Unmasking an apartheid-era killer: victims break their silence in new doccie

For years, Raymond Soenies sat outside his house each day waiting for his dad to come home. Then six years old, he believed his father, Edward, had abandoned him. It was only later that he learnt he had been killed.

Edward Soenies was a victim of apartheid-era serial killer Louis van Schoor.

Between 1986 and 1989, Van Schoor, a former police dog unit member and security guard, killed 39 people. His modus operandi involved responding to silent alarms at business premises, where he “hunted” and shot suspects with his 9mm Parabellum. Some victims were burglars, but others were innocent bystanders pulled in off the street. All were black or coloured. 

Many of the shootings were ruled “justifiable homicide” by the police. In 1992, Van Schoor was convicted of seven murders and sentenced to 20 years in jail. He was released in 2004 after serving just 12 years. In a 2015 interview, he did not deny rumours he had shot at least 100 people, saying: “I can’t argue with that. I didn’t keep count.”

In a BBC Africa Eye documentary, South African journalist Isa-Lee Jacobson interrogates Van Schoor about his actions, seeking the painful truth about why he carried out the killings.

Filmed over four years, The Apartheid Killer focuses on the stories of those whose lives were affected by these atrocities — including the relatives of victims and Van Schoor himself.

His unapologetic demeanour and lack of remorse almost deterred Jacobson, but it was her desire to bring some sort of closure to the Soenies family and other victims that saw her persevere.

When she and BBC journalist and videographer Charlie Northcott met Van Schoor, he candidly and defiantly said he had nothing to apologise for, because he saw his killings as justified.

Until now, many of the victims’ loved ones have never had the chance to share their stories. But in the documentary, they are finally given a platform to discuss what happened and its enduring impact on their lives. Among them is Raymond Soenies.

“On the day my father was killed, I sat outside and waited for hours. My granny told me not to worry and said maybe he had gone to the army, because he wanted to be a soldier. I waited for him from 4pm until it was dark. I just felt something wasn’t right,” Raymond said.

It was only two years later that the Soenies family found out in a newspaper article that Edward had been killed by Van Schoor. His body was buried in an unmarked grave, and it has taken the family more than 30 years to have it exhumed and reburied.

Jacobson first met Van Schoor two decades ago after he was convicted of murder and imprisoned in East London. 

In 2002, in a gruesome twist, Van Schoor’s daughter, Sabrina, hired a black man to kill her mother, because she considered her a racist bully. 

Sabrina, then 22, arranged the murder of her mother, Beverly van Schoor, a prominent Komani (Queenstown) businesswoman, because of years of verbal and physical abuse at her mother’s hands, as well as her disapproval of Sabrina's black friends. As the hit man, Feza Mdutshane, killed Beverly with a breadknife, Sabrina waited in her bedroom with her baby. 

She paid Mdutshane with cash, her car keys and her mother’s phone. Detectives tracked Mdutshane down using the phone, which led to his confession. Sabrina listened to every moment of her mother’s struggle, which nearly resulted in her decapitation, before staging a scene of hysterics in the street. 

Convicted of murder, Sabrina was sent to the same prison as her father. As a journalist, Jacobson interviewed Sabrina in the women’s section of the prison, and she also met Van Schoor in the men’s quarters before he was released.

“What I felt, at the time, 20 years ago, was that this was an enormously powerful human being. And he was really frightening. When he was in prison, he was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, but I still found him absolutely terrifying,” Jacobson said.  

Motivated by a desire to see justice served, Jacobson began to delve into the Van Schoor case. When she began her research in Qonce (King William’s Town), a woman at the archives mentioned knowing the Van Schoor story well, as one of her family members had been shot by him. Jacobson repeatedly met random people who said their relatives had been his victims. She then learnt that some white people were bragging about Van Schoor’s shootings, while others who owned security companies were even using them as a sales tactic.

“The scale of it became apparent, and it became incumbent upon me to try to understand how many more [victims] there were,” Jacobson said.

She teamed up with the BBC’s Northcott and together they began to work on the documentary The Apartheid Killer in 2020.

While the Covid-19 pandemic delayed finalising the film, another challenge was tracking down the relatives of Van Schoor’s victims and accessing their case files. Some were too traumatised to share their stories, but for the Soenies family, who had been trying for more than three decades to have Edward’s body exhumed and buried, the documentary was a godsend.

Like Jacobson, Northcott also felt duty-bound to tell this story. Having already spent considerable time in South Africa, he had learnt that some of those responsible for apartheid-era atrocities had not been held accountable for their actions. Like Van Schoor, individuals who had committed unimaginable cruelty — killers and torturers — now lived freely among the populace. This injustice left him feeling profoundly unsettled.

“I was interested in finding one of these killers and trying to understand how he felt now. And one of the shocking things to confront with Van Schoor was his attitude today about what he did — a total lack of remorse,” Northcott said.

Jacobson says that what haunts her is that “there are so many apartheid-era killers walking free, and they’re going to die unless we talk to them and get their version of the truth”. She adds: “So many of them have died with their secrets, and I feel it’s important to talk to them.”

When asked in the documentary about how he wants to be remembered, Van Schoor says he wants people to think of him as a peaceful, loving, caring person.

For Raymond, Van Schoor is not only the man who killed his father, but also the person who changed the trajectory of his life.

Now 41, Raymond has only just started to heal after burying his father’s remains in 2022, with the help of Jacobson. His father was the family’s breadwinner, and his death left them destitute.

“Growing up, there were many nights I slept outside in the cold and the dark. I often went to bed without food. I know what hardship and struggle are. When my father died, life became a struggle.”

Raymond said his father’s murder left him heartbroken and angry. He felt renewed anger after watching the documentary and seeing that Van Schoor still feels no remorse for what he did. For 35 years, Raymond was haunted by dreams of his father, unable to find peace.

“My life would have been very different if Van Schoor had never killed my father. I was a good rugby player, and my father also loved rugby and always played it with me. If he had lived, I could have gone on to play for the Springboks,” he said.

Raymond never threw away his father’s maroon rugby shirt, which reminded him of his dad and assuaged the pain of his absence. Only the rugby shirt and the memories of his father’s love, hugs and smile sustained him.

• The Apartheid Killer will be available on BBC News Africa’s YouTube channel from Monday.