Part One: Louis van Schoor: The Deadliest Security Guard in History

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media Ah, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a
podcast where I the host, Robert Evans, am pretty hungover
because last night I saw Twisters.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Molly, Molly Conger our guest for today. Have you seen
Twisters or Twister? You know the classic film that it's
based on.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
I assume I've seen the original, you know in snippets
on T and T as a child.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
You wouldn't forget it. One of the great Phil Paxton.

Speaker 3 (00:32):
Roles So's Twisters Too is like the son of the original,
The son is the original Twister, like just put they
just put an s on it, which is fine.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
But it's the son of the original Torneo trying to
reckon with his father's Well.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
That's one of the through lines with both movies is
that all of both 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 that's what they're trying to do, is murder
a tornado and vengeance because she lost all of her

(01:21):
friends to a tornado.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
It was It's great.

Speaker 4 (01:24):
It was described to me by a friend who saw
it as Glenn Powell in a very long Wrangler jeans ad.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Oh he is, so you know how you know, Molly,
how like some 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.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Right, Twister, this time is personal.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
Wasn't that 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.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
I don't feel like that's the thing anyone would do
on a regular basis.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
No, it was like you know, the guys who like
blogged about you know, they didn't wash their jeans. They
put them in a freezer instead.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
I don't understand jeans, guys. I never liked jeans. But
this movie's 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.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
Well, how else would you get whatever you put it
in the tornado tornado? Yeah, I mean, I guess you
could feed it to a cow. I know the Twister
likes to eat cows.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
They only feed things to the tornado in the way
that is the most dangerous they could possibly do. Although
one of the other through lines in the Twister universe
is that automotive glasses invulnerable, cannot be harmed.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
You are cyber trucks.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
It's great stuff, great movie. What's different about them is
the first movie is like Oklahoma porn, and that you're
watching Oklahoma be destroyed, and that's great because it's a terrible.

Speaker 3 (03:06):
Place people like you especially Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, yeah, this one. It's like Oklahoma porn. But they
love Oklahoma, although they do they do have the tornado
attack a rodeo which is a great seat.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
I hope Party Bus the Rodeo Bowl was safe.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
I think the well No, actually, the bulls get sucked up.
A lot of things get sucked into tornadoes in this movie.
There's a high body count. It's great, good movie.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
I enjoyed it.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
I got very drunk and now my head hurts. How
are you, Molly?

Speaker 3 (03:40):
Oh, I'm doing great today.

Speaker 4 (03:42):
Robert, would you buy the Glen Powell jeans?

Speaker 2 (03:47):
No, because those jeans would clearly only fit Glenn Powell.

Speaker 4 (03:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:52):
Oh, and you're at a phase of your life now
where comfortable pants are an affordable luxury.

Speaker 4 (03:57):
I like to think Glenn Powell's either three D printed,
made from AI or the ink might have just run
out a little bit.

Speaker 3 (04:05):
I'm googling Glenn Powell. I don't know what.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
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 like he's got

(04:28):
like resting family annihilator face, one of those guys who
there's a terrible crime lingering inside you somewhere.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah, did this man exist before? If never? He doesn't
look familiar to me at all.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
He's I don't know if I'd seen him in anything
before Twisters.

Speaker 4 (04:44):
I always he has kids three d No, He's been
everywhere for like the last year. It's been very big
in my group chat. We've been talking about why why
this man is being forced upon all of us? And
now he's reached you, Robert, he's getting to me.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
I gotta say, honestly, downgrade from Bill Paxton. But what
isn't a downgrade from Bill Paxton? That man had a
great face? Oh Bill?

Speaker 4 (05:09):
And now and now that is the cold open, cold
open has done.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
That's is it done?

Speaker 2 (05:14):
Oh shit, Molly, today we're talking about apartheid. Oh and
we're back apartheid. I hardly know, Tiede. That doesn't the
joke doesn't work that way.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
It worked in writing speaking.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
I really work in writing because is not a thing
you know, or a name or anything like that.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
Molly.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
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 bastard's way to do this part.

