My racist mother had to die

Ten years ago, the white residents of East London in South Africa were driving around with "I Love Louis" stickers on their cars, decorated with three bullet holes through a heart, in protest at the trial of South Africa's most prolific murderer. The police, magistrates and apartheid-era political establishment of the dilapidated port had long protected Sybrand Jacobus Lodewikus van Schoor - Louis to his friends - as he shot 101 people over four years, killing 39 including children.

Van Schoor was a former policeman turned security guard and, as far as the city's whites were concerned, he was doing a good job at keeping the crime statistics down. But the dead and wounded had two things in common. They were all black or "coloured" (mixed race) and not one was carrying a gun.

The bulky Afrikaner with his long, flowing beard inspired terror among the city's black population, who called him "Jesus" because of his appearance. That was how East London's elders liked it - until apartheid imploded and the time came to call Van Schoor to account. When he was finally convicted of murdering seven people - a fraction of the tally but enough to put him away for 20 years - Van Schoor said that his only regret was being parted from his then 12-year-old daughter, Sabrina. Now it is Sabrina's turn to be locked up for murder, over the protests of a section of East London citizenry. Except that this time, the people who once lived in fear of her father are giving her their support.

The city's black and "coloured" residents have turned out in force to cheer Louis van Schoor's daughter for a slaying that they describe as a blow against racism. Even Sabrina's lawyer hailed her as a "heroine" for hiring a hitman to slit her mother's throat.

But her motive was very different from her father's. Among Louis's victims were Liefe Peters, 13, and his friend, John Swartbooi, 14. In 1988, they broke into the Wimpy hamburger restaurant on East London's seafront and headed for the cash register. Van Schoor pounced. He ordered the boys to walk toward the exit and not look back.

Swartbooi swung around as the first shot hit Peters and two more caught his own leg and buttock. Van Schoor hauled Swartbooi to his feet, leaned him against a table and shot him a third time before leaving him for dead. By the time the young man came to in hospital his friend was in the morgue.

Van Schoor later said it was too dark to see that the two boys were children. The response of the police and judiciary was much the same as it had always been. For years, Van Schoor got away with the killings under a South African law that permitted anyone to shoot dead a person fleeing the scene of a serious crime. Included in the definition of "serious" was petty theft if it involved trespass.

The police, magistrates and inquests routinely cleared Van Schoor of any criminal act even though survivors gave disturbing accounts of trying to surrender when they were shot or of Van Schoor snatching innocent people walking down the street, dragging them on to the premises he was guarding and shooting them. The victims were always black and their word counted for little against a white former policeman. Detectives invariably took Van Schoor's account of the killings at face value, and several times allowed him to amend his sworn statements to say he had met a legal requirement to give a warning before shooting.

At inquests, magistrates usually failed to ask a single question of Van Schoor - even when, on one occasion, he claimed that he shot a "fleeing" suspect in the chest because the man was running backwards. The pathologists' reports of shots fired within inches of victims allegedly escaping arrest sparked no greater interest among the magistrates. A single inquest in 1989 declared that Van Schoor had justifiably killed 25 of his victims. When the local MP asked that Van Schoor's gun licence be revoked, the police said they could not take away a man's livelihood.

As apartheid collapsed, the establishment was finally forced to put a stop to Van Schoor. It did so by arguing that the police and magistrates had been wrong all along. Van Schoor was eventually tried for 19 murders, convicted of seven and sentenced to 20 years. It was the biggest murder trial in South African history but barely touched most of the killings carried out by the security guard.

To many whites in East London, Van Schoor was the fall guy for apartheid's unpunished crimes. But Sabrina was also being punished. Her father and mother were already divorced, and Louis van Schoor's imprisonment was to mark the beginning of a hellish time for her.

