The Apartheid Killer: 2. ‘We love Louis’
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We're just arriving at the home of one of South Africa's most notorious killers.

The man who murdered Edward Sunnis. It's actually worse than I thought it would be. I didn't realise it was going to be so kind of rudimentary, you know. It looks like just enough to shelter someone. The wooden shack in front of us sits below a sloping mountain. It's been raining for hours and there's a mist hugging the trees. This is a remote area, a good place to hide when you don't want the world to find you.

One of the conditions for us visiting this place is that we will not reveal its location. As we walk towards the house, there's a giant puddle. And to get to the gate, we have to jump across water along a series of stepping stones. The windows of the house are boarded up in places.

A Rottweiler, a massive black dog, is jumping at the fence. The dog is called Brutus, named after the guy who stabbed the Roman emperor Julius Caesar in the back. He looks mean, but when you open the gate, he's actually friendly. The inside of the house is completely different to the outside. It's small, but immaculate. There's a bedroom in front of you.

The duvet is so flat, it looks like it's been ironed. There are other details that catch the eye too. Strips of sticky paper are hanging from the wooden rafters, covered in dead and dying flies. And bizarrely, a set of nunchucks, martial arts style, are dangling from a peg on the wall. In the middle of the room is a man, a white man with sharp, bright eyes. His name is Louis Fonscourte.

Also known as the Apartheid Killer. This is World of Secrets, Season 3, The Apartheid Killer. A BBC World Service investigation with me, Ayanda Charlie. And me, Charlie Northcote. Episode 2, We Love Louis. When I first approached South African journalist Isa Jacobson to work with me on this story, this was her reaction. Oh! LAUGHTER

It was like, please no, please don't do this to me. Prior to working with us, Aiza had spent over a decade on the case of Louis Fonskoa. The horror of it, the injustice of it, filled her with dread. You know, it was not something I was looking forward to at all. And that tension is awful. Fonskoa is the man who killed Edward Sunis, the father of Raymond, who we met in episode one, and the brother of Marlene.

And Edward wasn't VanScore's only victim. One of the reasons Isa couldn't leave this story alone is because so many people died. Officially, VanScore's body count was 19. But for years, there have been rumours that he shot more than 100.

The scale of Fonskua's reign of terror has not actually been fully investigated. There are other killings and shootings out there. Did it feel unfinished for you? Like, was there a restlessness in you? Yeah, I think a restlessness is a great way to describe the way that I was feeling. This feeling of unfinished business. All of Fonskua's killings occurred in one place, the city of East London, in South Africa's windswept Eastern Cape.

A small coastal town, it's actually incredibly beautiful. That's the absurdity of it. These incredible beaches that go on forever and these dunes and this wild seascape. But it's also shark infested. So there's this kind of tension in the place. The murders took place in the 1980s, the height of South Africa's apartheid government.

Edward's sister Marlene remembers the brutality of those times. Casual violence against black people was unfolding everywhere. She's still haunted by the memory of one incident, which happened while she was catching a train with her mum. The trains were so full and we had to stand inside the trains. The seats were full. Hundreds of black commuters were piling into a train to try and grab a seat. A white guard was walking up and down the platform.

But if they were too slow, the white guard patrolling would slam the train's metal doors shut, whether the people were inside or not. And this woman was carrying a child about two months old as they're going into the train. So this guy didn't look to see if everybody's already into the train. So as he passes, he just slams the door closed and hits the child's head, squashed it together.

just like that, on the child's head. And the people started to scream. And when she looks, the child is, half of the child's head is not there because those toes are heavy. The child was killed by the guard, but there were no consequences. During apartheid in East London, Black Lives did not matter to the white authorities. And they didn't care. They didn't care. He just saw her screaming and he looked behind, he saw the blood and he just went home.

She just took the remains and just folded it and went home. It was never even spoken of. Every day, atrocities like this were taking place across South Africa. A white man could kill a black child knowing that nothing would happen to them. This is the world Louis Fonskoe lived in. This is the world where he carried out his killings. Louis Fonskoe was a security guard who operated in East London.

He was apparently guarding 70% of the businesses in East London, of the white businesses. Places like high schools, like burger joints, seaside restaurants, places that sold clothing or that stored food. And these were the places that he was guarding against intruders. Vanscore owned a business called Flash Security, and it was thriving.

It prided itself on having quick response times to break-ins, protecting the vast majority of companies in the city. But there were a few things that made Fonsko's business unusual. He was almost always the only security guard who went out on patrol, and he used special equipment to guard his properties. Rather than put in normal alarms in these buildings, the ones which make a deafening noise when triggered, many businesses used silent alarms.