Speaker 3 (05:52):
I didn't have a childhood we can examine.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Uh yeah, well arguable. But you know, you have your
new pot cast 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.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
Turns out they're usually perverts.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, they're usually some usually sex crimes, usually some sort
of pervert shit.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
The first couple of groups 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.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
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 cringe worthy to ninety percent of the population probably
helped 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,

(06:54):
otherwise it can curdle. Now, we don't know what perversion
the object 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 guy is appropriate both because
of your show and because the like on the week

(07:14):
we record this. One of the big news stories is
that a right wing paramilitary mob supported by members of
the Kanesset has laid siege to an IDF base in
Israel and defensive soldiers who carried out gang rape and
torture on Palestinian prisoners. You know, 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.

(07:34):
But the gist of it is they won. Those guys
got released, and that's pretty bad. There was some talk
that like 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 Kannesset about it, and one lawmaker

(07:56):
was like, is it legitimate to shove a stick into
someone's rectum? And another parliamentarian was like, yeah, if he's
a Hammas militant, everything is legitimate. And it's 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

(08:16):
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, But it's it's
usually not the scary thing they say.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
It is they found a way to make prison break uncool.
Like normally a mob storming a prison would be no
storming prisons. Yeah, not this, but really, they really wrecked it.
They really wrecked it.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
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 want a boxing match.
You hate the Olympics for all of the good reasons
to hate the Olympics, not because.

Speaker 3 (09:01):
It's you know, satanic grooming of your children. What comes
of it?

Speaker 2 (09:05):
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,

(09:25):
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 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

(09:49):
a terrorist, right, Like That's 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 acts of police violence. Right.
The police are kind of going to be oftentimes your

(10:12):
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 US 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

(10:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:51):
Right.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
It happens every single time, and it's actually going to
happen in this story because the subject of our episodes
is a 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 and apartheid South Africa.

(11:13):
His name, Oh yeah, no yet we are 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 Lewis ben Shore. Now,
because this isn't apartheid episode, it is going to be

(11:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
And we can pronounce the Dutch as badly as we want.
We're not going to do well, We're not going to.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
This first name might got our bad Guy's full name
was cybrind Jacobus loudwick Us van Schure, which and.

Speaker 3 (11:58):
We're not looking up how to actually pronounce that. Well, no,
we're not.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
He doesn't deserve it, although I will tell you load
Wickus is where we get the Lewis, which I guess
makes sense, like if I knew a load Wickss, I
would probably call him Lewis, because that's that's a that's
quite a name to have to say. Although I do
think I'm getting the wickest part right, just because I
watched the movie District nine in preparation for this, you know,

(12:23):
which really really reminded me how much CGI has aged
in the last what has it been twenty years? Anyway,
cybri and Jacobus Loadwikes fan sure was born at some
point in nineteen fifty one in South Africa. This is
one of those guys where we really don't know a
whole lot about his childhood given where he lived much
of his life. He may have been born in East London,

(12:45):
which is a city, not a part of London, 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 well and dreary, which is what they did
to a lot of the world's.

Speaker 3 (13:02):
Bringing a little bit of.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
Home, Yeah, bringing a little bit of home along with
your terrible cuisine. Now, I hope most listeners are at
least broadly familiar with the concept of apartheid in South Africa,
which literally means separateness in Afrikaans what became South Africa.
The country started as a colony of the Dutch East
India Company in the seventeenth century. The mission initially was

(13:24):
purely capitalist in the most mercenary sense imaginable. The most
notable early official was a guy named Jan von Reibek,
who arrived in sixteen fifty two 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

(13:47):
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 boats to take away. So they launch raids
on company farms and there's some small battles between guards

(14:08):
and local warriors. Much of the violence is centered around
or in response to, cattle raids by the indigenous Kokoy people.
Van Rybeck felt like the problem could be solved by
making it more of a pain in the ass for
the Kokoi to access their ancestral lands. So in sixteen
fifty nine he had his forces start to build a
giant fence. As is always the case, whenever you build

(14:30):
a fence with guard towers, you're gonna 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 listed 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.

Speaker 3 (14:50):
Gangs on what is he maleficent like building a big
thorny hedge.

