Luis Garavito: The Most Prolific Serial Killer in History

It was the afternoon of November 7th 1998, in Pereira, Colombia, a small city in the foothills of the Andes, and part of Colombia’s fertile coffee producing region known as “the Coffee Axis.” A group of local children were playing football in a field. At one point, a young boy chased the football into a corner of the allotment, where he spotted a human skull.

When the police arrived, they noted it was too small to be a man’s, and therefore they speculated the skull was a woman’s. But as the rest of the skeleton was excavated, forensics quickly determined that the bones belonged to a boy who had been on the cusp of puberty, between the ages of 11 and 13. The death of a child that age was hardly surprising in 1990s Colombia, where decades of civil war, political upheaval, and struggles with ruthless drug cartels had created a class of homeless street urchins known as “The Disposables.”

Although half of Colombia’s children lived in poverty, and 10% of them had no formal education whatsoever, the Disposables were in the direst straits of all.

There were approximately 60,000 Disposables in Colombia with 20,000 of them living in the nation’s capital, Bogota. The rest of them were spread out in other cities across the country. The Disposables spent their young lives on the streets.

They got into drug addiction, smoking cheap cocaine residue, as young as six. Both boys and girls got into prostitution at ages as shockingly young as nine. The boys ran with gangs, they engaged in street violence, and even committed murders of other children, usually bludgeoning each other to death with clubs and chains or stabbing each other with knives and broken bottles.

Sometimes over nothing more than competition over the best sleeping spots. They had no family to claim them or protect them. Thus, they were prime targets for adult predators, or guerillas who wished to press-gang them as child soldiers, or cartels who wished to use them as drug mules.

If the Disposables disappeared or were killed, very few people would notice. And because these children usually had never visited a dentist a day in their lives, their bodies, should they ever be found, could not even be identified by dental records. And so, the body of the boy found in a field in Pereira was not assigned a high priority by police.

Odds are they’d never even learn what his name was.

But perhaps the police should have paid closer attention. Lately, people across Colombia had become alarmed by the spike in the rate of child disappearances. Not just of the Disposables, but children with parents and families too. Panicked mothers and fathers wondered where their children were.

In the past year, dozens of children had been reported missing from the city of Pereira alone. A similar uptick in disappearances had occurred across the country. And then, on November 15th 1998, police uncovered a mass grave of 36 children in Pereira. Combined with other smaller dump sites, the total number of bodies leapt up to 41.

Over the coming months, an additional 27 children were found in a mass grave in the Cauca Valley to the south. Further reports of dump sites and mass graves poured in from other parts of Colombia, setting off a countrywide investigation.

At first, the police entertained the theory that these children were victims of a Satanic society or a trafficking ring. But the bottles of lubricant and cheap brandy invariably found at each burial site convinced police that they were looking at the work of one man. A prolific serial killer. Police considered this might be the handiwork of Pedro Lopez, the Monster of the Andes, who had killed an estimated 200 to 300 children in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador in the space of just a few years.

Lopez had been released from a Colombian mental institution just 9 months earlier on 50 dollars’ bail, and on the condition he continued his psychiatric treatment and reported his activities monthly to a judge. Pedro Lopez would soon disappear without a trace. Yet there were numerous things about the killings that ruled out Lopez as a suspect.

First of all, some of the bodies found in the mass graves had been there for a while, and were obviously killed prior to Lopez’s release. Second, Lopez primarily targeted young girls. But the bodies in the new mass graves were overwhelmingly young boys between the ages of 6 and 13.

Thirdly, the modus operandi did not match. Pedro Lopez’s M.O. primarily consisted of sexual assault and strangulation. These new bodies showed signs of intense torture and grievous bodily harm prior to death, along with severe mutilations post-mortem.

These victims were beaten, bludgeoned, burned, slashed, stabbed, impaled, disemboweled, castrated, and decapitated. And that is all the detail I want to give on the subject. Needless to say, these boys perished in the most horrific and painful way imaginable.

This wasn’t Lopez. It was the work of an entirely new monster.

When the perpetrator of these crimes was eventually caught, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 1853 years and 9 days in prison. But due to Colombian constitutional constraints at the time, which also outlawed the death penalty, the man could only serve a maximum of 40 years. This sentence maximum has since been extended to 60 years. But only for subsequent convictions.

Meanwhile, the man who filled all those mass graves had given a full confession and assisted police in finding even more bodies. As a result, his sentence was cut down to just 22 years imprisonment. He has spent the last two decades locked up at La Tramacúa, the notorious maximum-security prison in Valledupar, and kept in perpetual solitary confinement, due to the fact he would almost certainly be murdered by the other inmates.

“The Beast”, as he has come to be known, applied for early release from prison in 2021, but was denied by the judge on the grounds he could not afford the monetary fine he still owed for the murders. It’s not like inmates make much from labour in a Colombian prison. But, as of 2023, the Beast has reached the end of his sentence and has become eligible for release.

At time of writing, he could be let out of prison at any moment, either in late 2023 or sometime in 2024. For his part, the Beast is eager to get out in public again. He has spoken in several interviews over the years of his desire to get married and start a family.

He also wants to become a religious preacher. The Beast is also considering a run for Congress, so he can pass laws that help abused children. In the same interviews, the Beast has demonstrated next to no remorse for his crimes, and usually finds a way to minimize what he’s done.

Blaming it on his own upbringing, his mental illnesses, the devil, and alcohol. In 2016, he said to a visibly disgusted interviewer, Jon Sistiaga, “I have committed a series of behaviours that violate criminal laws and moral norms. I am a human being equal to any other.

With some flaws. But not one that is dangerous.”

As you read this article, you can decide for yourself whether you think this man should ever be released from prison.

Meet Luis Garavito

Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos was born to Manuel Antonio Garavito and Rosa Delia Cubillos on January 25th 1957. In case you were wondering, at time of writing, this makes the Beast of La Tramacúa currently 66 years old. If Garavito is released in 2023 or ‘24, and if the eye cancer he has recently developed doesn’t spread and kill him first, this is young enough to potentially give Garavito a good couple decades running amok in public before he dies of old age.

Garavito was born in the small country town of Genova, located within Colombia’s “Coffee Axis.” The Colombian Conflicto broke out in 1964 when the government was challenged by both right- and left-wing paramilitary groups (in itself a sequel to the Violencia period which had tormented the childhood of Pedro Lopez a decade earlier). As such, the Garavitos were forced to move to the tiny hamlet of Ceilán in the Cauca Valley.

Luis Garavito was the eldest son and second born of seven children - four boys, three girls. We are largely dependent on Garavito himself for the details of his childhood. And there is good reason to believe Garavito may have exaggerated some of the negative aspects of his upbringing to provide an excuse for his later criminal behaviour.

However, we must also allow for the likely possibility that at least some of his account is truthful, since the overwhelming majority of serial killers come from abusive homes. Lacking an independent source from this period - since no comprehensive and reliable account has been given by his family members - we shall never know for certain.

According to Garavito, his father, Manuel Antonio, was a violent alcoholic who regularly beat his children and did not allow them to have friends or to associate with people outside the family. He also heaped verbal abuse upon his children, in particular calling Garavito an idiot, a weakling, an imbecile, and a bastard. The last of these insults may have been literal since Manuel and Rosa seemed to have had a fractured relationship almost from the start of their marriage.

Manuel was allegedly an adulterer who never shared a bed with his wife, but spent his time having affairs with other women and sleeping with prostitutes. Rosa allegedly retaliated with occasional affairs of her own. But a Catholic marriage in mid-20th century Colombia did not exactly leave open much possibility for a divorce.

Manuel’s physical and verbal abuse was so spontaneous and unrelenting, the children often hid from their father when he got home from work. Garavito recalls that Manuel was so strict and harsh that there rarely was a day where you could speak, play, or laugh, in his presence without fear of a beating. Garavito said, “We could not develop in a way that children should.” Furthermore, despite never sharing a bed with his wife, Manuel would sometimes sleep in the same bed as his children.

According to Garavito, his father may have molested him: “He slept with me and he bathed me. I have a vague memory, it was at night, and he kind of fondled me and touched my private parts. I never loved that man. I saw him as an executioner.”

Manuel and Rosa frequently got into shouting matches, throwing around insults of “high calibre.” According to Garavito, when things turned physical, the domestic abuse between Rosa and Manuel was reciprocal, with the two adults beating on each other with equal frequency, but, due to basic sexual dimorphism, Rosa often lost the fight. Garavito claims he was the only one to try and defend her, which further provoked the wrath of his father upon him. Garavito alleges that, at age six or seven, when he endeavoured to defend his then-pregnant mother from being beaten too severely by his father, Manuel dragged his son outside, strapped him to a tree, and flogged the boy repeatedly with the flat side of a machete.

According to Garavito, Rosa was also violent with her children, although alcohol was not the source of her aggression. She did not drink. Rosa was angry and contemptuous, resentful of her lot in life, and she took out her frustrations on little kids who couldn’t defend themselves. According to Garavito, Rosa generally neglected her children, viewed them as an inconvenience and a burden, and raised them with “little affection or care.”

Garavito began school at age 7 after his family had relocated to Ceilán. It proved to be little respite from his homelife. He had to wear glasses, for which he was teased by his classmates. He was also given the nickname “Garabato” which means “Squiggle”, but the hurtfulness of the epithet among children doesn’t exactly translate. He played quietly by himself during recess.

According to Garavito’s teachers, he was an attentive student, but wasn’t too bright and struggled with certain subjects. Garavito claims the teachers did nothing to stop the other students from bullying him. Eventually, Garavito responded to the bullying with fits of anger, often with him turning violent. Sometimes this scared off the other students, sometimes it got Garavito mercilessly beaten up by a gaggle of them.

When he wasn’t exploding in fits of anger, Garavito maintained the shy silence that kept him from receiving too many beatings at home.

In 1967, when Garavito was ten years old, he gained the first inkling that he might be same-sex attracted. Another boy at school innocently touched Garavito and he recalled feeling a “pleasant sensation he did not understand, and a longing to remain at the boy’s side.”

There is some ambiguity about whether Garavito was homosexual or bisexual. Garavito insists that he is attracted to women but his fairly sexless relationships with future girlfriends and his perpetual erectile dysfunction would beg to differ. It is possible that, being a product of his culture and the times, Garavito felt pressured to be attracted to women, and remains half-closeted to this day. Even so, while Garavito insists he is attracted to women, he is “much more attracted to men.”

Though the use of the term “men” might be stretching it. Garavito has stated that the primary objects of his desires throughout his life were early adolescent boys. “If I saw a young man, let’s say of 13 or 14 years old, I subconsciously felt but understood that I liked that child and that I wanted to caress him.”

It should also be noted that Garavito did not rule out children much younger than 13 or 14.

