A white South African man convicted of attacking and killing 39 black people during the apartheid era has died days after admitting police involvement in his crimes.

A former white South African security guard who confessed to killing dozens of black people during apartheid has died. BBC News claimed that police officers were complicit in his reign of terror, is dead.

In a series of chilling interviews given to a British television station just every week before his death, 72-year-old Louis Van Schoor revealed that law enforcement officers were deeply involved in his crimes and should share the blame for 39 killings he confessed to while working as a security guard in the late Eighties.

Van Schoor died of sepsis brought on by a leg infection. Families of his victims still want justice. “He made it out alive!” Marlene Mvumbi said whose brother was amongst the victims. “I hope they continue to reopen these cases. The families deserve justice. We got nothing and the pain is still the same”

All his victims were black.

Van Schoor didn’t name any names in the report, and there is no such thing as a direct confirmation of his claims about the involvement of South African police officers, who were notorious for his or her brutal methods of suppressing activism and enforcing racial segregation during the apartheid era.

Despite confessing to committing at the very least 39 murders, Van Schoor was convicted of just seven murders and sentenced to greater than 90 years in prison.

However, a judge allowed the sentences to be served concurrently, resulting in his early release on parole in 2004 after serving just 12 years of his sentence.

The station’s investigation into Van Schoor goals to get to the bottom of the case and explain why South African authorities have yet to elucidate why his killings weren’t reassessed after the end of apartheid.

During questioning, the former policeman insisted he never intended to “kill black people” and denied being a racist, although he admitted that he found the persecution of black people “exciting.”

Before becoming a security guard in 1986, Van Schoor spent 12 years with the East London Police, where he worked with “attack dogs” to trace down and arrest mostly black protesters and criminals. He compared his job to “hunting, but a different kind,” the BBC reports.

Van Schoor, once a robust and brutal man, now uses a wheelchair after having each legs amputated, a shadow of the ruthless figure he was 40 years ago, when he was generally known as the “Apartheid Killer.”

In time, Van Schoor has turn into a vagabond figure, old and frail, stooped over with an untidy, gray beard. He is unapproachable, lonely, and has no friends to talk of.

Many of his teeth rotted and fell out years ago, and his face is lined with wrinkles from years of smoking and sleepless nights.

A recent heart attack also left its mark.

But unlike many of the people he shot, Van Schoor is alive and respiration.

His wrinkled clothes, like his house, reek of cigarettes, a continuing reminder of his declining health and befitting the dark past that also weighs on his mind.

Speaking to the BBC, Van Schoor attempted to lighten the mood by telling a disturbing joke about his decision to stay conscious during an operation to amputate his legs reasonably than undergo anaesthesia – in a way bragging about his endurance.

“I was curious,” he laughed enthusiastically. “I saw them cutting… cutting the bone.”

His voice trailed off. No one else found it funny.

Van Schoor’s face became serious again as he tried to persuade BBC reporter Charlie Northcott that he was “not the monster people think he is”.

In the Eighties, Louis Van Schoor carried out a series of assassinations that left 39 people dead over a three-year period. At the same time, South Africa was under a brutal apartheid regime that enforced a racial hierarchy and brutally oppressed blacks in favor of whites.

Van Schoor’s quite a few murders put him in line with some of America’s most notorious serial killers, including Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Gary Ridgeway, generally known as the Green River Killer — all of whom were chargeable for at the very least 30 murders.

The only noticeable difference was that each one of Van Schoor’s victims were black, the youngest being just 12 years old.

The murders took place in the rugged, windy city of East London, a once-poor area in the Eastern Cape where many residents lived in slums.

Working as a security guard at greater than 70 percent of the city’s white-owned businesses, including restaurants, stores, factories, and schools, Van Schoor had the perfect cover to murder with impunity in the name of maintaining a racist system.

“He was a kind of killer-avenger. He was a Dirty Harry character,” says Isa Jacobson, a South African journalist and filmmaker who spent 20 years investigating Van Schoor’s crimes.

