragnet that was closing in around him after he heard on the radio that investigators believed he had killed at least 34 people. At around midnight one night, three days after shooting his latest and last victim dead,

Lewis telephoned Dominique Jones, one of the reporters, to set the record straight. Number 39, pal, was all he said. No. Again, he, was all he said. No. Again, he's not a bright man. That's something that happens on like, I don't know, like season 17 of Police Procedural. Yeah, but he just called a jurist and be like,

"'Shut another guy today, number 39, feeling fine.'" Heidi describes Lewis in this last period of impunity as the human avatar of the apartheid government, exuding a calm macho air of competence and utterly certain violence meant to calm the white populace and frighten black South Africans away from white society. He's a human wall. In the last months of his long killing spree, Lewis shot a person almost every week, and he killed one person almost every three weeks.

But then in November of 1989, the fever pitch of media attention and protests prompted the local attorney general to order an inquiry. This was one of the most significant criminal prosecutions of the late apartheid era, a sign that the consensus around this evil system had frayed irreparably. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Lewis and his security firm recognized that the wind had shifted and so did the local cops. In 1991, Lewis was finally arrested and charged.

The final credible tally of his kills was 39 dead and dozens more injured. We will never have any clear idea of how many people this guy shot. But he kills at least 39, which puts him up there. That is top 1% of serial killers, right? That is a lot. And at a kind of incredible pace.

Yeah, like especially for three, like if you hear a serial killer kills like 20 people in 30 years, you're like, wow, that's one of the big ones, you know? But Lewis is- He's just cranking him out. Yeah, he is. He's really a workman-like big ones, you know? But Lewis is- He's just cranking them out. Yeah, he is. He's really a workman-like serial killer, you know?

He's just putting in the hours, Molly. It's all about putting in the hours. Anyway, here's ads. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust,

and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal.

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI.

In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV.

Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is gonna sniper me out of some tree. But not me. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation.

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The Hunt. A family annihilation. Today. And a disappearing act. Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS,

to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh.

Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Sabrina, his daughter was just 12 years old and I'm not a serial killer mom. It's alarming that this man has children.

I just wanted to make that clear. I forgot about Sabrina. Yeah, it's alarming he has a daughter. I do not like that part. Oh, you're really not gonna like where her story goes. Oh good. Although, throughout all of this, he has like little contact with her, right?

Sabrina's been with her mom. He has very little contact with her. Yes. That's the best. You would think so. Oh no. So she's 12 years old in August of 1991 when she learns via radio broadcast that her father was accused of being one

of the most prolific murderers in the country. She described herself as feeling almost dead because quote, I worshiped my father. I was very, very upset. Well, yeah, obviously. Louis had not been super present, but also her mother and her brothers, they seem like they were assholes.

Like I think her whole family kind of sucked ass. Sabrina's really the only one who maybe doesn't. Yeah, but her mom didn't kill like 80 guys. No, she sure didn't, but she kind of likes him more because her mom is the one that's around all the time and Lewis shows up occasionally for like special visits. Right, sometimes though. When you're 12, like your mom who grounds you

is a bitch who sucks and like your dad yeah shows up and takes you to the movies It's cool. I got it. She doesn't want Sabrina to see her dad at all and sometimes he he'll set up like secret visits Like would she Sabrina staying with a friend he'll come over to sit to hang out with her Which is really weird really weird Yeah That's real red flag. That's really weird and creepy actually. Red flag behavior. Yeah. Now Sabrina had against her,

again, against her mother's wishes, started reconnecting with her dad in like the months or the years before he got arrested. She'd even started dressing like him and going barefoot to mimic his fashion sense. Her mother seems mostly to have wanted to try to keep her away from the topic, but the case quickly made her dad famous.

She remembers the night that they found out about this, a cop friend of the family drops by and tells her her dad is a superhero. So again, we are talking white people in apartheid South Africa. These are not a lot of thin on the ground, nice folks. I don't mean to be melodramatic, but I felt bile rise in my chest when you said that.

Oh yeah. That's yucky. there is a massive level of popular support for Lewis during his trial from the white populace of East London. The BBC reports, quote, one entrepreneurial businessman printed bumper stickers with pictures of the security guard. They said, I love Lewis next to a heart full of bullet holes.

next to a heart full of bullet holes. The second half of that sentence was so much worse. There's like, sometimes there's society. I'm going to get in trouble. Since the trial occurred in the dying days of the apartheid regime, the justice system still favored a man like Lewis. He was ultimately charged with 39 murders, but only convicted of seven. The other 32 killings were listed as justifiable homicides.

