Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - “The Beast” - Luis Garavito

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Luis Garavito was born in Colombia in 1957 to an abusive, alcoholic father and a time of civil unrest. At the age of sixteen, Garavito was kicked out of the house. This sparked a transient lifestyle and murder spree during which Garavito raped, tortured, and murdered over one hundred victims.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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One of the most popular Disney characters besides Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck is Goofy. His creator, Art Babbitt, described Goofy as an everlasting optimist, a gullible Good Samaritan, a half-wit. When we meet someone who's been nicknamed Goofy, we assume that the person is quirky but harmless. His unusual traits also make him endearing. Perhaps this person has a deep love for children. It never crosses our minds that someone called Goofy is a dangerous predator.

And yet, that was one of the nicknames given to the world's most prolific serial killer. Louis Salfredo Garavito Kubios. Acquaintances and neighbors who were unaware of the predator in their midst called him Tribaline, the Spanish name for Goofy. But between 1992 and 1999, Garavito raped, tortured, and murdered at least 138 boys, between the ages of 6 and 16, across 60 towns in the Latin American country of Columbia. This is a conservative estimate based on the number of victims whom police could identify or link forensically to Garavito. In an investigation that continues to this day, Colombian and Ecuadorian law enforcement officials believe that Garavito may have killed as many as 300 children. And that's why the man that locals once described as goofy is now known to the world by a more sinister name. La Bastia, the Beast.

Hi, I'm Greg Paulson, and this is serial killers. Today we're going to take a deep dive into the life of Luis Garvito, arguably the most prolific serial killer in the world to date. I'm here with my co-host, Vanessa Richardson. Hi, everyone. We'd like to ask a quick favor. Would you leave a five-star review of serial killers on your favorite podcast directory? It seems so simple, but it really helps.

helps us out. And don't forget to subscribe while you're there because a new episode comes out every Monday. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram at Parcast and on Twitter at Parcast Network or on our website, Parcast.com. Between 1992 and 1999, Luis Alberto Garavito Kubillos, aka the Beast, raped, tortured, and murdered, At minimum, 138 boys throughout dozens of towns in Colombia and even parts of Northern Ecuador. Garavito preyed on kids whose disappearances were likely to go unnoticed. He bound, raped, and tortured his victims with knives and candles, before disemboweling and

decapitating them. But he escaped notice for years by committing his murders against a backdrop of violent civil strife. From the mid-1940s, right up until a ceasefire in 2016, the nation of Colombia existed in a state of near constant unrest. This guerrilla warfare between government forces and insurgent movements also involved crime syndicates engaged in drug trafficking and paramilitary groups associated with terrorist acts. But even so, the sheer volume and heinousness of Garavito's crimes were unprecedented in Colombia. It took considerable ingenuity and a little luck to apprehend him.

That ingenuity included borrowing strategies from law enforcement agencies across the globe and pioneering forensic techniques. Colombian police also implemented new techniques to narrow their list of suspects and accumulate evidence against Garavito. But it took them years to catch up to Garavito, whose predatory behavior started at a young... age. Luis Alberto Garavito Kubios was born on January 25, 1957, in a small Colombian village called Hanova. He was the firstborn child of Rosadelia and Manuel Antoni's seven children.

Only a few months after his birth, the dictator Gustavo Rojas was overthrown. The attacks by the government-backed paramilitary increased in frequency and violence throughout the nation. The National Center of Historical Memory estimates that 55 years of Civil War in Colombia has killed over 220,000 people. Four out of five casualties were civilians. Another 25,000 people disappeared, while an additional 5.7 million were displaced by the violence. Many of them were children.

If he didn't witness torture and murder, Shirley Young Garavito heard about it. The political violence of the time forced his family to flee their home. However, the move didn't make young Garavito any safer from violence within his home. According to Garavito himself, the family suffered constant verbal and physical abuse at the hand of its patriarch. Garavito's father, Manuel, was a womanizer and alcoholic. Garvito claims his father assaulted his mother, Rosa, even while she was pregnant, and that Manuel sometimes tied up his son before beating his wife.

