Part One: Louis van Schoor: The Deadliest Security Guard in History
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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where I, the host, Robert Evans, am pretty hungover because last night I saw Twisters.

Molly Conger, our guest for today. Have you seen Twisters or Twister? You know, the classic film that it's based on? I assume I've seen the original, you know, in snippets on TNT as a child. Oh, you wouldn't forget it. One of the great Bill Paxton roles. So Twisters 2 is like...

The son of the original Twister. They just put an S on it, which is fun. It's a fine movie. There's not more tornadoes than there were in Twister. But Twister, there's about four minutes of Twister that isn't actively a tornado. Like that movie really gives you a lot of twisters. And so does Twisters.

But it's the son of the original tornado trying to reckon with his father's legacy. Well, that's one of the through lines with both movies is that all of the main character in a Twister movie has always lost loved ones to a tornado and is trying to fight the tornado for revenge. And in this one, they develop a way to kill tornadoes. And so that's what they're trying to do is murder a tornado in vengeance because she lost all of her friends to a tornado. It was...

It's great. It was described to me by a friend who saw it as Glenn Powell in a very long Wrangler jeans ad. Oh, he is. So you know how, you know, Molly, how like some of those Alex Jones freaks believe in like race specific bioweapons, like they made a disease that only targets white people or can't hurt Jews or whatever, right? Twister, this time it's personal. The guy in Twister, his jeans are like they were DNA coded for him.

Like you couldn't get a fit of jeans that tight unless they were literally grown around your body. Wasn't that a thing for a while where like the denim guys were like wearing their jeans in the bathtub and letting them dry to their body? I mean, I don't I don't feel like that's a thing anyone would do on a regular basis. No, it was like, you know, the guys who like blogged about, you know, they didn't wash their jeans. They put them in the freezer instead. I don't understand jeans, guys. I never liked jeans.

But this movie is great. It's got a really good truck. They're all Ram trucks, unfortunately, but one of the trucks is really good. It shoots fireworks at the tornadoes, which winds up being a critical part of fighting the tornadoes. Well, how else would you get whatever you're putting in the tornado into the tornado? You've got to be able to shoot the tornado. Yeah.

I mean, I guess you could feed it to a cow. I know the Twister likes to eat cows. They only feed things to the tornado in a way that is the most dangerous they could possibly do. Although one of the other through lines in the Twister universe is that automotive glass is invulnerable. Cannot be harmed. Well, they're driving Cybertrucks.

It's great stuff. Great movie. What's different about them is the first movie is like Oklahoma porn in that you're watching Oklahoma be destroyed. And that's great because it's a terrible place. For people like you especially, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This one, it's like Oklahoma porn, but they love Oklahoma, although they do have the tornado attack a rodeo, which is a great scene.

I hope party bus the rodeo bull was safe. I think the well, no, actually, the bulls get sucked up. A lot of things get sucked into tornadoes in this movie. They there's a high body count. It's great. Good movie. I enjoyed it. I got very drunk and now my head hurts. How are you, Molly? Oh, I'm doing great today. Robert, would you buy the Glenn Powell jeans?

Uh, no, because those jeans would clearly only fit Glenn Powell. Yeah. No, and you're at a phase of your life now where comfortable pants are an affordable luxury. I like to think Glenn Powell is either 3D printed, made from AI, or the ink might have just run out a little bit. Hold on. I'm Googling Glenn Powell. I don't know what that is. He's one of those guys who's handsome in a way that, like...

I can't like there's nothing about him that I can say is like not good looking but also it's off it's upsetting kind of like Anthony Starr from the boys which which works for the role that he's playing there's just something a little bit uncomfortable about how good looking he is and Glenn Powell he's got like he's got like resting family annihilator face one of those guys who there's a terrible crime lingering inside you somewhere

Yeah. Did this man exist before? I've never, he doesn't look familiar to me at all. I don't know if I'd seen him in anything before Twisters. He has been everywhere for like the last year. It's been very big in my group chat. We've been talking about why this man is being forced upon all of us. And now he's reached you, Robert. He's getting to you. He's reached me.

I got to say, honestly, downgrade from Bill Paxton. But what isn't a downgrade from Bill Paxton? That man had a great face, Bill. And now that is the cold open. Cold open is done. Is it done? Oh, shit. Molly, today we're talking about apartheid.

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Oh, and we're back.

Apartheid, I hardly know. Tide. The joke doesn't work that way. It worked in writing. No one here speaks Dutch. It doesn't really work in writing. I liked it in writing. Because Theod's not a thing, you know, or a name or anything like that. Molly.

This is not just about apartheid, right? I mean, it's set during apartheid. I'm not just going to do an apartheid episode because I don't know if that just doesn't feel like the behind the bastards way to do this. Uh,

Yeah, well, arguable. But, you know, you have your new podcast, Weird Little Guys, coming out where you talk about all of the weird little guys trying to ruin life for everybody else. These crazy little Nazis who become mass shooters and terrorists and commit all sorts of wacky crimes and also are like...

Always into bizarre shit besides that kind of stuff. It turns out they're usually perverts. Yeah, they're usually some... Usually sex crimes. Usually some sort of pervert shit. The first couple scripts I've written, I'm like, I did not choose a trio of child sex perverts on purpose. It's just always there. Yeah, it's the... You get, like, Twitter and stuff loves to make fun of, like, middle-aged kinks who are, like, really into whatever their weird kink is. But, like...

I do think that being able to talk about it in a way that is cringeworthy to 90% of the population probably helps stop you from, I don't know, like setting off a bomb in a post office. Like you need to do something with that pervert energy that's not just perversion. Otherwise, it can curdle.

Now, we don't know what perversion the subject of our episode for this week has, but this is we are going to talk, Molly, about a weird little guy. And this is appropriate. A weird little guy of apartheid. And this this guy is appropriate both because of your show and because of your show.

And because the like on the week we record this, one of the big news stories is that a right wing paramilitary mob supported by members of the Knesset has laid siege to an IDF base in Israel in defense of soldiers who carried out gang rape and torture on Palestinian prisoners.

