If parents weren’t aware of their missing children, police now finally were, and by the early part of 1998 had formed a task force to help track the killer.
A few small clues
As police began realizing that boys were going missing, investigators noted that the victims usually disappeared at around 10 a.m. every day, usually about the time the longtime drunk finally roused himself from the depravities of the night before.
And in 1995, Garavito broke his leg, leaving him with a permanent limp, which would provide for police another important clue to track the killer in their midst.
On June 8, 1996, Garavito enticed a boy on a bike to follow him into the woods after first buying sweets for him and a few other boys at a local shop.
The boy’s body was later found, his head decapitated with his severed penis stuffed into his mouth.
Police were led to Garavito after the boy’s mother learned her son had last been seen at the shop with a few of his friends as well as a stranger with a limp who had purchased the treats.
Garavito confessed to buying the sweets, but insisted he had then left the boys and gone home.
Police let Garavito go, but he was now on their radar. They just didn’t know exactly what they had.
Discovery of a serial killer's spree
In February of 1998, police found the corpses of three naked children, their ages estimated at between 11 and 13, outside the town of Genua, Columbia. Each had his hands tied and each had suffered knife wounds on his necks and genitals. There were also signs of bite marks and anal penetration. A bottle of lubricant was left at the scene.
“The fact that Garavito was drunk during these attacks can in part explain his ability to be so violent – lack of inhibition in the hands of a depressed, angry, and abused man can, alarmingly lead to such violent acts. For most of us, beheading someone is seen as violent, but Garavito had his own definition of violence, which clearly had no limits when intoxicated,” said Davies.
Authorities were hoping that identifying the victims – despite only finding bones – would help them solve the crimes, but what little evidence they had allowed only DNA testing and forensic reconstructions, since there were no dental records for the boys.
The idea that the victims were street children was solidified by the lack of dental records, but authorities were stifled by the available directions they could take to determine just who was buried in the mass graves they were finding. While Garavito had doubtless left behind forensic evidence including hair and semen, no DNA samples were taken, because the costs of such testing are prohibitive.
Experts chose to attempt forensic reconstruction, despite the challenges presented by the victims being children, making it much more difficult to complete the process.
“The bones of children are still going through the growth process, so proportionally, the measurements are very different (than those of adults),” said forensic reconstruction expert Mario Leon Artunduaga, who took on the challenging project.
Later, police learned that the boys were friends who helped supplement their families’ incomes by selling fruit, gum and other odds and ends as street vendors.
The three boys did not disappear on the same day, however.
Two of the boys went with Garavito the first day after he made them a job offer, while the third boy went home to tell his mother that he had gotten a chance to earn some money helping a man transport cattle, and it was not until the next day that his desire to help support his family led to his death.
A big mistake
In most cases, even the smartest of criminals do something stupid to get themselves caught, and Garavito was not all that smart. He was usually drunk, and that made him careless, and even more likely to make mistakes.
In 1998, Garavito made one of his biggest.
He had just finished raping and murdering one of his young victims, and he was celebrating with a drink of cheap brandy. Drunk, he fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand, setting himself and the field on fire.
When he woke up, his arm and side in flames, he made a quick getaway, but because he was in such a hurry, he left behind a wealth of invaluable clues.
Chapter 5: Clues tell a big story
Those clues would be the first steps toward tracking down an elusive criminal.
Meanwhile, authorities at other crime scenes were continued to investigate using the clues they had, including the ritualistic poses, matching rope fibers and empty booze bottles that were a calling call of sorts for what they were realizing was just one man.
One man developed a hunger to catch him, and using the words of Robert Ressler, “The best way to catch a killer is to think like one,” Alderan Duran immersed himself in the details of one of the worst cases in Colombian history.
“We were going to solicit information from the FBI, so we could get up to speed,” Duran said. “Here in Colombia, no one had managed a case such as this.”
At the scene of the fire, coroner Carlos Hernan Herrera had a bounty of clues, including the killer’s underwear, eyeglasses and money.
Herrera also had a pair of men’s shoes and realized that the killer had a limp, likely due to an injury, based on wear patterns he noticed on the soles of the shoes.
They were also able to determine the killer’s height, as well as his age, based on the eyeglasses, which revealed through the prescription that he had an eye condition that was common only in people 40-45 or 55-60 years old.
They were able to narrow down their findings to 25 people, much easier than looking at the entire population of Colombia.
Tracking a madman
As they put clues together, they realized that amazingly, they were looking for one man, and based on some clues, they believed it was someone they had once had in their custody.
After learning more about criminal profiling from the FBI, Duran decided to send some officers to go undercover as homeless people in Colombia, a dangerous mission considering the violence that plagued the streets where children were forced to join gangs in order to stay safe at night.