Garvito stated that Manuel's weapon of choice was a leather belt. Every time his father came home, he would scurry to hide in his bedroom. Manuel would call his son a bastard and an imbecile and beat him mercilessly. At one time or another, Garavito has insinuated that both his parents committed sexual abuse, yet Garavido also admitted to molesting his younger brothers as they slept. Manuel's abusive tactics allegedly included keeping his children isolated. Manuel didn't allow his children to play with other kids outside of school. And when Garo Vito was in school, other children bullied him mercilessly.

Teachers describe Garo Vito as being withdrawn, distant, and prone to violent temper tantrums. In the early 1960s, Corporial punishment was permitted in Colombian schools, and some teachers carried belts and canes. Therefore, it's possible that when Garavito acted out, his teachers beat him. In light of how he was allegedly treated, it's unsurprising that Garavito dropped out of school in the fifth grade when he was around 11 years old. If Manuel prohibited Garavito from developing friendships, then we can safely assume that dating was absolutely out of the question. Still, Garavito remembered having his first sexual encounter at the age of 12 with another boy his age. And he described that experience as pleasurable.

However, something horrific also happened to Garavito at that age. One of Manuel's adult friends raped him. According to Garo, the man was the town apothecary. Not only did he repeatedly rape young Garavito, he also tied him to the bed and tortured him. When we hear of the brutal violation of a child, naturally we believe the child and feel sympathy. Yet when the individual reporting the assault is a serial killer, we have to be cautious. Garavito is quick to recount his violent experiences as a child, perhaps as a way of shirking responsibility for the violence he himself later committed. And even as a child, Garvito was demonstrating his vicious and violent impulses.

Garvito recalled tearing apart two birds when he was only 12. Vanessa's going to take over the psychology here. She's not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, but she has done a lot of research for this show. Since the 1970s, psychologists have produced research, which consistently reveals that animal cruelty during childhood is a strong indicator for future violent behavior, whether that means serial killers or school shooters,

an overwhelming majority of violent criminals have a history of mutilating animals and reveling in their cruelty. But not only was young Garavito's psychological distress overlooked, he was raped again in the early 1970s at the age of 15. His abuser attacked him when Garavito showed disgust for heterosexual pornography. This time, the man who violated him was his neighbor, another friend of Manuel's, who Garavito presumed he could, trust. While still a teenager, Garavito followed in his father's footsteps and became a heavy drinker. He was allegedly struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts. And also, like his father and his father's friends, Garavito became abusive and predatory. In 1973, at the age of 16, he lured a boy away from a train station in the city of Buga and attempted to molest him. This was

the beginnings of the same MO he would refine years later to rape, torture, and kill hundreds of children. When this first victim screamed, Garavito was caught and arrested. He denied that his intention was to molest the boy, and the police ultimately released him, but his father Manuel threw him out of the house. Thus began Garavito's transient lifestyle at 16 years of age. First, he drifted from John. to job around his hometown. As Vanessa noted, he was already a heavy drinker, and he regularly brewed his own alcohol from sugar or maize. His alcoholism fueled his volatile temper

and often caused him to lose jobs. Garavito often fantasized about killing his father, but never summoned the courage to even return home. Instead, he moved to the town of Armenia, a medium-sized city that served as the axis of Columbia's coffee economy. There he secured a job at a bakery and spent the rest of the 1970s seemingly attempting to get his life on a positive track. He attended church and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. However, Garvito also led a double life.

He frequented Valencia Park, a place known for the sex trafficking of children. And as he was sexually exploiting children, he presented himself as a working family man. In the early 1980s, 20-something Gar-something Gar-Tarfinding. Ravito eventually found another job at a supermarket and got involved with an older woman, a beautician named Claudia. Claudia already had two children, a 14-year-old boy and a little girl. But his attempts to play doting father and husband did nothing to suppress his pedophilic urges toward boys.