The gist of the story, not that this is a story you should just get the gist of. You should read some reporting on it. But the gist of it is they won. Those guys got released, and that's pretty bad. There was some talk that like, oh, is Israel heading down the road of a civil conflict? But they just caved on. It's totally fine if our guys –

Like the kind of shit they were doing to some of these captives was like there was a debate in the Knesset about it. And one lawmaker was like, is it legitimate to shove a stick into someone's rectum? And another parliamentarian was like, yeah, if he's a Hamas militant, everything is legitimate. And it's first off. I disagree.

I disagree with that if they are Hamas militants, but they're they're usually not like you're just picking people up off the street. You know, we know that in a lot of these cases, it's a lot of people who are getting grabbed for absolutely no reason, which is always, by the way, always the case when a government is grabbing a bunch of terrorists and torturing them. It's always some dudes, you know, and ladies and whatever kids are.

But it's usually not the scary thing they say it is. They found a way to make prison break uncool. Like normally a mob storming a prison would be a feel good story. I know, normally I love mob storming prisons. Yeah, not this mob. But they really wrecked it. They really wrecked it. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like how a lot of people are hating the Olympics, which normally I'm in favor of, but they're doing it for all of the weird, crazy, gross reasons. Like, no, no, you don't hate the Olympics for that. Not because some lady won a boxing match.

You hate the Olympics for all of the good reasons to hate the Olympics. Not because it's, you know, satanic grooming of your children. God damn it. You were ruining the things that I have been hating long before you did. Anyway.

It's bad to torture people. There's no justification for what we're seeing in Israel now, which is, you know, I think a dark turn. This stuff has been going on for a while. The reporting on the torture at that base had come out through like New York Times had done a story on it, as well as some like local Israeli papers. So it's been like pretty heavily reported. And this kind of thing, it's the inevitable result of building an apartheid state, right? You saw a lot of shit like this in South Africa because you had these people

chunk of the population who were, you know, terrorists carrying out what they saw was liberatory acts of terrorism. You know, Nelson Mandela, like, was a terrorist, right? Like, that's the reality of the situation. And whenever you have that, the apartheid state is going to respond by demonizing the chunk of the population that those terrorists come out of and doing horrible, horrible things to them, including generally horrific attacks

acts of police violence, right? The police are kind of going to be oftentimes your kind of ground level enforcers of the very worst parts of this society. And that's true everywhere, you know, stuff like this happens. We could talk and we have talked in the past about the use of dogs against black detainees by U.S. police during the Jim Crow era, right? And obviously aspects of that continue on for today. But a lot of

how dogs were used to do violence to black people, particularly during the civil rights era, is directly relevant to stuff that happened in apartheid South Africa, right? Every single time you have kind of any sort of apartheid regime being held in place, and it's always held in place by police, there's always really, really fucked up dog stories, right? It happens every single time. And it's actually going to happen in this story because the subject of our episodes-

He's a guy who winds up as a security guard. He's probably a serial killer. It's probably fair to call him a serial killer. He's definitely a serial murderer. And he was also a dog cop in apartheid South Africa. That's the worst kind of cop.

Oh, yeah. No, we'll be talking about, and of all the dog cops, South African apartheid era dog cops might be the worst dog cops. These guys, pretty ugly stuff. His name was Louis Van Shure.

Now, because this is an apartheid episode, it is going to be bleak as all hell. And because this is an episode about South Africa, thankfully, it will also involve ridiculous names. So we do have that coming for us. Right, Molly? I will promise you some very silly names. And we can pronounce the Dutch as badly as we want. We're not going to do well. We're not going to do well. Like this first name I got. Our bad guy's full name was Sybrand Jacobus Lodwickus Van Shoor.

And we're not looking up how to actually pronounce that. Nope. We're not. No.

No, we're not. He doesn't deserve it. Although I will tell you, Lodewickus is where we get the Lewis, which I guess makes sense. Like if I knew a Lodewickus, I would probably call him Lewis because that's quite a name to have to say. Although I do think I'm getting the Wickus part right just because I watched the movie District 9 in preparation for this, you know, which really, really reminded me how much CGI has aged in the last, what has it been, 20 years? Yeah.

Anyway, Sybrand Jacobus Ludwigus Van Schoor was born at some point in 1951 in South Africa. This is one of those guys where we really don't know a whole lot about his childhood.

Uh, given where he lived much of his life, he may have been born in East London, which is a city, not a part of London. Uh, because South Africa, you know, when British people had their time running South Africa, they just kind of named a bunch of shit after places they had left behind because it was too wet and dreary, which is what they did to a lot of the world. Just bringing a little bit of home. Yeah. Bringing a little bit of home along with your terrible cuisine. Yeah.

Now, I hope most listeners are at least broadly familiar with the concept of apartheid in South Africa, which literally means separateness and Afrikaans. What became South Africa the country started as a colony of the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century. The mission initially was purely capitalist and most mercenary sense imaginable. The most notable early official was a guy named Jan van Rijbeek, who arrived in 1652 to set up a refreshment station for passing cargo ships.

His job was to make money delivering as much quality agricultural product into the holds of company ships as possible. But greed led the company to take more and more good farmland, which pissed off the people who had been living there for, you know, a long time and didn't care much for the fact that all these white people were now saying, you can't walk around here. You can't hunt here. You know, like you can't like we've got this now. We need it for our for our boats to take away.

So they launch raids on company farms and there's some small battles between guards and local warriors. Much of the violence is centered around or in response to cattle raids by the indigenous Kukui people.

Van Rybeck felt like the problem could be solved by making it more of a pain in the ass for the Kukui to access their ancestral lands. So in 1659, he had his forces start to build a giant fence. As is always the case, whenever you build a fence with guard towers, you're going to do some fucked up shit, right? Like no story that started with let's build a giant fence ever ended very well.

And this fence is no different from that. Since fences are hard to build, he enlisted the aid of Mother Nature and planted a huge hedge of wild almond trees and thorny scrubs across sections he didn't want to bother using work gangs on. What is he, Maleficent? Like building a big thorny hedge around Sleeping Beauty? It's a very Disney racism fence that Jan has created here.

I mean, I guess that's eco-friendly, right? Was he using native species? Yeah, you can't fault him for being green. I will say that. Like, he at least is an environmentally friendly architect of the earliest stages of the apartheid system.

As an article on the hedge fence by Zubeda Jaffer notes, quote, for many, this hedge marks the first step on the road to apartheid and symbolizes how white South Africa cut itself off from the rest of Africa, dispossessed the indigenous people and kept the best of the resources for itself.

