Luis Garavito

• 1. The Beast of Colombia

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  Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos was sentenced to 1,853 years and 9 days in prison, the longest term ever handed down in Colombia. He was born on the 25th of January 1957 and died on the 12th of October 2023. Colombians called him La Bestia, meaning The Beast. In some towns he was known as Tribilín, the Spanish name for Goofy.

  Between 1992 and 1999, Garavito murdered at least 193 children and young people, most of them boys, in western Colombia and in Ecuador. Before the killing began, he had already sexually assaulted and tortured an estimated 200 minors. He is regarded as the most prolific serial killer of children in modern history.

  For years he moved through Colombian towns as a drifter, a churchgoer and a familiar face. Almost nobody connected him to the children who vanished. Neighbors in one place nicknamed him Conflict, and his own sister avoided him. How did such a volatile man escape notice for so long? Who were the children whose disappearances went unreported? What finally exposed him? And what does a sentence of nearly two thousand years mean in a country whose law sets its own ceiling?

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• 2. A Neglected Childhood

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  Garavito remembered a home where his parents fought constantly. He said he "had the misfortune of being in a family that spent its time arguing, fighting, and throwing words of great calibre." He called his father a "womanizer" and claimed the man beat the family, so Garavito and his siblings learned to hide. By his account, his father spoke to him mostly to hand out errands and work, and often berated him.

  At Simón Bolívar School in Ceilán, classmates mocked him and he struggled with most subjects. They nicknamed him "Garabato", meaning squiggle, because of his glasses. He reportedly spent recess alone.

  Around 1968 his father pulled him out of the fifth grade so he could earn money for the family. The boy was also discouraged from making friends or spending time with girls.

  In 1969 a routine vaccination visit became, in Garavito's later telling, the first great wound of his life. He alleged that the pharmacist-phlebotomist, a devoutly religious neighbor and acquaintance of his father, sexually abused and injured him. Experts and others have questioned whether this account is true.

  Garavito said he afterward killed and dissected two birds out of frustration. He also admitted to molesting a six-year-old boy that same year. Family and friends described a withdrawn, extremely aggressive boy, "ready to take revenge on the world."

  Trujillo, where the family settled in 1971, brought no relief. Garavito said he told no one about his own abuse until his arrest, fearing nobody would believe him. Soon after arriving, he claimed, a neighbor showed him pornography, mocked his disgust, then beat and assaulted him. Through relatives, he began drinking alcohol.

  In 1972 his mother evicted him after he tried to assault a 5-year-old boy. A year later, at a Bogotá train station, he attempted to assault a 6-year-old, who screamed, and he was briefly detained. He said his father scolded him not for the act but for failing to choose a woman instead. After more fights over his behavior, he was thrown out of the family home for the last time.

  On his own, he took work on a coffee plantation in Trujillo. There he fell in love with a schoolteacher and single mother named Luz Mary Ocampo Orozco.

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• 3. Faith and Fixation

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  In 1978 Garavito began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and converted to the Pentecostal faith. He worked as a store clerk and met his first girlfriend, Luz Mary, there. Only his older sister Esther stayed close to him, and even she avoided him because of his drinking.

  He later moved to Armenia and took a job at a local bakery. His routine mixed church services, where he beat his chest during prayer, with Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and occasional visits to psychiatrists. His evenings often ended in Valencia Park, where he sought out child prostitutes.

  In the spring of 1980, after being fired from the bakery for fighting with co-workers, Garavito attempted suicide. He was hospitalized repeatedly at the San Juan de Dios hospital, telling doctors his life was worth nothing. They treated him for depression, though he showed clear signs of psychosis and bulimia, and prescribed antipsychotic medication. Trying to explain his despair, he told the psychiatrist he "wanted" children, then rephrased it as wanting a family.

  By the autumn of 1980 he held a supermarket job in Armenia, in Quindío, with two-hour breaks on Thursday and Sunday afternoons. A short relationship with a single mother named Claudia had ended when she left him. He soothed himself by assaulting street children during those breaks, in nearby Quimbaya and Calarcá. That autumn he began carrying razor blades, candles and lighters to torture his victims.

