It was the print of Daniel Camargo Barbosa, and police were closing in.
Chapter 4: Camargo’s final arrest
Camargo was arrested on February 26, 1986, after his nervous behavior caught the attention of two policemen, who stopped him and searched his possessions.
They found a photo of one of his victims in his pocket, and in a duffel bag he was carrying, they found bloody clothing and the excised clitoris of his last victim, a 9-year-old girl named Elizabeth Telpes.
He was also carrying a copy of “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoyevsky.
He initially gave police a fake name, but was identified by one of his rape victims, who had been lucky enough to escape.
Camargo confesses
Camargo eventually confessed to killing 71 young girls, although that number is estimated at a much higher 150, and told police he sought out virgins because he liked to hear the sounds of them crying as he raped and tortured them.
Calmly, with no remorse, he was able to lead authorities to the bodies of victims that had not yet been discovered. Camargo told police that after raping his victims, he used a machete to cut and dismember them so the bodies of the young girls would be more difficult to find.
When officials asked him about the internal organs of his victims, he said, “At most I got the hearts, because that is the organ of love.”
He claimed that the humiliation he suffered as a child was the reason for killing young girls, the girls his stepmother had hoped he would be.
“My sickness is in my head,” said Camargo, whose attorney attempted to get his sentence reduced on the grounds that his client was insane. “I am aware of my mistakes.”
Chapter 5: A madman on trial
Camargo went to trial in 1989, and during proceedings he took the stand and confessed to murders he’d committed in five cities across the country.
In 1989, Camargo was sentenced to 16 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowable in Ecuador. He would have been released in 2005, and extradited back to Colombia to finish the remainder of his sentence.
It would never be enough for the friends and families who lost their girls.
“He killed one of my friends around my neighborhood,” wrote one friend in a website conversation. “We were only 5 or 6 years old. I still remember when I got the sad news of her death. They found her in a wooded area across the street from my house. He was an animal, she was only a little girl! I still get goosebumps just to think that it could have been me. Is horrible to remember the story even now.”
He would serve his years at Garcia Moreno de Quito prison, the same facility that Pedro Alonso López (“The Monster of the Andes”) called home.
A victim remembers
Espinoza Vera Beice was 24 when Camargo enticed her to accompany him by bus to help deliver money to an evangelical pastor working at a plastics factory.
It was an odd ruse, but Beice bored the bus in January 1986 nonetheless, leaving behind the safety of the market.
She went with Camargo out of pity, she said.
“He was a little old gentleman, dirty, double jacket, carrying heavy boots, and he asked me where the Tennis Club was. I told him but he said, ‘No, I have been told that people around there steal.’”
Beice decided to help.
“He led me down the street Aguirre and Tungurahua, told me to wait, to accompany him to Guayaquil Park, where we would catch a car,” she said.
When they got off the bus, there was a golf course in the distance, and Camargo asked he to go with him.
“I said ‘No, I don’t want to walk out there, because I’m afraid of snakes.’ Then he grabbed my arm hard, I said, ‘Let me, let me go. I’m leaving.’”
A few weeks later, she recognized him on television, and she and her mother went to the police to file a complaint.
The police used a lineup, and Camargo was there.
“He still wanted to shake my hand hello,” she said, incredulously. “God was there, always with me, did not abandon me.”
Another narrowly escapes death
Maria Alexandra Velez was one of the first to appear in court after Daniel Camargo was arrested.
She told the court about her own experiences in 1986, when Camargo used his ruse to deliver money to a priest on her as she was returning to work after her lunch hour.
“When I returned from my lunch, I do not know where or how, I already had in front of me this gentleman. “He said, ‘girl, I need you to help me. I have to give money to a church being built on the railway. I need you to come with me,’” she said.
Instead, she told Camargo to take a taxi, but he was insistent.
“He wanted at all costs that I go with him. I told him no, I had just started working and I could not miss any time, but told me not to worry.”
She suggested that a nearby concierge accompany him, but Camargo rejected the help.
“Fifteen days later I saw on the news that they had arrested Camargo. I was shocked,” she said. “It was not in God's plan to go that day with Camargo. I am grateful to God.”
Now a mom of three, she warned her girls.
“I tell the girls to be careful with people who talk, many are painted like sheep and are not, so they are a little more careful,” she said.
Another victim was not so lucky
When Carmen Priscila, 19, was found, her family could not identify her because by then she was only bones.
Instead, they were forced to listen as Camargo told Carmen’s brother, Abraham Molina Calvache, what he had done to Priscila.
“I met her through the streets around the Victoria Park,” he said. “She was dressed in jeans, but the color of the blouse I do not remember. I approached her and persuaded her to accompany me to deliver the money.”