In 1968, Garavito was taken out of school with only a fifth-grade education, due to his poor academic performance and because his father wanted him to help earn money for the family. As unpleasant as certain aspects of his school-life had been, this placed himself at his father’s mercy almost full time.

But allegedly Manuel was not the only abuser he had to worry about. Garavito claims that at the age of 12 or 13, he was repeatedly abused by a neighbour. The man was allegedly a friend of his father’s, deeply religious, and the owner of a local drugstore. The abuse would allegedly happen whenever Manuel took his son there to receive flu shots and medication.

Garavito claims the neighbour strapped him down to a bed, burned him with candle wax, cut him with a knife, and bit him on the genitals and buttocks during the sexual assaults. According to Garavito, the bites were apparently so hard that they did lasting damage to his penis. These sessions were allegedly not isolated events, but happened with some regularity. Garavito claims that he did not tell his parents about the ongoing sadistic abuse because they would not have believed him.

Weigh those comments for what they are worth.

The similarity of the alleged assault by the neighbour to Garavito’s later M.O. has led some criminal psychologists to believe that Garavito invented these facts for his own sexual gratification during his sessions with mental health experts. Instead of Garavito relating a childhood trauma, he was enjoying the impromptu fabrication of erotic fiction. Others suggest these events may have been genuine, shaping Garavito’s view of sexuality and blurring the lines between sex and violence in his mind, and thus Garavito may have felt compelled to replicate them to achieve sexual gratification in later life.

Garavito claims that the initial instance of his neighbour’s abuse awakened a desire to hurt animals. “The only thing I wanted at that moment is to have killed myself. Then I saw two little birds and I stoned them to death. I took the little birds, opened them, and tore them to pieces. That was after my assault. I was very sorry. I don’t know why I did it.”

Shortly after the neighbour’s regular abuse began, Garavito claims that he, as a 12 year old, molested a 6-year-old boy. Garavito also claims that around this time he also began to assault his brothers. “My brothers and sisters were very young, and I felt something inside that I couldn’t explain. We all went to bed where I suggested they take off their clothes and I began to fondle them.

Nothing happened. Neither did my parents find out, nor did my brothers remember. Also, sometimes when they were sleeping, I would again take off my brothers’ clothes and fondle them.”

The drugstore owner’s abuse of Garavito allegedly continued unabated for approximately two years. Then, in 1971, when Garavito was 14, the family moved to the town of Trujillo, also in the Cauca Valley. It was there that Garavito claims he was sexually assaulted by another neighbour. Apparently, this man had shown Garavito heterosexual pornography.

When Garavito recoiled in disgust, the neighbour allegedly beat the teenager, before dragging him outside into the bushes and sodomizing him. Once again, it is unclear whether this incident actually happened or whether Garavito invented it as both an explanation for his later crimes and as a form of sadomasochistic erotica to titillate himself while he spoke to psychologists. Garavito is a classic case of anti-social personality disorder. He is highly manipulative and a chronic liar.

You can’t rely on a word he says.

Either way, in 1972, Garavito’s personal narrative sees him transform from a traumatized victim into a relentlessly aggressive predator. Especially because, at the age of 15, Garavito encountered another pastime that would be crucial to the contortion of his psyche and the flourishing of his M.O.

The Demon Drink

Alcohol was certainly fuel for the already festering mind of Luis Garavito. Because of its depressive, agitating, and disinhibitory qualities, booze is foremost among the mind-altering drugs that are capable of exacerbating personality disorders and various forms of mental illness. With the assistance of a dozen beers or half a bottle of the hard stuff, thoughts and impulses that might have stayed buried are brought to the forefront and enacted in real life. Garavito is not even close to being the first alcoholic serial killer.

The connection is quite common.

For instance, Jeffrey Dahmer always needed to get shitfaced to throttle the life out of his drugged and helpless victims. Aileen Wuornos sometimes knocked back twenty beers in a single day while she was hitchhiking and murdering men on the road. And Ted Bundy, in his early murders, needed to get similarly blotto’d on Mickey’s Big Mouth malt liquor to carry out acts of abduction and sexual sadism. But, with Bundy, as time wore on, the impulse got stronger and stronger, and the need for a disinhibitory liquid got weaker and weaker.

Garavito, on the other hand, never lost the need for booze in order to reveal the monster that lay beneath. It was a Jekyll and Hyde situation. Even as an adult, he was timid and well-mannered when sober. But he turned into a torturer, murderer, mutilator, and necrophile when drunk.

But all that lies ahead.

As a 15-year-old boy, Garavito had easy access to alcohol, eventually gravitating toward cheap brandy since Colombia is the land of the grape rather than the grain. His father drank heavily, which allowed Garavito to sneak a bit of household booze for himself. And in the 1970s, attitudes toward teenage drinking were more relaxed, so a young person could acquire a bottle of liquor from a store more easily, provided they had scraped together the money.

Additionally, Colombian drinking culture involves more moderate consumption, with even pre-teens sometimes being given small amounts of wine with dinner. And, among adults, rates of full-blown alcoholism are far lower in Colombia than in North America or Northern Europe, which meant that teenage binge drinking is not at the top of people’s concerns. At least not compared to hard drug use like lacing a cigarette with cheap cocaine residue.

Garavito also had genetics running against him. His father was a drunk and came from a family of drunks. And although his mother was a teetotaler, her father was also a relentless old soak who had died of cirrhosis of the liver, and she had two brothers who were also professional grog-guzzlers.

Garavito claims that two of his own brothers were boozehounds as well. Thus, Garavito was a budding piss-artist from a long ignoble lineage of piss-artists. This made an occasional, casual, constrained tipple almost impossible for him.

Garavito says that after the incident of him failing to become aroused by heterosexual pornography he tried to “correct the problem” by sexually propositioning dozens of older women, along with plenty of girls his own age. In order to summon up the courage (and possibly the willpower) to do so, he first needed to be thoroughly lubricated by alcohol. But his forwardness and confidence were counter-balanced by a rather off-putting and creepy drunkenness. Thus, the booze-reeking 15-year-old was always (and unsurprisingly) turned down by every woman he approached.

Drunken carousing, however, became a permanent fixture in the teenager’s life. Some of this was just for entertainment among his friends. But the removal of Garavito’s inhibitions quickly led him toward the real object of his desires. In late 1972, Garavito, under an extreme state of intoxication, was caught by his mother trying to force himself on a 5-year-old boy.

Garavito later claimed that this boy’s fear and distress first ignited in him a strong impulse toward sexual sadism. It is unclear whether this was the only boy that Garavito molested in 1972. It is just the only instance in 1972 where Garavito got caught. Garavito himself claims that the incident was a one-off.

And, according to Garavito, the act disgusted his mother and father and he was thrown out of the house for a week or two. But the police were not called and no charges were laid.

In 1973, at age 16, Garavito continued his depredations. Again, the number of victims in this year is unknown. But we know there were several. He travelled widely, possibly to reduce the chances of detection.

He was arrested at a train station in Bogota, 400 kilometers or 250 miles away from Trujillo, after attempting an assault on a six-year-old boy. The assault took place on a train platform and the boy screamed, immediately attracting the attention of authorities. The brazen and sloppy nature of the assault can be attributed to Garavito’s state of intoxication at the time. Garavito was charged with attempted sexual assault on a minor, but the case did not go to trial.

Under police questioning, Garavito denied that he wanted to sodomize the victim, but just wanted to “lightly abuse him.”

Meanwhile, the incident led to Garavito being permanently thrown out of the house. According to Garavito, his father, Manuel, did not object to the act of sexual assault in principle, but the fact it was homosexual in nature. Manuel chided his son for choosing young boys instead of women as his prey. Or at least that’s what Garavito later claimed.

From there, the 16-year-old was thrown into the world of Colombia’s many homeless young men. Some of them were recruited by paramilitary groups, some of them turned to crime, but most of them were exploited as a source of cheap labour. He first found work at a coffee plantation in Trujillo. It was while working at the coffee plantation in ‘73 that Garavito first met Luz Mary Ocampo Orozco, who was then a young woman living with her mother.

Garavito and Ocampo formed a platonic friendship, although Garavito later claimed that he immediately fell head over heels in love with her. Their friendship was interrupted later that year when Ocampo moved to the small town of Circasia to find work. This would not be the last time Garavito and Ocampo would see each other.

In early 1974, at the age of 17, Garavito left Trujillo looking for better paying work. He bounced between the cities of Armenia and Pereira in the “Coffee Axis”, doing odd-jobs until he found a position as a clerk at an insurance company. It was steady work and respectable, and in 1975, at the age of 18, Garavito even began taking night classes in marketing.

Given his rough childhood, if Garavito was mentally sound and sober, this might have been a new lease on life. A success story. A triumph over adversity.

However, Garavito’s chronic alcoholism put an end to all that. He’d show up to work drunk and aggressive, which quickly brought him into conflict with his co-workers and employers, even escalating to a few fistfights before he was fired. Thereupon, Garavito got a job as an assistant at a department store before he repeated the same pattern and was let go.

From there, Garavito drifted back to doing odd-jobs in various towns and cities, along with begging and selling trinkets on the side. Occasionally, he’d find a job as a bag boy at a grocery store before his consistent drunkenness got him fired there too.

In his private life, things followed a similar pattern. Garavito struck up a number of platonic friendships with women, and even formed a few romantic attachments. When drunk, he’d try to have sex with his girlfriends and sometimes even asked this of his erstwhile platonic friends (to varying results mingled with trauma, shock, and horror).

During the grim drunken sex act itself, he ran into the problem of unremitting erectile dysfunction. This does not seem to be a result of the alcohol. Instead, Garavito expressed frustration that he didn’t find the women attractive.

The alcohol was likely an attempt to overcome his lack of attraction rather than the cause of his sexual malfunctions. Hence it seems likely Garavito was homosexual, not bisexual, but due to the culture and the times he felt pressured to prove that, yes, he was a red-blooded male like any other. And, of course, due to the fact Garavito was drinking around his girlfriends, he’d quickly turn nasty and commit acts of verbal and physical abuse.

But when he was sober, Garavito often seemed full of remorse, and his behaviour toward his girlfriends was then quite caring and tender. Nevertheless, the endless boozing gave these relationships a short shelf-life. Garavito was unable to go more than a few days without getting hammered.

This meant the women in his life were subject to recurrent threats, beatings, and drunken harangues. After enough of these outrages, the women always threw Garavito out of the house, and spread word of his alcoholism and abusiveness throughout the community. Thus, Garavito regularly wore out his welcome in a neighborhood, village, or town, and hit the road to start again with strangers.

The only thing that allowed him to stay in one place for a few months was the fact he was very quiet and kind when sober, which bought him a little extra time with people before he was ostracized.

Garavito didn’t keep many friends, which is unsurprising for an alcoholic with ASPD. His closest confidante in life was his sister, Esther, the only member of his family he spoke to after being tossed out of his childhood home. Garavito would regularly go back to Trujillo to visit her.