If someone broke a window or climbed over a gate into a factory, a shop or a restaurant Van Scoor was protecting, he would receive an alert in his own control room. And the person who broke in would have no idea Van Scoor was coming. It's part of that modus operandi of Louis van Scoor. This is Dominic Jones, a young newspaper reporter in East London in the 1980s.

The silent alarm was an alarm system that worked on a radio signal. And when somebody broke into a premises and triggered the alarm, it would send a silent signal to a central control room, which would then notify Louis von Squier. Whoever had broken into the premises was usually unaware that their presence had been detected. He had the element of surprise.

Through the silent alarms, Van Scoor had designed a human mousetrap. Those who carried out the break-ins never sensed the danger coming. In fact, they were being hunted. And when Van Scoor found them, he was lethal. And he would arrive, usually only armed with a two-way radio and a handgun with 15 bullets in the clip.

Some of those bullets were hollow-point, hollow-nosed bullets with the intention of doing the most damage to a human body. He basically went out to kill every night. Fonskwo perfected hunting people in the dark. He was physically strong and fast. On his night patrols, he didn't wear any shoes, so he could move silently as he snuck up on the intruders. They had a name for him in one of our native languages.

His nickname in Xhosa was Whiskers, as in Cat's Whiskers. He arrived silently, like a cat, barefoot. Van Scoor had played rugby. He really prided himself on his athletic prowess and he would have been nimble and quick. He claims he had extraordinary night vision. And there's another pattern to Van Scoor's killings.

He never once killed a white person. The people he was hunting and shooting in the dark, every single one of them was black. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.

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and search the girlfriends, our lost sister, and start listening. So we're on our way now to hopefully meet with Van Square. We've tried contacting him for several days now and he's not been responding to any of our calls or messages. It's almost comically gloomy as we're driving towards Van Square's house. There's a massive rainstorm rolling over us. The sky is grey, heavy.

with journalist Isa and our producer Jim, Ayanda and I all sat together, crammed into our hire car. Met Louis Franscois multiple times and each time there's a feeling of dread because it's confronting a past that's really awful and uncomfortable and it's impossible to go in feeling anything other than dread and a sense of sickness.

It took Aiza months to find where Fonskour has settled. It's literally the middle of nowhere in South Africa. And for good reason. Nowadays, there's a risk some people may want to kill him. The road cuts through beautiful green hills, stretching as far as the eye can see. We pass forests, lakes, cows, and an occasional giraffe poking its head above the leaves. We are not on our way just to have a chat with Fonskour. We want something from him.

We want to find out how many people he really killed. We want to know what happened to Edward Sunis. And we want to know how he got away with it. Interviewing someone like this is a delicate balance between asking and listening, of saying enough but not too much. It's a journalistic dance that Isa first experienced 20 years ago when she met Van Scoor for the first time. I remember feeling absolutely terrified by him.

He was still physically very fit, tall, bearded, and I couldn't help but think to myself what it must have been like to encounter him in the dark. Before doing this interview, we carefully planned out how we wanted to approach it. If we were too aggressive, Van Scorn might shut down. We needed to make him comfortable, to open him up, if we wanted to unlock his secrets. And sometimes...

That involves a bit of role play. It's not a comfortable feeling. You know, playing up the white South African, all of that kind of stuff that would make him feel more comfortable, you know, probably even adjusting my accent. You know, there's stuff that one does. To make your accent more Afrikaans.

Well, more South African. I would even introduce some Afrikaans in order to show that I'm able to speak it because it might get me closer to him. The interviews with Van Scoor that you'll hear in this series took place over many days. I joined the team a bit later, so the questions you'll hear were asked by Charlie and Isa. Walking into Van Scoor's house for the first time, I had butterflies in my stomach.

How can you not when you're meeting a man who's killed so many people? But in person, Van Scoor is not what you'd expect. He's in his 70s now. His eyes are sharp, but his beard is grey. And he's sitting in a wheelchair. Both of his legs are missing. I had a heart attack, a silent heart attack, a couple of years ago. And unfortunately, I picked up problems with my legs. Isa and I sit down with Van Scoor in his living room.

He's friendly and welcoming. He seems almost pleased to see us. He shares an anecdote about his fearsome reputation. I was in a shop somewhere and two guys were talking. And they were talking about Louis van Squoort. And I was standing right next to them. And when the guy had finished talking, I said to him, excuse me, do you know Louis van Squoort? Yes, he knows him. He's this, that and the other. And I said, do you know me? He looked at me. He said, no, I don't know you.