They staked out the downtown market area where the most recent disappearances had occurred, and agents ate garbage in order to not raise any suspicions while keeping a close eye on the boys in the neighborhood.
Chapter 6: Investigators – and a victim – get lucky
One day in the midst of their investigation, a boy named Ivan Savogal had gone out to sell lottery tickets in hopes of raising money for school, but when night came he still hadn’t returned.
Maria Bertilda Lara, Ivan’s mother, called police in hopes of securing help in tracking down her missing son.
When he took on the case of a boy who went missing while selling lottery tickets to raise money for schooling, public prosecutor Fernando Aya found himself in the middle of one of the most horrific crime sprees in Colombian history.
He soon realized that details of his case matched those of the boys whose bodies had been found in other regions of the country.
Aya had to hope that he was able to move fast enough to track down the killer and save the boy, and had to hope against hope and awful odds that the predator would slip up again.
A lucky break
As Aya worked his missing boy case, officials using FBI techniques had no idea where to begin looking, until a secretary who had once worked in Tunja, a city about 25 miles north of Bogotá where Garavito had been temporarily arrested in 1996, heard detectives talking.
She immediately recognized the similarities of the case of the missing boy in Armenia, and she told detectives about Garavito’s arrest three years earlier.
As it happened, Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos was one of the 25 people on their current list of suspects.
Armed with that information, they were able to track down Garavito’s family and some of his friends, who helped them find one of the man’s female friends.
His sister gave them a black cotton bag filled with items her brother had left behind. It contained not o
nly documents of Garavito’s travels, which placed him at many of the crime scenes, but also photographs and journals detailing his gruesome acts.
At a friend’s house, police collected a suitcase Garavito had left in her care, filled with newspaper clippings that contained news of the murders. There were also bus ticket stubs that placed Garavito at the scenes of several murders.
Another bag was found after police traced a receipt for a money order, which revealed that their suspect’s left side was severely burned, on his arm and his side.
Still, they did not know where Garavito was.
Escape proves infinitely lucky
John Ivan Savogal was selling lottery tickets to raise money for school when he had the misfortune to run into Luis Garavito, who dragged the boy into the woods and tied him up in preparation for a night of torture.
Luckily for Savogal, the boy’s screams drew the attention of a teen who had slipped into the woods to smoke a joint.
He followed the sound of Savogal’s screaming, and found him with Garavito. The teen began hurling rocks at Garavito, who cut Savogal’s ties and ordered him to run deeper into the woods. The boy instead ran toward his rescuer, and the two ran off on foot while Garavito gave chase.
His limp, however, slowed the serial killer down. When he arrived at the farm where the two boys were hiding, he didn’t know that the girl who lived there was pointing him in the wrong direction, and the victim and his rescuer were able to escape and report the incident to the police.
Soon, officers and townspeople were swarming the woods in search of the man who attempted to abduct one of their own, but Garavito had seemingly eluded capture.
As the last police car drove away, Garavito slipped out of the woods and attempted to blend into the crowd.
But police hadn’t gone far. They, along with Savogal and his pot-smoking benefactor, were waiting for the man to come out so that Savogal could identify him.
Garavito was used to this sort of thing. He gave police a fake name, Bonifacio Morera, and assumed he would be back on the streets soon enough.
The task force got busy, though, and during the three months “Morera” awaited trial, they were comparing evidence and fingerprints, and they soon determined that the man they had in custody was in fact Luis Garavito, one of the worst serial killers in all of Colombian history.
“We are not facing some sort of criminal genius,” said prosecutor Pablo Elias Gonzalez. “We are confronting an individual who had no inhibiting restraints to killing.”
Evidence doesn’t lie
Aya was certain they had the right guy, and officers lined up the wealth of evidence they had against him, including items found from the mass graves and telephone numbers discovered in the prisoner’s clothing that revealed his true identity.
The also had the items from Garavito’s luggage and various bags, including photographs of victims cut from ID cards, newspaper clippings he had squirrelled away as trophies and a calendar that kept notes of each of his kills.
“All sex offenders are usually collectors. Luis Alfredo (Garavito) is,” said forensic psychiatrist Oscar Diaz.
The evidence was solid.
On October 29, 1999, Garavito was charged with 114 murders, each chronicled in the madman’s collection of notebooks.
When he finally confessed, it was with real tears, convulsions and blame that he did not place on himself, but rather on the evil spirit with which he was possessed each and every time he took a young boy’s life.
He blamed two things, an obsession with Hitler – “I admired Hitler, wanted to become like him, get power to make myself respected,” he said. “I always longed to be important, to be on television, in the press and everybody talking about me.” – and peer pressure from Satan for his years of sadistic criminal behavior.
