World Of Secrets - The Apartheid Killer: 6. Faces at the Window

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

How many people did Louis van Schoor really kill? We reveal he carried out many more shootings than he was tried for. He said the police knew about them and supported him – that he had been made a scapegoat. Did he feel any remorse? What of the family of Edward Soenies, murdered by van Schoor? After 35 years, how have they tried to re-build their lives? The van Schoor case represents one of many apartheid crimes. It was part of a much wider, systematic terror - the legacy of which has left a trail of trauma still being felt across South Africa today. Since this episode was recorded, it has been announced that Louis van Schoor died, on 25 July 2024. 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 death and violence, which some listeners may find distressing.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Before we start, this episode of World of Secrets includes descriptions of death and violence, which some listeners may find distressing. Following his conviction in 1992, Louis van Scoor is sent to the East London Penitentiary, where he quickly becomes a model prisoner. The guards respect him. He's allowed to run a small prison shop, selling cigarettes and snacks to fellow inmates. And he mows the lawns in the main compound.

Van Scoor's cellmate is black, and they become friends. He gets three square meals each day, and as the years roll by, he begins to look forward to freedom. Although he was originally sentenced to more than 90 years in prison for seven murders, he's allowed to serve each term simultaneously. In effect, he only has to do 12 years in jail. It's an extremely lenient deal. But back home, things are far less peaceful.

A crime is about to take place that will shock South Africa. It's one o'clock, I'm Shadley Nash with the latest news. A prominent Queenstown businesswoman has been found stabbed to death in a home... In a surprising twist in the murder of Queenstown businesswoman Beverly Van Squir, police have arrested a daughter in connection with her death. Sabrina, Louis' daughter, is arrested. She's accused of hiring assassins to slit her mum's throat with a bread knife. I hired someone to murder my mother.

The day I actually collected him myself from the graveyard to bring him to the house. And I let him into our house while my daughter was sleeping. And I took my daughter from my mother and I put her in a room and I locked us in the room and he went to my mother's room and he murdered her. And then he left and that's when I found the police. Louis van Schoor is not the only murderer in his family. While he's in prison, his daughter becomes a killer too.

This is World of Secrets, Season 3, The Apartheid Killer. A BBC World Service investigation with me, Ayanda Charlie. And me, Charlie Northcote. Episode 6, Faces at the Window. Episode 6, Faces at the Window. The young woman who hired hitmen to murder her mother is behind bars tonight, and her lawyers were relieved that it wasn't life. 22-year-old Sabrina Fonskour planned the murder after her mother disapproved of her black friends.

She was sentenced to 25 years at the Grahamstown High Court. Sabrina's matricide was headline news across post-apartheid South Africa in 2002. Her trial took place later that year. Fansgur had plotted the murder of her mother, Beverly, a businesswoman in Queenstown. During mitigation, she said she killed her mother because she was racist and was an abusive parent. The court found that missing funds from her mother's business at the time of the killing were connected to the crime. Sabrina joins her father, Louis Van Squoore, who is serving a long-term sentence for murder in a separate case. While her father had been in prison, Sabrina began to rebel.

She partied and drank a lot, and she began dating black and mixed heritage men, something her family were strongly uncomfortable with. She eventually got pregnant and had a child with a man called Sean, who's now her husband. Sabrina claimed in court that she killed her mum because she was racist towards her child and her partner. There were rumours that her relationship with her mum had been fraught for a long time, and that money may have been involved as well. But these theories weren't accepted by the court. Sabrina was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and was sent to the same jail as her father. It seems bitterly ironic that for killing one white woman, she served almost the same length of time as her dad

for killing dozens of black men. The hitman is also sent to prison for a similar length of time. When we meet Sabrina, she's free, but on parole. As she looks back on her crime, she no longer tries to justify it. I can't hide from what I've done. I know what I did is wrong. As she looks back on her crime, she no longer tries to justify it. I often think of how differently life would have turned out, not for me, but for my family, my brothers, their children, my children. I often know that I robbed my children of a grandmother. They often ask me, where's Penny Beth?

