World Of Secrets - The Apartheid Killer: 3. The Killing Machine

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

The making of mass murderer Louis van Schoor. The “apartheid killer” was part of a system which enabled the shootings as “justifiable homicide”. As we investigate one of his most horrific crimes, we begin to expose the web of lies surrounding the killings and ask: how were they covered up?Since this episode was recorded, it has been announced that Louis van Schoor died, on 25 July 2024. There will be more about this later in the series. This was a four-year investigation and the interviews with Louis van Schoor were recorded in 2022 and 2023.Please note, this episode of World of Secrets includes descriptions of violence and torture, which some listeners may find distressing. Season 3 of World of Secrets is a collaboration with the BBC World Service investigations unit, Africa Eye. Here’s a link to the BBC Africa Eye film, which we recommend you watch after listening to this podcast: https://youtu.be/QPB42_uLLh0 If you are in the UK, you can watch on BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0021dvm#WorldofSecrets

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Before we start, this episode of World of Secrets includes descriptions of violence and torture, which some listeners may find distressing. During our interviews with security guard Louis van Schoor, I asked him if he'd ever been afraid when he went into buildings in the dark, alone, hunting the people who'd broken inside. I've been scared in many parts where I went into. I know there was once a clothing factory.

This lady had mirrors all over in the shop for people to be able to see in. That night, Fonskua grabs his gun and drives up to the clothing factory. He removes his shoes as he enters the building. I went in there and I just had a sixth sense that there's somebody inside. His senses are on high alert

as he tiptoes through the room full of clothes. He passes row after row of mirrors hanging on the wall, glinting in the moonlight. I was walking down the passage slowly and my eye caught in the mirror a person holding a gun and I turned around and I shot. Vanscaw's most frightening memory from his time as a security guard was the time he saw himself in the mirror and shot his own reflection. I shot myself in the mirror.

It's a reaction. I was auto-alert. I saw that movement. I turned around and I shot because he had a firearm. And it was a reflection of myself. When he started killing in the 1980s, Van Squoer's victims typically had one or two bullet wounds. By 1989, some of them had as many as eight.

Van Squoer says he was just doing his job. But there are clues, everywhere, that it was more than that for him. There are signs that he enjoyed it. I used a Czechoslovakian CZ 9mm pistol. It's a deadly weapon. I had a contract. I used maximum force. And that's the bottom line.

This is World of Secrets, Season 3. The Apartheid Killer. A BBC World Service investigation with me, Ayanda Chali. And me, Charlie Northcote. Episode 3. The Killing Machine. In front of us are a pile of Louis van Scores journals. He's got dozens of them. Years of memories.

He's so keen to show us how transparent and open he is about his past, he told us we can read through them as much as we like. You'd think that a serial killer's journals would be gripping reading. But the funny thing is, they're not. He writes about the kind of mundane stuff any of us jot down in our diary. One day, my kids and I, we just decided to have a braai.

A braai is what we South Africans call a barbecue. There are pages and pages of banal details like this. Memories with his family, relationship struggles with his wife. Only once does Franskwur mention his killings, and it's one sentence. In spidery writing at the bottom of a page, he wrote,

maybe I was wrong and I am a murderer. I spent days reading these journals, looking for any insights into Fonscour's mind. And when I saw that, I was excited. I thought, finally, we've got something. I asked him to read this line aloud, so I could watch his reaction. Maybe I was wrong and a murderer. He could barely get the words out of his mouth. wrong and a murderer. He could barely get the words out of his mouth. He was really uncomfortable reading it in front of me,

squirming around in his seat. He seemed almost annoyed that he'd written it. And he quickly tried to explain to me that it was only a fleeting moment of doubt. The whole reflection about your actions as a security guard, questioning whether your shootings were actually, maybe they were matters, what do you think about that? No, that I have never doubted.

You doubted it? I say, you get that day or two that you... But at the end of the day, I've never doubted that I was right. Your mind is playing games with you. Then two or three days after that, you're strong again and you carry on with your beliefs. By questioning himself, it's clear that there's some kind of conscience inside of Fonskwo, tugging at the back of his mind. But the way he quickly dismisses that emotion,

and doubles down on the idea that his killings were justified, is revealing too. Nobody is born a killer. They become one. And many of the clues to what shaped Van Scoor lie in his childhood. I was taught from small, you don't lie, you don't steal. And you don't bugger around with another man's wife. It's discipline, you're very disciplined. My dad worked on the railway. He was a real Afrikaner. What does that mean to someone from the outside who doesn't know what that means?

What's a real Afrikaner? A real Dutchman, a boer, very strict people. My dad was also very strict but very fair. You get told to do something and you don't do it, you're in for it. You get a hiding. We got spanked many times. And that's how you learnt. Right is right and wrong is wrong.

Fanskwo's home was tough and authoritarian. Physical punishment was normal to him. He was raised to like discipline, to like order. And part of that order was racial segregation. You had all the separation of nations or race. You had your white areas, you had your black areas. Real apartheid, to put it bluntly. The blacks were trying to intimidate the whites.