Yeah, he should have been, seven should be enough though to put you away forever, right? Like seven murders. It is, it is, right? No. That should be a long sentence. We're not gonna get one. Lewis was convicted. He was sentenced to something like 90 years,

but he was allowed to serve them all concurrently, which means he was guaranteed, pretty much guaranteed, less than 20 years behind bars with good behavior. And he is a great prisoner. All the guards loved him, loved him. Super popular with the white prison guards. Relatives of his victims were furious, and the case made it clear how much

work the police had put into keeping Louis free. The dead that good enough were able to uncover was just a fraction of the total, which we will never know. Many black families in East London never recovered the bodies of their family members. Marlene Muvumbi's brother Edward was killed by Vanshoor in 1987. His body was thrown into an unmarked grave, and the family was left unnotified. For Sabrina, her father's disgrace was a constant confusing through line in her adolescence. In high school, she read an article about her dad and realized how little she understood him. She decided to write her up. She had a school project to do an article to like write about an

evil man and like what made them evil. And she's like, well, I'll write an article about my dad. And she gets a bunch of news clippings from the librarian about her father, but she decides not to write the piece because as she starts writing it, she can't not write defensively about her father. And she notes, most of my friends

were blacks and coloreds by then, and I thought it would look like I was praising him. So she writes about Hitler instead. Oh, good. I was gonna write about my dad, but I went with Hitler. Yeah, it's a lot easier to just write about Hitler. Jesus, you're doing great, sweetie.

You're doing great, honey. At some point, this eighth grade English teacher should have said, you know what? I'm gonna give you an A, and I'm gonna send you to the guidance counselor. We're just gonna give you an A here. You don't have to write an article about your dad. You don't have to do that.

You don't have to do that. I'm very sorry that happened to you. In fact, please don't. Yeah. You know who never writes articles about their fathers? Sponsors of this podcast. You don't need to do another ad, right? Oh wait, did we already do two ads?

Jesus, sometimes I just in the zone, Sophie. I just can't stop plugging. You just love products and services so much. I just can't stop plugging. It's the shell for capitalism. I love it. Oh, I just love Chumba Casino so much. Sometimes when I go to bed, every time when I go to bed,

the only thing with me is Chumba Casino. Wow. It's my lover, my friend, my comfort. When I heard Toyotas have amazing resale value Wait, is that it's Toyota doing ads because if that's the case I I What are we doing here Sophie? Get me on the horn with the Toyota guys I want to I want to tell them to bring the Hilux to the US You know, do we do we have juice with Toyota now? Do we have something?

I think I suggest you to the ad people for Toyota. That's never gonna happen, Sophie. They're on your show. They're on your show. Well, that's great. Every month. Finally, the oil and gas industry. I think Holly Frye reads them.

I'm like, Robert would love to do an ad for Toyota or T-Mobile, and they're like, great, good to know. The problem is the Toyota people don't want the kinds of ads that I would do, which is the kinds of ads that'll sell Toyotas, right? Because there's no- They're cowards, they're just cowards. There's absolutely no car that has been used

as successfully in as many insurgent conflicts and outright conventional wars in the world as the Toyota Hilux, you know? Toyota reliability is what you wanna put underneath- Robert, we didn't need an ad plug, get back to the script. I'm surprised they didn't have a Hilux and twisters. Oh, I mean, if you're gonna shoot a tornado. They definitely are getting paid by Dodge.

Don't you need a Hilux? Don't you need to make a technical to fight a tornado? No, here's why I think it's realistic that they were all Rams and twister because the Dodge Ram is the official truck of people with 17 DUIs and every character in Twisters has numerous DUIs. Like it is, these guys are Oklahoma storm chasers.

Not a one of them has ever gotten behind the wheel sober and that is appropriate for a Dodge Ram. Yeah. It's not safe to drive a Dodge Ram sober, you know? You'll flip it. So back to the story. Yeah. Of course. Sabrina insists that her mother

and most of the rest of her close family were very racist. And I don't think she has to go to extreme measures to convince me of this. That sounds true to me. She claimed them to have turned out differently because some of her earliest memories were of the maid that her wealthy mother hired to raise her. The maid was a black woman and Sabrina often called her mom.