And I can't explain to them. When your father is a mass murderer, what does it do to you? Is Sabrina's horrific crime somehow connected? Sabrina says it isn't. She's adamant she's a different kind of person to her dad. And the best way to recognise that is to look at

the different ways they view their crimes. How did your attitude to what you did contrast with your dad's? My father has never admitted to what he did. I know what I did was wrong. I have asked for forgiveness from everyone, whereas my father doesn't feel like he needs to apologise. So I know that there is a big difference between me and my father. I can admit that and I can see that.

But he also needs to see what he's done wrong. He cannot move forward in life until he admits it. Sabrina believes her dad's health is suffering because of his failure to reconcile with what he did. His heart is weak. He's lost his legs. His lonely shack in the middle of nowhere feels like a prison of his own making.

Deep down, perhaps he does know he did wrong. But his emotions have been somehow sealed up in a vault within himself. Sabrina's husband, Sean, senses the same thing too. It killed a lot of people. Those things must haunt him. Those things still haunt him. People get sick because of what they know what they did and what is eating them inside.

If you do harm, it's going to come back to you three times harder. He knows this, what he did. He needs to go and apologise to those families. I mean, he needs to get to those people and apologise and really do it sincerely. Even though he thinks it was his job, those people deserve an apology. He needs that even for himself to heal. He won't heal. He won't heal. In many ways, an apology by Fonskwo would never be enough.

Over the course of this series, we've heard many numbers floating around about his killings. It's been confusing at times. There were rumours that there were 100 shootings. Officially, at his trial, he was charged with 19 killings. The journalist Dominic Jones came to the number 39. When we set out to investigate the story ourselves, one of our goals was to answer, how many people did he actually kill?

Thanks to Isa Jacobson, the South African journalist who's led this effort, we have found an answer. She spent hours, spread over many months, digging in archives in the Eastern Cape. She sorted through endless piles of dusty boxes filled with papers, police reports, autopsies and witness statements. Among the documents she found are the names of the people Van Scoor killed. The total number, as far as we can tell, of human beings whose lives he destroyed. He was convicted for only seven counts of murder and two of attempted murder.

But we know that he was responsible for 41 acts of killing. 41 people. And many of these killings were not included in his trial in 1992. They remain in the archives, still classified as justifiable homicides. We know that Fonsko was not tried for at least 20 killings. Never went to trial for those? Never. He was never investigated. The crime scenes were never investigated. He never went to trial.

He just walked away scot-free from 20 acts of killing. How does it make you feel when you hear that? I think the whole scale of it is just mesmerizing. It's astounding that anybody could get away with it, and it's astounding that any court of law could allow this to happen, that any justice system would say that this is essentially okay, that justice system ultimately ignored all of those bodies and all of the families, all of the trauma and heartache that would have been experienced by those people at that time, negated, you

know, expunged from the face of the planet. And the message it sends is, we don't care. We just don't care. Ultimately most of the people who were shot by Fenskewer were poor. They were black and they were poor. And that is a fatal combination. One of the tragedies of all these killings is that the family members of victims were never informed of the details.

Many were never told when or how their relative died. Some people, like Marlene and Raymond Sunis, never got the body back either. The police never bothered to tell them. The details remained hidden in dusty files in the archives, badly labelled and hard to find. This carelessness, this callousness, has deprived Van Scores' victims of any closure. Having gathered this new information on Van Score, Isa and I go back to him. We want to

confront him about what he did, one last time, to let him know how much pain he caused. I do want to have the opportunity to say what I feel to his face, to see if I can extract any humanity out of the guy and any more truth. There are victims whose lives were taken by him. And if he was more truthful, it might help them. One of the reasons why he was willing to talk to me is because I'm a white South African, because he feels safe with me. And I want him to know that he shouldn't feel safe with me any longer. As we arrive at his shack, Van Scoor's dog, Brutus, is there to greet us again.

Inside, Van Scoor seems more relaxed than last time. He's sitting in his wheelchair in a white T-shirt, smoking a cigarette. At last, we've made him feel comfortable. For the first time, he drops his guard. Do you remember the first time in your life when you shot someone? I can't remember when. I don't know. I don't keep count. I didn't keep count.