  Afterward, he wrote each victim's name in a blue notebook and prayed for them, pacing his room and beating his chest. He read the Bible every night, searching the Book of Psalms for an explanation of himself. A friend gave him an esoteric book, and he turned to astrology, tarot and Satanism. He visited palm readers and fortune-tellers, then decided they knew little about the occult.

  Adolf Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf became another obsession. Garavito drew parallels between their lives, such as traumatic childhoods and years of vagrancy. He later told investigators he "liked the concentration camps."

  On the 25th of January 1984, his 27th birthday, Garavito entered psychiatric care for 33 days after a mental breakdown. He received a permit to leave on the 28th of February and instead fled to Pereira. There he molested two children in the Getsemani sector, was publicly identified, and fled again.

  In December 1986 the mass murderer Campo Elías Delgado, who killed his own mother and several others at a Bogotá restaurant, dominated the headlines. Garavito watched the coverage on a bar television and admired the national attention Delgado received. From then on he fantasized about a machine gun, the killing of his father and family, and then his own suicide.

  In Pereira, Garavito moved in with Graciela Zabaleta, a single mother charmed by his confidence, though he was mostly absent. His friends Jairo Toro and Ancizar Valencia saw him drunk with young boys at local motels. Nobody confronted him. In 1988 Garavito began documenting his assaults, keeping trophies in black cloth suitcases at the homes of several women.

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• 4. The Killing Years

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  "Kill, that with killing many things may come." According to Garavito, these were the devil's words, spoken during a ouija board session in which he answered that he would serve. In early October 1992 he made a first attempt. Drunk, he lured a boy who sold sweets and cigars toward a wooded lot in the Melia hotel sector of Bolívar. Police interrupted, beat him, and took 1,000 pesos, a watch and a ring before releasing him.

  Three days later, on the 4th of October 1992, he noticed 13-year-old Juan Carlos near a bazaar in Jamundí where he had been drinking. Garavito said moonlight on the river stirred a "strange force" and childhood memories that enraged him. He bought synthetic rope and a butcher's knife and offered the boy work for 500 or 1,000 pesos. The boy was led to a remote spot near the railroad and killed. Garavito claimed he blacked out and wept at the blood on his clothes the next morning.

  On the 10th of October 1992 he traveled to Trujillo to see his sister Esther. He drank brandy to hold back his impulses and smashed containers in a rage when a child walked past. On the way, in Tuluá, he murdered 12-year-old Jhon Alexander Peñaranda.

  The killings multiplied in 1993. Garavito lured eight boys aged 9 to 11 from a school to a wooded lot in the La Victoria district. Victims in southeast Bogotá included Henry Giovanni García, Marco Aurelio Castaño, Juan David Cárdenas and Jaime Orlando Popayán, along with three children never identified. He moved on through Tuluá, Pereira and Quimbaya, killing more children, and ended the year with 13-year-old Mauricio Monedero Mejía.

  On the 4th of February 1994, Garavito lured 13-year-old Jaime Andrés González from the Plaza de Bolívar to a sugarcane field, soon after being expelled from a bar. Afterward he came upon a large crucifix and heard a voice berating him. He buried his knife and prayed for forgiveness, then dug it up again. Back in his hotel room, he chanted the fifty-seventh psalm until dawn.

  On the 12th of January 1997, Garavito murdered an 8-year-old boy, and he killed two more minors during this period.

  In the summer of 1998 he crossed into Ecuador. On the 20th of July 1998 he murdered 14-year-old Abel Gustavo Loor Vélez, a shoe-shiner and paper boy. He also murdered 12-year-old Jimmy Leonardo Palacios Anchundia in Chone. Both boys came from poor families and disappeared at noon. Locals noticed a foreign drifter with a thick Colombian accent begging for money in July and August. He was spotted at an all-girls' school in Santo Domingo before fleeing an operation Ecuadorian police were preparing. Searchers found two bodies there, one a young girl killed in a way that matched his pattern. Four murders in Ecuador are attributed to him, and he also claimed to have killed in Venezuela.

  In 2003 Garavito confessed to 28 more murders, five of the victims adults. He said he had ordered the deaths of the adults rather than carrying them out himself.

