The police bought the land in 1979, and over the next decade it became the headquarters of a Security Branch unit known by the bureaucratic codename C1, and later C10. Its first commander was Dirk Coetzee, who ran the unit from 1980 to 1981 and later admitted his role in the murder of Griffiths Mxenge and others. The euphemisms were deliberate. Officially it was a counterinsurgency section; in practice it functioned as a hit squad. What began as a handful of policemen grew into nine squads of operatives. Its work was hidden behind official secrecy and, investigators later found, threaded through with corruption, as officers siphoned off state funds for themselves. The farm's calm appearance, cattle, an ordinary farmhouse, was camouflage for what the state preferred no one ever see.

The victims must come first, because the state worked hard to erase them. In November 1981, operatives murdered Griffiths Mxenge, a respected human rights lawyer who defended detainees and belonged to the African National Congress. He was abducted near Durban and stabbed more than 40 times, his body mutilated to make the killing look like a robbery. He left behind a wife, Victoria, herself an activist, who was assassinated four years later. In 1986 the unit was implicated in the deaths of the men remembered as the Chesterville Four. These were not statistics. They were lawyers, organizers, and young activists with families, lives, and futures that apartheid's agents chose to end.

Vlakplaas was built on a particular cruelty: it turned the oppressed against themselves. Captured liberation fighters were brought here, tortured, and pressured to switch sides, becoming what the unit called askaris, after a colonial word for African soldiers. Broken and coerced, some were then sent back into Black townships to identify and kill their former comrades. One of the most infamous, Joe Mamasela, by his own later accounts was involved in numerous killings. The system did not merely destroy individuals; it tried to corrode the bonds of trust within the very communities resisting apartheid. That was its design, and that is part of what makes its history so painful to tell.

When South Africa became a democracy, the secrecy began to crack. Before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the late 1990s, the unit's last commander, Eugene de Kock, whom the press called "Prime Evil," detailed the killings he had ordered and carried out; he was convicted on eighty-nine charges and sentenced to two concurrent life terms plus 212 years in prison. Some who confessed received amnesty; many families received no justice at all, and decades later inquests into deaths like Mxenge's were still being reopened. The farm itself passed through caretakers and even briefly housed a rehabilitation ministry before the government reclaimed it, intending to preserve it as a heritage site. The hope is that Vlakplaas becomes a place of memory, so that the names of the murdered, not the men who killed them, are what endure.