And she's like, well, I grew up with this black lady basically raising me, because my mom was busy all the time and it just became very aware of how racist everyone in my family was. As a teenager, she becomes pregnant and it is with a child that is going to be mixed race, which is a real big deal in South Africa at the time

Your dad is the the racism murderer. Well, here's the thing. Her mom is furious. She claims that her dad Who is? By buying bars at this point Like calls her mom and is like be nicer to her about this She says her dad actually was always very supportive of her having a mixed race baby. Okay, I am once again, I once again misjudged the serial killer's parenting.

He's not bad about this. Her mom is apparently though. She claims that a black friend of hers was the only person who listened to her and didn't judge her and like helped her decide, you know, to keep the kid, which she does. Now, over time, her mother's racism began to grate more and more on her, although it may have just been how controlling Beverly was. Sabrina was kind of the black

sheep of the family. Her mother's this rich workaholic, her half-brothers take over a security firm that her mother started and they get rich. They shouldn't be allowed to work in that business. None of this family should be doing security. I know they're not guilty of this, they're not involved. I just, we just shouldn't allow it. She claims they brag about being affiliated with Lewis before he gets convicted.

So I think they do suck ass. And that's marketing. Yeah. Now, Sabrina, you know, again, kind of the black sheep and claims she was basically a prisoner in her mother's home. Eventually she reached out to the father of her child who introduced her to a man named Gino who promised that he had a solution to her issues, murder.

Is it a gun? No, it's a much more brutal murder than that. Now there are two versions of this story. Maybe both have some truth. One is that Sabrina wanted to stage a murder that looked random, like a robbery gone wrong, so she could take her inheritance and be free. The other is that she was just so disgusted

by her mom's racism that she felt her mother had to die. I don't find that last one entirely credible. I've run into interviews. It's poetic. I've run into interviews. Yeah. Maybe, maybe. I mean, I'm sure that's maybe something that she tells herself as part of this justification,

part of this working up to it, but it's mostly because like your mom's being kind of a bitch. Your mom's kind of a bitch and you want her money, right? Probably, probably. Yeah. And it's weird. I also think maybe she's not super well because there's interviews where she claims like

on the last day of her mom's life, she wanted to give her a nice goodbye and tell her she loved her and thank her for raising her. She's not putting the dog down. Take her to get some chicken nuggets. You're having a man slash her throat. What is going on here? Take her to her favorite park one last time.

Yeah. You wanna go on a walk, mom? Don't mind the guy looming in the corner. Yeah, it's, anyway, she'd also claimed that Gino threatened to kill her and her brother if they didn't do the killing after a while. And anyway, I don't know, a lot of shady stuff here. I don't know how much I believe of these claims,

but Sabrina did have her mother murdered. She hired a man to slit her throat and then came upon the body and called the authorities. The whole thing was found out almost immediately. Sabrina was sent to trial where she was not consistent, claiming at times that her mother had loved her mixed-race granddaughter and apologizing for what had happened.

Still, she also became something of a rallying point for many of the Black East Londoners who'd spent years terrified of her father from the BBC. At her trial in June, 2002, Sabrina's admirers, the same South Africans who had lived in fear of her father, crowded into the public gallery to commend her for striking a blow against racism by murdering her mother.

Her lawyer, a black man, compared Sabrina's need to free herself from her mother's oppression to the plight of South Africa's freedom fighters under apartheid. Which I don't even really know what to say about that. There's a lot going on, just like a lot of psychology going on here. There's a lot going on here.

You're really feeling that rubber band effect of trauma from the apartheid years in this case. Has she had the baby or is she just like very pregnant? She has, I think she's had the kid by this point because she's separate. She misses out on the kid's childhood, you know? But maybe, I don't know. Yeah, I just can't imagine a more like

it's so weird. visible symbol, right? That like this man who was using apartheid to murder, she has this mixed race child. And then he was like a chill grandpa. Yeah, he is kind of a chill, well, not quite. Serial killer grandpa. Yeah. Serial killer grandpa. It's just a lot going on for poor Sabrina.

I just, I don't know that I falter for it. No, no, I don't, I can't really blame her too much. Louis- And they didn't have like forensic files back then, so she didn't know that murder for hire never works. It never works. It never works. As much as we love Hitman and movies, no one has ever successfully gotten paid for a murder.