But even Esther, while sympathetic, tried to limit the amount of contact she had with him because of Garavito’s alcoholism. Even she had been on the receiving end of his drunken aggression. As for the rest of his family, Garavito held a deep animosity toward them.

A consistent refrain, whenever Garavito was drunk, was how he hated his mother and most of his siblings, and how he wanted to murder his father. He’d rant about it to anyone who would listen. And while we can never be sure that Garavito has told the truth about his childhood, whatever he suffered at the hands of his father continued to rankle and fester within him.

The pattern of moving to a new town, befriending or hooking up with a woman, and then using alcohol to burn it all down to ruins and ashes, repeated itself from 1974 to 1978. It is unclear how many children Garavito assaulted during this time. But we know there were quite a few, likely into the double-digits across the 4 years.

Garavito insists at this time he was preying upon not just young boys but young girls as well. This may be true, or it may be yet another manifestation of Garavito’s case of the “not-gays.” He also made use of child prostitutes from among “the Disposables” - the thousands of impoverished orphans who lined the streets and alleyways of Colombia.

And Garavito was cruel and rough with them. His sadistic streak had already been unleashed. He would beat them, threaten them, and torture them, but to this point Garavito didn’t go as far as to kill them.

That inferno was yet to come.

The Beast at Heaven’s Gates

In 1978, when Garavito was just 21 years old, his alcoholism had become so pronounced that he fell into a deep depression and had frequent thoughts of suicide. As such, Garavito joined Alcoholics Anonymous, which had spread from the United States to Colombia in 1959. And, from putting one’s faith in the general notion of a higher power, it was just a short skip and a hop to joining a more formal religion.

A thoroughly lapsed Catholic, Garavito was brought by a fellow AA member to some services held by the Pentecostal church, an internationally widespread Protestant sect with lively, elaborate ceremonies, rife with music, and replete with miraculous faith healing and people speaking in tongues. All of this showmanship had the effect of reigniting Garavito’s belief in the divine. But the biggest appeal of Pentecostalism to Garavito was the concept of being cleansed of one’s sins and being “born again.”

Sure, in Catholicism, one can confess one’s sins and try to gain entry into Heaven by charity and acts of piety, but some sins are a bridge too far and ensure damnation. The only official requirement for salvation in Pentecostalism is to “accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour” and to “join the family of God.” It was thus by a simple declaration of faith that a sexual sadist and relentless child predator hoped to enter the Gates of Heaven.

He still thinks he’s going to Heaven to this day.

In addition to AA and Pentecostalism, Garavito approached the Colombian Department of Social Services, who referred him to a fairly rudimentary counselling service to talk through his depression and alcohol abuse. He underwent this counselling, on and off, for the better part of 5 years. Nevertheless, it should be noted that during this period Garavito frequently fell back into the bottle, and he did not stop his predatory behaviour against children.

He also did not discuss his attraction to children, much less his crimes against them, with any of his counsellors. And so, externally Garavito adopted a double-life, like most serial killers. But internally, unlike many serial killers who simply wear a façade, Garavito was torn by a genuine cognitive dissonance, where he could not reconcile his hopes for salvation with what he was doing to society’s most vulnerable.

This tangle of piety and self-justification is evident in all of his TV interviews. By day, Garavito would attend church services, and was known by other parishioners to beat his chest out of supposed “remorse” during prayer. At night, having been cleansed of sin, Garavito would visit the local parks and alleyways and solicit the sexual services of street urchins, or lure other, more unsuspecting children with parents and happy homes toward quiet, isolated areas where they would be at his mercy.

Not that Garavito had any mercy to give them.

In 1978, shortly after his conversion to Pentecostalism, Garavito relocated to the town of Circasia, where he got a job at a grocery store. It was there that he reignited his friendship with Luz Mary Ocampo Orozco, who worked as a cashier in the same store. Although their relations remained platonic, Garavito claims that his love for Ocampo continued to burn brightly. He even managed to stay sober around her, and was gentle, soft-spoken, and kind.

He told Ocampo all about his religious conversion and hopes for salvation. It was only later that Ocampo heard from Garavito’s sister, Esther, about just how bad his alcoholism continued to be.

The same blissful state of ignorance did not apply to the owners of the grocery store. After a few months, Garavito was fired for absenteeism and occasionally being drunk at work when Ocampo wasn’t there. Thereupon, Garavito picked up sticks and moved to the city of Armenia, where he got a job working at a local bakery. He finally managed to keep things on an even keel at that job.

He did his drinking off-hours. But he did not cease his predations against children, frequently visiting Valencia Park to solicit Disposables who were as young as nine.

Garavito continued working at the bakery until early 1980, when he showed up drunk and fought with other staff members. He was promptly sacked. Unemployed, penniless, and soon homeless again, Garavito fell back into depression and the suicidal thoughts returned.

Additionally, he had developed a case of bulimia. Already a relatively small man, only standing at 165 cm or 5-foot-5-inches, he now became rail thin. In the spring of 1980, Garavito checked himself into the psychiatric wing of San Juan de Dios hospital in the city of Manizales, where the doctors found he was also suffering from paranoia and hallucinations.

He was treated with antipsychotics. Most notably, in one therapy session, Garavito began to confess to his psychiatrist that he had a desire for children, but then he walked that statement back, explaining that he meant that he wanted to start a family. Like with his previous therapists, Garavito ultimately decided not to disclose his pederastic urges.

He was released after a few weeks and moved back to Armenia where he got a job at another grocery store. While working there, he charmed a single mother and hair stylist named Claudia. He was kind to her and did not interfere with her child. Garavito has gone on record to say that, “The first woman’s company I actually enjoyed was Claudia’s.” This seems a little at odds with his being in love with Luz Ocampo. But who can expect consistency from a psychopath, serial killer, and a compulsive liar?

But the relationship did not last long because Claudia had a somewhat mercenary approach toward men, and Garavito could hardly splash the cash on a stock-boy’s wage. After their break-up, Garavito intensified his predatory behaviours. During his (rather generous) 2-hour lunch breaks at the grocery store, he would travel from Armenia to the towns of Quimbaya or Calarcá, which were both within 20 km or 12 miles from the city.

He would drink cheap brandy along the way. By the time he arrived, Garavito would lure one of the poorer children from a marketplace or park, usually by offering them money to perform an odd-job of some kind. Once they were in an isolated spot, Garavito would get progressively drunker and then sexually assault them.

In addition, he would beat them and bite them on the limbs, neck, and genitals, echoing the assault Garavito claims he experienced at the hands of the pharmacist neighbour as a child. By the autumn of 1980, Garavito had taken to torturing his victims with candle wax, burning them with a lighter, and cutting them with a razor blade. In some cases, he amputated one of their toes.

Garavito also removed one of his own front teeth so he could, according to him, bite his victims “more effectively.” At this time, Garavito assaulted and tortured, but did not kill, his victims.

From 1980 onward, Garavito preyed upon a rough estimated average of between 15 and 25 children per year, not counting the so-called “Disposables” whom he solicited for sex and subjected to the same torture. As a result, it wasn’t long before his victims entered the triple digits. And here is a man who, one day soon, might be released from prison, and who is fanatically confident that, when he dies, he will ascend to the Gates of Heaven.

Agent of Evil

In order to minimize his chances of being detected, Garavito quit his job at the grocery store in Armenia, bought a simple wooden sales cart, and set out on the road. He sold trinkets, religious icons, and occasionally fruit. He travelled widely across Colombia in order to prevent anyone from recognizing him as a perpetrator or tracking him down.

Furthermore, being a street vendor allowed him to hang out at marketplaces without drawing suspicion while he was on the prowl for victims. As for his sales, he only needed to make enough to pay for food and booze. Garavito was okay with sleeping rough, though periodically throughout the 1980s he would shack up with a woman, increasingly selecting single mothers, so he could return to a place after being on the road and sleep comfortably under a welcoming roof.

As a result of these tactics, Garavito was able to sexually assault and torture an estimated 200 to 300 children across Colombia between 1980 and 1992 without being caught. We can trace Garavito’s probable movements in this period by looking at the spikes in local reports of child abuse.

Garavito’s cognitive dissonance between his religiosity and his crimes persisted. When sober, he was frequently depressed about what he was doing, several times attempting suicide. At night, he would feverishly read the Bible trying to find a stray passage that might somehow justify what he was doing to children.

He would also strip naked and hit himself in the chest in contrition. He began asking his victims what their names were so he could record them in a blue notebook, which he read while he prayed. Garavito claims he had frequent nightmares from which he woke up and cried, before bursting into maniacal laughter when he remembered that, despite his faith, his crimes had given him a great deal of sexual pleasure.

His contemplations of God, the afterlife, salvation, and his justifications for sin, were not aided by the fact he frequently suffered from psychosis, delusions, and hallucinations, muddling his thoughts. And then there was the booze, which was omnipresent, and capable of quieting any depression or frustration with exaggerated confidence followed by sweet oblivion.

When scouring the Bible for a justification failed, Garavito leaned into the idea that he was pure evil. A natural first step was Satanism. Garavito indulged himself in black magic, seances to commune with the dead, sacrificial rituals to summon dark spirits, and the foretelling of the future with tarot cards.

He visited occultists and fortune tellers until he decided that he knew more about the spiritual underworld than they did. Garavito began to believe the devil was speaking to him and sending him commands. This is not unheard of with serial killers.

Jeffrey Dahmer began to believe something similar. It has a twisted form of logic to it. If an all-powerful evil being is sending you commands, then who are you, a mere frail mortal, to disobey?

You could then indulge whatever sadistic or depraved activity that gave you sexual pleasure while acknowledging head-on that it was morally wrong. It didn’t need to be rationalized, justified, and it definitely wasn’t your fault. The Devil made you do it.

Literally. In this respect, Satanism eliminated the cognitive dissonance Garavito had previously felt.

And I say “cognitive dissonance” rather than genuine “remorse”, which is a word that sometimes crops up in accounts of Garavito hitting himself, praying over the names of his victims, and feeling depressed about what he was doing to these children. The word “remorse” is also thrown around quite a lot in statements by Garavito himself. But it is quite clear from his interviews and published psych evaluations that Garavito is a psychopath, neurologically incapable of feeling empathy or true remorse.

Instead, when we talk about Garavito feeling conflicted, we’re talking about his awareness that what he was doing was against laws and moral norms. Being religious in a highly religious country, he knew full well the Ten Commandments prohibited murder. He knew that Christ preached a compassion that was the polar opposite to hurting an innocent child.

He knew that hurting a child is illegal. He knew that a mob of people would happily kill him for what he was doing. His so-called remorse was entirely relative to how he was perceived.

So, in the face of his god and of Colombian society, he tried to justify what he’d done, and when he could not, he simply shrugged his shoulders, said he was a sinner, and said he “felt bad about it.” But he didn’t actually care about the suffering of those kids.