I really can't say. So, to me, a number, I can't put count. I didn't keep count. I really can't say. So to me, a number, I can't put a number to it. It was not my idea of putting so many notches on my gun or anything like that. But why don't you remember the first time that you got shot? As I say, if my memory recalls, I shot one while I was in the police force. And I honestly don't know how many I shot. Some say over 100. Some say 40.

I don't know. Look, let's for argument's sake, okay, I was charged with 40 counts. Let's say for argument's sake, I shot 50 people. Fonsko seems to have no idea how many people he killed. But this is the first time ever in an interview that he's admitted it may have been as many as 50. Isa presses him further. You weren't trying to apprehend anyone were you?

Oh what? You were trying to kill. No my dear. Not once was it my intention to kill. Well I've been going through the archives and I've been going through the court records. And it's a horror show. It's a what?

Horror show. It's a bloodbath. We show Van Scoor some of the crime scene photos we discovered in the archives. They're horrendous to look at. Victims lying on cold floors or metal autopsy tables. Their eyes wide open. In some cases, dum-dum bullets have left gaping holes in their torsos. There's a lot of blood. And a few of the people lying there are clearly children. This is a 12 year old.

Yeah, well, he looks much different lying there than what he was at night. I know that you say you were doing your job, but this is doing your job. I don't know when you last looked at these photos. I mean, you went for his heart. You shot him in the heart. As a... Another child.

And again and again in all of these you're going for the upper body. You're going for the upper body. Why? Why? If you weren't shooting to kill. There is no intention of going for the upper body. Intention is to suck the culprit. We tried again, giving him another opportunity to show an ounce of remorse. Deep down, surely, he must feel something for the people he killed. I said I was sorry for all the pain and suffering I'd caused people,

but I'm not sorry for who I've done my job. I think a lot of people just find it so surprising that it hasn't affected you, it doesn't haunt you in any way. The fact that you took those lives and you don't remember them i think a lot of people will find that kind of surprising do you ever feel anything no no you didn't feel anything as far as i'm concerned i did my job is there no nowhere in you that feels some shame at all for this for these atrocities? I'm sorry no. And you may think I'm a hard bastard or whatever

but it's not. It's not so much being a hard bastard it's just the fact that you are a serial killer you know these are serial killings. You're stepping over the line now. Never have I been proven by court a serial killer. Seven counts? It's not a serial killer. Not a serial killer.

All of us are sitting a few feet away from each other in a tiny living room. The air is rippling with tension. We can really feel his anger now. In the end, all we know is that there are countless bodies, right? Countless bodies. That's what I was charged for. And that must sit somewhere on your conscience. Somewhere on your conscience. Unfortunately for you, it doesn't.

How do you want people to remember you? A peaceful, loving, caring person. Louis Fonscois. A peaceful, caring, loving person. Fonscoeur has buried what he's done so deep inside of himself, he sounds almost delusional. His inner demons have been locked away, but they are about to come back. To haunt him.

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. Before leaving Van Score for the last time, we had one more issue we had to ask him about. How much protection did he have from the South African police during his killings? Did he have a relationship with the brutal officers at Cambridge Police Station, the place where Joe Jordan of the ANC was tortured? To what extent were they involved? I was welcome at Cambridge Police Station. involved. I was welcome in Cambridge Police Station. I got a lot of information from the police. I gave a lot of to attend the scene.

Not once did anybody say to me, Hey Louis, you're under the borderline. You must cool it or step it aside or whatever the case may be. They all acknowledged what I did. They all acknowledged what I did. Every shooting was documented. They all knew what was happening. Fonskwa says all the police in East London knew about and supported his killings.

Having gone to prison, he feels betrayed that so few officers stood up and defended him during his trial. No officer has ever faced charges for their involvement in his crimes. No policeman or police officer was charged to anything relating to my case. What happened to them? Why weren't those investigations done properly? They all knew what was happening, but to say their own schemes, I didn't know. I was targeted. Due to the shift in the political situation of our country, we have to find a scapegoat somewhere along the line. And they picked me. Even with my court case, one or two officers came and testified for me.