Please note, there's no correlation between being gay and being a pedophile. The majority of child molesters are men who are married. married to women, and they tend to target children in their own social networks, the children of family, friends, and neighbors. Garvito made several attempts to reside with older women and their children as a family. Somewhat surprisingly, by all accounts, he never raped the children of the women he lived with. When it comes to sexual offenders who target children, there are two types, regressive and fixated. The regressive sexual offender is attracted to adults. adults and children alike. Their impulse to target children is very opportunistic, so they

target children they already know. On the contrary, Garvito actively sought out strangers. Right. His decision to target children he didn't know better fits the typology of the fixated sexual offender. They actually find adults of any gender sexually repulsive, preferring to interact with children not only sexually but socially. The point remains that when it comes comes to pedophiles, they can be of any sexual orientation because the basis of the perpetrator's sexual attraction is the victim's age and not gender. Garo Vito described his desire to molest the children that visited the supermarket where he

worked as a satanic force. Toward the end of 1980, he went to extreme lengths to feed his predatory impulses. His day at the supermarket included a two-hour lunch break. Each day, Garavido used that time to travel to the neighboring town of Kimbaia, where he would rape children. Then Garavido would return to the supermarket in Armenia, where he sold milk and candy to other kids. Garvito eventually lost his job at that supermarket. It's not clear why, but there are a variety of reasons he could have left. Garvito was a severe alcoholic, which would have made it hard for him to be a reliable worker. It's also possible he left to avoid suspicion and capture for his assaults, or was let go

due to his worsening mental illness. However, even without the job, his predation continued. In fact, Garavito's sadism intensified in the early 80s, no longer satiated by overpowering children and raping them, he began to torture them. He mutilated them with razors and burned them with candles and lighters. Perhaps his increasing sadism is what compelled Garavita to seek psychological help, albeit in a way that would prove disturbingly ineffective. We'll return to our story in just a moment from the podcast network.

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With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. Now, our story continues. In the early 1980s, Luis Garavito worked at a supermarket and spent his lunch breaks raping young boys in Kimball, Colombia. He soon escalated to torturing and mutilating the young boys he raped. By the mid-1980s, Garavito really... there was something wrong with him.

In January, 1984, Luis Garavito sought psychiatric treatment and was even hospitalized for 33 days. He told the psychiatrist he felt suicidal because he wanted to have children. What he did not tell the doctor, however, was that he was sexually attracted to children and actively raping and torturing them. Garavito entered treatment, presumably, to get the help he needed to have a normal life, but then chose to keep from his doctors his most abnormal proclivity. And this wasn't the only time that Garavito sought psychiatric care, only to hide these critical issues from his doctors.

Considerable research shows that patients lie to their therapists at an alarmingly high rate. One 2015 study done at Columbia University that surveyed 547 clients found that 93% admitted lying to their therapists, While some patients downplayed their emotional suffering or denied they had suicidal thoughts, others lied to hide drug use and criminal activity. So in that regard, Garavito is typical. But while everyone engages in some degree of compartmentalization, serial killers take it to a dangerous extreme. Dr. Elliot Layton described it like this. If the average person were to strangle someone to death in a fit of rage, they wouldn't be able to cope with what they had done.

They'd be overcome with the guilt of killing another human being. Exactly. According to Dr. Layton, they'd either turn themselves in or commit suicide. But serial killers divide people into two groups, those they care about and treat well, and those whose feelings they totally disregard. That's why so many of them can convincingly lead double lives for so long, while undetected by those around them. And for Garavito, the double life ultimately included seeking help for some psychiatric problems

while purposefully concealing his true nature and crimes. Garvita was hospitalized multiple times throughout the 1980s when he was in his 20s. At one point, he was even prescribed two drugs. One was an antidepressant called viscillin. The other was Synogen, which is used to treat psychosis, which is not a condition but a collection of symptoms. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness,

Symptoms of psychosis include breaks in reality, such as seeing and hearing things that are not there, believing that someone is following you, or believing that you have supernatural abilities. While we're not aware of which symptoms Garavito reported to his doctors that convinced them to prescribe medications, we do know he never disclosed his predatory feelings and behaviors during treatment. This is probably why he was able to convince the doctors that he was well enough to be released, only to resume raping and torturing young boys. Garavito, like many serial killers, was later diagnosed as a narcissist

with an antisocial personality disorder. This diagnosis came from Dr. Luis Alfonso Ferreiro Parra, a psychologist and criminal profiler who worked on Garavito's case. Such people have an excessive need for admiration and believe they are superior to other people and lack empathy towards others. he could have wanted his caretakers to like him,

as well as believed there was nothing wrong with what he was doing. After that first hospitalization in early 1984, he immediately went to Pereira, where he continued the pattern he started in Armenia. He assumed the facade of a family man, taking up with a woman named Gabriela and living with her and her son Rodolfo for three years. He even made some friends,

who later chillingly recalled, Garavito going out drinking and taking off with adolescent boys. Garavito's relationships with women were platonic. He deliberately chose women who were older than he was, as many as 10 years his senior, and who already had children from prior relationships. This kept the pressure off Garavito to be sexually intimate with them, which, by his own admission, he could not do.