I said, "Well, I'm Louis van Schoor." "Now, what have you got to say?" "I'm sorry," and they turned off and they rushed away. He's a serial killer. Most of us imagine a mass killer to be menacing or outwardly scary. Someone you'd immediately be wary of. But when you speak to van Schoor, it's his normality that's unnerving. He's polite, softly spoken, and in the midst of all that charm, he does not deny that he killed 19 people.

He justifies it. Every case that I was involved in had a full investigation and all my shooting incidents had been before court and was justified justifiable homicide because at that stage the law permitted it. Maximum force may be used. That's what the law stated. Despite every single one of his victims being black, Van Scoor is adamant that he's not racist.

All the people that are shot were blacks. That's not because of race, it was because of crime. It wasn't a racial thing. To me it was fighting crime. I was doing my job and I'm proud of it. It is true that as far as we know, many of the people Vanscor shot were breaking into buildings. But they weren't exactly bank robbers. These intruders were stealing clothes, petty cash and often food.

None of them ever had a gun. And all of them came from impoverished backgrounds. Isa and I pushed him on this point, and on the fact that all of his victims were black. You want to play the race game now? You can't tell me I went out specifically to kill black people, because that was not the intention. The intention was fighting crime. And at any point did you see these people as humans? Yes. Humans breaking the law.

To Van Scoor, the people he shot were criminals. And for breaking into buildings, they deserved to die. When we asked him about the killing of Edward Sunnies, he said he didn't even remember it. Half the time I don't even know where I shot somebody and where I didn't. Because I blocked that out. Why did you block them out? I want to keep on thinking I shot somebody there or I'm driving in town, I shot somebody there, I shot somebody there.

No, thank you. A lot of people would feel like it's a huge thing to take a life. It's not. It's not. As far as I'm concerned, I did my job. When we met Vanscaw, we had a plan to make him feel comfortable, to try and expose his innermost thoughts and reveal his secrets. But as we speak to him, it quickly becomes clear that that plan is failing. Vanscaw is smart.

And his justification of his killings is smooth and legalistic. Looking him in the eyes, it feels like we're in a silent boxing match. He's determined not to slip up in front of us. I'm not that monster that the people say I am. There's a reason Van Scoor can justify his killings with so much confidence. A lot of what he's saying is true. At the time he was killing people, his shootings were signed off by the police as justifiable homicides.

He's not behind bars. And he's not a wanted man. Even today, many people see him as a crime fighter, not a murderer. In the 1980s, the image of a white, male, crime-fighting hero was at its pinnacle.

Apartheid South Africa banned many foreign films, but not Hollywood action movies. Movies like Dirty Harry, Batman, Mad Max, and at the time, Fonskour was at his height, The Terminator with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hasta la vista, baby. In all these movies, the white hero shoots and kills the bad guys. His supporters saw Louis Fonskour as the Terminator of East London, a killer of criminals.

And the businesses he protected, the white people he guarded, loved him for it. The business community, they saw me as a hero. The other alarm companies, they actually complained at a stage that they were losing business. And their guys didn't have the success that I had. I brought the crime rate down from, you can say, 90% to 5%.

He saw himself as a crime fighter, but so did the rest of the community, the white community of East London. And they saw him as a hero because he was credited with bringing down the crime rate. Though Van Scoor often talks about being a crime fighter, he's keen to make himself look as humble and relatable as possible. I didn't want to be known as a hero. I'm just a normal, ordinary citizen that knew the law,

open up a company to protect other people's property and lives. Vanscoor was so well loved by the white community of East London that they even printed stickers for their cars. And this sticker would say, I heart Louis, with a bullet hole right through the heart. If you're driving around East London today, there's no way you'll see these now. But I've seen these stickers of Vanscoor.

and next to the heart full of bullet holes is the face of a man with a beard. He's smiling, with his hair neatly combed to the side. In the picture, he looks like the kind of man who'd open a door for an old lady. On leaving Ranscourt's shack after many hours of trying and completely failing to get him to open up, we feel dejected. Our plan to expose his inner secrets, to find some new evidence within him, is falling apart.

We'd spent months trying to find this killer, but when we found him, he was charming and unbelievably persuasive in justifying his actions. It did make us wonder, maybe this story isn't about a mass murder at all. Maybe we got it all wrong. We decided to change our approach. So we go to meet Fansku's daughter, Sabrina, for some insights into her dad's psychology. She's someone who knows him intimately and understands how he thinks.