Speaker 2 (14:55):
It's a very Disney racism fence that Yan is created here.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
I mean, I guess that's eco friendly, right? Was he
using species? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (15:05):
You can't fault him for being green. I will say
that he at least is an environmentally friendly architect of
the earliest stages of the apartheid system. As an article
on the hedge fence by Zobeta 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

(15:26):
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 Reibeck'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

(15:49):
that ensued. For you know, they had a war. They
had wars and stuff alast for the Boers and for
everyone else. Really, the British were also really interested in
having some of this land and will to deploy better,
more competent violence to do it. They took the Cape
Colony in seventeen ninety five, abolished Dutch as the language
of administration because fuck you guys, that's why.

Speaker 3 (16:11):
And by the.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
End of the eighteen hundreds, you know, things are sailing
along well. The British empires 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 like improve
race wise during the time they're in charge of South Africa.
For you know, for instance, they end slavery right like

(16:34):
within the British Empire, which includes this, slavery becomes legal
in the mid eighteen hundreds. 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

(16:56):
journalist Heidi Holland's book The Color of Murder does a
decent job of setting up the next few moves. Around
eighteen thirty eight, clinging to a dream of racial exclusivity,
but leaving behind their homes in the fields they had cultivated,
the Afrikaaners set out to escape the British by migrating
northwards across the Drakensburg Mountains into Natal and over the
Orange River into the Transvall the great tracks some bloody

(17:17):
nineteenth century battles with Zulu warriors and their defeat in
the war with the British seventy years later helped create
a fierce nationalism among the Afrikaaners. The concentration camps of
the Anglo Boer War, in which men, women and children
perished at the hands of the British, left Afrikaaners a
profoundly defeated tribe with a defensive psyche that was to
have disastrous repercussions in later years. Now, we've talked in

(17:40):
this podcast about how one of the first modern concentration
camps was set up by the British during the Boer
War and they were in turning, they turned black South
Africans and Boers, right, and they killed a significant chunk
of the Boer population through these camps, Like these were
really terrible places, thought until they read Heidi's book about

(18:02):
how that chapter played into the apartheid government. Right, 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,

(18:25):
we are owed 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 kicked 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

(18:46):
and I am going to go find someone weaker to
bully the helly the hell out of right, Like, that's
a big part of the actual psyche of apartheid.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
You go fuck up the bread, Like, come on, guys,
you know, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna throw it
out here. Take Manchester. You 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 gonna complain.
If somebody is like, hey, you want to come to
a free Manchester from the Bower's rally, I'm going to
say no, let them have it.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
I'm fine with that. That just doesn't sound like my business.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, it's not my business. So something happens to Manchester.

Speaker 3 (19:27):
Some what are they called menkunions, They're going to be
really Matt Robert, Oh.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, there's gonna be a lot of
Mancoonian 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 at that point. Right,
South Africa becomes independent pretty early. It's the same status

(19:50):
Canada has obviously as Americans. It's Molly and i'ed 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.

Speaker 3 (20:07):
Swans in Canada belong to the.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
King too, 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.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
But whatever, I don't think they could do it again.

Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah, I don't think they. 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?

Speaker 3 (20:43):
I think you're making it up.

Speaker 2 (20:45):
No, no, no, it's a John Goodman movie where a
bunch of yokels from the Great Lakes region invade Canada.
It's a classic. I need to watch it with Garrison.
The film is just Canadian Bacon, Okay, Okay, So that's
kind of.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
A mouthful for a title.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yeah, well, Canadian Bacon's a fine title. It's a good
movie anyway.

Speaker 3 (21:06):
So yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
South Africa gets its independence pretty early in the nineteenth century,
more or less, but domestic peace is elusive. There are
tensions not only between black and white, but between English
speaking whites and Boers. Eventually, the Afrikaaners won in nineteen
forty eight and the National Party came to power, pushing
a program of enforced racial separatism backed by state violence.

(21:30):
And this is kind of when apartheid officially slides into
being right. You had aspects of that enforced by racial
laws that had pre existed it back to the colonial era.
But it's the National Party that comes to power with
the problems that basically, we are going to make, you know,
separate white and black people, right like that, that's our program.