In addition to Satanism, Garavito added Nazism, mostly in connection to the violence it wrought rather than anything ideological or racial. He picked up a copy of Mein Kampf, various biographies of Hitler, and accounts of World War Two. Garavito connected with the fact that Hitler was once a homeless and impoverished artist in Vienna.

He admired the fact that Hitler had gone from a situation very similar to his own to being totalitarian dictator of a country and nearly conquering all of Europe. Garavito also admired Hitler’s particularly ruthless and violent methods. He had a particular affection for the idea of shooting large numbers of people in mass graves they had been forced to dig themselves.

Garavito also recognized the “usefulness” of keeping Jews, gypsies, and political prisoners in concentration camps, and was stimulated by the torture and misery inflicted there. Of course, Garavito overlooked the fact that, as a same-sex attracted person, he would have likely wound up in one of those concentration camps as well. Nor did the Third Reich look kindly on alcoholics, whom they considered genetically flawed, and whom they often imprisoned, institutionalized, and even euthanized.

But Garavito took no notice of that. Instead, he studied the (likely untrue) theories of some historians that Hitler was homosexual. To Garavito’s mind this brought them even closer together as kindred spirits.

In similar vein, Garavito came to idolize Colombian mass murderer Campo Elias Delgado, an army veteran who got up one day, went to the bank, cleaned out his savings account, bought a revolver and 500 rounds of ammunition, then proceeded to shoot, stab, and burn several of his neighbours, before heading to an Italian restaurant, having a few drinks, and then opening fire on the other customers. In total he killed 29 people and injured 12 before the police put a bullet in his brain. Garavito began to have fantasies about killing people in front of journalists and large crowds.

He dreamed of buying a machine gun, going to Trujillo, and filling his father full of bullets, before gunning down his mother and his other siblings, and finally turning the gun on himself. All this was wrapped up in Garavito’s feeling that he was entitled to vengeance upon the world. And he wanted to take himself out rather than allow himself to be caught.

He had all of these murderous fantasies before he had killed a single child. Yet harming an adult was something of a daunting prospect for Garavito, who was short, thin, malnourished, and rather timid around people when he was sober. When the time came to kill, Garavito ultimately chose more defenseless victims.

On January 25th 1984, Garavito got drunk, fell into a deep psychosis, and began to cut himself in public. He was locked up in a psych ward and put on medication. He was given cognitive behavioural therapy, a.k.a. talk-therapy, for his depression.

He was kept institutionalised for a month and was released on February 28th with a supposedly clean bill of health. That same day, he went to the city of Pereira where he abducted, sexually assaulted, and tortured two boys. Garavito went to his sister Esther’s house, who was by then living in Pereira, and asked her to store a small cloth bag.

Unbeknownst to her, it contained two identity cards taken from the boys. However, a few days later, the victims spotted Garavito in public and pointed him out to adults, forcing Garavito to flee the city. Police were not able to identify Garavito from witness descriptions, and no warrant was circulated.

Garavito continued to seek psychiatric treatment as an outpatient at various mental hospitals, occasionally being committed after one of his suicide attempts. Again, he never disclosed his crimes or pederastic inclinations to his therapists. He was also arrested by police in 1984 on suspicion of petty theft, but was released without charge.

It was two years before Garavito was bold enough to return to Pereira. It was a large enough city that he was fortunate enough not to be recognized by any former witnesses. Throughout 1986, Garavito continued to ply his trade as a street vendor, along with continuing to stalk and assault victims.

He also shacked up with a single mother named Graciela Zabaleta, having randomly met her after leaving a mental hospital nearby her house. Garavito approached her and immediately suggested they become boyfriend and girlfriend. Although the directness of this approach could have had the exact opposite effect, Graciela was charmed by Garavito’s confidence and invited him into her home.

For the next several months, Garavito paid Graciela’s bills and groceries with the proceeds of his street sales. He was also very kind and seemingly protective of Graciela’s children. Erectile dysfunction kept sex off the table, but like Luz and Claudia, Garavito later claimed he was madly in love with Graciela.

His relationship with her managed to last longer than some others, because he frequently headed out of town to stalk victims. This prevented Graciela from seeing Garavito drunk too often. For Garavito’s part, he attempted to stay sober whenever he was in her home.

However, by early 1987, Graciela had seen Garavito drunk, deranged, and angry too many times and she asked him to leave.

Garavito hit the road again. He began exclusively selling religious iconography – pictures of the Pope and various Saints. He continued to lure children and assault them, diversifying his tactics by dressing up as a priest, a beggar, or walking with crutches to not arouse suspicion. And the worst was yet to come.

Slaughter

After preying upon between 200 and 300 victims in the two decades between 1972 and 1992, Garavito claims that he began to feel a “sense of apathy” about carrying out further sexual assaults. He also began to have trouble reaching sexual climax during these atrocities. The thrill just wasn’t what it used to be. Then, in the autumn of 1992, when he was 35 years old, Garavito claims that he was communing with spirits via a Ouija Board when he heard the Devil speak to him.

The dark lord supposedly asked Garavito if he would like to serve him, to which Garavito answered yes. Satan allegedly replied, “Then kill. And with killing, many rewards may yet come to you.”

A few days later, on October 1st 1992, Garavito was heavily intoxicated and staggering down the streets of a resort district just north of the city of Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast. He spotted a young boy sat on the sidewalk selling sweets and cigars. Garavito approached and offered the boy money to come and perform an odd-job for him. The boy declined.

Because Garavito was thoroughly shitfaced, he began to get aggressive, groped the victim, at which point the boy called for help. Two police officers approached, pistol-whipped Garavito, then beat him severely to the point of bleeding and dragged him to the local police station. There, Garavito bribed the officers with his watch, a ring, and 1000 pesos (only 50 cents in modern US currency) to release him without charge.

Three days later, on the evening of October 4th 1992, Garavito staggered out of a bar in the town of Jamundi and began following a 13-year-old boy named Juan Carlos. Garavito claims that the moonlight somehow filled him with a desire to kill, and he had flashbacks of his childhood and became filled with rage. Garavito began tailing Juan Carlos through a crowded market district, quickly dipping into a shop to purchase a rope and a butcher’s knife.

Then Garavito approached the teenager and offered him 1000 pesos to do a quick task for him. The boy agreed and followed Garavito out to a railroad track. Garavito beat the victim, knocking out his front teeth, then tied him up, sodomized him, and slashed his throat with the butcher’s knife.

Post-mortem, Garavito mutilated the victim’s rectum with the knife and castrated the corpse. Then the drunken murderer passed out. Garavito claims that when he awoke the next morning, he began to weep when he saw the boy’s bloodstains on his clothes.

Juan Carlos’ body was discovered three days later. Due to the fact he was poor and such murders were common, his death was not assigned a high priority by the police.

On October 10th, Garavito headed to Trujillo to stay a few days with his sister Esther. Garavito claims that at the time he was trying to suppress his homicidal urges, despite having now gotten a taste for it. By some twisted drunken logic, Garavito tried to tame his murderous impulses by keeping constantly obliterated on brandy, thinking he would not feel any rages if he stayed so drunk he could barely stand. Of course, such a level of intoxication cannot be maintained for more than a few hours and the alcohol merely exacerbated Garavito’s mental illness rather than curbing it.

Garavito claims that, on October 12th 1992, while working in the nearby city of Tuluá, he saw a child walk by on the street and became so angry that he smashed the wooden crates and clay containers on his sales cart.

A few hours later, Garavito spotted 12-year-old Juan Alejandro Peñaranda. Garavito lured him to an isolated spot with promises of money, tied him up, sexually assaulted him, and stabbed him to death. In the hopes of making the murder look like a ritual killing committed by some kind of Satanic cult, Garavito sliced off the victim’s fingers, thumbs, and toes. Then he dumped the body in Cauca River, which incidentally had the nickname “The River of Death” because of the number of “Disposables” commonly found floating in it.

After the murder of Peñaranda on October 12th 1992, Garavito no longer tried to suppress his homicidal urges. He was hooked. He took up killing full time. Literally.

He unleashed the sort of hell upon Colombia that hadn’t been seen since the days of Pedro Lopez. Because of the sheer scale of the violence, the failure to identify all of the victims, and Garavito’s own failure to remember the precise dates of them all, the record grows a little hazy moving forward. But, by a rough estimate, Garavito killed between 45 and 60 children per year. That’s 4 or 5 children per month, averaging at least one child per week.

Garavito targeted the Disposables and the children of the rural peasantry and urban working class. Due to the nature of Colombian society at the time, it was only if you murdered a victim in the middle or upper classes that police assigned some priority to the investigation. The Disposables had no one to report them missing. The parents of lower-class kids did report their children missing, but very little was done.

Pedro Lopez exploited the same situation in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador in the 1970s. There was also the issue of reporting a child missing if one of the Colombian militias or the drug cartels were behind it. To do so invited deadly retribution. Thus it was the classism and inactivity of the police, and the poverty and utter chaos of the region, that were responsible for how both Garavito and Lopez racked up such disgustingly high body-counts.

In addition to targeting poor children, Garavito also had a preference for boys who were slim, neotenous, with innocent features. Essentially the younger and more effeminate looking the better. He also preferred to kill children of predominantly European ancestry, especially if they had blue eyes or light-coloured hair, rather than children with darker features and/or native Colombian ancestry.

That said, Garavito’s victims spanned the entire spectrum of appearances. He ultimately wasn’t fussy. Garavito’s murder victims were typically between the ages of 6 and 13, with one exception being a 16-year-old disabled teenager who had lost the use of his legs.

Garavito also murdered 5 adults who were accidental witnesses of his killings – he did not torture or sexually assault them or mutilate their bodies. Due to the fact that many of the children had no dental records, no parents to claim them, or were otherwise too decomposed when their bodies were found, scores and scores of children could not be identified at the time. It took elaborate facial reconstruction and years of research to discover their identities.

And, to this day, 27 of Garavito’s victims still have not been identified.

Unlike the first murder of Juan Carlos, Garavito generally struck during the daytime, preferably in the morning, approaching victims in the marketplace or the streets. He would also lurk around schoolyards in the afternoons. His approaches differed. Sometimes he’d appear as a street vendor, a priest, a beggar, a schoolteacher, a disabled tramp hobbling on crutches, and he even disguised himself as an old man.

In Trujillo, Garavito took care to gain a reputation in the local community as a charity-worker who was fond of kids, a façade he was able to carry off very effectively when he was soft-spoken and sober. Due to Garavito’s large, low-hanging ears, the children affectionately gave him the nickname “Goofy” after the Disney character. The charity work gained him access to orphanages and other children’s charitable organizations.

Regardless of the cover he used, Garavito would then make up an excuse to lure a child to a secluded spot - usually a job for money. If the child seemed hesitant to go with him, Garavito would increase the amount. That usually clinched things. Other times, Garavito would offer sweets or gifts, and in some cases he’d offer drugs to street children who were addicted to smoking cheap cocaine residue.