According to Sabrina's own account, the only people who helped her out were non-white. She claimed in court that she was molested by three white men as a child. When she told her mother and brothers they laughed and called her a liar. But a "coloured" man listened and that was the start of a parallel life that few whites understood or countenanced. Sabrina's mother, Beverly, 48, was an influential businesswoman in Queenstown, about 100 miles from East London. She was a pillar of the town's white establishment, holding the local franchises for one of South Africa's leading estate agencies and an auction house. Sabrina helped her run another business, a florist and bridal boutique. After work it was a different story. Most evenings, Sabrina headed for the "coloured" suburb where she had a series of boyfriends and a part-time job at a cricket venue. Beverly didn't like it.

"Every time we used to fight, it was always about coloureds," Sabrina said in court. "She beat me with a shoe, a wooden spoon, anything she could find. She called me a whore. My mother has tried to shoot me, but she stopped before it got that far. She even stopped me from going to church because it was on a farm and I could meet people there she didn't approve of."

A woman who calls herself Beverly's best friend, Maggie Riggier, said that Sabrina's mother often hit her daughter in the face and would lock her in her bedroom to "stop her mixing with people of other races".

"[Sabrina] was hurt and scared, and a prisoner in her own home," said Riggier. "Bev used to call her a whore for 'running around with kaffirs and hotnots'. Bev hit her in the face, a lot. I saw how she treated her and I did nothing. This town will say I betrayed Bev, but she would have expected me to tell the truth."

The relationship between mother and daughter deteriorated further after Sabrina became pregnant, at 18, by a "coloured" man. Her mother pressured her into having an abortion. A year later, she was pregnant again. Sabrina said that her mother was still urging her to abort this child at five months pregnant: "My mother had found my coloured boyfriend by threatening his family. She told his mother I was a whore and because his mother was a Christian, she made her son bring me back," she said.

Sabrina's father, in prison, opined that an abortion would be wrong. His daughter gave birth to a girl, Tatum. "That baby was black when she came out," said Riggier. "And Bev just wept. I said something crazy, stupid, that we could make its skin lighter by putting it under a light: anything to console her. Things got worse after that."

One of Sabrina's former boyfriends, Navin Neermul, described the lengths that Beverly went to. "Her mother came over with two security guards to tell me that if I didn't stop seeing her daughter, something would happen to me. She was a very arrogant and racist person," he said.

Riggier said that Beverly believed her daughter's attraction to black men was a reaction to her father's crimes: "Bev said that maybe it's because her father shot those blacks and she's trying to rectify it by sleeping with blacks and coloureds." Two months ago, Sabrina went in search of someone to kill her mother. She found Feza Mdutshane, 27. One morning in late March, Sabrina opened the door to Mdutshane and told him to wait quietly while she went to her mother's room to fetch her baby. She found Beverly putting on her make-up in her night dress. Sabrina picked up Tatum and walked out of the room as the killer entered. He slit Beverly's throat with a breadknife. Sabrina's only comment after the murder was: "Are you sure she's dead?"

In payment, Sabrina gave the killer some cash, the keys to her VW Golf and her mother's mobile phone. She told police that her car had been stolen. Detectives soon tracked Mdutshane as he was using Beverly's phone, and the killer confessed. So did Sabrina, once she got to court. "I did do this to liberate myself," she said. "I did ask him to kill my mother. I did it out of anger. It was preplanned. I tried to stop it once or twice but it had gone so far I couldn't."

The prosecutor, Malherbe Marais, tried to get witnesses to admit that it was the "low morality" of Sabrina's boyfriends that her mother objected to, not their race. But none could be shifted from their view that it was all down to colour.

As Sabrina admitted matricide in court, there were cheers from the public gallery from dozens of black and "coloured" supporters. Among them was Maria Phillips. "She was just doing exactly what Mr [Nelson] Mandela said - making friends with people of different colours. But her mother tried to stop it. She was a very rude lady," she told a local newspaper.

"She liberated herself from racial oppression, just as Africans in this country had to do," Sabrina's lawyer, Siphiwo Burwana, told the court.

Inside Fort Glamorgan prison in East London, Louis van Schoor saw it differently. He told his spiritual counsellor, John Stoltz: "I let her down; I wasn't there for her. Please tell her that I love her."