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Louis van Schoor: South Africa's 'Apartheid Killer'

Jun 6
3 min read

Updated: Jun 18

Louis van Schoor occupies a uniquely disturbing place in South African history. A former policeman turned security guard, he shot a large number of people — overwhelmingly Black and mixed-race men and boys — in the city of East London during the late 1980s. His case is inseparable from the injustices of apartheid: for years the legal system treated his killings as 'justifiable homicides', and he was prosecuted only as the era drew to a close. This account presents the documented facts and the disputes that surround them, in a case that remains genuinely contested.

It is a story that sits at the intersection of serial violence and a system designed to value some lives far more than others, and the two cannot be separated.

A guard with a gun and a free hand

Sybrand Jacobus Lodewikus 'Louis' van Schoor was born in 1951 in South Africa. He served in the police, reportedly in a dog unit, before working as a private security guard contracted to protect white-owned businesses in East London. Armed with a 9mm pistol, he would respond to alarms at commercial premises at night — and repeatedly opened fire on the people he encountered there, in a role that effectively licensed him to use lethal force with little oversight.

The killings

Between roughly 1986 and 1989, van Schoor shot a large number of alleged intruders, with the total number of deaths widely reported as at least thirty-nine. His victims were almost entirely Black or mixed-race, and some were as young as their early teens. According to court testimony and later accounts, he sometimes fired many shots, and survivors alleged that he shot people who had already surrendered or had their hands raised — claims that he disputed but that go to the heart of the case against him.

Portrait poster of bearded farmer Louis van Schoor with dark text about a hidden serial killer and evil in a rural setting

Justified by the system

For a long time, the apartheid-era legal framework worked in his favour. Many of the killings were initially classified as 'justifiable homicides', and van Schoor maintained that every person he shot was a criminal caught in the act of breaking in. He was reportedly never cautioned by police or the courts during his active years — a reflection of a society in which the racial identities of the victims and of the man who killed them shaped how each death was judged, and how few questions were asked.

Prosecution and conviction

As apartheid neared its end, van Schoor was finally arrested and brought to trial. Although he was linked to far more deaths, he was charged with a smaller number of cases and, in 1992, convicted of seven murders and two attempted murders. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison and served roughly twelve before being released on parole in 2004 — an outcome many felt fell far short of the scale of the killings attributed to him.

His own account, and the disputes

Van Schoor insisted he was not a racist and claimed he had been unfairly singled out as a monster, arguing that he had acted lawfully against intruders in a high-crime environment. In a documentary recorded late in his life, he went further, claiming that local police had known about and even encouraged his actions. Critics, survivors and victims' families reject his self-justification, pointing to accounts of unarmed people shot at close range. The gulf between these competing narratives is central to the case and remains genuinely unresolved.

Death and reckoning

The story took a further dark turn within his own family: his daughter, Sabrina, was later convicted of arranging the murder of her mother, van Schoor's ex-wife — an episode that added another layer of grief and notoriety to an already infamous name. Van Schoor himself died in East London in 2024, at the age of seventy-two, reportedly from sepsis, and his death reopened public debate about accountability for apartheid-era violence and about how many killings had quietly been excused at the time.

Whether labelled a mass killer or a serial killer, van Schoor stands as a stark emblem of a system that, for years, allowed certain lives to be taken with impunity. His case is studied today less for the man himself than for what it reveals about institutionalised injustice — and the long, unfinished work of confronting it, with the voices of his victims' families at its centre.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Louis van Schoor?

A South African former policeman and security guard who shot a large number of mostly Black men in 1980s East London, known as the 'Apartheid Killer'.