Garavito traveled from town to town, allegedly to find work and send money back to his so-called family, but in reality he was praying on children wherever he went. Garvito would usually arrive in a new town on the weekend. He hid in plain sight, assuming a variety of false identities with forged documents. With the exception of his distinctive red glasses, he changed his appearance, including his outfits and hairstyle. Garvito sometimes pretended to be a street vendor,

selling pictures of Pope John Paul and the baby Jesus. Other times he pretended to be a beggar or teacher or some other benign figure. He most frequently impersonated a priest. Waring his disguise, he would then approach a boy who was alone in a bus terminal or a commercial district in broad daylight. He correctly surmised that no one would notice a child missing for several hours during the day. Garavito generally targeted boys with fair skin and blue eyes. between the ages of 8 and 14. Occasionally, he requested the child's help with a task related to whatever the town's economy centered around. Sometimes he asked for help herding cattle, carrying a crate of oranges, or harvesting sugar cane.

Garvito offered the boy whatever he believed would gain his trust, food, money, work, or even alcohol or drugs. After luring the unsuspecting child away from the highly populated area, where he found him, Garavito forced him to walk for miles to the outskirts of town, deep into the plush sugarcane fields or coffee plantations. Garvito often drank heavily along the way. He made sure each boy was exhausted from miles of walking and far from anyone who could hear his cries. Garavito then attacked his victim in a drunken haze.

He bounded the child with nylon rope and proceeded to rape him. Garvito soon discovered that he derived greater pleasure from inflicting pain on his victim than raping him. This included biting and burning his victims. As he refined and escalated his rapes and tortures, Garvito made his way through the coffee fields of six cities. In the 1980s, he was raping and torturing at least one child per month. It's clear that Garvito isn't just a rapist. He's a sexual sadist. According to Dr. Alan Francis, sexual sadism is a rare, distinct mental disorder.

Sexual sadists require a victim's pain to generate sexual excitement. All the tortures that Garavido enacted, including non-consensual restraining, biting, burning, and stabbing are signs of sexual sadism. The disorder usually begins early in life, and its severity increases over. time. As Garavito transformed into an increasingly sadistic rapist, he developed a fascination with mass murderers. In 1986, he became obsessed with the case of Campo Elias Delgado, a man who went on a killing spree in Bogota. On the afternoon of December 4, 1986, Delgado stabbed two women and a 14-year-old girl to death. Then he went to his mother's apartment complex and murdered her in the apartment they shared.

He set his mother's corpse ablaze and ran through the building crying fire to lure the neighbors into the hallway. As they rushed out of their apartments, Delgado killed them, one by one. Delgado then spent some time visiting with a former student before proceeding down the street to an Italian restaurant. After an hour of dining on an expensive meal,

Delgado opened fire on the other patrons, with a 38 caliber revolver in what the media described as a Rambo-style bloodbath. By the time the police arrived, 10 minutes later, he had gunned down 20 more people, many with several shots to the head. Another 15 were wounded. Delgado died during his face off with the police, but it's unknown whether they shot him dead or he killed himself. In addition to being obsessed with Campo Elias Delgado, Garvey. Garavito was also fascinated with Adolf Hitler. It's chilling but unsurprising that Garavito would admire Hitler. He's a mass murderer, admiring another mass murderer.

Garavito may have developed his obsessions with Delgado and Hitler because he was fantasizing about the murders he wanted to commit. And according to Garavito, his first murder was inspired by another unsettling obsession. By the time Garavito was 35, he was fascinated with him. black magic. He later claimed that in the fall of 1992, he used a Ouija board to summon the devil. According to Garabito, a voice asked him, do you want to serve me? When Garavito replied, yes, the voice said, quote, if you kill, many things will come to you, end quote. In the fall of 1992, 35-year-old Garavito allegedly heated a demonic voice that Orrador.

ordered him to go to Hamundi, Colombia, and commit murder. This was where Garavito would kill for the first time. Auditory hallucinations are a hallmark of psychosis, a condition we know Garavito once took medication to manage. But we don't know if Garavito was actually experiencing psychosis, or whether this was a story he came up with to avoid blame. Criminal psychiatrist Joe Navarro described Garavito not as someone suffering from psychosis, but as a psychopath.