  At the end of his spree he drifted through western Colombia as a homeless wanderer, weary of killing children because they were so easy to lure. He planned instead to kidnap several adults and kill them while drawing the attention of journalists, perhaps dying in the frenzy. Those plans never came to fruition.

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• 5. Disguises and Survivors

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  Garavito, raised in Colombia's Paisa region, said he knew exactly where to find the children he wanted. He told investigators he chose children from humble backgrounds: working children, the homeless, peasants and orphans. He lured them with small gifts such as money, candy or odd jobs. He boasted that he preferred children who looked "innocent."

  Although he was terrified of the dark, he approached children in broad daylight, in places ranging from open countryside to crowded city streets. In the evenings he drank brandy near schools, waiting for a child to walk by alone.

  To avoid suspicion, he dressed as a Catholic priest, a schoolteacher or an elderly man, and changed disguises often. In Trujillo, meanwhile, people knew him as Goofy, a generous man who gave to children. Locals even went out of their way to keep documents safe for him.

  Once a child trusted him, Garavito walked with them to a secluded spot, encouraging them to talk about their lives until they grew tired and vulnerable. After drinking about half a bottle of brandy, he bound the child and threatened them with a knife. He later said he had made a "pact with the devil" and that Satanic rituals played a part in the killings. Investigators found the bodies naked and bearing signs of prolonged torture.

  Garavito collected keepsakes from his victims, but he feared the Colombian National Police's scent dog team. Afraid the dogs might trace them to him, he disposed of some of what he had kept.

  A few children lived to describe him. Carlos Alberto was 10 years old when Garavito approached him in the Circasia sector of Quindío in the early 1990s. Garavito offered gifts and 200 pesos for work, led him to a secluded hill at Alto de la Taza, and assaulted him at knifepoint. The frightened boy was made to say he had enjoyed it, and Garavito left, saying they would meet again the next week.

  Brand Ferney Bernal Álvarez was 16 and worked with his father in the cockfighting business in the 1990s. Garavito took him to a secluded spot under threat of a knife and assaulted and tortured him. Bernal broke free from his restraints and ran.

  The earliest survivor was William Trujillo Mora, who was 9 in 1979 in the Valle del Cauca region. Garavito seized him with a machete and held him in an abandoned building for 12 hours. When Garavito lost consciousness from drinking, the boy escaped. Years later he told his story on the Colombian television program Los Informantes.

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• 6. Children Nobody Counted

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  Beginning in the 1980s, children from impoverished backgrounds, a group some called "desechables" or "disposable," started disappearing from Colombian streets. During the decades-long civil war, few such children were reported missing. Nobody was assembling a pattern.

  On the 7th of November 1998, children playing football in Pereira found a skeleton. Authorities paid little attention until the 15th of November, when graves holding as many as 36 children were uncovered, almost all of them boys. Their bodies showed signs of binding, sexual assault and prolonged torture. In total, 41 children were found in the department of Risaralda and 27 in neighboring Valle del Cauca.

  The brutality was so extreme that investigators first suspected a Satanic cult or an international child-trafficking ring. The Prosecutor's Office instead concluded that one man was responsible, because nylon cord and liquor bottle caps appeared at every scene.

  On the 25th of January 1999, Garavito's 42nd birthday, an earthquake reduced the El Arepazo restaurant in Calarcá to rubble. Authorities found its owner, who described Garavito and pointed them his way. He said he had known the man for years but avoided him because of his drinking and aggression. Several bodies were later found within 20 meters of each other near the restaurant, where Garavito had assaulted an unidentified youth in 1988.

  On the 6th of February 1999, outside the town of Palmira, searchers found two children lying side by side near a sugarcane field. The next day they found a third body only meters away. All three had their hands bound, and the murder weapon lay nearby. Garavito had passed out drunk at the scene with a cigarette in his hand, setting the cane field alight and burning himself badly. He left behind money, burnt glasses, shorts, shoes and underwear, along with receipts and a note bearing Graciela Zabaleta's address.