Now, Dutch colonial possessions didn't stay limited to the land they'd taken in Van Rijbeek's era. And over the next century and a half, white colonizers who came to call themselves Boers moved towards the interior. They eventually collided with a migration of Bantu people and great violence proceeded from their clash that ensued for, you know, they had a war. They had wars and stuff.

Alas for the Boers and for everyone else really, the British were also really interested in having some of this land and willing to deploy better, more competent violence to do it. They took the Cape Colony in 1795, abolished Dutch as the language of administration because fuck you guys, that's why. And by the end of the 1800s, you know, things are sailing along well. The British Empire's giant, they got a whole bunch of South Africa, everybody's happy, except for nobody is actually very happy.

Now, I should note that while the British – there's some things you can say that they improve race-wise during the time they're in charge of South Africa. For instance, they end slavery, right? Within the British Empire, which includes this, slavery becomes illegal in the mid-1800s.

But they also pass some of the first race laws, like a lot of the laws that become the undergirding legal parts of the apartheid system start as British colonial laws. So it's a mix of things. The whole story is bigger than we're going to get to in this episode. But this paragraph from journalist Heidi Holland's book, The Color of Murder, does a decent job of setting up the next few moves.

Around 1838, clinging to a dream of racial exclusivity but leaving behind their homes in the fields they had cultivated, the Afrikaners set out to escape the British by migrating northwards across the Drakensberg Mountains into Natal and over the Orange River into the Transvaal. The Great Trek, some bloody 19th century battles with Zulu warriors, and their defeat in the war with the British 70 years later helped create a fierce nationalism among the Afrikaners. The concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer War, in which men, women, and children perished at the hands of the British,

left Afrikaners a profoundly defeated tribe with a defensive psyche that was to have disastrous repercussions in later years. Now,

We've talked in this podcast about how one of the first modern concentration camps was set up by the British during the Boer War. They interned black South Africans and Boers. They killed a significant chunk of the Boer population through these camps. These were really terrible places. I hadn't thought until I read Heidi's book about how that chapter played into the apartheid government.

It makes sense when you think about these sense, the fact that any reading you do of like white culture in South Africa during apartheid, there's this constant sense of life under siege and this constant sense of aggrievement, right? We are owed something that we don't have. We are owed domination, right? We are owed power.

Almost this vengeance because of the things that have been done to us. Right. The sense of persecution is a major fueling factor for apartheid. Right. Like the fact that the British kick the shit out of them is a big part of why they're going to be so shitty for so long. Right. It has a it's that kind of like I have now been bullied and I am going to go find someone weaker to bully the hell out of. Right. Like that's that's a big part of the actual psyche of apartheid.

It just seems like they should have taken that beef with the British back home. Like, go do that in the English Channel or something. Yeah, go fuck up the British. Like, come on, guys. You know, I'm just going to throw it out here. Take Manchester. You can probably take Manchester. They don't have that many guns anymore. I bet you guys have more guns. Go take Manchester. You know, nobody's going to complain. If somebody is like, hey, you want to come to a free Manchester from the Bowers rally? I'm going to say no. Let them have it. I'm fine with that.

That just doesn't sound like my business. Yeah, it's not my business if something happens to Manchester. Some what are they called? Mancunians? They're going to be really mad, Robert. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there's going to be a lot of Mancunian terrorism in Johannesburg. But that's not my problem either. Now, British victory in the Boer War came not long before the outbreak of World War One. And if you know your colonial history, you know that the British Empire didn't have a long, healthy life after that point. Right. Right.

South Africa becomes independent pretty early. It's the same status Canada has. Obviously, as Americans, it's Molly and I's divine right to not know how the Canadian government actually works. So I don't actually know if the British have any power in Canada anymore. I don't think so. I'm pretty sure you guys are have your training wheels off, but I'm not going to check that out. Swans in Canada belong to the king, too.

I feel like all swans belong to one of the kings. But yeah, I don't understand it at all. I also feel like, you know, well, actually, the Canadians beat us in the one war we had with them, but whatever. I don't think they could do it again. Yeah, I don't think they'd win this time, right? I don't know. Maybe if it was like, no, I think the Great Lakes...

I think actually, if I'm remembering the documentary Operation Canadian Bacon well enough, or was that the name of that John Goodman movie? I got to look this up now, Molly. Have you seen this movie? I think you're making it up. No, no, no. It's a John Goodman movie where a bunch of yokels from the Great Lakes region invade Canada. Yeah.

It's a classic. I need to watch it with Garrison. Oh, the film is just Canadian bacon. Okay. Okay. So that seems kind of a mouthful for a title. Yeah. Well, Canadian bacon is a fine title. It's a good movie anyway. So yeah, South Africa gets its independence pretty early in the 19th century, more or less. But domestic peace is elusive. There are tensions not only between black and white, but between the English speaking whites and Boers. Okay.

Eventually, the Afrikaners won in 1948, and the National Party came to power, pushing a program of enforced racial separatism backed by state violence. And this is kind of when apartheid officially slides into being, right? You had aspects of that enforced by racial laws that had preexisted back to the colonial era. But it's the National Party that comes to power with the promise that basically we are going to make

separate white and black people, right? Like that's our program. One of the first architects of the system is a guy named Hendrick Verward, who became leader of the country. He started out as the, he was the education minister initially. I think he used to be a teacher. And he's a very racist guy. Described in a speech, his belief that black citizens could never be more than hewers of wood and drawers of water. So that's a good basis for a stable society.

Race becomes a strictly managed legal category, marked NID card, something that delineated when and where people could travel and exist legally. Now, this is not a natural state of affairs. It doesn't work very well for very long in any of the places in the world that try versions of this, and it always has to be enforced through state violence. In South Africa, the government developed a wider variety of tools, civil and military, for this purpose. One of these tools was Section 49 of the Criminal Procedures Act.

Act, which established a legal obligation for police to interfere in criminal activity and define the degree of force they were allowed to use to do it. Section 49 and its predecessors had existed in various forms in South African law back to the colonial era, but the most significant amendment of the apartheid era came in 1977. It read as follows.

