By Chiara Carter
The man dubbed South Africa's worst mass murderer strides into the Wimpy on down-at-heel East London's grandly named Esplanade.
A tall, tanned, fit-looking middle-aged man is flanked by a teenage daughter on each side.
The name of this man with piercing green-grey eyes and a distinctive long beard can be found alongside Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy on international lists of serial killers.
He is Louis van Schoor - the former policeman-turned-security guard who is alleged to have killed 39 people and is alleged to have shot as many as 100.
He is now out of prison on parole after serving 12 years, four months and 13 days of his 91-year sentence that effectively translated into a 20-year prison term.
Van Schoor orders soft drinks for his daughters who lean against and look lovingly at their dad while he gazes intently round the restaurant before beginning to talk about the past, how prison has left him born again, a "changed man", and his dreams for the future - a future that includes a fifth marriage and a farm.
His fiancée, Eunice de Kock, is a lawyer in Cape Town who struck up a correspondence with Van Schoor after reading about him four years ago.
Letters turned to phone calls and then a visit on his birthday. Love blossomed and the two became engaged.
When I spoke to De Kock after her fiance's release, she was bubbling with happiness to be with the man she calls "bokkie" and "engel" and for whom she plans to give up law to go farming in Namaqualand.
Far from being concerned at being in love with a mass murderer, De Kock seems to have a soft spot for such killers; she also admires the apartheid killer Eugene de Kock, who is serving 112 years in Pretoria Central Prison.
Plans for marriage are consigned to the future, however, because her beloved is for the moment confined to the magisterial district of East London. He is not allowed to discuss either his trial or experiences in East London's Fort Galmorgan prison where he was apparently a model prisoner.
Van Schoor plans to write a book about his life, a narrative that he says will "set the record straight" and make it clear that he is neither a mass murderer nor a serial killer but instead a "crime fighter".
Van Schoor's protracted shooting spree took place at a time of intense racial polarisation in the late 1980s - that time of states of emergency, mass revolt, white repression and fear.
And South African history, according to Van Schoor - who at one point planned to apply for amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission - has much to do with his killings, although he denies they were racially motivated.
Van Schoor says he was very much a product of his society and experiences, which included special training in the police and stints on the then border.
But he denies that his killings were motivated by blood-lust or racism. He says he was merely doing his job as he thought right at the time, a time when the law allowed one to shoot a fleeing suspect in "self-defence". He refers to these killings as "incidents".
"It was nothing to do with race. I was purely protecting people's property," Van Schoor says.
Van Schoor's modus operandi was to respond to silent alarms at business premises and shoot intruders with his 9mm pistol - as many as eight or 10 times, according to court testimony.
He would then phone the police to come to the scene, and if the victim survived, he would be arrested. If dead, the killing would occasion only an inquest hearing.
In the way of South African society at the time, these "intruders" were black, the judicial authorities white - a racial divide that goes a long way to explain how a security guard could get to shoot so many people without raising a judicial eyebrow.
When Van Schoor's shooting career eventually and belatedly came to public attention, lurid accounts emerged of a huge, bearded figure prowling dark buildings and firing repeatedly at cowering suspects who were often unarmed and sometimes shot in the back as they fled.
But when Van Schoor was brought to trial in the dying days of apartheid, he had more than a little support in his home town. Cars sported I love Louis stickers illustrated with a black heart pierced by bullets.
Today, Van Schoor winces at the mention of these stickers and the racial polarisation they expressed. He says he has no time for racists and his prison experience has made him the more adamant that racial difference is irrelevant and that people are people.
Experts still quibble over whether Van Schoor should be classified as a mass murderer or a serial killer. The killer himself rejects both these labels.
"That is very far from the truth. I was a crime fighter," he repeatedly asserts.
Van Schoor says the security company he owned at the time was responsible for policing seven out of 10 businesses in East London and it was his job to deter intruders.
How do you get to shoot one person, let alone dozens?
"I can't say it is easy, but I suppose the time I spent in the police made me used to shooting and killing," he replies.