And yes, there was fear. Tension was brewing. We could basically read the writing on the wall, that the blacks are, they're going to become part of society. It's something that we had to accept and live with, which I think 99% of your population couldn't accept. The white population had fear. You could feel the tension.

And that's how we grew up. Apartheid was drilled into your head. It was genuine apartheid. Fear of black people claiming their rights and overturning the white establishment rippled through homes like Fonskwo's. And that fear pushed him to do what many young white men

did at that time. He joined the South African police. I joined the police force in hour 16. A lot of the population obviously agreed with apartheid. They wanted it to stay. We were told that we were protecting our country, and that's how we saw it.

The role of the police is to enforce the law, and the laws of the apartheid state were brutally oppressive towards black people. This belief system was internalized by the teenage Van Squoer. Van Squoer represents the psychology of apartheids. He represents the psychology of white people under apartheid. South African journalist Isa Jacobson has researched Van Scores' role in the police. And he wasn't in an ordinary unit. He was part of an elite and brutal task force. He was part of the dog squad, a terrifying unit of the police force in South Africa.

It was used to enforce segregation, to break up riots, to break up any form of resistance to apartheid. It was about enforcing racism. They had Alsatian dogs that they would set on people and they didn't really care what those dogs did. They would sit on people and they didn't really care what those dogs did. I'm watching footage of the dog squad unit of the South African police. And just a warning, what you're about to hear is deeply disturbing.

The recording shows four white officers training their dogs to attack, using three unarmed black men as bait. They repeatedly unleashed their Alsatians, ripping clothes and skin from the victims. This recording was never intended to be seen by the outside world. It was leaked to the public in the 1990s. One of the most horrifying things about it is that the white officers are laughing. This is like a game to them. The humanity of the people they're torturing never crosses their minds. I think that a lot of those guys really enjoyed what they did. I think that they got a kick out of it.

Because, essentially, they could do what they wanted. They could operate on their own and get away with it. The white police had supreme power in South Africa, and they exercised it to its limits. Fonskoua remembers his time in the dog squad fondly as some of the best years in his life. They were good years. My time in the police force was good. The dog squad was lacquer.

It was... What does that mean? It was a productive unit of the police. I found out later in my security business that the blacks were more scared of a dog than of a gun. The police used different dogs, and we had the attacker dogs. A guy runs, you loosen your dog, and they normally go for the arm or the leg,

and you come in and you take over. It sounds a lot like hunting. Yeah, hunting at a different species. Yeah, it was interesting and adventurous, put it that way. It's like my dog and a lot of people. It was like hunting, but a different species. Hearing Van Scores say those words was a turning point for me. The first time the mask truly slipped from his face.

This is a man who valued order, valued discipline. And in his warped, apartheid-infused psychology, that included hunting black people with dogs. For just as long as Hollywood has been Tinseltown, there have been suspicions about what lurks behind the glitz and glamour. Concerns about radical propaganda in the motion pictures. And for a while, those suspicions grew into something much bigger and much darker. Are you a member of the Communist Party? Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? I'm Una Chaplin, and this is Hollywood Exiles. It's about a battle for the political soul of America,

and the battlefield was Hollywood. All episodes of Hollywood Exiles from the BBC World Service and CBC are available now. Search for Hollywood Exiles wherever you get your podcasts. Date is the 15th of July 1987. Time now approximately 01.12 minutes.

This is a real recording, captured by a police officer attending to the scene of one of Van Scores' killings. Two men have been shot dead inside a primary school. Van Squaw claimed they were stealing things, and that he killed them after they tried to stab him. And that's the unusual thing about this mass killer. Every single one of his shootings were reported to the police. Reported by Louis van Scoor himself. And in each case, the police's conclusion was the police. Reported by Louis van Schoor himself. And in each case, the police's conclusion was the same.

My cases all went through court, and it was classified as justifiable homicide, because at that stage, the law had permitted it. Justifiable homicide. Van Schoor was able to operate in apartheid-era South Africa because there were laws which essentially gave him a license to kill. That's Isa, the journalist leading the investigation into Van Scoor's case. Essentially, this was a guy who knew exactly what he was doing,

and he got away with it for a lot of years because he knew the laws. Black people were being murdered with impunity. In the 1980s, Section 49 of the South African Criminal Procedures Act stated that it was justifiable to use lethal force in self-defence or against someone fleeing the scene of a robbery on private property. So long as Van Scoor could demonstrate that the person was attacking him or trying to get away, he had a legal right to kill them. He knew this law intimately.

I'm Luke Van Scoor. He knew this law, intimately. This is him talking on a police crime scene videotape after one of his shootings. as I was about two, three paces into the premises the black male charged me had a knife in his hand in an attacking position I fired one shot he still carried on approaching I fired a second and third shot after which the suspect was just about on top of me when I fired a fourth shot where he collapsed over a chair after which the suspect was just about on top of me when I fired a fourth shot,

where he collapsed over a chair and fell, still touching the knife in his hand. Section 49 is the reason Van Scoor was never arrested by the police. It's one of the reasons he's not in jail today. His killings were ruled justifiable under the law of the time. But there's a problem. When Fonskoua is the only witness and all the other witnesses are dead, how do we know that he's telling the truth? How do we know he was actually attacked?

