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.
Molly, Molly Conger our guest for today. Have you seen Twisters or Twister? You know the classic film that it's based on.
I assume I've seen the original, you know in snippets on T and T as a child.
You wouldn't forget it. One of the great Phil Paxton.
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.
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.
But it's the son of the original Torneo trying to reckon with his father's Well.
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 friends to a tornado.
It was It's great.
It was described to me by a friend who saw it as Glenn Powell in a very long Wrangler jeans ad.
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.
Right, Twister, this time is personal.
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.
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.
I don't feel like that's the thing anyone would do on a regular basis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are cyber trucks.
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.
Place people like you especially Yeah, yeah.
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.
I hope Party Bus the Rodeo Bowl was safe.
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.
I enjoyed it.
I got very drunk and now my head hurts. How are you, Molly?
Oh, I'm doing great today.
Robert, would you buy the Glen Powell jeans?
No, because those jeans would clearly only fit Glenn Powell.
Yeah.
Oh, and you're at a phase of your life now where comfortable pants are an affordable luxury.
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.
I'm googling Glenn Powell. I don't know what.
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 like resting family annihilator face, one of those guys who there's a terrible crime lingering inside you somewhere.
Yeah, did this man exist before? If never? He doesn't look familiar to me at all.
He's I don't know if I'd seen him in anything before Twisters.
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.
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?
And now and now that is the cold open, cold open has done.
That's is it done?
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.
It worked in writing speaking.
I really work in writing because is not a thing you know, or a name or anything like that.
Molly.
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.
I didn't have a childhood we can examine.
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.
Turns out they're usually perverts.
Yeah, they're usually some usually sex crimes, usually some sort of pervert shit.
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.
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,
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
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. 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 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 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.
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.
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.
It's you know, satanic grooming of your children. What comes of it?
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, 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 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 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 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.
Right.
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. 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 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.
And we can pronounce the Dutch as badly as we want. We're not going to do well, We're not going to.
This first name might got our bad Guy's full name was cybrind Jacobus loudwick Us van Schure, which and.
We're not looking up how to actually pronounce that. Well, no, we're not.
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, 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, 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.
Bringing a little bit of.
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
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 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 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 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.
Gangs on what is he maleficent like building a big thorny hedge.
It's a very Disney racism fence that Yan is created here.
I mean, I guess that's eco friendly, right? Was he using species? Yeah?
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 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 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.
And by the.
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 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 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 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 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
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, 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 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.
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.
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.
I'm fine with that. That just doesn't sound like my business.
Yeah, it's not my business. So something happens to Manchester.
Some what are they called menkunions, They're going to be really Matt Robert, Oh.
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
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.
Swans in Canada belong to the.
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.
But whatever, I don't think they could do it again.
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?
I think you're making it up.
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.
A mouthful for a title.
Yeah, well, Canadian Bacon's a fine title. It's a good movie anyway.
So yeah.
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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.
So they just sort of codified what cops already do when they shoot a fourteen year old boy in the back.
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 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.
The difference is it doesn't allow it. It sounds like it man did al.
Well, it could be argued to mandate it, right.
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.
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 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.
Right, Oh, that's not who you want doing this. No, No, it is not good. No, it is.
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 of having stolen an item of such relatively trivial value as an apple and who had fled an arrest could be shot.
Oh no, So like at this point, we're talking like CBS door security guard run to cops just shooting children.
Yeah, you jack an apple and the rent a cop can empty a nine millimeter into your back, perfectly legal.
I feel like that's going to escalate.
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, 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 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.
Just a great opportunity, It's just a.
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
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, 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 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 that a dog, right.
Perfect, she's mad.
No poor dogs, although these are the dogs they breed in South Africa to be race violence dogs are pretty brutal animals.
You do have to say, do you know what kind of dogs they were fond of?
They start with like German shepherds, but they kind of breed their own, like these are our South African doing race violence.
Dogs, right, Oh, they made they made special ones.
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.
Head you know what you want to use native flora and.
Fauna, exactly exactly. Thank thank you for understanding, Molly.
I'm trying to see a picture of these dogs.
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, our audience is kind of a captive population. And here's these ads.
And we.
What was happening there? What are you doing? Did you did you forget what you were doing? What happened?
Nothing?
We're back, We're back, We're here, We're here.
Why not?
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 away very quickly.
Right.
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,
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.
No one likes apartheid thing, rather get shot.
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.
One bullet hole you can you can stitch that up.
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.
Okay, clarification, Robert.