(21:51):
One of the first architects of the system is a
guy named Hendrik ver Ward who became leader of the country.
He started out as 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 huers of
wood and drawers of water. So that's a good basis

(22:12):
for a stable society. Race becomes a strictly managed legal category,
marked an ID 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

(22:33):
government developed a wider variety of tools, civil and military
for this purpose. One of these tools was Section forty
nine of the Criminal Procedures 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 forty nine and its predecessors had existed

(22:54):
in various forms in South African law back to the
colonial era, but the most significant amendment of the apartheid
era in nineteen seventy seven. 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

(23:15):
an attempt to arrest him is being made, or resists
such attempt and flees, the person so authorized may, in
order to affect 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. Where the
person concerned is to be arrested for an offense referred
to in Schedule one, or is to be arrested on

(23:37):
the ground that he is reasonably suspected of having committed
such an offense, and to 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.

Speaker 3 (23:52):
So they just sort of codified what cops already do
when they shoot a fourteen year old boy in the back.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
Yes, and this is a you noted, not so different
from how the cops. 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

(24:18):
his 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.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
The difference is it doesn't allow it. It sounds like
it man did al.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
Well, it could be argued to mandate it, right.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
Because whereas American police, you know, over and over again,
this goes to court court 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 interact.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
That's how the laws. I don't think anyone. I've never
come across cases people being punished for not shooting someone
in the back. But there's 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

(25:15):
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 US 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.

Speaker 3 (25:36):
Right, Oh, that's not who you want doing this. No, No,
it is not good. No, it is.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Not and it is not going to end well. One
South African legal expert analyzing this law before it was
amended in nineteen ninety eight, noted as described in a
study by Cartha Ghizy Sammy Kistan of the University of
on Pretoria in response to the confirment of such open
ended powers on the arrestor to shoot and kill. For instance,
a young child who had stolen or was reasonably suspected

(26:02):
of having stolen an item of such relatively trivial value
as an apple and who had fled an arrest could
be shot.

Speaker 3 (26:08):
Oh no, So like at this point, we're talking like
CBS door security guard run to cops just shooting children.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah, you jack an apple and the rent a cop
can empty a nine millimeter into your back, perfectly legal.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
I feel like that's going to escalate.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Really, it's going to happen a lot. Now. This brings
us back to our weird little guy for this episode,
Lewis van Schore. Now, I found very little that's verifiable
about his childhood. In 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,

(26:46):
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 in
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 I don't think

(27:07):
he's motivated by racism. We'll talk about this because this
is debatable. I think this guy's just a serial killer
and the best way to do that is going to
be getting into law enforcement and apartheid South 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.

Speaker 3 (27:28):
Just a great opportunity, It's just a.

Speaker 2 (27:30):
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 sixteen 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 as

(27:52):
a teenage boy, I a problem with that system. Really
bad idea, but worst person to give a gun and
a bad's The fact that he would get to carry
a gun seems to have been a major part of
why he wanted to do this, right. He specifically became
a cop because he wanted to walk around with a gun.
Van Shure was big. He's a physically powerful guy. Basically,

(28:15):
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

(28:36):
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 nineteen ten,
many of the first detection dogs were used for tracking,
and by the nineteen thirties there were several hundred police
dogs in service and a breeding program. I do love

(28:59):
that a dog, right.

Speaker 3 (29:01):
Perfect, she's mad.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
No poor dogs, although these are the dogs they breed
in South Africa to be race violence dogs are pretty
brutal animals.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
You do have to say, do you know what kind
of dogs they were fond of?

Speaker 2 (29:18):
They start with like German shepherds, but they kind of
breed their own, like these are our South African doing
race violence.

Speaker 3 (29:25):
Dogs, right, Oh, they made they made special ones.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
Everyone kind of does. You know, when you get when
you develop your own system of race based dog based
race based violence, you're gonna make your own dogs for
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 uh or wherever. Yeah, right, exactly, the.

Speaker 3 (29:52):
Head you know what you want to use native flora and.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
Fauna, exactly exactly. Thank thank you for understanding, Molly.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
I'm trying to see a picture of these dogs.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
It's like I'm just trying to talking about dogs using Yeah,
so no police dogs. There's initially like if the police
us 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,

(30:23):
our audience is kind of a captive population. And here's
these ads.