Or that the victims were actually fleeing? What really happened inside the buildings where the killings took place? We don't know. Unless there were people who miraculously survived an encounter with Louis van Squa. It's a calm, clear evening in July 1988. The night of one of Fonskoua's most controversial and shocking killings. The description of the shootings you are about to hear, perhaps more than any other, helped take us into the mind of this man.

Fonscour receives an alert from his control room. They were all silent alarms. There's no sound or anything there. It goes through to the control room. It's gone off inside a popular burger restaurant on the East London seafront, The Wimpy. During the day, they serve milkshakes and cheeseburgers in an American-style diner. After midnight, it's quiet and the lights are off. The control room then relays the message to me via the radio.

I then respond to it. Franscois drives to the scene, close to a beautiful promenade facing the Indian Ocean. close to a beautiful promenade facing the Indian Ocean. The restaurant is partially on stilts, jutting over a small cliff above the sea. The water is crashing into the jagged rocks below. I don't drive right up to the premises. I stop a block away, and I go on foot so that I'm not detected.

And the surprise is then from me on them. He's holding a torch in his left hand and in his right, a gun. I use a semi-automatic. When I put it in my palm, it just fitted perfect in my hand. It's a deadly weapon. Vanskor's pistol holds 15 rounds. And he loads it with dum-dum bullets. Ammunition which expands on impact, causing maximum internal damage to whoever they hit.

He walks up to the restaurant, silently, and unlocks the front door. As he enters the dark, Van Scoor goes straight to the silent alarm control panel. It tells him precisely where the intruders are inside the building. I know exactly which circuit is what section of the house or the building, the shop or the factory. I don't switch on lights because that gives my position away. And that is when he begins to hunt for them. The Wumpi was dark. I wasn't scared to enter a building.

I expected to encounter somebody. The Afrikaans word is parat, ready for something that is going to happen. So you on maximum alert. Van Scoor draws his gun and almost like an animal he uses his senses to sniff out his prey. I relied a lot on my nose sense. If somebody breaks in, their adrenaline gives off an odour and you can pick that up. And I follow my instinct. Very sure, everything is 100%. You switched on at that moment because there's a possibility

there could be nothing but there's a possibility that could be a danger and i stopped and i listened and i could hear there was somebody inside and I could hear there was somebody inside. One ran to the window, the other one inside charged me, tried to stab me. The smoke from Van Scores' pistol settles. The wimpy burger bar has become a scene of carnage. There's blood on the floor, and lying between two tables is a body.

It's the body of a child. On the rocks outside, having somehow smashed through the window, is another body, being gently washed by the spray of the ocean. Another child. The victims that night were 12-year-old Leafy and 14-year-old John. To Fenskewer, their age means nothing. Do you feel any kind of sadness that they were so young? I can't say I do. Fonskua claims the kids attacked him. Members of the police dog squad respond to the scene of the shooting

and the usual formalities follow. Yet another justifiable homicide, it seems. But this time, there is something different. As an ambulance arrives to pick up the dead bodies, they discover something incredible. One of the children is alive. The boy on the rocks, 14-year-old John. The next day in the Wimpy Bar, people are eating their burgers as if nothing ever happened. But in hospital, John regains consciousness and he begins to talk.

What he has to say is incredibly important. John's testimony completely contradicts what Van Scores says happened that night. He wants us to believe he's just an ordinary person, a law-abiding security guard who was just doing his job. But can we really believe anything VanScore tells us? That's next time on world of secrets thank you for listening to world of secrets season three the apartheid killer from the bbc world World Service. This has been episode three of six. We would like as many people as possible

to hear our investigations, so please leave a rating and a review and do tell others about World of Secrets. It really does help. Season three is a long-form audio production for the BBC World Service, presented by me, Ayanda Charlie, and Charlie Northcott. It's a collaboration with BBC Africa Eye, with original investigation by Isa Jacobson and Charlie Northcott. There's a BBC Africa Eye film about the apartheid killer, which we'd recommend watching too after listening to the podcast. Look for the link in the show notes. The series producer is Jim Frank, field production by Isa Jacobson. The series editor is Matt Willis.

Anne Dixie is senior podcast producer at the BBC World Service. The podcast commissioning editor is John Manel. For just as long as Hollywood has been Tinseltown, there have been suspicions about what lurks behind the glitz and glamour. Concerns about radical propaganda in the motion pictures. And for a while, those suspicions grew into something much bigger and much darker. Are you a member of the Communist Party? Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

I'm Una Chaplin, and this is Hollywood Exiles. It's about a battle for the political soul of America, and the battlefield was Hollywood. All episodes of Hollywood Exiles, from the BBC World Service and CBC, are available now. Search for Hollywood Exiles wherever you get your podcasts.