As we've learned in past episodes, psychopaths have a different brain structure from neurotypical adults. Their deformed amygdala and small frontal cortex warp their ability to experience fear, guilt, and sadness as well as their general behavior and impulse control. If Caravito was incapable of feeling guilt, then he'd have nothing holding him back

from indulging at his worst impulses. and on October 2nd, 1992, Garavito gave into his most horrific impulse of all. Luis Garavito spent the 1980s raping and torturing young boys, and on October 2nd, 1992, at the age of 35, Garvito committed his first murder. On that October night, Garavito was drinking at a bar when he noticed a teenage boy named Juan Carlos walk by. Garavito paid his tab, walked out of the bar, and followed the boy. When Juan Carlos paused on his stroll, Garavito dipped into a shop and purchased a butcher knife, nylon rope, and cheap liquor.

Eventually, Garavito approached Juan Carlos and fed him one of his tails. Garavito lured Juan Carlos over the railway line and into the woods, where he raped and murdered him. Juan Carlos's skeletal remains were discovered three days later. later, and they bore the marks of Garavito's brutality. Garavito had knocked out the boy's front teeth, tortured his feet, and cut off his genitals. When Garavito recounted his first kill, he claimed to be triggered by the reflection of the moon on the water, that somehow the reflection transported him back to his childhood, unleashing the hatred he had for his father and the other men who abused and violated him.

According to Garavito, the rage he felt was so intense it drove him to kill. Remember, Garavito is a psychopathic killer, so we can't take his word at face value. He may have made up this story as a way of garnering sympathy for himself, though it is also possible that his own experience of violence drove him to inflict that same pain on others. Garavito recalled waking up the next day after Juan Carlos's murder, with his clothes soaked in blood. He later claimed to feel remorse after this, but if that's true, then the remorse didn't last long.

Only six days after he killed one on October 2nd, 1992, he raped and killed another boy, 12-year-old Alexander Panoranda. The beast had been unleashed. Garvido moved on from Hamundi to Bogota, the capital of Colombia, where he killed eight more boys in 1993. With every crime, he refined his MO and grew more vicious. Here's one reporter on the subject. Prosecutors say Garavito would offer his victim's money or a drink

and persuade them to go for a walk. As to motives, they say Garavito was apparently abused himself as a child. But further investigation proved it was more than a simple walk Garavito took his victims on. Initially, he severed the thumbs and toes of his victims so that it would appear that they had been killed by satanic cults or vigilante groups who were implementing vicious crusades against people living in the margins of Colombian society, sex workers, substance abusers, and others that violent factions labeled undesirable. The deadly attacks being waged by these cults and vigilante groups in Colombia during the 1990s

may have contributed to why Garvita was able to kill so many children without raising suspicion. The Colombian conflict left many people roaming the country in search of work wherever they could find it. Therefore, the arrival of a strange man in town traveling by himself sparked no concern. Unaware of the sadistic killer roaming among them. Locals describe Garavito as someone who enjoyed playing with children. They gave him the nickname Tribaline, the Spanish translation for the Disney character, Goofy. But Garavito was a far more sinister character. than they ever suspected. By the end of 1992, Garavita was killing multiple people in one day.

He documented his kills in a diary with meticulous detail. He also stashed mementos, from photographs of the children to the bus tickets he used to travel from Killingfield to killing field. This desire to record his crimes is a common one among sexually motivated serial killers for two reasons. According to Dr. Kukonis, the executioner. The execution of the crime never matches the fantasy that the sadistic serial murderer has of the kill. In a futile effort to make the experience of the attack match the fantasy, the killer makes detailed notes with the intention of perfecting his technique for the next attempt. Two, documenting the rape and murder in elaborate detail allows the killer to relive his crime whenever he chooses.