They just happen a lot.
You know, you live at Robert dogfight ring.
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.
What you're telling me is that you did method a dogfight.
That's basically what I got from that as well.
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.
Met Molly.
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. 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 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. 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.
And it's like data Toulpicard. Sometimes terrorism is the answer.
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.
For necklace dog apologists.
Yeah, these dogs were evil.
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.
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.
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?
Anyway?
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 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.
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 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 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 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.
It's not regrettable violence for them. It's it's like a foam lobby.
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. 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.
Yeah, that really works on two terrible lives.
Yes, are you saying it's like hunting a different species than you normally hunt.
Or a different species like you.
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.
I don't know.
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.
Yeah, No, it's that's not good. It's not good on any level.
He's not good at any level. And it's confusing wordplay.
Doesn't normally hunt people, but he doesn't see black people like he does.
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
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 a role protecting the state from its citizenry, you know.
And this sort of like barely contains like snapping its jaws at the end of it, barely.
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 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.
I've met some cops, right, that's a cop.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Now.
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 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 barefoot runner too.
I'm so.
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?
Yes, it's the only sport that South Africans love. That's probably not true. But I'm not feeling very charitable towards.
South Africa today, or should you on any day? Yeah?
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.
Okay, so he's just playing like like just been like a.
Local yeah, kind of sporting league thing.
Yeah, that's good for men to have hobbies.
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.
It's good for men to have some hobbies.
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 great at being married, and he meets it.
Do these all and divorce? Oh yes, yes, okay, they're alive. Yes, they are alive.
They are alive. You're not going to be surprised to hear that. There's some spousal abuse in this story.
But oh, he wasn't a kind.
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.
Seems the least efficient way to do that.
He's an enormous man.
You have not like normally a fishing trip is a good alibi, but you're will him.
Somehow the tactic worked. So maybe Bev just didn't like smart men.
It's just like bruised idiots like us. Yeah.
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.
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.
And I don't think good, but like not bad in any particular way.
I can still be surprised.
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.
Okay, okay, I judged unfairly.
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 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 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 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, 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.
Wasn't ted Kennedy running with flyers and say like, you know, I'll drive you Gus, I'll drive the legislative vehicle. Yeah.
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 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 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 on me constantly, and I wanted him to get a job closer to home so that he would cheat on me slightly.
Less and for at that point, girl, just get out.
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.
Right.
Lewis does try to do as she asks for a while. He gets a job at a carpet store.
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 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.
Not a great salesman, not a lot of adrenaline in selling carpets.
You know, you can't bully a customer into buying a rug.
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 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.
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 people who are trying to tear down the system get angry because the cops do something brutal and they carry out an attack.
Right.
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.
Best idea any of those guys ever had.
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 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, 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 killed one and he used to say, ha, I'm ahead of you.
This is this is not lego Ghibli and those rings just murderer kills.
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.
Well, they are accountable to the police, but the way that the police monitor them is by going good job.
This is probably going to go good.
Yeah, it's going to be great. But you know what else is going to be great? Molly?
Oh?
Is it products and services?
I hope it's not an ad for Falcon security. That would be really awkward.
A simply say ad yeah, simply.
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 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 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 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 final straw, right, and maybe I.
Could accept one or the other. But yeah, chanting she did on by a serial killer, absolutely not.
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.
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
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 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 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.
Some of them were meek and some were just fat. Maybe she was strong and fack.
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.
So we're really drawing a lot of conclusions about the wives here.
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.
Well, I mean he does it for the love of the game. He does do it for the.
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 in to trim the grass, periodically murdering young men who had the temerity to commit property crime and thus keeping criminality under wraps.
Is A.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess.
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.
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 shoots people so many times.
So is there a separate thriving industry of like whoever comes and picks up the bodies?
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.
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.
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.
Bruh, Stop, that's weird. That's just being a murderer.
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.
Here's an excerpt from.
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. 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.
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.
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.
Yeah. Oh, they don't have like no ballistics or anything. They're not doing any doing science.
Yeah, they're not doing that on these cases A working a part time in the floor.
They don't come with.
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 sentenced for breaking an entering after Lewis nearly murders them.
So that's cool.
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?
Oh, you know, not as good as about an hour ago, but still pretty good?
Yeah?
Great, excellent.
Well, Molly, do you have anything you want to before.
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.
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.
Instead of any of that, you should open your podcast app of choice and subscribe to Weird Little Guys, my new weekly show.
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.
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.
Yep.
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.
Bye bye.
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