Speaker 3 (30:35):
And we.

Speaker 4 (30:41):
What was happening there? What are you doing? Did you
did you forget what you were doing? What happened?

Speaker 3 (30:46):
Nothing?

Speaker 2 (30:46):
We're back, We're back, We're here, We're here.

Speaker 3 (30:50):
Why not?

Speaker 2 (30:51):
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 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. And once that happens, the kind
of the prescription against using dogs to hurt people goes

(31:16):
away very quickly.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
Right.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
Professor Sandra Swartz studies the use of dogs and apartheid policing,
and she claims, quote things changed fast with the increasingly
heavy hand of the apartheid state in nineteen sixty one
and SAPs study toward Europe shifted the focus of canine policing.
Sharpville had occurred and the police wanted a different kind
of dog, one that could impose physical and psychological order
on the African population. These crew dogs, mainly German shepherds,

(31:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
No one likes apartheid thing, rather get shot.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
Well, yeah, of course, like almost certainly, yes, absolutely, I'm
much less scared of 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.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
One bullet hole you can you can stitch that up.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
Yeah, geez, 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.

Speaker 3 (32:31):
Okay, clarification, Robert.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
They just happen a lot.

Speaker 3 (32:35):
You know, you live at Robert dogfight ring.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
People don't take care of their dogs. Everyone's on methamphetamine.
Not me, but everyone else. A lot of dogs have
a lot of fights, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (32:46):
What you're telling me is that you did method a dogfight.

Speaker 4 (32:50):
That's basically what I got from that as well.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
There's pieces of that in my life, Mollie, but not
the whole picture in Oklahoma. It wasn't in Oaklan. I mean,
I saw dog fights in Oklahoma, but I was too
young to be doing.

Speaker 3 (33:03):
Met Molly.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
In nineteen seventy six, midway through Lewis's policing career, dogs
became targets of gorilla attacks on the police. A school
uprising that year began with the killing of a police
dog and some 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.

(33:29):
And they would do it regrettably, respect They would do
it pretty brutally. They necklaced some of these dogs, which
was a method of actually 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

(33:51):
extends to you know, they do it to some captured dogs.
Eventually they do it to other people too. But it's basically,
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 the people who might be
thinking of talking to the cops probably understand the message.

(34:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
And it's like data Toulpicard. Sometimes terrorism is the answer.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
Sometimes terrorism is the answer. Although I do think maybe
you didn't need to necklace the dogs, but I'm not
going to I'm mon, throw the apartheid government of you.
You know, you guys did what you what you thought
you had to do.

Speaker 4 (34:49):
For necklace dog apologists.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
Yeah, these dogs were evil.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (35:07):
As well, base And to be fair, none of those
dogs that none of them meet a fine end. I
mean even still today no modern American policing g average
police dog dies from being left in a hot car.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, it happens 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?

Speaker 3 (35:33):
Anyway?

Speaker 2 (35:33):
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 Schwart. This

(35:56):
story is from nineteen ninety eight, 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 or 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.

(36:18):
The police initially demanded a bribe, then turned the suspects
in debate by passing 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 brise until

(36:41):
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

(37:03):
into a frenzy. And this video of police shaking down
people for bribes and then having their dog maul them.
Police are like prep 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
like that's that's that's how apartheid cops. You know, all

(37:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
It's not regrettable violence for them. It's it's like a
foam lobby.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
But 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's sicked on people he always described as protesters
and criminals. Nearly all of these people, he admitted, were black.

(37:58):
He said of this that it was quot 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.

Speaker 3 (38:08):
Yeah, that really works on two terrible lives.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
Yes, are you saying it's like hunting a different species
than you normally hunt.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
Or a different species like you.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:26):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
Yeah, No, it's that's not good. It's not good on
any level.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
He's not good at any level. And it's confusing wordplay.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
Doesn't normally hunt people, but he doesn't see black people
like he does.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
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

(39:08):
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, is this he is this creature
positioned between the citizenry, the citizenry and the state and
kind of reduced to animal violence in order to serve

(39:28):
a role protecting the state from its citizenry, you know.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
And this sort of like barely contains like snapping its
jaws at the end of it, barely.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
Barely capable of thought, right, Like, that's Lewis, and that's
these these dogs that are bred just to maame people.
Numerous friends and family members describe Lewis as not a
bright guy and someone who is often prone to violence.
His colleagues on the force may believed that this may
have been something he did out of insecurity, that he
was so violent because he thought he was dumb. One

(39:59):
colleagues said he was not a clever bloke, but he
would go to Helen 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.