But it wasn't enough for Garavito to relive his crimes. He needed to keep killing. He eventually graduated to stabbing his victims with a knife or screwdriver as he raped and murdered them. Garavito's choice of weapons and the parts of the body he penetrated both suggest a parapheria. Paraphilia is a condition where an individual has recurring, intense sexual urges or behaviors involving atypical objects, situations, or targets. So paraphylla conditions would include. pedophilia, necrophilia, and bestiality. Yes, but the DSM-5 now makes the distinction between paraphylias and paraphylic disorders. Consider the parapheria known as peakerism. Peekarism is the

experience of intense sexual arousal from penetrating the skin of another person with a sharp object. It doesn't become a disorder until a person is willing to stab another person without their consent in order to fulfill their paraphylia. In other words, what makes Garavito's parapheria a disorder is that he acted without consent or care for the damage he caused others. Right. He stabbed children. Not only could they not consent, their inability to consent fueled his sadistic pleasure.

Luce Elena Robayos, the bacteriological expert on the Garavito case, theorizes that in Garavito's mind, the knife or screwdriver was an instrument of pleasure. He chose to stab his victims in certain areas, like the hands, so they wouldn't die quickly. By slowly torturing the children to death, Garavito prolonged his own pleasure. It was later revealed that Garavito wasn't just stabbing his victims. He often disembald his victims while they were still alive. That kind of sadistic pleasure and the sense of power that comes with it is described as fleet of Garavito chased that feeling, staking out victim after victim in pursuit of it. He was not going to stop until he was caught.

Our story will continue in a moment after a brief message. And now let's continue the story. Luis Garavito killed numerous boys from 1992 to 1993. Yet his depravity would reach new lows as he added a final atrocity to a sadistic ritual. Garavito began to decapitate his victims. In 1993, he tortured and murdered at least 11 boys in this grotesque manner. The last of these boys, a 12-year-old, was able to draw a knife to defend himself when Garavito attacked. The brave boy succeeded in severing the tendons in Garavito's thumb, but sadly, he failed to escape with his life,

and the injury failed to dampen Garavido's drive to kill. In February 1994, he murdered 13-year-old Jaime Andres Gonzalez, near the town of Tuluwa. After killing Jaime, Garvito later claimed that he began to hear an additional voice speaking to him. This voice berated him, calling him worthless. So he attempted to obey the voice and stop killing. He buried the knife he had used on Jaime, and he turned to the Bible. though he also continued to practice witchcraft. Serial killers tend to have a cooling-off period

where they attempt to return to their normal lives. The act of traveling from town to town itself may have provided Garavito with his cooling-off period. That would end as soon as he arrived into a bus station and found his first victim in a new place. Most serial killers tend to have an anchor point where they live or work. They then kill within that area.

Garavito's travels were limited by the black cloth bag he carried that held his murder trophies. When the bag became too heavy, he dropped it off at his sister's home in Bogota and went back on the road to take more young lives. By the end of 1994, he killed 27 more children. That's 27 murders in a single year. The next year, when Garavito was 38, he experienced a bad fall that broke his leg. While this slowed him down, it didn't stop him. After 1995, he walked with a distinct limp, but he kept killing. Just like the injury to his thumb sustained a few years earlier, this wouldn't slow Garavito down.

In fact, he killed four children in 1995 in the Valle region. Two of the four boys were cousins. Consistent with Garavito's pattern, their bodies were discovered on a hillside in the outskirts of town, unburied yet concealed by tall plants. On June 8, 1996, a boy disappeared in the town of Boyaka. His mother immediately began to search for him. She learned that her son was last seen at a shop with some other boys and a stranger who had bought them candy.

The stranger was identified as Garavito, and the police brought him in for questioning. He admitted to buying the children's sweets, but insisted that he then left them alone. Only after they released Garavito did they find the corpse of the missing boy. Garavito had decapitated the child, severed his genitals, and stuffed it inside the boy's mouth. By the time they made this horrible discovery, Garvito had left town. Because the boy Akam police let Garavido go, he was able to kill a 13-year-old boy in Pereira, shortly after killing the boy in Boyaka.