Once, on the morning after Halloween, Garavito lured a victim by offering to help find the candy the boy had lost the night before. Once he had convinced his victim, by whatever means, Garavito would then walk a very long distance with the child until they were too tired to resist. Then Garavito would strike. The attacks were sudden but not quick, with prolonged torture that could last the better part of an hour.

In 1993, Garavito escalated the brutality of the killings. He resumed the atrocities of his previous non-lethal attacks – the burning, the cutting, the biting. In addition, Garavito began disemboweling his victims while they were still alive and he was in the middle of sexually assaulting them.

It became something of a grotesque signature of his. Such was the fate experienced by eight schoolboys between the ages of 9 and 11 that Garavito brazenly lured to a secluded area and bound with rope in the town of La Victoria. He moved from one victim to the next while the others watched.

After it was over, Garavito severed the victims’ toes post-mortem and took them as trophies, along with their pictures cut out of their identity cards. Garavito soon dumped the toes, however, for fear of being detected by sniffer dogs. He would instead document his killings in a little notebook, take photographs of the victims’ bodies, cut out any newspaper reports of the killings, and keep the receipts and bus tickets of his journeys between towns.

He kept these mementos in a black cotton bag at his sister Esther’s house.

After the mass murder in La Victoria, Garavito travelled an hour north and used the same modus operandi to torture and murder 11 more victims in Bogota, this time killed one by one. He then departed for Tuluá and found more victims, and spent the rest of 1993 hopping between Pereira, Quimbaya, Armenia and 54 other towns and villages, taking the lives of dozens of victims. By the end of the year, Garavito began removing a victim’s vital organs post-mortem and taking them with him from the scene.

He did not keep them as trophies but soon discarded them at a second location. Due to rapid rates of decomposition and interference from wildlife, the viscera was almost never found.

In 1994, Garavito added the torture method of flaying the skin off the victim’s buttocks with a razor blade held between his fingers. On February 4th, in Bogota, Garavito lured 13-year-old Jaime Gonzalez from the Plaza de Bolivar on a long trek to a sugarcane field. Garavito was already extremely intoxicated, having just been thrown out of a bar for flying into a drunken rage over the quality of the food.

He continued to drink from a cheap bottle of brandy once they reached the field. After Garavito murdered Gonzalez, he caught sight of a nearby crucifix which triggered his latent fear of God. Garavito panicked, buried his knife, prayed for absolution, then dug up his knife again, and went to a hotel where he paced naked around the room for the next several hours, flogging himself and reciting Psalm 57: “Be merciful unto me, O God.

For my soul trusteth in thee. In the shadow of thy wings will I take my refuge, until these calamities be overpast… He shall send from heaven, and save me from the reproach of him that would swallow me up… My soul is among lions. And I lie even among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword.”

The fact Garavito chose Psalm 57 indicates his narcissism and lack of accountability for his actions. The passage features King David calling upon God to rescue him from the evils of the world, including the slander of other people. Garavito also saw himself beset by the evils of the world, and beseeched God to rescue him, instead of recognizing that it was he, Garavito himself, who was the greatest evil of all.

While still in Bogota, Garavito spotted a 12-year-old boy sleeping on a bus. He plied him with brandy and lured his now intoxicated victim to a ravine. There, Garavito stripped off the victim’s clothes and had begun to bind him with rope when Garavito detected the smell of rotting flesh.

He soon discovered that they were standing next to a mass grave. Not one of Garavito’s. This was Colombia.

As Garavito recoiled from the smell, the boy seized his chance and grabbed Garavito’s knife. The boy slashed the blade at the older man, slicing the tendons in Garavito’s left hand as he raised his arms to protect himself. Ultimately, however, Garavito managed to overpower the victim and murdered him.

The killing blow was usually a deep cut across the throat while Garavito climaxed. But post-mortem Garavito frequently escalated this to full-on decapitation. Also post-mortem, Garavito would castrate the corpse.

When feeling particularly enraged and venomous, Garavito would place the genitals in the cadaver’s mouth.

Only two known victims out of hundreds after Garavito’s murder spree began in 1992 wound up being luckier in their escape attempts. Brand Ferney Bernal Alvarez was a 16-year-old who worked for his father running a cock-fighting business. Garavito approached the victim, didn’t try to lure him, but immediately threatened Alvarez with a knife.

Garavito marched him into the forest and bound the victim with rope. Garavito stabbed Alvarez seven times with a screwdriver during the sexual assault. However, Alvarez was able to break free of the ropes and run away before Garavito could kill him.

In Circasia, Garavito approached a 10-year-old boy named Carlos Alberto. Garavito offered the victim 200 pesos (or roughly 10 cents in modern US currency), along with some small gifts, and lured him to a secluded tree-covered hillside. The usual modus operandi ensued.

At one point, Garavito asked the victim if he was enjoying it. The boy, hoping to mollify his abductor, responded yes. And so Garavito let the boy go without killing him, saying, “That’s how you like it, that’s how I like it.

See you next week.”

By 1995, there were enough unexplained corpses of children turning up in the town of Armenia for the local District Attorney’s office to set up a four-man task force. The team began asking for reports of similar discoveries from across Colombia. Hundreds of such reports flooded in. However, many of the children had not been identified, nor were detailed descriptions of their injuries often given, making it impossible to tie the bodies matching Garavito’s M.O. to one man.

In that same year, police discovered the bodies of 4 children in varying states of decomposition on a hillside in the Cauca Valley. They were all from the lower classes, between the ages of 8 and 10, and two of them were cousins. All of them had disappeared before noon, with the cousins disappearing on the same day, and the two other children disappearing on different days.

It appeared that once the killer found a decent spot, he would lure subsequent victims there as well, quickly subduing and binding them once they saw the previous corpses. Police also found several empty bottles of cheap brandy and a bottle of lubricant at the scene. This was one of the earliest connections authorities made to a killer of children stalking the region.

The bodies all showed similar injuries and the same cause of death: a slash across the throat. The killer had also added the torture method of inserting a knife into their rectums. DNA found on the bodies indicated they had been sexually assaulted, but police did not know whether this had been done pre or post-mortem.

Indeed, Garavito’s usual M.O. was to assault his victims while they were alive, but sometimes when the victim expired too soon, Garavito engaged in necrophilia.

State of Decay

In 1996, Garavito was arrested in the town of Tunja under suspicion of the murder of a 12 year old boy named Renald Delgado Quintero. Garavito had been identified by a store owner and several local prostitutes who had seen Garavito lure the boy away from a crowded marketplace. However, police had no other evidence and it was Garavito’s word against the eyewitnesses.

After some smoothtalking and coming off as harmless as possible, Garavito managed to be released without charge. He immediately modified his appearance and travelled 450 km or 280 miles west to Pereira where he promptly murdered 10-year-old Jorge Ramirez shortly after arriving.

On June 8th 1996, Garavito was in the town of Boyaca and approached a group of boys in a shop and bought them all sweets. He then managed to lure one of the boys away for an odd-job, with the boy following him on his bike. The victim’s mutilated remains were found 5 days later. Garavito was still in Boyaca at the time and was identified by the other boys.

Garavito was arrested. Under police interrogation, Garavito admitted to buying the boys sweets but then claimed he left them alone after that. Police showed poor judgement and released him. Four days later, Garavito again travelled to Pereira where he immediately tortured and murdered a 13-year-old boy.

Then in late June, Garavito moved on to Circasia where he ran into Luz Mary Ocampo Orozco, whom he had first met in 1973, and worked with at a grocery store in 1978. Garavito said he had always loved Ocampo. She was now a schoolteacher and single mother of a 15-year-old son.

Garavito told her that he no longer worked for grocery stores but for the past several years had been a street vendor, and was now a salesmen of air fresheners to schools across Colombia. But because the school year was now finished, Garavito complained that he was out of work. He asked Ocampo if he could stay with her.

She consented. Garavito began selling fruit from a cart in the marketplace and paid Ocampo money in exchange for room and board. But his stay did not last long, due to his alcoholism.

Locals in Circasia began to call him by the nickname “Conflicto” because he was frequently drunk and aggressive. By the end of July, Ocampo was eager to be rid of him and Garavito moved out.

In August 1996, while in Bogota, Garavito broke his leg. It is unclear whether this was from a drunken fall (which is quite common with chronic alcoholics), or whether it was from a physical confrontation with an adult, or an injury sustained while he was trying to kill another victim. Either way, it placed Garavito on crutches with a neck-brace for the next month. During that time, Garavito briefly stayed with a male friend before returning to Circasia and begging Luz Ocampo to let him stay again.

She cautiously said yes, and Garavito spent his days begging on the streets, no longer able to work or kill any victims. He gave the proceeds of his pan-handling over to Ocampo. In mid-September, when Garavito was sufficiently recovered, he went out and bought Ocampo a television, and paid for it in installments.

Two weeks later, in October, Garavito was drunk again and got into a physical altercation with Ocampo’s teenage son because Garavito wanted to put on the local news while the kid was watching something else. Ocampo kicked Garavito out of the house and had to assume paying the installments for the television herself. Two months later, on Christmas Day, Ocampo had a male friend visit her and give her a Christmas present.

Garavito must have been watching the house because that evening he made a drunken phone call to Ocampo where he called the male friend a gay slur and said he didn’t like him visiting. Ocampo responded by telling Garavito he was banned from ever staying with her again.

At 6 am the next morning, Garavito turned up at Ocampo’s house, still drunk from the night before, shouting threats and peppering her with obscene insults. Garavito then attempted to strangle Ocampo. She and her son fled and took refuge in a neighbour’s house. Garavito trashed Ocampo’s place and stayed there several hours before sobering up, writing Ocampo an apology note, and then departing.

Ocampo never saw him again. Shortly thereafter, in the second week of January 1997, Garavito murdered three victims, all between the ages of 6 and 8 years old.

In need of a new place to stay, Garavito rekindled relations with Graciela Zabaleta, a single mother in Pereira with whom he had first formed a romantic relationship in 1986. The two had been periodically in contact since then. Garavito paid her a visit in early 1997 and sweettalked her into moving in again. He used the place as a base of operations while continuing to travel across the country killing victims.

Thus she did not see him often, which might explain the relative longevity of his stay with her. But Garavito was also active in Pereira. For instance, on October 1st 1997 he murdered two boys at a bus terminal.

The next month, in November, police uncovered a dump site of four victims in a countryside ravine in the Risaralda region, not far from Pereira, where Garavito was based. The gruesome discovery set off a blizzard of police investigation and media coverage which alarmed Garavito. Ultimately, however, the investigation stalled for lack of suspects. Then, in February 1998, 100 km or 60 miles to the south, police discovered the bodies of three boys lying on a hillside, just outside the town of Genova.