Speaker 3 (40:12):
I've met some cops, right, that's a cop.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
Yeah, that sounds about right.

Speaker 3 (40:19):
Now.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
The picture of 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 Wars squad. He also starred in four
wheel drive challenges, racing over hillsides and beaches and his

(40:42):
superpowered 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 is a

(41:03):
barefoot runner too.

Speaker 1 (41:04):
I'm so.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
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?

Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yes, it's the only sport that South Africans love. That's
probably not true. But I'm not feeling very charitable towards.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
South Africa today, or should you on any day? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (41:24):
I think it's I think it's actually it's the Eastern
Capes Tug of Wars squad, so that might be just
a Tug of War squad that he was also in.
And he's on the police rugby team.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
Okay, so he's just playing like like just been like a.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
Local yeah, kind of sporting league thing.

Speaker 3 (41:39):
Yeah, that's good for men to have hobbies.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
It's good for men to have some hobbies.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
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 serious You could call him a serial monogamist.
He's married four times before age forty, so he's not

(42:16):
great at being married, and he meets it.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
Do these all and divorce? Oh yes, yes, okay, they're alive. Yes,
they are alive.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
They are alive. You're not going to be surprised to
hear that. There's some spousal abuse in this story.

Speaker 3 (42:29):
But oh, he wasn't a kind.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
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 stake 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 and a fuck his wife.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
Seems the least efficient way to do that.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
He's an enormous man.

Speaker 3 (42:57):
You have not like normally a fishing trip is a
good alibi, but you're will him.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
Somehow the tactic worked. So maybe Bev just didn't like
smart men.

Speaker 3 (43:10):
It's just like bruised idiots like us. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
She leaves her husband for for Lewis, and the couple
gets married in nineteen seventy eight. They set up a
home with Beverly's three young sons on a small farm.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
So he seems like the kind of guy who would
be totally chill raising another man's sons. I think that's issues.
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 step dad.

Speaker 2 (43:38):
And I don't think good, but like not bad in
any particular way.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
I can still be surprised.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Yeah, yeah, I kind of was like, oh boy, I
bet this kid's doing guys doing some fucked up shit too.
And like now his kids, like said, seem to feel
pretty positively towards him, So I don't know.

Speaker 3 (43:56):
Okay, okay, I judged unfairly.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
Yeah, these are so he's basically has a homestead, right,
He and Bev are homesteading, right, And this is obviously
something people in the US do, I do it, but
it's part of the white South African dream. It is
a Boer tradition right before, right, right, and this 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 he

(44:20):
used to be someone else's and build a homestead, you know.
In nineteen seventy nine, 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 sons, have
testified that he beat Lewis beat their mother right, although

(44:40):
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
Schure 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

(45:01):
helped was a guy named Basil Niemann, who was later
charged in court for sicking his German shepherds on an
elderly black farm worker. Nieman 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,

(45:25):
like handing out posters that show a growling German shepherd
and the slogan I'll be your watchdog. Yeah, the meaning
of those sides was not missed by anybody, right Like, yeah, he.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
Wasn't ted Kennedy running with flyers and say like, you know,
I'll drive you Gus, I'll drive the legislative vehicle. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Now, for most of Lewis's life, South Africa had been
embroiled in the Namibian War of Independence, which his people
generally called the angle In Bush War. This was a
hideous little conflict that ranged from the late sixties to
nineteen ninety, 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

(46:08):
the border, but the nature of the conflict means that
they are engaged in combat. Right, at least that happens
sometimes 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

(46:30):
pretty sure Bev is the one telling the truth here.
Wanting to fight in the angle In Bush War is
a very Lewis thing, So I'm gonna guess she's probably
given us the truth. More or less either way. Lewis
quits the police in nineteen eighty. He says, because I
just didn't want to fight anymore, and Beverly is like, well,
I made him quit the police because he was cheating

(46:51):
on me constantly, and I wanted him to get a
job closer to home so that he would cheat on
me slightly.