This wasn't the last time police would fail to stop Garavito. They had another chance to stop him later that year in 1995. A storekeeper and several sex workers in Tunha put him at the scene of the disappearance of a boy named Rinald Delgado. Garvido convinced the local police that he was being falsely accused because he was disabled. And they released him. He changed his disguise and left Tunha. Next, Garavido went to Rissarralda, where he murdered Jorge Andres Brown, a 10-year-old who sold sweets to bus passengers. By the end of 1996, Garavito had recorded over 100 victims in his diary of death.

In 1997, Garavito moved to Bogota, where he pretended to be a Franciscan monk. His first victim was an eight-year-old boy named Jimmy. After murdering Jimmy, he killed two additional boys before eventually moving on to Pereira. On October 1, 1997, Garavito kidnapped two boys from the bus station in Pereira. Several days later, people discovered their tortured and abused bodies. Police desperately hunted for the killer. And they seemingly caught a break in the case. Not long after the October 1st disappearances, another boy reported an attempt.

attempted rape to the police and described his attacker. The police scoured the streets and apprehended a man who fit the child's description. He had a limp, fell into the correct age range, and sold honey in the same bottles that had been recovered at the crime scene. Unfortunately, this was not Garavito. The man's name was Pedro Pablo Ramirez Garcia, alias Pedro Pichuga. And he had a record of sex assault. He insisted he was innocent. But the police didn't buy it and imprisoned him.

But during Petchuga's incarceration, Garavito struck again and murdered four boys in Bogota. The police realized the killer they were searching for was still on the loose. Just a month later, in November of 1997, some children made a gruesome discovery. They found a human skull while playing near a ravine in Pereira. When law enforcement arrived at the scene, they discovered a mass grave containing the corpses of 36 boys. That gory discovery compelled Pereira police to create a task force to track down the killer in January of 1998. The first thing they did was contact other local law enforcement agencies to inquire if they too were

investigating similar crimes. Reports about the mass disappearance of children poured in from 10 other districts. In February 1998, the naked corpses of two children were found outside of Hinovah. The 11- and 13-year-old boys were close friends who sold fruit and gum to assist their families. More mass graves were discovered across Columbia when the sugar cane fields were next ready to be cut and harvested. In Colombia, sugar grows all year round

in a constant cycle of harvesting, milling, and distilling. However, 85% of the sugar is still harvested by farmhands, which could explain why so much time-pocket before these mass graves were discovered. Likely fearing that the harvest would expose him, Garavito fled to Ecuador in 1998. He assumed the name Bonifacio Morera and continued to kill. Local children started to disappear, and the Ecuadorian police immediately suspected the foreigner with the distinct limp and the Colombian accent.

Garavito fled back to Colombia before they could apprehend him. By the late 90s, there were several police units in various towns, including Armenia, Palmyra, and Villavicencio, charged with finding the killer. However, they operated independently, forming their task forces when they found mass graves they believed unique to their town. But it was the discovery of a particular mass grave in February 1999 that broke open the case. This was the crime scene where Garavito's lust for murder left. a trail of evidence that would expose him as the beast. In Part 2, we'll investigate Garavito's fatal mistake and uncover how some intrepid policing

finally brought his seven-year terror to an end. Thanks again for tuning in to serial killers. If you want to listen to any previous episodes of serial killers, you can find them on Apple Podcasts, Tune-in, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify, or on our website, parkast.com. Spelled P-A-R-C-A-S-T.com. If you like what you hear, please leave a five-star review or tell us what you think on social media.

We're on Facebook and Instagram as At-Parcast. And Twitter, at-Parcast Network. It seems simple, but it really helps our show. Have a killer week. Serial Killers was created by Max Cutler, is a production of Cutler Media and is part of the Parcast Network. It is produced by Max and Ron Cutler,

sound design by Carrie Murphy with production assistance by Ron Shapiro and Paul Mahler Additional production assistance by Carly Madden and Maggie Admeyer. Serial Killers is written by Sophia Kintero and stars Greg Paulson and Vanessa Richardson. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce,

and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. I've seen something in the road, I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag, and there was a fool of blood. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 is out now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to hear something spooky?

Some monster, it reminded me of Bigfoot. Monsters Among Us is a weekly podcast featuring true stories of the paranormal. One of the boys started to exhibit demonic. possession. Stories straight from the witness's mouths themselves. Something very snakelight lifted its head out of the water. Hosted by me, your guide, Derek Hayes. Somehow I lost eight whole hours. Listen now on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.