But I must say 99% turned against me. Why? It can only be to save their own skin. Amidst everything that Fonskoa told us, this is perhaps the terrible truth at the heart of this story. He was a killer. But he was a killer backed by a system. Backed by the institutions that were meant to protect people.

Fonskua pulled the trigger, but there were so many others in positions of power who allowed him to do that. And none of them did anything to stop him. We contacted the South African police multiple times about the allegations in this podcast, but they did not respond. in this podcast, but they did not respond. The Fanskwe case is representative of the way in which the whole of South Africa worked at the time. The white community was completely complicit and benefited from Fanskwe's killings.

He was the one who went to prison, but the rest of the community benefited, lauded him and promoted what he was doing. They called him a hero. So many people decided to just move on. So many white people said, well, that was in the past. In 94, we have a black government. We're given another chance. And we don't have to look at what happened in the past.

But it doesn't mean that if you don't look at something, that it's not there, that it's not festering all the time underneath the soil of this country, along with the blood, along with the violence. Fenske was a serial killer. He was a serial killer because there was a system that allowed him to be one. And there are so many people like him, walking free, apartheid era killers, torturers, who are leading normal lives. And it will come back. It will come back to haunt us.

Vanscour's atrocities are a microcosm of a much wider pattern of white-on-black violence under apartheid in South Africa. Decades of brutality by police and security officers, very little of which is formally documented. Once the white apartheid regime fell and Nelson Mandela came to power, there was an attempt to dig up the horrors of the past in this country. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission hoped to bring all the secretive, terrible things that had happened during the apartheid years into the light,

to help everyone find healing. Victims and perpetrators were encouraged to come forward. Powerful testimonies were heard across the country, watched on TV by people around the world. However, the commission was incomplete. Those who confessed to crimes were offered amnesty. But taking part was voluntary, so many people who carried out atrocities never bothered to turn up. Only a handful of apartheid-era killers and torturers ever went to jail.

There is no official death toll for the nation. No statistic that can encompass the scale of what happened. East London was just one town among so many where horrors took place. Very few of those families impacted have found closure from that era. But through the work of Isa, Marlene and Raymond Sunnis have come a step closer to theirs.

In episode one, you heard us describe the exhumation of a body. It was confirmed to be Edward, the beloved brother and father they both remembered. The man who died as a bullet passed through his hand and into his heart. We were there with them when they moved his body back to their ancestral home, a few hours drive from East London. The first time Edward had returned

since his son, Raymond, was a little boy. It's early morning, frosty and bright, with a gentle wind. We are stood on a hill next to the Sunnis' family graveyard. Their ancestors, generations of mothers and fathers, lie resting all around us. Edward's body is no longer in a plastic bag. He's in a beautiful wooden coffin, covered with flowers and the branches of a native tree. He's having the funeral he never had. As he's lowered into the ground, people are crying. But they're smiling too.

After 35 years of waiting, they are welcoming Edward home. Here we are, hallelujah. And here we have this tombstone this morning and this tombstone will tell us but here is Edward hallelujah and it will tell us we must remember what happened hallelujah to him praise the name of the Lord hallelujah. We should rejoice, we should cry happy tears. We are rejoicing. Funskua has taken nothing from us because we're getting Edward back.

A father, a brother, a good man is coming home. The moment we left him at the gravesite when it was all done. I felt so relieved, so proud, so dignified and also humbled that it actually could happen to people like us, that we could actually get what we wished for and longed for in such a long time. So the feeling is really something that I can't explain properly. But I have so much joy in my heart. So much joy, so much peace. For Raymond, the boy who waited so long for his dad to come home, this was the moment he felt the touch of his spirit once again. An ending, but a new beginning too. now in the world and I have peace now. And I can go and talk to him, to the graveyard. It's the best thing that happens to me today.

Now he's free. And also I'm free now and I can go on with my life. So I'm free now and I can go on with my life. I never loved somebody like my father. But today I bury my father in the right way. Where he belongs. And the spirit, I see the spirit, he was happy. He was happy.

