Jeanette and Katryn Schoon were killed on 28 June 1984. The young mother and her six-year-old daughter died after a parcel bomb exploded inside their apartment in Lubango, Angola. Craig Williamson and Jerry Raven, South African security police officers, together confessed to manufacturing the bomb and sending it to Angola. These are the facts that can be stated without dispute or hesitation. Beyond these details, however, the story of Jeanette and Katryn Schoon's last moments alive drifts into speculation, contradictory and contested narratives, and supposed conclusions based on unverifiable evidence.

The questions related to how and why the assassination of the Schoons took place is a central concern for this book. To the extent possible, based on interviews Marius Schoon gave while he was alive, the memoirs of Jeanette's father, Jack Curtis, and my own research in Angola, I have attempted to reconstruct the likely chain of events on the day of the bombing, and the immediate events that followed. In narrating these details, I have drawn inspiration from Luise White's book The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo. For White, the purpose of studying an assassination is not to confirm, once and for all, the facts of the matter. Rather, the study is done ‘in pursuit of history, of how narratives about the past are produced and reproduced and how power is produced and reproduced by these narratives’. In the case of the Schoons, the different narratives of the assassination demarcate critical fault lines, which have been used to argue both for and against amnesty for the killers. In addition, the contestation around whether apartheid operatives deserve amnesty for this double murder hinges around determining where the line exists between being a ‘combatant’ within the ANC's military infrastructure and merely being a member of the political underground. At best, the line here is subtle, and difficult to draw clearly and cleanly. At worst, the line simply doesn't exist.

For Williamson and Raven to receive amnesty from the TRC, they were obliged to argue that the bomb was an act of war, targeting a soldier. The pair claimed that Marius Schoon was involved in supporting MK while in Angola and was therefore the intended target of the bomb.