It just doesn't happen. The only people involved in that industry are FBI agents and the mentally unsound. That's just it. That's the whole business. Now, Louis publicly, cause there's a lot of articles interview him when his daughter goes to trial.

It's a huge famous trial. And Louis is very publicly accepting of his granddaughter and Sabrina, I think for self-serving reasons. For one thing, he's about to go up for parole, right? And so he wants to make it clear. I'm not a racist, you know? I shot at a hundred black guys, but I'm not a racist.

That sounds like a lie to me. Yeah. He also, he kept being like, if you let me out early, I'll be able to raise my granddaughter while my daughter's locked up. You shouldn't be allowed near the children. You shouldn't be raising a kid? What are you talking about?

A judge should write up something special that says you can't do that. You are not allowed to be anywhere close to children. In fact, when he was brought into court as a character witness to try to help mitigate his daughter's guilt, he just spent all of the time defending himself and arguing for his parole. Okay, look, I'm not a lawyer.

This isn't legal advice. But if you ever need a character witness for a criminal proceeding, don't invite a serial killer. I would say, here's my legal advice, free legal advice for all you listeners out there. If you need a character witness for a court case, pick a guy who shot less than a hundred people. You know, not gonna say never pick a guy who shot anyone,

but certainly not a hundred people. That's the number. I mean, I guess he does have sort of a unique lived experience when it comes to being a bad person. So he does have some perspective on that. I will say as a journalist, if I were just looking for like critiques on shooting a guy in the dark,

I would certainly call Lewis, right? He seems to have been an expert at shooting people in the dark in the back. Probably would be great at that job. I don't know, I don't think that's a job. Anyway, him being a character witness does not work. She goes to prison, she's gonna be there for like 13 years. Lewis does 12 years behind bars. So almost as long as him.

A little longer. Oh, longer? Lewis only does 12. That math really adds up. That's really him. A little longer. Oh, longer? Oh, that math really adds up. That's really showing cool. And when he gets out, he'd been telling reporters as he was trying to get early release, I've got to raise my granddaughter. I want to be there for her.

He immediately moves to a different city and he doesn't even tell his daughter, does not adopt the granddaughter. Thank God. None of it gets married right away. That's fine. Just what? Gets married again.

To a human woman? Yeah, some lady. And then he gets a job on a farm funded by a state project to provide poor black people with land and support for operating agricultural businesses. I have to go. Oh. South Africa, baby.

Apartheid's gone, but we're still fucked as hell. Oh, so Apartheid ended while he was in jail. Yeah, 94. Yeah, I just lost track of our years. So he comes out into a different world. Very different world, but he gets right to work scamming the government. So I will say, I found an article,

some of the people who worked on that farm said he was a really good member of the team. He was very good at teaching people, he was good at scaring off thieves. But the person who makes all of these claims in this article, because he gets forced out when there's news stories that are like, it's kind of fucked up, this guy's getting money

meant for poor black people to like encourage them to farm after he murdered all those folks. The person who makes these claims that like, actually he was great and it's really bad that he had to leave is Patricia Nugumbalanga who owned most of the farm and intersperses her claims about how good Lewis was with anger at the fact that the government has not sent any more subsidies.

And Nugubalanga also faces criminal charges herself from a local security guard who accused her of beating him badly after he broke into a building on the farm. So I don't know how to parse this. I don't know if Lewis was a good worker or not, or if there's something weird about this lady, but the fact that he is on this farm causes an outroar when it gets published, right? And he is on this farm causes an outroar when it gets published, right? He is forced from the property. For the rest of his life,

Lewis would be visited on occasion by reporters. He claimed at the end of his days to be, quote, happy and content, and that 90% of the people who recognized him on the streets supported what he'd done. But he also expressed disgust at the new South Africa. Everything has changed, people's attitudes, the service and shops, it's not the same.

Yeah, I bet. Yes. The only good news I can give you is that by July of 2024, Father Time caught up with the old bastard and did to him what the justice system wouldn't. A BBC reporter who visited him before his death noted that he had lost all his teeth and had both his legs amputated after a heart attack.

In true Lewis fashion, he accepted only the most brutal form of surgery. Per the BBC, when the surgeon carried out this procedure, Fanshawe requested an epidural instead of a general anesthetic so he could watch them remove his legs. He's such a sicko. He's such a fucking sicko.