If any person authorized under this act to arrest or assist in arresting another attempts to arrest such person and such person resists the attempt and cannot be arrested without the use of force or flees when it is clear that an attempt to arrest him is being made or resists such attempt and flees, the person so authorized may, in order to effect the arrest, use such force as may in the circumstances be reasonably necessary to overcome the resistance or to prevent the person concerned from fleeing. Whether

where the person concerned is to be arrested for an offense referred to in Schedule 1 or is to be arrested on the ground that he is reasonably suspected of having committed such an offense, and the person authorized under this act to arrest or to assist in arresting him cannot arrest or prevent him from fleeing by other means than by killing him, the killing shall be deemed justifiable. So they just sort of codified what cops already do when they shoot a 14-year-old boy in the back. Mm-hmm.

Yes. And they this is, as you noted, not so different from how the cop the law treats police in the United States. Now, that is a process that developed here becoming more normal, not that cops haven't always used violence, but it becoming as normal as it is for police to shoot fleeing people. That has become more normal. Right. As laws have been added to the United States and as court cases have kind of increased the amount of immunity that police have in situations like that. Apartheid South Africa pretty early on.

codifies a system of immunity that allows cops to shoot people in the back.

The difference is it doesn't allow it. It sounds like it mandates it. It could be argued to mandate it, right? Because whereas American police, you know, over and over again, this goes to court, courts say, no, if cops don't want to do anything, they don't have to. They're not obliged to intervene. They're not obliged to help. But I thought you said that they are required to intervene. That's how the laws – I don't think anyone – I've never come across cases of people being punished for not shooting someone in the back, but –

Basically, the law says you have to intervene if you are one of these kinds of people authorized by this act and you think that you come across a crime, right? And you are allowed, if you choose to, to use lethal force if someone tries to run away from you, right? So not just self-defense, but if someone is fleeing arrest.

And this law, another way in which it differs from kind of how the U.S. treats stuff like this, because obviously our cops do this shit all the time. In South Africa, the law can extend to a wider variety of white citizens, including people working as security guards for local businesses. Right. Oh, that's not who you want doing this. No, no, it is not. No, it is not. And it is not going to end well.

One South African legal expert analyzing this law before it was amended in 1998 noted, as described in a study by Karthigese Sami Kisnan of the University of Anpertoria, in response to the conferment of such open-ended powers on the arrestor to shoot and kill, for instance, a young child who had stolen or was reasonably suspected of having stolen an item of such relatively trivial value as an apple,

and who had fled an arrest could be shot. Oh, no. So like at this point, we're talking like CVS door security guard rent-a-cops just shooting children. Yeah, you jack an apple and the rent-a-cop can empty a nine millimeter into your back.

Perfectly legal. I feel like that's going to escalate really fast. It's going to happen a lot. Now, this brings us back to our weird little guy for this episode, Louis Van Shore. Now, I found very little that's verifiable about his childhood and early life. His father was a cruel authoritarian who bullied him. He's basically said by some people who knew him that like his dad never gave him a break.

He was probably an abused kid, right? It's probably fair to say he was abused as a kid. He would certainly have been exposed to outrageous levels of racism because he is a white kid in apartheid South Africa. I will say I'm not sure this guy is actually particularly racist for white people in apartheid South Africa. I do actually have to note that. What does that mean, though?

I don't think he's motivated by racism. We'll talk about this because this is debatable. I think this guy is just a serial killer. And the best way to do that is going to be getting into law enforcement and apartheid. So that's the easiest way to get away with murdering people. But I think it's the murdering he's motivated by more than the color of the people he's murdering. Right.

Just a great opportunity. It's just a really it's really easy to get away with murdering poor black people in apartheid South Africa if you're a cop. And that's why he wants to be a cop. That's my take on it. But we'll see where you land.

So schooling is not something that interests Lewis, and he drops out at age 16 to join the police. He starts carrying a gun immediately as soon as he drops out of school. He is a an armed police officer. It's a teenage boy. I can't think of a problem with that system. Really bad idea. The worst person to give a gun in a batch.

The fact that he would get to carry a gun seems to have been a major part of like why he wanted to do this, right? Like he specifically became a cop because he wanted to walk around with a gun.

Van Schoor was big. He's a physically powerful guy. Basically, everyone who meets him, even as an old man, is like, yeah, he was like physically a very imposing man. And he is never afraid of violence. The police in South Africa in those days had a special use for men like that, enforcing the increasingly unpopular apartheid system through hideous violence. Now, as in the United States, a great deal of police racial violence was accomplished using dogs.

and Van Shure was quickly promoted to work as a handler in the dog unit. South African police had established dog units initially for detective work in rural areas and gold mines after 1910. Many of the first detection dogs were used for tracking, and by the 1930s, there were several hundred police dogs in service and a breeding program. I do love that a dog barked right as I was reading that. Yeah, that was perfect. She's mad. Mm-hmm. Now, poor dogs.

Although these are the dogs they breed in South Africa to be race violence. Dogs are pretty brutal animals. I, you do have to say, Oh, do you know what kind of dogs they were fond of? They start with like German shepherds, but they kind of breed their own. Like these are our South African doing race violence dogs, right? Oh, they made their, they made special ones. Everyone kind of does. You know, when you get, when you develop your own system of race-based dog, dog-based race-based violence,

You're going to make your own dogs for it. Everyone's a little different. The kind of racism you want to do in the, you know, Mississippi with dogs might be different than the kind of racism you want to do in Pretoria, you know, or in, you know, or wherever. Yeah, right. Exactly. It's important. Like with the racism hedge, you know what you want to use native flora and fauna. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you. Thank you for understanding, Molly.

I'm trying to see a picture of these dogs. I'm just trying to delay talking about dogs. Yeah, so police dogs, there's initially like if the police, like the dogs are just for tracking, right? And if they're used to harm suspects, there's like penalties and stuff that have to be paid. But, you know, Molly, speaking of using dogs to brutalize captive populations, you know,

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What was happening there? What are you doing? Did you forget what you were doing? What happened? Nothing. We're back. We're back. We're here. We're here. Why not? So there were initially penalties when police dogs were used to harm suspects. But as dogs who would, you know, were like they started using dogs more and more less for like crimes out in the bush and more for like gang crime and then for crowd control for breaking up particularly strikes and riots. Um,

And once that happens, the kind of the prescription against using dogs to hurt people goes away very quickly, right? Professor Sandra Swartz studies the use of dogs in apartheid policing, and she claims, quote, things changed fast with the increasingly heavy hand of the apartheid state. In 1961, an SAPS study tour to Europe shifted the focus of canine policing. Sharpeville had occurred, and the police wanted a different kind of dog.

one that could impose physical and psychological order on the African population. Jesus Christ. New dogs, mainly German shepherds, were imported, bred, and donated. The force was multiplied with an emphasis on force. Yeah, they have this big protest riot thing, and they're like, we need to tear some people up with dogs. Like, that's how we're going to keep a lid on this whole no one likes apartheid thing.