Speaker 3 (46:57):
Less and for at that point, girl, just get out.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
Yeah, Bev is kind of Bev's a piece of shit too,
that's it. She deserves the abuse, but she's also going
to be a terrible person in this story, so her
judgment's not great.

Speaker 3 (47:11):
Right.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
Lewis does try to do as she asks for a while.
He gets a job at a carpet store.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
What are those skills does this man have? Yeah, Like,
there's no attack ons 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

(47:38):
get all of it. But he gets a job at
a carpet company, that his wife owns. But Lewis fan
sure not the kind of man who wants to work
at a carpet store, right, Like, he's just not not
a great salesman.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Not a great salesman, not a lot of adrenaline in
selling carpets.

Speaker 3 (47:54):
You know, you can't bully a customer into buying a rug.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
Yeah, I think Lewis 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 in 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

(48:19):
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 turn him down. Now we
don't really know why possible. You know, he's in his
like thirties, something like that, forty closing in on forty.

(48:42):
And you know, by this point it's the early nineteen eighties,
mid eighties, and the apartheid regime is facing like a
lot more condemnation from the international community, and the gorilla
war rights has kind of from within has stepped up
several notch and a lot of these gorilla a lot
of attacks, right, A lot of the terrorist attacks on
the state are inspired by police violence. Right, Like the

(49:06):
people who are trying to tear down the system get
angry because the cops do something brutal and they carry
out an attack.

Speaker 3 (49:13):
Right.

Speaker 2 (49:14):
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 un what
it would be the.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
Best idea any of those guys ever had.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
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. It's purview proceeded directly from
a number of the social changes that had swept South

(49:52):
Africa in the last few years. As I said in
nineteen seventy seven, the criminal Code is amended to basically
allow security guards to murder people for unning away. Up
to the end of the seventies, 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,

(50:13):
and the police are like, we don't want to do
this anymore. Lewis's boss at Falcon, Major CJH. 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 form firm. Major later told a reporter I
know Van Schure was was the kind of bloke that
liked to use his firearm. That I know because I

(50:34):
killed one and he used to say, ha, I'm ahead
of you.

Speaker 4 (50:37):
This is this is not lego Ghibli and those rings
just murderer kills.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
You're just murderers. You are not in a sure so
they're just they're making like what like furgated neighborhoods like
a It hasually small businesses. I think I think it's
mostly like 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.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
Well, they are accountable to the police, but the way
that the police monitor them is by going good job.

Speaker 3 (51:13):
This is probably going to go good.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
Yeah, it's going to be great. But you know what
else is going to be great? Molly?

Speaker 1 (51:17):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Is it products and services?

Speaker 2 (51:19):
I hope it's not an ad for Falcon security. That
would be really awkward.

Speaker 3 (51:23):
A simply say ad yeah, simply.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
Safe, simply safe. Now we've got a guy with a gun. Uh,
we're back 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 eighties. Some of what

(51:48):
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,
those during that three year period. What we know is
that Section forty nine provided Clote and Van Schuur with
all the legal cover for murder they needed. So long
as they argued that they had tried to get a

(52:10):
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 burst after this
and a real prominent bigot. But she does not seem

(52:32):
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 nineteen eighty three. Right now,
the murder, it may, I mean she says that, like
she says that him taking this job was like the

(52:54):
final straw, right, and maybe I.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
Could accept one or the other. But yeah, chanting she
did on by a serial killer, absolutely not.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
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 how
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.

(53:27):
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, but yeah, you know that's
she's four. Lewis continued to run through ryot wives at
a steady rate after this. He divorced the teacher two

(53:48):
years later after having two daughters with her. No not
I love match, and then in nineteen ninety 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 in society. As

(54:08):
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 okay, a little rude. The papers at the time
always like to tell you when his wives are fat,
which I think is gross. The arm chair psychiatry done

(54:30):
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 people.