One of the stranger aspects of the Van Schoor tale, which unfolded when the country began taking its first steps towards negotiations and the demise of apartheid, was his role in confiding in journalists about his ever-rising death toll.
Van Schoor is doing his best now to duck media attention. But in talking, it becomes clear how he disclosed details of his shooting toll to journalists.
He is articulate and frank. Despite carefully considering his answers, he does duck dealing with painful questions about the past while his daughters look on with the self-same grey-green eyes.
So how many people did he really shoot?
"I don't remember. I don't really know" is the chilling reply.
Whose face does he remember from the darkness at those after-hours premises? Which victim stands out?
"None," is the answer.
"I don't remember faces. I remember some events, sequences of things," Van Schoor says.
Is he sorry now?
"In 2000 because of the rehabilitation and progress I felt on my side, and in the light of so much bad publicity and so on, I made an effort to contact the victims, their families. We couldn't do it.
"I then went to the media and made a public apology, rightly or wrongly. I apologised for the pain, suffering my actions caused them. I meant this sincerely. There was huge public response, but to this day I've had no contact with them (families/victims)."
He has also no idea of the whereabouts and no desire to meet his bete noire, a young journalist who was working at the local paper at the time.
Every solved murder story has a detective hero; in this case it was journalist Patrick Goodenough, who investigated rumours about Van Schoor after initially regarding them as too outlandish to be true.
What Goodenough and a colleague, Dominic Jones, gradually gathered from inquest files, court records, interviews with survivors and chats with the good burghers of East London was a chilling dossier of carnage.
Goodenough battled to get the story into print in the face of timid and disbelieving editors. Eventually the story of East London's fast-off-the-mark security guard made it to the front page of the Sunday Tribune.
What the white justice system viewed as no more than an efficient security guard, the wider world saw very differently. The publicity led to more people coming forward, with more chilling accounts, mainly to the Black Sash, an anti-apartheid human rights advocacy organisation.
It was claimed that Van Schoor dragged victims into deserted premises and then shot them.
"I never did that. Never," the paroled killer says.
In the end, Van Schoor was charged with 19 cases of murder and 21 of attempted murder. He was convicted of seven murders and two attempted murders.
The law was changed to prevent similar shootings by security personnel.
When Van Schoor went to jail, it was around the time Chris Hani was assassinated and the country was teetering on the edge of an uncertain future.
Van Schoor has come out of jail 10 years into democracy.
"There are no words to describe how it feels to be free, but I am still waiting to enjoy fully the fruits of democracy," he said.
His first outing as a free man was to lunch with his elderly mother and relatives, but Van Schoor says he is lying low partly because of public attention.
Interestingly there has been virtually no reaction from the black community.
The silence is significant. Van Schoor's victims were black, poor and in many cases itinerant. Who knows whether the relatives of the dead and the survivors know this figure of their nightmares is free.
From the stares from other tables at the Wimpy it is a different matter for white East Londoners. But Van Schoor does not want to run away because of his notoriety.
"I've done my time. I ask people not to judge me on the past, but the future," Van Schoor said.
Van Schoor might be free, but Fort Glamorgan is not entirely gone from his life.
One of Van Schoor's last acts before leaving prison was to bid farewell to another daughter, Sabrina, serving a 25-year sentence for hiring a killer to murder her mother, Beverley.
Sabrina's trial was something of a cause celebre in the Eastern Cape, not least because her defence was that her mother kept her a prisoner to prevent her mixing with coloured and black friends.
Sabrina astonished people by declaring that she wanted her father to look after her mixed race child, who is in the custody of the state and said to be happy in a foster home.
Sabrina's half-brothers have rejected the child, but Van Schoor says the colour of his grandchild makes no difference. He hopes to get to know the little girl but he will not be making a bid to take her away from her foster family.
"Let her stay where she is happy and secure," Van Schoor said.
His last words before leaving the restaurant are: "I'm not a serial killer. I called the police after each encounter."