She lives in a small house in the heart of East London. There it is. Pink one. Oh, yeah. As we get out of the car, we notice an ominous sign on the gate of the house next door. This home is protected by the good Lord and a pit bull. If you come here to steal or do harm, you might meet them both. Oh. Oh.

Just like her dad, Sabrina has dogs. And she has her father's piercing bluish-grey eyes too. Sabrina lives with her two children and her husband, Sean. I asked her what she remembers about her dad growing up. My father was very well known for protecting people. They enjoyed what he was doing.

When he shot someone, they would say, well done, Louis, good job. Keep up the good work, you know. Sabrina grew up with her dad in an all-white community, the same community he worked for as a security guard. I believe that his childhood, his friends, his family, the people he worked for, the people he was trying to protect, they all had one thing in common. They wanted to be safe. They wanted to feel safe.

They wanted to be protected. And once he did it once, he continued to do it. He had a mindset saying that I have to do this. This is what is right. But what felt right to the Fanskua family and the white community they served felt very different to black people in East London. Sabrina's husband, Sean, identifies as mixed race. And he grew up segregated on the other side of town.

At home, during her childhood, Sabrina also felt uneasy about her dad. It was almost like there was something missing inside of him.

My father wasn't there. I would see him for one or two hours and then he would leave. As a child growing up, we were never told, "We love you. I love you." So we were never shown emotion because I don't think he knows how to show that emotion. One of the emotions that she says is missing from her father is empathy, an ability to feel the pain of others. I don't think he can engage with it emotionally.

because he doesn't feel anything. He doesn't feel the pain. He doesn't feel... He doesn't want to feel. Sabrina's husband has met Van Scoor many times and he's also felt a similar kind of uneasiness, something disturbing inside his mind. I don't know, Charlie. It is tough to get into that man's mind and to know...

Is von Skur a serial killer or is he a crime fighter?

When I interviewed Van Scoor, he spoke a lot about the law and catching criminals. He tried to make us think that he's humble, that he's just an ordinary guy. But there were other moments too. Glimpses into the mind of someone who thinks very differently to you and I. The first time I realised this was when he described his recent amputations. Van Scoor chose not to have a general anaesthetic during his operation.

He wanted to watch the doctors cutting off his leg. I said to the anesthetist, I want to be awake. I want to be awake during this operation. He said to me, why? I said, because I'm curious. And I lay there and I could feel it when they sawed through the bone. I could feel the jerking as they were cutting. But before that, they got, it's like an electric soldering iron.

which they burn the nerves and the main arteries, they burn it to close it and so forth. And you could smell meat burning and you could see the smoke coming up. He watched them saw off his own leg. This is the father Sabrina described, a man with no empathy, a man who's killed 19 people and feels nothing for the victims. And telling this story wasn't the only creepy thing he did.

He sent Isa, the South African journalist who found him, photos of the aftermath of his operation. Horrific images of his stumps, his skin and his bedsheets, covered in his own blood. Fonskoi didn't find the gore off-putting. He found it funny. He spoke of this traumatic surgery as though it had happened to someone else. And his eyes, when he was talking, were lit up. He was smiling. We didn't know it at the time.

But that glimpse into Fonscu's inner darkness was only the beginning. There are details about this man's killings that have been hidden for decades. Evidence that could finally bring some justice for the families of his victims. Secrets that powerful people don't want the world to know. Did you ever hear stories about the Cambridge police station and the kinds of things that happened there?

What kind of things? Torture, extrajudicial killing. At the end of the day, no. No, I've got no knowledge of it. That's next time on World of Secrets. Thank you for listening to World of Secrets, Season 3, The Apartheid Killer, from the BBC World Service. This has been Episode 2 of 6.

Subscribe or follow now so you get all episodes and our next investigations automatically. If you haven't already, check out our previous two seasons. Season 3 is a long-form audio production for the BBC World Service presented by me, Ayanda Charlie, and Charlie Northcott. It's a collaboration with BBC Africa Eye with original investigation by Isa Jacobson and Charlie Northcott.

There's a BBC Africa Eye film about the apartheid killer, which we'd recommend watching too after listening to the podcast. Look for the link in the show notes. The series producer is Jim Frank, field production by Isa Jacobson. The series editor is Matt Willis. Anne Dixie is senior podcast producer at the BBC World Service. The podcast commissioning editor is John Manel.

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