One of them had been impaled on a pike so thoroughly that the sharp end came out of the victim’s mouth. This sparked another flurry of media attention, again alarming Garavito. In the coming months, he followed the news stories of other victims being discovered in various fields and forests across Colombia.

By July 1998, Graciela Zabaleta had finally grown tired of Garavito’s drunk and abusive behaviour whenever he was home, and politely asked him to leave. Garavito departed peaceably but got Graciela to agree to keep another black cotton bag at her house. Meanwhile, Garavito was convinced he should move his murderous activities abroad for a while anyway, so he bought a forged passport with the name “Bonifacio Morera” and flew to Ecuador.

He spent the next two months begging for money. Locals immediately marked him out as a foreigner due to his heavy Colombian accent. In late July, Garavito murdered a 14-year-old boy and then a 12-year-old boy in the town of Chone, Ecuador.

Then Garavito moved on to the city of Santo Domingo, where people made complaints to authorities about him lurking around a school. Surprisingly, given his usual victim profile, it is worth noting that it was a school for girls. Which means either Garavito was branching out, or deliberately trying to modify his killing pattern, or else he was actually bisexual after all.

It is also possible Garavito was lurking around boys’ schools, but it was his only his presence at the girls’ school that triggered local alarm. Either way, Santo Domingo police set up a sting operation to catch Garavito in the act of either molestation or abduction, but Garavito must have caught wind of it because he fled the country. Shortly thereafter, Ecuadorian authorities discovered the corpse of a boy and a girl, both of whom had been killed with Garavito’s usual M.O.

It is possible that the girl was an intended victim or that she was an opportunistic one because she had been in the company of the boy. Garavito claims that from Ecuador he flew to Venezuela, where he killed another victim, before returning to Colombia in late August. Now unwelcome at Graciela’s place, Garavito regularly began sleeping rough as he travelled across Colombia.

And then, in November 1998 a mass grave of 36 victims was uncovered. Reports of other killings and mass graves began to flood in from across the country. A national taskforce was set up to coordinate the investigation. Finally, after years of police inaction, the hunt was on.

Needle in a Cane-Stack

On the morning of February 6th 1999, Garavito murdered three children in a sugarcane field just outside the city of Palmira in the Cauca Valley. The usual modus operandi was observed. But Garavito was far drunker than usual.

He had stripped off his shorts and underwear and was in the middle of performing an act of necrophilia on one of the corpses when he passed out on top of the body. He had a lit cigarette in his left hand. The sugarcane around him caught fire.

The flames began to scorch his left side, causing second and third-degree burns down his left arm, side, and leg. When Garavito awoke, he panicked and fled, abandoning his glasses, shoes, underwear, shorts, and some money that was in his pockets. A veritable treasure trove of forensic evidence.

He also left behind the usual empty bottle of cheap brandy. Garavito ran across the countryside, with his ass and genitals exposed, hiding from people, until he was able to discretely steal a pair of trousers from a clothesline. He then hitchhiked, barefoot and with his burns untreated, 190 km or 120 miles north from Palmira to Pereira to put some distance between him and the now smouldering carnage.

Arriving in the early evening, Garavito staggered into a local drugstore and got some basic first aid. He then disappeared without telling the shopkeeper his name or what had happened. Garavito did not dare go to hospital.

Back in Palmira, the fire was put out by a local farmer and he discovered two of the three bodies in the process. Police found the third body the next day, February 7th, along with the items Garavito had left behind. The bodies showed injuries consistent with all the other victims that had been found across Colombia.

A number which had now passed into the triple digits. The money found at the scene was discovered to have been printed and circulated in Ipiales, a town 485 km or 300 miles to the south of Palmira, on the Ecuadorian border. This implied the murderer of the three victims in Palmira likely travelled widely, same as the serial killer sought by the national taskforce.

More concretewas the information derived from the glasses and shoes. The glasses had a left lens designed for a person with a specific type of astigmatism in his left eye. It was a condition that only occurred in people aged between 40 and 60 years old.

Garavito was 42 at the time. The arms of the glasses were bent downward, suggesting the wearer had unusually placed ears. Garavito had earned the nickname “Goofy” from the children of Trujillo for a reason.

The shoes, meanwhile, had unusual patterns of wear and tear on them. Firstly, there was no erosion at the tip of the shoe, implying that the suspect had a foot smaller than the size of the shoe. Second, and most crucially, the circular wear patterns in the middle and heel of the right shoe suggested that the suspect had a limp, slightly rotating his foot as he walked.

Indeed, Garavito had broken his leg in August 1996 and it had healed badly. Moreover, examination of the footprints found at the scene indicated that the suspect was between 5-foot-4 and 5-foot-6 inches tall. Again, Garavito was 5-foot-5.

The information was relayed to the national taskforce. They pulled files from the archives of all suspects implicated in criminal activities involving pederasty since 1989. Five thousand suspects came up.

Detectives immediately filtered out those cases involving female victims. All the victims found in Colombia were boys. They had not yet connected the killer to the one girl found in Ecuador.

This reduced the number of cases to 1500. Next, the investigators excluded suspects that were under the age of 40. This drastically (and shockingly) reduced the number of suspects down to just 95 people.

It would appear that 70% of the atrocities on file in Colombia at the time were perpetrated against young girls, and that 94% of the suspects on file who acted against young boys were below the age of 40. When detectives filtered suspects for the height range of 5-foot-4 to 5-foot-6, the number was further reduced to 45 people. Finally, detectives focused on the suspects who had been implicated in sex crimes in the areas where the majority of the mass graves and dumpsites had been found.

Namely, the area around and including Bogota, and the various towns and villages of the “Coffee Axis.” This reduced the list to 25 names. Luis Garavito was on that list.

The suspect names were circulated to local law enforcement across Colombia. One such investigator was Aldemar Duran, lead detective on the February 1998 case of three boys who were murdered in Garavito’s birth town of Genova. Duran worked so tirelessly on the case, never taking time off, and barely sleeping, that his colleagues nicknamed him “The Killer’s Shadow.”

When the case exploded into a national investigation in November, Duran quickly matched the victim injuries, specific type of rope fibers, and the cheap brandy bottle left at the scene to the other cases. Since Colombia had no forensic psychologist who had worked on a serial killer case before, Duran contacted the FBI in the United States for insights on how to build a profile for a serial killer. He then got to know every snippet of information in the dozens and dozens of murders in intimate detail and attempted to put himself in the mind of the killer.

Duran suspected the man travelled around the country as a vagrant, and so placed undercover officers in homeless communities up and down Colombia, paying no attention to jurisdiction. Duran started researching the 25 suspects on the list circulated by the national taskforce. When looking into Luis Garavito, he found that he had been arrested in the town of Tunja in 1996 under suspicion of the murder of Renald Delgado Quintero.

Witnesses had seen Garavito walking off with the victim, but Garavito had been released due to lack of evidence. But when he was arrested, Garavito had filled out some paperwork and listed his place of residence as Trujillo, where he had spent the final years of his childhood before being thrown out of home. Duran found this interesting, because mass graves had also been found on the outskirts of that town.

Shortly after making these discoveries, Duran found out that Garavito had been arrested for a second time in 1996, this time under suspicion of murdering a victim in the town of Boyaca. Again, he was released. Feeling certain that Garavito was the killer the nation was looking for, Duran departed for Trujillo to see if he could track down anyone who knew Garavito.

Meanwhile, close scrutiny was being placed on the city of Pereira because it was the first place where police had found a mass grave. They were conducting house to house searches, but found nothing. However, another name on the list of 25 suspects resided there – one Pedro Pablo Ramirez Garcia.

He had a criminal record related to pederastic activities going as far back as 1980. What is more, he was 44 years old, was 5-foot-6, and walked with a limp in his right leg. He was also a street vendor, and had been seen selling honey contained in old bottles of brandy.

The same type of brandy found at a majority of the crime scenes. This was all quite compelling circumstantial evidence. Garcia was already a suspect in the murder of two victims at a bus terminal in Pereira on October 1st 1997.

Turns out those boys had also been killed by Garavito. Then another boy in Periera identified Garcia as the man who had tried to assault him. This was enough for police to hunt Garcia down and toss him in a cell.

However, Garcia denied any involvement in the killings. Nevertheless, police were sure they had their man. That is, until Garavito killed four more victims in Bogota, employing his usual M.O.

The police were troubled by this development, but they kept Garcia imprisoned as a precaution anyway and because the allegations by the Pereira boy hadn’t been resolved. That attempted assault had not been done by Garavito. Meanwhile, Detective Aldemar Duran was busy in Trujillo.

He had managed to track down Garavito’s sister, Esther. During questioning, Esther revealed that Garavito had left a black cotton bag with her for safekeeping. She turned it over to police.

The bag contained documents, receipts, photographs, postcards, and various souvenirs of Garavito’s travels between 1992 and 1994. Duran also found a box of notebooks in Esther’s home which contained a long list of children’s names. Among the papers was a receipt for a money order wired to a woman who lived in Pereira named Graciela Zabaleta.

Duran immediately made tracks to Pereira, where he interviewed Graciela. She turned over yet another black cotton bag containing even more evidence: documents, receipts, photos, lottery tickets, bus tickets, and newspaper clippings about the killings. But the bag contained something else.

Synthetic fibres from ropes that matched those found at the murder sites, razor blades with blood on them, a couple bottles of lubricant that matched the brand found at many of the crime scenes. This was damning stuff. Police had a new prime suspect.

Pedro Garcia, his attempted assault charge being dropped, was now released. The question was, where was Garavito? Neither Esther nor Graciela had seen him in months.

Graciela’s little black bag had led the police to the house Garavito was renting in Pereira, but when they arrived they found the property had been vacated. And Duran’s undercover officers in the homeless community had not found him either. It was as if he had simply disappeared.

Am I a Sadist? Then, in the early evening of April 22nd 1999, in the city of Villavicencio, Luis Garavito struck again. He had been getting drunk all afternoon on a bottle of brandy when he saw 12-year-old Juan Ivan Sabogal selling lottery tickets on the street.

Garavito did not waste time trying to con the boy, and immediately threatened him with a knife. Garavito threw his arm around Sabogal in a pretend gesture of affection and dragged him into a taxi, telling Sabogal to keep his mouth shut or he’d kill him. The taxi drove them to the outskirts of town, where they got out and Garavito forced Sabogal to climb over a barbed-wire fence.

Then Garavito ordered Sabogal to walk until they reached an isolated area at the top of a hill. Garavito forced Sabogal to his knees and tied his hands with a rope while repeatedly asking him, “Am I a sadist? Am I a sadist?

Am I a sadist?” Garavito then proceeded to hurl insults at the victim and wave his knife under his face, laughing at the boy’s abject fear. Garavito then took out his penis and began to masturbate.