  The glasses told investigators that the killer was middle-aged and had astigmatism in his left eye. The shoes showed that he walked with a limp and stood between 163 and 167 cm tall. Police arrested a local sex offender named Pedro Pablo Ramírez García, who was 44 and limped on his right foot. A young boy had named him as the man who tried to assault him. García stayed in jail until more children disappeared in Bogotá.

  Meanwhile the lead detective, Aldemar Durán, had begun to suspect Garavito. He contacted Garavito's girlfriend, who said she had not seen him since December. She handed over a black cloth suitcase he had left with her. It held photographs of young boys, detailed journals of his murders, tally marks for his victims and bills. The trail led to Garavito's residence, but the property was vacant, and García was released once Durán tracked down the girlfriend and sister. Detectives guessed Garavito was either traveling for work or hunting for his next victim.

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• 7. Arrest and Confession

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  On the evening of the 22nd of April 1999, Garavito was drinking brandy in the city of Villavicencio when he saw 12-year-old John Iván Sabogal selling lottery tickets. He introduced himself as Bonifacio Morera Lizcano, a local politician. He seized the boy with a knife, hurried him into a taxi, and forced him over a barbed wire fence onto a secluded hillside.

  A homeless 16-year-old nearby heard the struggle. The teenager cursed and threw stones at Garavito, who chased him with a dagger. Both boys ran to the Rosa Blanca farmhouse on La Coralina Road, where they met a 12-year-old girl. When Garavito arrived and aggressively demanded directions, she sent him into the woods, where he became lost.

  Police were called and began a search while urging angry locals to stay out of it. At about 7:00 p.m., they saw Garavito walking out of the woods. He gave a false ID and claimed to be the politician Lizcano. The officers suspected who he really was anyway, and on the 4th of July 1999 that suspicion was confirmed.

  For Colombia's Justice Department, a confession alone was not enough. Garavito had a rare eye condition found only in men of a certain age group, and his glasses had been made for it. Police scheduled an eye exam for the entire jail so he would not suspect why. The examination let them match the glasses left at a crime scene to him, and his height of 165 cm and his limp matched too.

  While Garavito was out of his cell, detectives took DNA samples from his pillow and living area. The DNA matched samples found on the victims. In October he was interrogated for more than 12 hours while a detective read aloud his crimes until he cried. He said he would get drunk and look for young boys. He denied being homosexual and described himself as a victim of childhood sexual abuse. On the 28th of October 1999 he confessed to about 140 children in various locations.

  The court found him guilty of 138 of the 172 counts. Yet Colombian law limits imprisonment to 40 years. Because Garavito helped police find the victims' bodies, even that was cut to 22 years. That arithmetic would return to haunt Colombia as his parole date approached.

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• 8. Prison, Death and Public Anger

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  Garavito served his sentence at a maximum-security prison in Valledupar, in the department of El Cesar. He was held apart from other prisoners because officials feared he would be killed at once. He could have become eligible for parole in 2023, after serving three-fifths of his term. In 2021 a judge blocked a request to release him early for good behavior because he had not paid a fine owed to his victims.

  Garavito kept hoping for a different future. He told Colombian senator Carlos Moreno de Caro that he planned to enter Congress, become a Pentecostal pastor and marry. He claimed he wanted to help abused children once free.

  Journalist Guillermo Prieto, known as "Pirry" La Rotta, interviewed him for a show broadcast on the 11th of June 2006. Pirry said Garavito tried to minimize his actions and spoke of starting a political career to help abused children. Pirry added that, with good behavior, Garavito could probably apply for early release within three years.

  In his last years Garavito suffered from severe eye cancer and leukemia, which left him blind, weak and tired and required daily blood transfusions. He spent most of his time in the prison's medical unit making handcuffs, earrings and necklaces. Psychiatrists diagnosed him with antisocial personality disorder and noted narcissistic traits.

  At 66, Garavito died in a hospital in Valledupar of a heart attack, tuberculosis, leukemia and eye cancer.

  Many Colombians had protested the prospect of his early release, and they increasingly felt his sentence was not enough. Some argued he deserved life in prison or the death penalty, neither of which exists in Colombia. Colombian law had no way to impose more than he received, which critics saw as a failure to imagine a serial killer in Colombian society. The law has since raised the maximum penalty for such crimes to 60 years in prison.

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