I think I might rather get shot. Well, yeah, of course. Almost certainly. Yes, absolutely. I'm much less scared of, well, like a normal dog bite. I'm much less scared of than a bullet. But a mauling by a German shepherd, I think I would prefer taking my chances with a round of nine millimeter. One bullet hole. You can stitch that up.

Yeah. Jeez. I mean, neither of them is a great option. But yeah, I've seen I've been around too many really bad dog fights, you know, to want to. Now, I'm not running them. You know, I'm not running them. OK. Clarification, Robert. They just happen a lot. You know, you live out in the country. Dog fight ring. People don't take care of their dogs. Everyone's on methamphetamine. Not me, but everyone else. Yeah.

A lot of dogs have a lot of fights is what I'm saying. What you're telling me is that you did meth at a dog fight. That's basically what I got from that as well. There's pieces of that in my life, Molly, but not the whole picture. Wait, did you live in Oklahoma? It wasn't in Oklahoma. I mean, I saw dog fights in Oklahoma, but I was too young to be doing meth. Molly. Molly.

In 1976, midway through Lewis's policing career, dogs became targets of guerrilla attacks on the police. A school uprising that year began with the killing of a police dog. And some pro- like, so-

I can't. Obviously, the dogs aren't at fault. They're dogs. But I also can't blame people who are being mauled by dogs from murdering police dogs. And they must regrettably respect it. They would do it pretty brutally. They necklaced some of these dogs, which was a method of it started out. It was a way that like it within sort of like black communities in South Africa, if you had other black people kind of like

talking to the cops, right? Like rolling on folks, you would necklace them, right? And they, it extends to, you know, they do it to some captured dogs. Eventually they do it to other people too, but it's basically you, you fill a tire with gasoline and you stick it over a person and you light it on fire. It's a way of saying, don't do what this guy did. Or in the case of the dogs, don't do what this dog did. Now, I think I,

And the people who might be thinking of talking to the cops probably understand the message. I don't think the dogs do, but nobody's nobody when you're fighting a, you know, effectively trying to overthrow your government. Everything you do isn't going to be squeaky clean. Right. It's an ugly, ugly thing.

I mean, it's like Data told Picard. Sometimes terrorism is the answer. Sometimes terrorism is the answer. Although I do think maybe you didn't need to necklace the dogs, but I'm not going to backseat, overthrow the apartheid. I'm not going to Monday morning quarterback this. I'm not going to backseat, overthrow the apartheid government of you. You know, you guys did what you thought you had to do. Molly and I are not your target audience for necklace dog apologists. Right.

We're not your target audience. Yeah. These dogs were evil. The dogs weren't evil. They were being used for an evil purpose. And if you're the person being mauled by the dog, I understand that like you're not going to think about the animals well being. And to be fair, none of those dogs that none of them meet a fine end. I mean, even still today. No, no. Modern American policing. The average police dog dies from being left in a hot car.

It happens a lot. They do a lot. I just don't understand how that happens anywhere. Do you people not know? Like, it's the same thing when people do it to babies. Like, what is, how are we still having this problem? Anyway, whatever. Lewis is not a particularly noteworthy dog cop. And without access to detailed police records, only a few of which still exist, we have to turn to other documented history for an idea of the kinds of things Lewis was doing with his police dog.

I found a story related in an article by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study based on a lecture by Professor Sandra Swart. This story is from 1998, so four years after the official end of apartheid. But a lot of like the different things that were put in place for apartheid legally are still in place. And we can assume this represents maybe a less extreme example of the kind of violence Lewis would have been involved in.

Police of the East Rand Dog Unit arrested three Mozambican immigrants looking for work. The police initially demanded a bribe, then turned the suspects in debate, bypassing two dogs who didn't bite to bring in Rex, a proper South African police dog who knew how to hurt.

The resulting video showed the tasting blood method, a shocking video of snarling savagery and a terrible failure for the immediate post-apartheid state. The video, complete with laughter, was regularly shown at police brides until it was leaked to the media and policemen were arrested and imprisoned. The incident strongly reflected the broken relationship between the citizenry and the police, the brute power of the state and the state's power of the brute. Bad dogs on the loose, said Swart.

And so that is they have this tasting blood method of like basically letting the dogs like rip people up in order to get them into a frenzy. And this video of police shaking down people for bribes and then having their dog maul them. Police are like playing it at police gatherings for each other as like entertainment. Like you guys will watch our colleagues fuck up these dudes with their terrifying dog and

Like that's that's that's how apartheid cops, you know, all these guys had been apartheid cops. That's how they like relaxed, you know.

So like that, these are the kind of people that Lewis is. This is who we're talking about. Right. Right. It's not regrettable violence for them. It's it's like a hobby. It's a perk of the job that you get to have a dog rip a person to shreds. You know, that's why you take this gig. He described his job with the police in one interview as handling attacker dogs.

which he sicked on people he always described as protesters and criminals. Nearly all of these people, he admitted, were black. He said of this that it was, quote, hunting, but a different species. And I don't fully know what he meant by that. I think I know what he meant by that. But there's actually a couple of things he could mean there. Yeah, that really works on two terrible levels. Are you saying it's like hunting a different species than you normally hunt? Or a different species from you.

Then you wouldn't say it's like hunting but a different species because usually hunting isn't the same species as you, right? Most people don't hunt...

The same species they are. I don't know. I don't actually understand entirely what he was saying there. Maybe it's a different species of hunting? You know? I don't know. Yeah. No, it's... That's not good. It's not good on any level. It's not good on any level and it's confusing wordplay. Does he normally hunt people but he doesn't see black people as people? He does hunt people but they are all black people. Now...

This is not an episode on the use of police dogs, but I do find the subject fascinating. And before we continue with Lewis's story, I want to read one more quote about his job by Swart. Quote, police dogs were creatures poised between citizenry and state, between technology and sentience, agency and training, between good and evil, and always between nose and teeth.