She agreed, and they took the bus to Guayaquil Park, where Camargo had told her the church would be.
As they walked, he turned to her and said, “Miss, I did not come to hand over any money, I brought you because I saw you and liked you, and I want to make love with you. Do not try to run or scream because I'm armed,” he said.
Camaro then led officers and Abraham to the site where Priscila’s remains had been left.
“On a hillside, in an area of 30 meters, we found only bones, no skin,” recalls Abraham, and breaks.
“I always end up crying reliving the experience. I am bitter. I wake up crying. I have still not recovered.”
Camargo behind bars
Police blocked access to Camargo, and the madman was demanding large sums of money for a chance to interview him, so his story wasn’t told until one journalist used trickery to hear Camargo’s words.
In June of 1986, Francisco Febres Cordero, a reporter for the United States-based Spanish newspaper Hoy (Today), pretended he was part of a group of psychologists that were allowed access to Camargo, so he was able to ask questions without raising the suspicion of either police or Camargo himself.
Later, Cordero said the prisoner was not only well-read – he’d devoured books by Sigmund Freud, called the father of psychoanalysis, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and many others during his stay on the Isle of Gargona – but also intelligent.
“He had an answer for everything and was able to speak of God and the Devil equally,” Cordero said.
In the end, revenge
One thing that Camargo didn’t have, however, was the ability to look into the future.
If he had, he might have made another escape attempt, but luckily for the young girls of Ecuador and Colombia, he could not, and as fate would have it, at least one of his victims had her revenge.
In 1994, just a few years before he was to have been released from prison, Camargo was killed by Luis Masache Narvaez, whose young cousin was one of the madman’s victims.
Masache, who whispered “It’s time for revenge” in Camargo’s ear, reportedly cut off the ear as a trophy.
Pedro López
Introduction
While it seems absolute
ly unbelievable that a man who admitted to authorities that he killed at least 300 young preteen girls, Pedro Lopez is currently not behind bars.
The madman – nicknamed the Monster of the Andes for his murderous tour of three countries – was arrested in 1980 for the deaths of 110 girls between the ages of 8 and 12, mostly poor children who were working in city markets with their parents to help eke out a living.
He is believed, however, to have killed more than 300 girls.
“It’s like eating chicken,” he said in explanation for his predilection for young girls. “Why eat old chicken when you can have young chicken?”
And while cannibalism was not part of Lopez’s MO, that statement reflects the complete disregard he had for his victims, whom he saw more as animals than someone’s daughter.
He once said that his urge to kill struck every three days, and after his 1980 arrest, he calmly took police on a morbid trek to the graves of 53 of the victims he’d buried in Ecuador.
He remembered quite clearly where each one of those 53 victims was buried.
Chapter 1: A childhood of tragedy
Born October 8, 1948, in Santa Isabel, Colombia, Pedro Lopez was the seventh of 13 children born to a Columbian prostitute.
His father, Micardo Reyes, was a member of the Colombia Conservative Party, and was killed in a riot when Lopez’s mother, a prostitute named Benilda López De Casteneda who was not Reyes’ wife, was three months pregnant with his son.
“I thought I was going to lose him from the shock, but I could feel him inside of me,” she said of the loss of Pedro’s father from her life. “He was of strong blood.”
In Colombia, prostitution is legal in certain zones, and is common due to the widespread poverty that sweeps across a nation that is perhaps best known for exporting cocaine.
Lopez had dreams of being a teacher when he was young, his mother said.
“He liked to help the other children, and with his notebook, he helped the other children learn their vowels,” she said.
His upbringing, however, would make those dreams impossible to achieve.
“I was the seventh son of 13 children of a prostitute in Tolima, Colombia,” he said. “All the children slept on a big bed behind a drawn curtain while our mother did her business with men.”
She was a violent woman, Lopez said, and vengeful as well.
“That woman was violent,” Lopez said. “She would punish me with such violence.”
A son sent away … or not
What happens next varies between Lopez and his mother.
According to his mother, eight-year-old Lopez ran away from home one day, and she searched desperately until nightfall.
“That night I cried and cried, and I couldn’t find him,” she said, adding that she turned to a fortune teller for help finding her boy.
According to López, his mother caught him fondling his younger sister’s breasts in 1957, when he was eight years old, and evicted him from the family home.
“My mother threw me out when I was eight after she caught me touching my sister's breasts. She took me to the edge of town but I found my way home again,” he said. “The next day she took me on a bus and left me off more than 200 miles from home. I was abandoned.”
Lopez made his way to Bogotá, Colombia's capital city, where he lived among the other children who made up the lowest rung of the social ladder.
“Most of the kids left their house because they were abused,” said criminal psychologist Alexandra de la Torre Daramillo. “The only place they could end up was on the streets, because they had no other options.”