In the taped confession that occurred during an hours-long interrogation, Garavito gestured wildly with his hands and smiled at investigators, even as he said, “Yes, I killed them, and I ask forgiveness for all that I have done.”
Garavito confessed to his crime with “appalling coldness,” said Pablo Gonzalez, who headed the team of forensic investigators who had tracked the madman.
Why did Garavito kill?
Garavito’s overwhelming crime spree raised questions across the nation about how one man could do so much damage, commit so many heinous crimes.
The answer is one that has raised questions ever since the first serial killer’s crimes hit the front pages of newspapers worldwide.
Antisocial personality disorder, the result of being raped from the age of six or so, transformed him into his aggressor in as much as Norman Bates eventually became his harsh, judgmental mother in the Alfred Hitchcock classic “Psycho.”
Like many serial killers, Garavito saw himself as a benefactor, as though he was doing a favor of sorts for his victims.
“Luis Alfredo killed the children to leave no witnesses who incriminated, but also as a way to spare the suffering endured as a child. So he thought. He was abused by his father, who told him he was useless. In addition, the best friend of his father raped him when he was 12 years old. So he chose victims who had that age range,” said Diaz.
Garavito said in one interview with police that he felt sorry for one of his victims, who described a level of abuse at home that matched what Garavito himself had suffered.
The sympathy ended there, however, because it did not stop Garavito from torturing and raping the boy before taking his life.
By the end of the year, he was found guilty of 138 murders, and sentenced to 1,853 years and nine days in prison. Because he had confessed, there was no trial.
Either way, the sentence itself was meaningless.
In an effort to protect against corruption, Colombia has no death penalty and the maximum sentence for any crime is 30 years.
Officials had never dealt with a crime as sobering as this, and the nation’s laws reflect that.
“This has no precedence in Colombia,” said the country’s chief prosecutor, Alfonso Gomez.
Garavito could be released sooner – his sentence was later cut to 24 years because he cooperated with police, drawing maps in prison that led police to the skeletal remains of other victims – due to good behavior behind bars.
“We have so far found 114 skeletons and we're still investigating the disappearance of other children,” said Colombia's chief prosecutor, Alfonso Gomez Mendez. “Luis Alfredo Garavito has admitted the murder of about 140 children.”
Estimates of his total number of victims have reached as high as 300.
When his crime spree was discovered, he was called “the world’s worst serial killer” by local media, although he also earned the moniker of the Beast, along with Tribilin, which translates in English to Disney’s character of “Goofy,” which likely would have Walt Disney himself spinning in his grave.
Victims’ families desperate for revenge
The family members of his victims called for his death.
Relatives of the children believed to have been tortured and murdered by Colombia's worst-ever serial killer have called for Luis Alfredo Garavito to be put to death.
Maria Aleida Velez, an aunt of two young paper delivery boys told the Associated Press “they disappeared a year ago, but for us, it seems like yesterday. If this man really is the assassin of my two nephews, I want him to get the death penalty.”
“They should take him out and execute him in public,” said Blanca Perez, whose son sold newspapers on the streets of Pereira before disappearing in 1996. “They should slice him up just as he sliced up so many of these children.”
Is rehabilitation likely?
Garavito seemed somewhat contrite when he made his official confession.
“I ask the Colombian people to forgive me, to give me the opportunity which maybe I deprived many people of,” he said.
But despite his pleas for forgiveness, rehabilitation is unlikely, experts say.
“This is most definitely
not someone who can be rehabilitated,” said forensic psychologist Dr. Christie Kokonos. “When you see pedophilia and sadism, particularly together, and there is evidence that the person was a psychopath, there is no known treatment. We know that these offenders continue to fantasize when they are incarcerated. They will tell you, the fantasies never stop.”
Nor does the killing.
“I can say that a person will only stop if he is stopped, is very old, or dead,” Diaz said.
And Garavito has no interest in rehabilitation, Diaz added.
“I've seen him laugh in the face to the authorities because he knows they can’t do anything more, while in America there are teenagers sentenced to life imprisonment.”
Still, Garavito could be tried in other regions or other countries, if there are links to him in those places.
“When authorities do not exchange information to catch criminals, when we do not work as a team, we are nothing,” Diaz added.
And then there are the victims who have gone unidentified.
“It is a case that has already been tried, but the least we can do is identify these remains, in memory of those children and those families,” said Colombian Senator Gilma Jimenez. “The case of Garavito tells us that there is a law and a criminal policy that has operated in Colombia that are definitely not correct. An individual who commits 168 murders can get out of jail. To those who defend these policies, what would you will say to society and to the families of the victims?”
Chapter 7: Families look back in sorrow
For those who lost their children, time stands still. Their loved ones are still boys, and will be forever, never to grow up, get married, have children, find a dream job.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 42