And I think that's a great quote about police dogs, but I also think it describes Lewis pretty well, right? Right. He is this creature positioned between the citizenry and the state, right?

And kind of reduced to animal violence in order to serve a role protecting the state from its citizenry, you know? And this sort of like barely contained, like snapping its jaws at the end of the leash. Barely sentient. Barely capable of thought, right? Like that's Lewis and that's these dogs that are bred just to maim people.

Numerous friends and family members described Lewis as not a bright guy and someone who was often prone to violence. His colleagues on the force may have believed that this may have been something he did out of insecurity, that he was so violent because he thought he was dumb. One colleague said he was not a clever bloke, but he would go to hell and back to get his man. It was his way of proving that he was as good as the others.

Right. Like I don't have smarts, so I'm going to have to compensate by being extra fucking aggressive. I've met some cops. That sounds right. That's that's a cop. Yeah, that's that sounds about right. Now, the picture biographer Heidi Holland paints of Lewis suggests a man who was perhaps performatively macho, if not reflexively so.

On the sports field, the hulking Lewis was able to show his physical talent more convincingly, playing flanker for the police rugby team and earning provincial colors in the Eastern Capes tug-of-war squad. He also starred in four-wheel drive challenges. Racing over hillsides and beaches in his super-powered Land Rover with its monster mag wheels and heavy black roll bar, dressed in shorts with the ever-ready holster on his hip, Lewis felt happy, according to his first wife.

To keep fit, he ran cross-country barefoot, a beer-swilling man's man. He was by all accounts well-liked in the police force and in East London's white community generally. I hate that this guy's a barefoot runner, too. I'm sorry, did you say that the police force has a tug-of-war team? They do, yes. Yes, Molly. Is this a traditional South African sport? Yes, it's the only sport that South Africans love. That's probably not true, but I'm not feeling very charitable towards South Africa today.

Nor should you on any day. Yeah, I think it's I think it's actually it's the Eastern Capes tug of war squad. So that might be just a tug of war squad that he was also in. And he's on the police rugby team. OK, so he's just playing like like it may have just been like a local. Yeah. Kind of sporting league thing. Yeah, that's good for men to have hobbies. It's good for men to have hobbies. Considering what this guy does for a job. Yeah. You really want him on his hobbies as much as possible.

Just come here and tug. It's good for men to have some hobbies. Asterisk, asterisk, asterisk. Yeah, always a good idea.

Lewis is well liked because the white residents of East London understood that their prosperity and comfort was undergirded by violence done by men like him. So what if he was stupid and boorish, which he was? Lewis was a serial. You could call him a serial monogamist. He's married four times before age 40. So he's not great at being married. He meets. Do these all end in divorce?

Oh, yeah. Yes. They're alive, though. Yes, they are alive. They are alive. You're not going to be surprised to hear that there's some spousal abuse in this story. Oh, he wasn't a kind husband? I feel like I barely even need to say that. Obviously, I'm going to. He meets his second wife, Beverly, while she's married to someone else. One member of their church later told that journalist Heidi he would go on fishing trips with Bev's husband and then sneak away to be with her.

So he's like driving this guy out to the woods to go fish and then just runs back home to fuck his wife. That seems like the least efficient way to do that. He's not a smart man. Like normally a fishing trip is a good alibi, but not when you're with him. Yeah, this guy always weeps.

Somehow the tactic worked. So maybe Bev just didn't like smart men. She's just like big bruised idiots, I guess. Yeah, she leaves her husband for Louis and the couple gets married in 1978. They set up a home with Beverly's three young sons on a small farm. Oh, he seems like the kind of guy who would be totally chill raising another man's sons. I bet that's not an issue for him. He actually is.

He's actually fine with this. Like all of the kids say he never hurt us. So he's a wife beating serial killer, apartheid enforcer, but he's a good stepdad. I don't think good, but like not bad in any particular way. Well, it's good I can still be surprised. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of was like, oh boy, I bet this kid's doing, this guy's doing some fucked up shit too. And like, no, his kids like said, seem to feel pretty positively towards him. So I don't know. Okay.

OK, I judged unfairly. Yeah. These are so he basically has a homestead. Right. He and Bev are homesteading. Right. And this is obviously something people in the U.S. do. I do it. But it's part of the white South African dream. It is a Boer tradition. Right. Whose land was that before? Right. Right. And just like that's a big part of like I mean, it's a big part of like the American tradition, too. Right. Like we're going to go out onto some land that used to be someone else's and build a homestead, you know.

In 1979, Lewis and Bev had their first child, Sabrina. And Sabrina is going to be a very important part of this story for reasons that are quite surprising, but we'll get to that.

Now, her sons, Beverly's sons, have testified that he beat, Lewis beat their mother, right? Although they insist, again, he was never violent towards them. His kids are really the only people that he's peaceful and kind of supportive to. Violence is never far from his behavior at the best of times, though. One way Van Shure made a place for himself in the local community...

was by using his police skills to train dogs for other small farmers. One of the small farmers that he helped was a guy named Basil Niemann, who was later charged in court for sicking his German shepherds on an elderly black farm worker. Niemann later ran for parliament, like this story of him going to court for mauling a man with dogs.

gets kind of famous. So he does sort of the right wing pivot from getting famous for being shitty. And he runs for parliament. Lewis campaigns for him, like handing out posters that show a growling German shepherd and the slogan, I'll be your watchdog. Yeah. The meaning of those signs was not missed by anybody. Right. Like, yeah,

Yeah, it's like Ted Kennedy running with fires and say, like, you know, I'll I'll drive you. I'll drive. I'll drive the legislative vehicle. Yeah. Now, for most of Lewis's life, South Africa had been embroiled in the Namibian War of Independence, which his people generally called the Angolan Bush War.

This was a hideous little conflict that ranged from the late 60s to 1990. And during parts of it, South African police were sent to the border and participated in aspects of the fighting. Right. These are police being used to secure the border. But the nature of the conflict means that they are engaged in combat. Right. At least that happens sometimes. Right.

Now, Lewis would later claim that he hated these duties, which were dangerous and terrifying. His wife, Beverly, says that was nonsense and that he had actually volunteered to fight at the border because he really likes fighting. Given what we can verify about Lewis and what comes next, I'm pretty sure Bev is the one telling the truth here. Wanting to fight in the Angolan Bush War is a very Lewis thing. So I'm going to guess she's probably given us the truth more or less.