When he was finally caught, Van Schoor claimed that everybody he killed was a “criminal” he caught red-handed in the act of burglary.

“These were intruders who were, in many cases, very desperate. They were going through the bins, maybe stealing a little food… petty criminals,” he said ruthlessly during the interview.

He never admitted that under South African law at the time, crimes of this sort weren’t punishable by death.

Van Schoor said he sometimes carried out multiple killings in a single night, spreading terror through the black community of East London. There were rumours of a bearded man, known in Xhosa as “Whiskers,” who made people disappear after dark. But his murders weren’t carried out in secret.

From 1986 to 1989, Van Schoor personally reported every homicide to the police.

However, the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 initiated a major change in South Africa that led to the end of apartheid and the transition to democracy.

Pressure from activists and journalists led to Van Schoor’s arrest in 1991.

Van Schoor’s trial, which featured a big number of witnesses and relied on extensive forensic evidence, ended in failure as a result of the continuing influence of the apartheid system on the justice system.

Police still classify Van Schoor’s remaining 32 killings as “justifiable homicides” as a result of apartheid-era laws that allowed the use of lethal force against resisting or fleeing intruders. Van Schoor used this defense to prove his innocence, claiming his victims were attempting to escape when he shot them.

The BBC investigation, led by Jacobson, examined old police reports, autopsies and witness statements to forged doubt on Van Schoor’s “justified” shootings. Jacobson spent years digging through scattered and hidden files in Eastern Cape towns to uncover the truth.

“The whole scale of it is just mesmerizing,” Jacobson told the BBC. “It’s astonishing that any court could allow this to happen.”

Among the most shocking evidence Jacobson uncovered were survivor testimonies that contradicted Van Schoor’s claims. Wounded victims described being shot while their hands were raised in give up, or that Van Schoor taunted them before being shot. One survivor recounted asking for water after being shot, only to have Van Schoor kick him in the wound.

His weapon was a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, often loaded with hollow-point bullets to inflict serious injury on his victims. In one case, he fired eight shots at an unarmed man.

In one other case in which the victim survived, Van Schoor shot and killed a 14-year-old boy who broke right into a restaurant for change. The boy said he hid in a restroom when he saw Van Schoor but got here out when a security guard cornered him and ordered him to face against a wall, then fired multiple shots at him.

“He told me to get up but I couldn’t,” the teenager said in his recorded statement, based on the BBC. “While I was lying there, he kicked me in the mouth. He picked me up and put me on the table and then he shot me again.”

Despite his account, the boy’s allegations were dismissed, and he was charged with breaking and entering. Many other young black men and boys who reported being attacked and shot by Van Schoor were met with similar skepticism.

Incredibly, the judge presiding over Van Schoor’s trial dismissed damaging testimony, calling the witnesses “unsophisticated” and “unreliable.” There aren’t any juries in South Africa, so the judge’s decision is final.

Van Schoor’s trial sparked a deep divide, with many in East London’s white community supporting him and even promoting him with bumper stickers depicting his image and the slogan “I Love Louis” surrounded by bullet holes.

Police can reopen Van Schoor’s case at any time and review his so-called “justified” shootings because there is no such thing as a statute of limitations under South African law for prosecuting murder or attempted murder.

“Louis Van Schoor just went out and murdered people for sport,” said Dominic Jones, a journalist who helped raise awareness about the corrupt vigilante at the time of the killings.

Van Schoor was a complicated angel of death—he had it set to receive notifications at any time when a silent alarm went off at the businesses he protected, giving him a way of where an intruder was so he could confront him single-handedly.

“I was barefoot. It’s quiet. You don’t have your shoes squeaking on the tiles and stuff like that,” he said.

Van Schoor used night to his advantage while filming his crime scenes. He would sneak up on his victims from the shadows, avoid the lights, and navigate the darkness by counting on his sense of smell.

“If someone breaks in, adrenaline gives off an odor. And you can smell it,” he told the station.