Speaker 3 (54:48):
Some of them were meek and some were just fat.
Maybe she was strong and fack.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Bev gets fat, which is part of why I think
these journalists are like, she's mentally weaker than him, but
like she's like a multi milli millionaire entrepreneur. I don't
understand why you think she's mentally weak.

Speaker 3 (55:05):
So we're really drawing a lot of conclusions about the
wives here.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
Yeah, I might say the single mother who was 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.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
Well, I mean he does it for the love of
the game. He does do it for the.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
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 nineteen eighties, Falcon Security had a contract
to protect seventy percent 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

(55:44):
in to trim the grass, periodically murdering young men who
had the temerity to commit property crime and thus keeping
criminality under wraps.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
Is A.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
Jacobson, a South African journalist, claims he was a kind
of vigilante killer. He was a dirty, hairy character. These
weren't intruders who were, in a lot of cases pretty desperate,
digging through bins, maybe stealing some food. Petty criminals do
these people don't realize this is real life.

Speaker 3 (56:08):
This is not a movie, isn't a TV show? What
are you doing about you're not reducing the amount of
violence in the community by killing people in the parking lot.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (56:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (56:52):
I guess.

Speaker 3 (56:53):
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's he is.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
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 experts may be. Yeah, he shoots people. He

(57:25):
shoots people so many times.

Speaker 3 (57:27):
So is there a separate thriving industry of like whoever
comes and picks up the bodies?

Speaker 2 (57:32):
I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of
work for 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 grades.

Speaker 3 (57:40):
He just thinks he's like the season one and two
the Arrow on CW. What is happening here? I can't
comment on this an amazing shot, and like everyone he
shoots dies or is he shooting ten guys a week?
He's ten guys a week.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (58:02):
Bruh, Stop, that's weird. That's just being a murderer.

Speaker 2 (58:07):
I don't think it's weird. That's yeah, that's just being
a murder. Murderer. Yeah, I'm going to read you for
an example of how the kind of murders he's committing.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
Here's an excerpt from.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
A BBC report in a particularly brutal case. On eleventh
July nineteen eighty eight, Van Shore shot a fourteen 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.

(58:37):
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.

Speaker 3 (58:55):
Wait, so even under this like bizarre framework where it's
cool to shoot the seat in the back while he
runs away, like you can't this.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
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 ship to me. Guess who the cops believe.

Speaker 3 (59:14):
Yeah. Oh, they don't have like no ballistics or anything.
They're not doing any doing science.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
Yeah, they're not doing that on these cases A working
a part time in the floor.

Speaker 3 (59:27):
They don't come with.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
Thelster walking around in there doing you don't give a ship.
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 an entering
and basically all of the survivors get charged in like

(59:50):
sentenced for breaking an entering after Lewis nearly murders them.

Speaker 3 (59:56):
So that's cool.

Speaker 2 (59:57):
Uh. Now, the good news is that in this case,
the but Lewis shot survived. But Lewis 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?

Speaker 3 (01:00:15):
Oh, you know, not as good as about an hour ago,
but still pretty good?

Speaker 4 (01:00:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:00:20):
Great, excellent.

Speaker 4 (01:00:22):
Well, Molly, do you have anything you want to before.

Speaker 3 (01:00:27):
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, well, welcome to the club.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
Well, yeah, I think you should not use dogs as weapons,
but you might use a weapon as a dog, you know,
try that out, you know, pick up.

Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
Instead of any of that, you should open your podcast
app of choice and subscribe to Weird Little Guys, my
new weekly show.

Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
Yeah, subscribe to Weird Little Guys. Then put a put
a dog lee sure out of Thompson submachine gun and
just drag it into the park, you know, and give
everyone a good time.

Speaker 4 (01:01:06):
And uh, because people, people have been asking, uh. The
the Apple ad free version of our network, cooler Zone
Media is available now and the Android version is getting
so unbelievably close, so close, so close, friends.

Speaker 3 (01:01:24):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Well everyone, this has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about a piece of ship. And this this this week
we got a real, real piece of ship for you.
So be back, enjoy, enjoy the ship. Suck up this ship,
you know, slip up the ship everyone. There will be
more on Thursday.

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):
Bye bye.

Speaker 4 (01:01:48):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast m

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Louis van Schoor: The Deadliest Security Guard in History