Either way, Lewis quits the police in 1980. He says, "'Cause I just didn't wanna fight anymore." And Beverly is like, "Well, I made him quit the police "because he was cheating on me constantly "and I wanted him to get a job closer to home "so that he would cheat on me slightly less."

And for a while. At that point, girl, just get out. Yeah. Bev is kind of Bev's a piece of shit, too. That said, she deserves the abuse. But she's also going to be a terrible person in this story. So her judgment's not great. Right. Lewis does try to do as she asks for a while. He gets a job at a carpet store. What other skills does this man have? Yeah. Like there's no attack dogs at the carpet store.

One of the interesting things, because he's abusive to her, she is much smarter than him. She becomes, she's like incredibly wealthy by the time she dies. Like she is a wildly successful entrepreneur. She just starts and runs numerous successful companies.

There's an interesting dynamic going on between them. We don't get all of it, but he gets a job at a carpet company that his wife owns. But Louis Van Shure, not the kind of man who wants to work at a carpet store, right? Like he's just not a great salesman, not a great salesman, not a lot of adrenaline in selling carpets. You know, you can't bully a customer into buying a rug. Yeah, I think Louis was the kind of guy who would tell you he was made for action.

My own argument might be that adrenaline and violence are both addictive, and he was addicted to adrenaline and violence. But, you know, whatever you say about him, Lewis was good at violence. So before long, he started looking for another career path. He applied for work as a daytime security guard, but this was hardly any more exciting than the carpet store. Desperate for action, he asked to rejoin the police. And this is one of the more interesting but unexplained parts of the story. The cops turned him down.

Now, we don't really know why. How old is he at this point? You know, he's in his like 30s, something like that, 40, closing in on 40. And, you know, by this point, it's the early 1980s, mid 80s. And the apartheid regime is facing like a lot more condemnation from the international community. And the guerrilla war, right, has kind of from within has stepped up several notch. And a lot of these guerrilla, a lot of attacks, right, a lot of the terrorist attacks

on the state are inspired by police violence, right? Like the people who are trying to tear down the system get angry because the cops do something brutal and they carry out an attack, right? There is a decent chance people on the force were like, Lewis was a great cop, you know, a decade ago or whatever, but we are in a different world now. And if we have him on the force, he's going to do something that gets us bombed.

Right. Which is probably true. You know, like that's not an unwise. It would be the best idea any of those guys ever had. Yeah. Yeah. We really do. He is not the man for this hour. Now, that doesn't mean the racial regime in East London had no job for him, though. Eventually, he was advised to seek work at a company owned by a former police major, Falcon Security.

Now, this is not a mall cop outfit. Its purview proceeded directly from a number of the social changes that had swept South Africa in the last few years. As I said, in 1977, the criminal code is amended to basically allow security guards to murder people for running away.

Up to the end of the 70s, most security firms had just provided silent alarms. And then police would come in to actually investigate and maybe arrest people. But this caused the cops to waste a lot of time on false alarms. And the police are like, we don't want to do this anymore.

Lewis' boss at Falcon, Major C.J.H. Cloat, who's also a former cop, was one of the entrepreneurs who sailed into the gap with a new kind of full-service security firm. Major Cloat later told a reporter, I know Van Shure was the kind of bloke that liked to use his firearm. That I know because I killed one and he used to say, ha, I'm ahead of you.

This is not like Legolas and Ghibli in Lord of the Rings counting their kills. You're just murderers. You are not in a fiction book. What are we doing? They're making like, what, like for gated neighborhoods? Like a...

It's mostly small businesses, I think. I think it's mostly like. But it's like a private murder police force. Yeah. Yeah. Accountable to no one and allowed by the state to shoot kids in the back. Well, they are accountable to the police, but the way that the police monitor them is by going, good job.

Kill another. This is probably going to go good. Yeah, it's going to be great. But you know what else is going to be great, Molly? Oh, is it products and services? I hope it's not an ad for Falcon Security. That would be really awkward. A Simply Safe ad. Yeah, Simply Safe. Simply Safe. Now we've got a guy with a gun.

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Anyway, it is unclear to me when Lewis made his first kill. Most official reporting suggests all or nearly all of his killings occurred in a three year spree near the end of the 80s. Some of what I've read leads me to question that. I think it definitely he started shooting people earlier, but he kind of I'm sure there's a period of ramping up to the speed of murder that he's going to be at, you know, for those during that three year period.

What we know is that Section 49 provided Clote and Van Schoor with all the legal cover for murder they needed. So long as they argued that they had tried to get a suspect to stop and surrender and that suspect had run, they had what amounted to legal impunity. The precise nature of the law meant that shooting someone in the back was not just legal. You could argue it was your duty, like legally speaking.

Beverly was, by all accounts, a huge racist. She's going to become an exceedingly wealthy person after this and a real prominent bigot. But she does not seem to have been a fan of murder. And her husband's behavior either disgusted her or at least frightened her. I should probably also emphasize that she knew he was cheating more or less constantly on her, all of which factored into her leaving him in 1983. Right. So the murder thing.

It may have. I mean, she says that like she says that him taking this job was like the final straw. Right. And maybe I can accept one or the other. But yeah, cheating or murder. I cheated on by a serial killer.

Absolutely not. Now, the inciting incident seems to have been when Sabrina, who is not quite four at this point, caught Lewis making out with her preschool teacher and told Bev. Oh, he is such a piece of shit. This led to horrific fights and eventually Sabrina would claim her dad threatened to murder her mom. Bev rightfully took Sabrina and her brothers away to Queensland.

As soon as they were gone in the divorce final, Lewis married Sabrina's teacher. She and her mother had to start a new life with her haunted by the knowledge that she had broken up her parents' marriage, even though obviously that's not your fault. You didn't do anything wrong. That was coming. Um,

But yeah, you know, she's four. Lewis continued to run through wives at a steady rate after this. He divorced the teacher two years later after having two daughters with her. Oh, that wasn't a love match? No, not a love match. And then in 1990, he proposes to the daughter of a wealthy local businessman.