He was always looking out for me. We feel that we've succeeded, confident that we can tackle the next chapter in our lives. I would like all the families to know they are not alone. It gives us hope that even other families would have the opportunity of having their stories heard and they could also be healed. All the people, not only the ones that were killed with Fanskur, the ones that have similar stories maybe from the killings of the apartheid regime, from everything that gives them headache. People think that that stuff's the past and it's all forgotten.

It will never be in the past. Many weeks after Edward's funeral, we received some news from Fonsco's daughter, Sabrina. He's been rushed to hospital with a severe infection of what remains of one of his legs. It sounds really bad. And in a bitter irony, the hospital he's taken to in East London is the same one where all his victims were taken to. I call Sabrina to find out how he's coping. Him and I were alone in the hospital room. He's staying in like a two-bed cubicle.

And the window looks out over the front of the Freya hospital and then he was lying on the bed closest to, not near the window, but towards the passage. And then I was sitting on the little chair next to him and he was like totally paranoid. If the fan would switch on, he would hear footsteps and then he would hear voices and then he could see

faces at the window and it was like astonishing because I can't hear or see anything he said to me that he's seeing dead people around him and that he's scared they're coming to take revenge gosh so what did you say to him I all I could say to him is that i'm the only one in the room with him and he's he's okay nothing's going to happen to him because he was afraid somebody was coming to kill him yeah so i had to try and comfort him and stay with him and did he say who the faces in the window were did he say what they would look like no no he didn't say who the faces in the window were? Did he say what they would look like? No, no, he didn't say who they looked like. He just said that he sees dead people. I feel that maybe he is thinking of the people of the past,

the people he's hurt. Why do you think he might be seeing that stuff? It could be his conscience so you think they might be his victims that he's seeing yes i think i think it might be his victims that um are around him or that he's seeing it does feel like it's something inside of him that's It's something inside of him that's coming out. Yes, I do. I think he's just maybe reliving some things that he doesn't want to even think about. I mean, what did you do? How did you react? I was holding his hand. I was rubbing his back.

I was talking to him. I was trying to calm him down. He was terrified. After burying his emotions for so many years, burying his guilt, the past is finally coming back to haunt Van Scoor. Faces are clawing at his window. The faces of his conscience. And it fills him with terror. For Marlene, now that Edward is finally buried, Van Scoor has no hold on her anymore. If you gather so much anger towards somebody like Funstool, you miss out on the good things.

He's like an empty shell. He doesn't have a heart. I want him to see it, that we are rejoicing, that he's taken nothing from us. He's nothing, Van Scoor. He's a ghost of the past. The apartheid world that made Louis Van Scoor has lost its grip. As he rides in his bed, tormented by what he has done, Marlene can walk the beautiful beaches of East London now.

She is no longer terrorised by white children beating her for no reason other than the colour of her skin. She can feel the cool spray of the ocean, the soft sand beneath her feet. She is free to enjoy the warmth of the South African sun. I'm going to all the beaches now. I'm going because there's no sign. I've been to Kanubi Beach, I've been to Bonza Bay Beach, so at least I enjoyed a bit. So we can go all over now. Apartheid has caused a lot of damage to people, but I think that talking about it, letting

people know, not keeping quiet, talk about it. You can maybe meet somebody who's in a similar situation. Maybe we could get together. We can talk about our pain together. We can heal together as a nation. Shortly after completing this series, Louis van Scoor died following complications from an infection in his leg. He passed away in his hospital bed in East London. The interviews you've heard in this series are the last ones he ever did. Thank you for listening to World of Secrets Season 3, The Apartheid Killer, from the BBC World Service. This has been Episode 6 of 6.

Subscribe or follow now so you get all episodes and our next investigations automatically. And if you haven't already, check out our previous two seasons. 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 researcher is Maddy Drury.

Production coordination by Katie Morrison. Field production by Isa Jacobson. We'd also like to acknowledge and thank journalist Patrick Goodenough. It was mixed by James Beard with additional sound design by Jez Spencer and John Scott. Original music by Anna Papadimitriou and Justin Nichols. The series producer is Jim Frank. 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 of Hollywood Exiles from the BBC World Service and CBC

are available now. Search for Hollywood Exiles wherever you get your podcasts.