Oh, you know what? Shine on you crazy diamond. It's good to know them who you are, right? That's not an option. Yeah, I guess it's an option. Yeah, it's very funny. I don't think the human mind can survive hearing your femur sawed through.

It's the BBC article super funny because it quotes him saying, I was curious.ur sawed through. Yeah. The BBC article is super funny because it quotes him saying, I was curious, I saw them cutting. They sawed through the bone. And speaking to the BBC World Service, Van sure wanted to persuade us that he is not the monster that people say I am. No, that doesn't happen.

No. That's not gonna do it, man. No. No. You didn't have to tell anyone that part of the story. Why didn't the doctor say no? Oh man. Anyway, Lewis dies July 25th, 2024.

He just died due to complications from sepsis in his legs. That's like a week ago. Yeah, yeah. My God. Very recently. You saw him in a vituary and you said, that's my body. Hell yeah. Who is this motherfucker? One relative of a victim told the BBC,

he got off easy, which I agree with. Sabrina, on the other hand, served out her time. She was noted by black inmates who served alongside her as being different from most of the other incarcerated whites. So it does at least seem like the not being a racist stuff was legitimate. Although she was sentenced to 25 years for the murder of her mom, like her dad,

she was released after 12 years or so of good behavior. And I wish her the best. Good luck, Sabrina. What happened to her child? I don't know. Wow. I'm gonna guess, honestly, with this family, no good news is good news, right?

Yeah, just foster care at this point. That's never a good option. It's never better than a family placement. But I think maybe in this case. Yeah, I think when your dad's when your dad's. Yeah. The murder guy. Yeah. Anyway, I didn't I didn't like that. That was like that.

I mean, I thought I thought it was going to be pretty bad when you told us that people were setting dogs' heads on fire. But I actually long for more of that now. Every time, when you're doing an apartheid South Africa story, it's basically always gonna be the bleakest shit you've ever heard in your life. So that's good.

Well, thanks. No good South Africans. Molly, you got any pluggables to plug? Oh my gosh, what do I have to plug? Oh, they're letting me make a podcast now, Robert. Oh good, really? Wait, who's doing that? I don't know, somebody very foolish.

Weird little guys, by the time this comes out, will be out, one, maybe two episodes, you'll be able to go and listen to them, you're gonna love them. It's very uplifting, kind of like this show. Just a lot of guys just doing normal stuff that's not upsetting. Yay. It's me, hi, I'm them.

I'm the problem, it's me. More horrible stories for your ear holes. No, I really do think people are gonna like it. Excellent, excellent. I do too, Molly, I really do. It's very, it's amazing. And it's just, it's like a little creepy crawly night and night, the bedtime horror story.

And you're, and it's amazing. Yeah, some people have asked like, oh, is it like behind the bastards where there's like a guest? And I think we ultimately decided that sort of a spooky bedtime story vibe was a little bit better. So it's just me telling you a story about something terrible.

Yeah. But like in a fun way. In a fun way. And I assume you will probably also tell them less about the film, Twisters. Oh my God. You know, I think by the time I record the second episode, I will have seen Twisters.

So maybe I can work that in somehow. If you really want to be prepped for the podcasting game like I am, Molly, you got to watch Twisters and then you need to go back and watch the OJ Simpson show where Ross from Friends plays Robert Kardashian. Oh my God, let it go. He calls him juice all the time. Oh, it's so funny. Oh, Ross from Friends plays Robert Kardashian. He calls him juice all the time. Oh, it's so funny.

Oh, Ross from Friends. Always a good time. Oh, that's a great show too. Beep is great. No Ross from Friends though, but that's probably for the best. I wish I had my own Gary from Beep in my life. You know, I was gonna say-

In the form of a dog who could talk. I almost said Ross from friends doesn't have like Armando Iannucci vibes, but actually he could have been in the death of Stalin. All right. You could have cast Ross from friends as some like fading, but elderly Soviet bureaucrat. Yeah, he could do it.

I think I would like to leave now. Okay. Podcast is over. Be well. Hey, I love you all. Bye. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the

iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jon Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world.

We cloned his voice using AI. In 2001, Police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode. Before escaping into the wilderness. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me. I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues.

I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice? Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy.

So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the Weird Little Guys Trying to Destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.