Like other street kids, Lopez stole clothing and food from dumpsters, and joined a gang of other gamines, a name given to the throwaway kids who lived on the streets of Bogotá, to have protection during the night as they slept.
His gang affiliation, however, would not be enough to save him from his second violation of trust.
Left to fend for himself, he at first resorted to begging, until an older man seemingly took pity on the boy and offered him warm meals and a warm place to stay, but instead held him in an abandoned building where he sodomized and tortured the boy until he grew tired of him, then tossed him back out onto the streets.
“There I was found by a man who took me into an abandoned building and raped me over and over again. I decided then to do the same to as many young girls as possible,” he said. “Being a child, I lost my innocence. I have always wanted to punish those responsible.”
Another hope dashed
When Lopez turned 12, four years after living on the streets of Colombia, an older American couple took him in, giving him a room, food and a chance to attend a local school targeted toward orphans. Here, Lopez was again sexually assaulted, this time by a teacher who had a thing for young boys.
Unwilling to endure any more sexual torture at the hands of his elders, Lopez stole enough money from the school office to fund his escape.
Lopez returned to the place he considered his only real home, the streets of Bogota, Colombia.
After a civil war and a long-term depression, the government in Colombia was restructuring and factories were finally reopening.
Still, Lopez had been on the streets since he was eight, and his short time in school did not teach him any skills that would help him secure a legal job or a place to live.
Since Colombia’s welfare system didn’t provide resources that were readily accessible to young people – they have programs, but there is no real safety net for the poor – he returned to begging for food, and soon established a reputation as one of the most talented car thieves in the city.
Chapter 2: His first stint in prison
Lopez was paid well by the local chop shops, and he was finally able to live out his dreams as a teacher, guiding the younger kids as they, too, learned the most effective ways to steal cars.
But even the talented have an off day or two, and Lopez was finally caught, and at age 18 was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison.
Two days into his sentence, Lopez was gang-raped by older inmates, which forced him to remember his early abuses and sent him into a murderous rage. He took revenge on three of those who were the most brutal, killing them in the weeks that followed with a makeshift knife in acts that were deemed self-defense.
“I don’t deny that I killed two in there, but the warden said don’t worry about it,” Lopez said.
Instead, he swore he would never again be seen as a victim.
His dark path had been determined, and he was almost destined to become a madman.
Prison violence was Lopez’s last straw
By the time he was released from prison in 1971, his abusive mother, the men who had robbed him of his innocence and trust, and the peers who had taken advantage of him, had transformed him into a twisted deviant who blamed all women for the sins of his mother.
“It’s part of the profile,” according to former FBI profiler Robert Ressler. “Serial killers very often have obsessions of some kind with their mothers. A love-hate relationship, in popular language. These moms usually aren't candidates for mother of the year, although they aren't necessarily abusive either. The common thread seems to be the sexual element, mothers who were very seductive, who had many sex partners of which the son was aware. Of course, the children of prostitutes are more likely to be exposed to this type of behavior.”
Revenge would be brutal
Bent on revenge, Lopez set out for Peru, where he would leave a devilish mark in his quest for retribution against those who had terrorized and brutalized him.
He chose to punish the poorest of children, the street children who worked the open air markets with their parents.
“I went after my victims by walking among the markets searching for a girl with a certain look on her face, a look of innocence and beauty. She would be a good girl, working with her mother. I followed them sometimes for two or three days, waiting for when she was left alone. I would give her a trinket like a ha
nd mirror, then take her to the edge of town where I would promise a trinket for her mother,” Lopez said.
The trick was effective, especially since poor children were easily lured by the gifts and the promise of more.
“He would show himself by helping, so the children would trust him,” criminal psychologist Daramillo said. “Then he would take them somewhere where if they would scream, they wouldn’t be heard.”
He would repeat the pattern, over and over, to satisfy his insatiable urges.
Chapter 3: Murder in Peru
Lopez saw Peru, home to Machu Picchu and a section of the Amazon rainforest, a nation that has an ocean border on one side, the Andes mountain range on the other, as the perfect place to begin what appeared to be a plan to obliterate all women from earth.
For the parents of girls – usually between the ages of 8 and 12 – who had gone missing, the questions were almost too horrible to answer.
“I told her to go sell some things to buy a bus ticket to come home,” said Marra Masbande Inde, the mother of one missing girl who never made it back to the place where she’s grown up.
Other parents believed their beloved girls had been kidnapped into the sex trade.
And that, although incomprehensible, might have been better than what actually happened.
Desperate parents ran advertisements in local newspapers offering rewards for information on their missing girls. They heard nothing.
A bad day for Pedro Lopez
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 44