It was then that a 16-year-old homeless boy spotted Garavito and Sabogal. Immediately recognising the younger boy was in danger, the 16-year-old began throwing rocks at Garavito. Sabogal seized his opportunity, got to his feet, and ran in the direction of the 16-year-old.

Garavito chased them both, his knife out and at the ready, but due to the limp in his gammy leg, the two boys managed to lose him. They passed by a local farmhouse and were spotted by a 12-year-old girl. Garavito wasn’t far behind, saw the girl, and demanded aggressively that she say where the two boys went.

The girl misled Garavito and pointed him in the direction of the woods, where he got lost. Meanwhile, the homeless boy and Sabogal made it to a local car garage. The 16-year-old entrusted Sabogal to a mechanic working there and immediately departed, not wanting to be involved further.

The mechanic called the police at 7:15pm. By that point, Sabogal had been reported missing and the police brought his mother to the garage to identify him. The police were in the process of driving the boy and his mother down to the police station to make a statement when Sabogal spotted Garavito from the car window, walking by the side of the road.

Sabogal pointed him out, and the police pulled over and immediately arrested Garavito. Showing no emotion, Garavito identified himself as Bonifacio Morera, and denied having anything to do with Sabogal’s abduction. The police did not believe him and took him down to the station.

While this man named “Bonifacio Morera” was being processed, police noticed that his signature was different on every piece of paper he signed. Under questioning, the man continued to claim innocence. Due to the fact that the suspect fit the description of the Palmira killer (5-foot-5, glasses, and a limp in his right leg) the national taskforce was alerted.

The suspect also had burns down his left side, which would have been consistent with wounds the Palmira killer might have sustained from the sugarcane fire. The national taskforce circulated the mugshot of the man who called himself “Bonifacio Morera” to law enforcement across the country. When Detective Aldemar Duran saw the photo, he identified him as Luis Alfredo Garavito.

But the man himself denied this and continued to identify as Morera. Garavito was detained at La Tramacúa, the notorious maximum-security prison in Valledupar for the kidnapping, sexual assault, and attempted murder of Juan Sabogal. Duran meanwhile tracked down one of Garavito’s platonic female friends, Maria Umbar Toro, and convinced her to visit Garavito in prison while wearing a wire.

During their discussion, Garavito told her that he had another black bag of documents stashed away, which he had instructed the wife of another prisoner in La Tramacúa to retrieve while she was visiting. Police located the woman and seized the bag. It contained more receipts, bus tickets, and children’s photographs.

There was also a piece of paper in the bag that later turned out to be Garavito’s tally of victims for that year. Next, police arranged for Garavito to have an eye exam to confirm he had astigmatism in his left eye, consistent with the lens of the charred glasses found in the sugarcane field in Palmira. In order to not raise Garavito’s suspicions, prompting him to cheat on the test, skewing the results, investigators got every inmate in the prison to take the test.

While Garavito was out of his cell, police entered and retrieved Garavito’s hair and samples of his DNA. Both came back as a perfect match for hairs and DNA found at multiple crime scenes. Next, police used the evidence in the black bags, along with police records and independent sources, to compile a history of Garavito’s movements since 1992.

It was an exhaustive process that took weeks, but the findings were that, wherever police had a record of Garavito’s location in the past 7 years, there were murders at that same location. All this took from late April to early July 1999. It was then that police decided to confront Garavito with the evidence in order to extract a confession.

On July 2nd, Garavito was subjected to 9 hours questioning. He denied everything. Including the fact that he was Garavito.

So police sent for Aldemar Duran, “The Killer’s Shadow”, who knew the Garavito case in intimate detail and had made some attempt to understand the killer’s psychology. Duran sat with Garavito for 18 hours of questioning, going over every scrap of information and piece of evidence, reconstructing the scenes of dozens of killings in gruesome detail. In short, Duran forced Garavito to relive the murders, which had a profound impact on him: arousal, anger, and even shame.

Eventually, Garavito broke down in tears and began repeatedly screaming, “Why?! Why?!” at the top of his lungs.

Then, in the early hours of July 4th, Garavito began confessing to the murder of dozens of children in Colombia between 1992 and 1999, providing dates and locations. The number of murders he admitted to during his initial confession reached a total of 140 victims. But that was not the total number.

Not by a long shot. Triumph and Tragedy All things considered, despite years of police inaction and disorganization, it was a clever bit of policing that got Garavito caught. Much of the credit belongs to the work of Aldemar Duran for identifying him and extracting his confession.

But there was also a slick bit of police work performed by others, like the forensic analysts who pieced together the evidence left in the sugarcane field in Palmira. The national taskforce coordinated with local law enforcement fairly efficiently, and imported experts and cutting-edge technologies from America, the UK, the Netherlands, and Russia, to get the job done. But here is where the justice system began to fail the grieving mothers and fathers of Colombia once more.

Luis Garavito went to trial in 2001, charged with killing 172 children, of which he was convicted of 138. Neither of these numbers come close to the total we now suspect. Garavito was sentenced to 1853 years and 9 days in prison.

As mentioned at the outset, due to a constitutional constraint, Colombian prisoners could only serve a maximum of 40 years of these sentences. Furthermore, due to the fact that Garavito confessed, and continues to cooperate with authorities in locating more bodies, and the fact that Garavito continues to maintain good behaviour while in prison, his sentence was ultimately reduced to 22 years. For perspective, that means Garavito got roughly two months imprisonment for the sexual assault, torture, and murder of each of the 138 children he was convicted for.

And roughly three weeks imprisonment for each of the children Garavito is estimated to have actually killed. And, if we add into the equation the estimated number of victims Garavito sexually assaulted and tortured but did not kill between 1972 and 1992, Garavito got roughly 10 days in prison for each one of his victims. What 22 years imprisonment means is that Garavito is due to be released in 2023 or 2024, at the age of 66 or 67.

He currently has advanced eye-cancer, for which he is receiving chemotherapy, and it may ultimately kill him. But it is unlikely to do so in the months before he is released. Therefore, it is incumbent on the Colombian authorities to negate the reward for his good behaviour, and the assistance he gave police, or to come up with a mental health or public safety reason to keep Garavito imprisoned.

But the ability and willingness of the Colombian Attorney General’s office and the relevant courts to do so is open to speculation. If Garavito is released, he says he wants to start a family, he wants to become a religious preacher, and he wants to go into politics to work with abused children. It is likely that, if he is released, Garavito will come under intense police and public scrutiny.

But here is the problem with having a mentally ill, psychopathic, sexual sadist, and pedophile running amok: all it takes is once slip of vigilance, or one instigating incident, and there might be another victim, or series of victims, left behind in his wake. The final possibility is that Garavito meets the fate of Pedro Lopez, who disappeared only a few months after his release. And, like in the case of Pedro Lopez, that disappearance probably won’t be created by the killer’s flight (since men like Garavito and Lopez aren’t able to stop killing and would leave a trail of bodies wherever they went) but rather someone in Colombia taking the law into their own hands and disposing of the killer’s body where no one will ever find him.

The sort of vigilante justice that prevails wherever the rule of law fails. And the rule of law has definitely failed the people of Colombia. Including those hundreds of children who suffered and died at the hands of a monster.

A man of incalculable evil who may one day soon walk free, and who, to this day, still believes he is entitled to pass through the Gates of Heaven. Dismembered Appendices At time of writing, 193 cases have now been definitively proven against Luis Garavito. Meanwhile, after his conviction, Garavito continued to make additional confessions.

At present, the number of these confessions well surpasses 200 victims. And he isn’t just making this stuff up. His confessions have sufficient details, dates, times, and locations to make investigators think that most, if not all, of these confessions are genuine.

Meanwhile, in the past two decades, investigators have continued their work independently, following up on additional murder and disappearance cases. The total number of those cases exceeds 300 victims. In terms of the number of confirmed, proven victims - 193 - Luis Garavito is the most prolific serial killer in modern history.

Something worsened by the fact that the overwhelming majority of the victims are children. The next runner up is Pedro Lopez with 110 confirmed victims. In terms of unconfirmed victims, Garavito and Lopez are neck and neck with totals that both exceed 300 children.

The other serial killers on that list don’t even come close. Such were the conditions in Colombia in the latter half of the 20th century that allowed monsters to thrive. As mentioned at the beginning, there has been quite a bit of social media activity reaching out to the Colombian government, through various channels, urging them not to release Garavito from prison.

I cannot explicitly advocate for any such communications myself, but I am raising my eyebrows suggestively while I point out the fact that these communications are ongoing. No fully comprehensive secondary source on Luis Garavito exists in English or Spanish, so this particular account was particularly difficult to research, cobbling things together from news articles, psych reports, academic papers, trial records, and so forth - some of which are in English, some of which had to be slotted into a translator. Many of the accounts are flawed and inconsistent.

But I have done my best to verify the correct version of events here. Meanwhile, if anyone is itching to write the first big, definitive, not-pulp-bullshit-version, of a true crime book about Luis Garavito, there’s a niche open for you. It is startling it hasn’t been done already, since Garavito is arguably the world’s worst serial killer.

But in the field of true crime, we tend to overlook stories that come from the developing world and focus on the Bundys and Gacys. As a corollary of that, no major Hollywood production has ever attempted to depict Garavito like movies have done with other serial killers. And, given the nature of his crimes, I’d say that is probably for the best.

Key Takeaways Luis Garavito, convicted of 138 child murders but suspected of 300+ victims, is the most prolific serial killer in modern history. Garavito’s sentence was reduced from 1,853 years to just 22 years due to Colombian law limits and his confession, making him eligible for release in 2023-2024. Garavito targeted impoverished Colombian street children known as ‘The Disposables,’ exploiting systemic poverty and police inaction to evade capture for decades.

Forensic evidence from a 1999 sugarcane fire—including glasses, shoes, and burns—finally enabled police to identify and arrest Garavito after years of investigation. Despite showing no genuine remorse, Garavito has expressed desires to marry, preach, and run for Congress to help abused children if released from prison. Frequently Asked Questions Who is Luis Garavito and why is he considered the most prolific serial killer in history?

Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, known as ‘The Beast,’ is considered the most prolific serial killer in modern history with 193 definitively proven cases and confessions exceeding 200 victims, with investigators following up on additional cases exceeding 300 victims. The overwhelming majority of his victims were children, primarily boys between ages 6 and 13. He operated across Colombia (and briefly in Ecuador and Venezuela) between 1992 and 1999, though he sexually assaulted and tortured an estimated 200-300 children without killing them from 1972-1992.

What was Garavito’s childhood like according to his own accounts? According to Garavito, his father Manuel Antonio was a violent alcoholic who regularly beat his children, verbally abused them (calling Garavito an idiot, weakling, imbecile, and bastard), allegedly molested him, and at one point strapped 6-7 year old Garavito to a tree and flogged him with a machete for trying to defend his pregnant mother. His mother Rosa was allegedly violent, neglectful, and resentful.