This may have been an attempt by Lewis, who's still working as a security guard at that point and regularly shooting suspects to gain a more reputable place for himself and society as he aged. If so, it didn't work out, largely because he seems to have been a bad husband. One local reporter described his four wives as either vulnerable, overweight or meek. OK, a little rude. The papers at the time always like to tell you when his wives are fat, which I think is gross.

The armchair psychiatry done by journalists after his murders became public described this as him seeking to fill his life with mentally weaker people. I don't know if I buy that because, again, Bev is an exceptionally competent and powerful businesswoman. So I don't know if –

It is a case of him filling his life with mentally weaker, weaker people. Some of them were meek and some were just fat. Maybe she was strong and fat. Bev gets fat, like which is part of why I think these journalists are like she's mentally weaker than him. But like she's like a multimillionaire entrepreneur. I don't understand why you think she's mentally weak. Yeah.

It seems like we're really drawing a lot of conclusions about the wives here. Yeah, I might say the single mother who is able to leave her husband to start a new life and become a millionaire on her own is probably mentally stronger than the man who just shoots people in the back for a living. I mean, he does it for the love of the game. He does do it for the love of the game. You know, find a thing you love and you'll never work a day in your life.

Bev is kind of thriving after the breakup. Lewis continues to do the only thing he'd ever been good at, violence. By the late 1980s, Falcon Security had a contract to protect 70% of all white-owned businesses in East London. Local business owners started to see Lewis as their version of the Punisher, a killing machine you sent in to trim the grass, periodically murdering young men who had the temerity to commit property crime and thus keeping criminality under wraps.

Issa Jacobson, a South African journalist, claims he was a kind of vigilante killer. He was a dirty, hairy character. These were intruders who were, in a lot of cases, pretty desperate, digging through bins, maybe stealing some food. Petty criminals. Do these people not realize this is real life? This is not a movie. This is not a TV show. What are you doing? What are you doing? You're concerned about crime. They like talking to him about, yeah. You're not reducing the amount of violence in the community by killing.

killing people in the parking lot. I think the white people in town see it as like, yeah, that's what you're doing is making them keep their heads down, right? You want to kill the ones who commit crimes, you know, because that'll scare the others and it'll just generally it'll keep the system in place. It'll let them know their place, right? Like that's why they like what he's doing, right?

I guess it's just, I don't know. I mean, it's like what we're seeing right now with Israel, right? It's like the people who mature psychologically in this kind of environment just have a different understanding of violence than we do, I guess. Yeah, they see him as part of the wall. Because there's like a dead guy in the parking lot. Yeah. Like you're seeing this. Yeah. He is part of the wall that they see their life as depending on.

Now, it's an unfortunate reality with cases like this that some chunk of the populace will always say, well, you just can't let people steal. And so this is where I provide you with more detail on the kind of murders that Lewis committed, sometimes more than one a week.

here's an excerpt from a beat. Yeah. No, he shoots people. He shoots people so many times. So is there a separate thriving industry of like whoever comes and picks up the bodies? I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of work for the, the hospitals. There's a lot of work for the morgues. There's a lot of, actually a lot of these guys go into unmarked graves.

He just thinks he's like the season one and two, the arrow on CW. What is happening here? I can't comment on that. Is he an amazing shot and like everyone he shoots dies or is he shooting like 10 guys a week? He's shooting at the height of his shooting people. He's shooting about one person a week and he's killing about one person a month. Stop. Stop.

That's weird. That's just being a murderer. I don't think it's weird. That's yeah, that's just being a murderer. Yeah, I'm going to read you for an example of how the kind of murders he's committing. Here's an excerpt from a BBC report. In a particularly brutal case on 11th July 1988, Van Shore shot a 14 year old boy who had broken into a restaurant searching for petty change.

The boy, who we have not named to protect his privacy, told the police he hid in the toilet when he saw Van Shure with his gun. He said the security guard called him out, told him to stand next to the wall, and then shot him repeatedly. He told me to stand up, but I couldn't, said the boy. While I was lying there, he kicked me in the mouth. He picked me up and propped me up against a table, and then he shot me again. So...

This is not a security guard comes across. It's not supposed to be right. Right. So even under this bizarre framework where it's cool to shoot this in the back while he runs away, like you can't do this. No, because he's not running away like this is supposed to be illegal. But here's the thing. Lewis says he ran away. The black boy he shot says he did all this horrible shit to me.

Guess who the cops believe? Yeah. Well, they don't have like. No. Like ballistics or anything. They're not doing any of that. They're not doing science. Yeah, they're not. They're not doing that on these cases. Like if the bullet hole. South African apartheid cops. The bullet hole is in the floor though. They don't got Dexter walking around in there doing blood spatter analysis. How did the hole get in the floor? They don't give a shit.

And in fact, this boy, as he is like in the fucking hospital recovering from being shot within an inch of his fucking life, gets charged with breaking and entering. And basically all of the survivors get charged and like sentenced for breaking and entering after Lewis nearly murders them. So that's cool.

Now, the good news is that in this case, the child that Louis shot survived. But Louis is going to kill other children. And in part two, we'll talk about that. And we'll talk about his daughter, Sabrina. It's going to be great, Molly. It's going to be a lovely time. But first off, most importantly, how are you doing? Oh, you know, I'm not as good as about an hour ago, but still pretty good. Yeah. Great. Excellent. Well, Molly, do you have anything you want to plug before we end up?

Plug the idea of not using dogs as weapons. No, but I also have a new podcast. Yeah. It feels so gross to say. Yeah. Welcome to the club. Well, I think you should not use dogs as weapons.

As weapons, but you might use a weapon as a dog, you know, try that out, you know, pick up. Instead of any of that, you should open your podcast app of choice and subscribe to weird little guys. My new weekly show. Yeah. Subscribe to weird little guys. Then put a, put a dog leash around a Thompson submachine gun and just drag it into the park, you know, and give everyone a good time. And because people, people have been asking the, the.

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Everyone, there will be more on Thursday. 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.

I think

A lot of people think that you're supposed to be going to therapy once you're like having panic attacks every day. But before you get to that point, I think once you start even noticing that you feel a little bit off and you can't maintain this harmony that you once had in relationships, that could be a sign that maybe you want to go talk to somebody.

There's always a benefit in talking to someone because we can all benefit from improved insight about ourselves and who we are and how we behave with other people. So if you're human, that's like a good indicator that you could benefit from talking to somebody. Find out if therapy is right for you. Visit BetterHelp.com today.

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