Garavito was bullied at school for wearing glasses and given the nickname ‘Garabato’ (Squiggle). He also claimed abuse by two neighbors—one a drugstore owner who allegedly sexually tortured him from ages 12-14, and another who allegedly sodomized him at age 14. How did Garavito lure his victims?

Garavito used multiple disguises including street vendor, priest, beggar, schoolteacher, disabled tramp on crutches, and even an old man. He typically approached children in marketplaces, streets, or schoolyards and lured them to secluded spots by offering money for odd jobs, sweets, gifts, or drugs. He would walk long distances with the children until they were too tired to resist.

In Trujillo, he gained a reputation as a charity worker fond of children, earning the nickname ‘Goofy’ from children due to his large ears, which gave him access to orphanages and children’s organizations. What was Garavito’s modus operandi for killing? Garavito typically tortured his victims for extended periods before killing them with a slash across the throat, often while he climaxed.

His methods included beating, bludgeoning, burning with candle wax and lighters, cutting with razor blades, biting on limbs/neck/genitals, stabbing, impaling, disemboweling (sometimes while victims were alive during sexual assault), castration, and decapitation post-mortem. He often placed victims’ genitals in their mouths when particularly enraged. He documented killings in notebooks, took photographs, and collected trophies like toes and identity card pictures.

Bottles of cheap brandy and lubricant were invariably found at burial sites. How was Garavito finally caught? Garavito was arrested on April 22, 1999 in Villavicencio after 12-year-old Juan Ivan Sabogal escaped his abduction and identified him to police.

The breakthrough came from forensic evidence left in a sugarcane field fire in Palmira on February 6, 1999—his glasses (with astigmatism lens for left eye), shoes (showing his limp and small foot), and money. Detective Aldemar Duran connected Garavito to the crimes through his sister Esther and ex-girlfriend Graciela Zabaleta, who provided black bags containing documents, photos, rope fibers, bloody razor blades, and lubricant matching crime scenes. DNA and hair samples from his prison cell matched multiple crime scenes.

What was Garavito’s original sentence and why was it reduced? Garavito was sentenced to 1853 years and 9 days in prison for 138 convicted murders (charged with 172). However, due to Colombian constitutional constraints at the time, the maximum sentence was 40 years (later extended to 60 years, but only for subsequent convictions).

His sentence was reduced to just 22 years because he gave a full confession, assisted police in finding more bodies, and maintained good behavior in prison. This meant roughly two months imprisonment per convicted victim. What is Garavito’s current status regarding release from prison?

As of 2023, Garavito has reached the end of his 22-year sentence and is eligible for release at any moment, either in late 2023 or sometime in 2024. He applied for early release in 2021 but was denied because he could not afford the monetary fine he still owed. He is currently 66-67 years old, has advanced eye cancer receiving chemotherapy, and is kept in perpetual solitary confinement at La Tramacúa maximum-security prison in Valledupar for his own protection from other inmates.

What has Garavito said about his potential release and future plans? Garavito has expressed eagerness to be released and has stated desires to get married, start a family, become a religious preacher, and run for Congress to pass laws helping abused children. In interviews, he has shown next to no remorse, minimizing his crimes and blaming them on his upbringing, mental illnesses, the devil, and alcohol.

In 2016, he told interviewer Jon Sistiaga: ‘I have committed a series of behaviours that violate criminal laws and moral norms. I am a human being equal to any other. With some flaws.

But not one that is dangerous.’ What role did alcohol play in Garavito’s crimes? Alcohol was crucial to Garavito’s crimes—he was timid and well-mannered when sober but became a torturer, murderer, mutilator, and necrophile when drunk.

He gravitated toward cheap brandy and began drinking heavily at age 15. He had genetic predisposition to alcoholism (father and maternal grandfather were alcoholics; two brothers were also heavy drinkers). Unlike some serial killers who eventually lose the need for disinhibitors, Garavito never did—he required alcohol to ‘reveal the monster that lay beneath’ in a ‘Jekyll and Hyde situation.’

What was the social context in Colombia that allowed Garavito to operate for so long? Garavito exploited Colombia’s extreme poverty and social chaos during decades of civil war, political upheaval, and drug cartel violence. There were approximately 60,000 ‘Disposables’—homeless street children with no family to claim them, many in prostitution and drug addiction from ages 6-9.

These children lacked dental records, making identification impossible. Police prioritized investigations only for middle and upper-class victims; poor children’s disappearances were largely ignored. The chaos also meant parents feared reporting disappearances if militias or cartels were involved, inviting deadly retribution.

This classism and police inactivity allowed both Garavito and Pedro Lopez to accumulate extraordinarily high body counts.

Key Takeaways

• Luis Garavito, convicted of 138 child murders but suspected of 300+ victims, is the most prolific serial killer in modern history.
• Garavito’s sentence was reduced from 1,853 years to just 22 years due to Colombian law limits and his confession, making him eligible for release in 2023-2024.
• Garavito targeted impoverished Colombian street children known as ‘The Disposables,’ exploiting systemic poverty and police inaction to evade capture for decades.
• Forensic evidence from a 1999 sugarcane fire—including glasses, shoes, and burns—finally enabled police to identify and arrest Garavito after years of investigation.
• Despite showing no genuine remorse, Garavito has expressed desires to marry, preach, and run for Congress to help abused children if released from prison.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Luis Garavito and why is he considered the most prolific serial killer in history?

Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, known as ‘The Beast,’ is considered the most prolific serial killer in modern history with 193 definitively proven cases and confessions exceeding 200 victims, with investigators following up on additional cases exceeding 300 victims. The overwhelming majority of his victims were children, primarily boys between ages 6 and 13. He operated across Colombia (and briefly in Ecuador and Venezuela) between 1992 and 1999, though he sexually assaulted and tortured an estimated 200-300 children without killing them from 1972-1992.

What was Garavito’s childhood like according to his own accounts?

According to Garavito, his father Manuel Antonio was a violent alcoholic who regularly beat his children, verbally abused them (calling Garavito an idiot, weakling, imbecile, and bastard), allegedly molested him, and at one point strapped 6-7 year old Garavito to a tree and flogged him with a machete for trying to defend his pregnant mother. His mother Rosa was allegedly violent, neglectful, and resentful. Garavito was bullied at school for wearing glasses and given the nickname ‘Garabato’ (Squiggle). He also claimed abuse by two neighbors—one a drugstore owner who allegedly sexually tortured him from ages 12-14, and another who allegedly sodomized him at age 14.

How did Garavito lure his victims?

Garavito used multiple disguises including street vendor, priest, beggar, schoolteacher, disabled tramp on crutches, and even an old man. He typically approached children in marketplaces, streets, or schoolyards and lured them to secluded spots by offering money for odd jobs, sweets, gifts, or drugs. He would walk long distances with the children until they were too tired to resist. In Trujillo, he gained a reputation as a charity worker fond of children, earning the nickname ‘Goofy’ from children due to his large ears, which gave him access to orphanages and children’s organizations.

What was Garavito’s modus operandi for killing?

Garavito typically tortured his victims for extended periods before killing them with a slash across the throat, often while he climaxed. His methods included beating, bludgeoning, burning with candle wax and lighters, cutting with razor blades, biting on limbs/neck/genitals, stabbing, impaling, disemboweling (sometimes while victims were alive during sexual assault), castration, and decapitation post-mortem. He often placed victims’ genitals in their mouths when particularly enraged.

He documented killings in notebooks, took photographs, and collected trophies like toes and identity card pictures. Bottles of cheap brandy and lubricant were invariably found at burial sites.

How was Garavito finally caught?

Garavito was arrested on April 22, 1999 in Villavicencio after 12-year-old Juan Ivan Sabogal escaped his abduction and identified him to police. The breakthrough came from forensic evidence left in a sugarcane field fire in Palmira on February 6, 1999—his glasses (with astigmatism lens for left eye), shoes (showing his limp and small foot), and money. Detective Aldemar Duran connected Garavito to the crimes through his sister Esther and ex-girlfriend Graciela Zabaleta, who provided black bags containing documents, photos, rope fibers, bloody razor blades, and lubricant matching crime scenes. DNA and hair samples from his prison cell matched multiple crime scenes.

What was Garavito’s original sentence and why was it reduced?

Garavito was sentenced to 1853 years and 9 days in prison for 138 convicted murders (charged with 172). However, due to Colombian constitutional constraints at the time, the maximum sentence was 40 years (later extended to 60 years, but only for subsequent convictions). His sentence was reduced to just 22 years because he gave a full confession, assisted police in finding more bodies, and maintained good behavior in prison. This meant roughly two months imprisonment per convicted victim.

What is Garavito’s current status regarding release from prison?

As of 2023, Garavito has reached the end of his 22-year sentence and is eligible for release at any moment, either in late 2023 or sometime in 2024. He applied for early release in 2021 but was denied because he could not afford the monetary fine he still owed. He is currently 66-67 years old, has advanced eye cancer receiving chemotherapy, and is kept in perpetual solitary confinement at La Tramacúa maximum-security prison in Valledupar for his own protection from other inmates.

What has Garavito said about his potential release and future plans?

Garavito has expressed eagerness to be released and has stated desires to get married, start a family, become a religious preacher, and run for Congress to pass laws helping abused children. In interviews, he has shown next to no remorse, minimizing his crimes and blaming them on his upbringing, mental illnesses, the devil, and alcohol. In 2016, he told interviewer Jon Sistiaga: ‘I have committed a series of behaviours that violate criminal laws and moral norms. I am a human being equal to any other.

With some flaws. But not one that is dangerous.‘

What role did alcohol play in Garavito’s crimes?

Alcohol was crucial to Garavito’s crimes—he was timid and well-mannered when sober but became a torturer, murderer, mutilator, and necrophile when drunk. He gravitated toward cheap brandy and began drinking heavily at age 15. He had genetic predisposition to alcoholism (father and maternal grandfather were alcoholics; two brothers were also heavy drinkers). Unlike some serial killers who eventually lose the need for disinhibitors, Garavito never did—he required alcohol to ‘reveal the monster that lay beneath’ in a ‘Jekyll and Hyde situation.‘

What was the social context in Colombia that allowed Garavito to operate for so long?

Garavito exploited Colombia’s extreme poverty and social chaos during decades of civil war, political upheaval, and drug cartel violence. There were approximately 60,000 ‘Disposables’—homeless street children with no family to claim them, many in prostitution and drug addiction from ages 6-9. These children lacked dental records, making identification impossible. Police prioritized investigations only for middle and upper-class victims; poor children’s disappearances were largely ignored.

The chaos also meant parents feared reporting disappearances if militias or cartels were involved, inviting deadly retribution. This classism and police inactivity allowed both Garavito and Pedro Lopez to accumulate extraordinarily high body counts.

Sources

• Original Casual Criminalist video: Luis Garavito: The Most Prolific Serial Killer in History
• Hero image source by Adbh266 / openverse, by-sa.

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