True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology)

by Jack Rosewood

  It wasn’t until after countless women and young girls had been murdered that Lopez was caught in 1978 by a tribe of Ayacucho Indians as he attempted to kidnap a 9-year-old girl.

  The tribe members stripped him and tortured him for hours, burying him up to his neck and pouring syrup on his head so the ants could eat him alive, a punishment they deemed suitable for his crime.

  Lopez would have perished – and many other young South American girls would not have died – if a female missionary had not convinced the tribe to turn Lopez into the police rather than go ahead with their planned lynching.

  Unfortunately, the police choose not to believe the Ayacucho witnesses to Lopez’s crime, and they let the madman go.

  Lopez escaped to Ecuador to the north, where he set about killing as many as three girls a week, sometimes slipping over the border to his nearby home country of Colombia to find his victims.

  For Lopez, watching his victims die after he violated them was sexually was more pleasurable than the sexual release of raping them.

  “There is a wonderful moment, a divine moment, when I have my hands around a young girl’s throat,” he said in an interview. “I look into her eyes and see a certain light, a spark, suddenly go out. Only those who kill know what I mean. The moment of death is enthralling and exciting.”

  Killing is power

  Lopez – who had never felt a sense of power as a child due to repeated violations from authority figures – killed his victims in order to garner that strength that he had long been missing, even as he was violently erasing another woman from the world.

  “One of the reasons he said he killed them was because they were poor. Maybe he tried to stamp out the weakness. This allowed him to feel stronger, bigger. This was a moment for him to be big,” said psychiatrist Dr. Maria Helena Trujillo.

  Lopez waited until daylight to rape and kill his victims, even if he had kidnapped them in the evening the night before, forcing them to endure a night of terror before they died.

  He wanted to see their fear, and see them die.

  “At the first sign of light, I would get excited,” he said. “I forced the girl into sex and put my hands against her throat. When the sun rose I would strangle her. It was only good if I could see her eyes. I never killed anyone at night. It would have been wasted in the dark.”

  While death was usually quick, some girls didn’t immediately die, and he was forced to continue strangling them after they regained consciousness.

  “It took them between five and 15 minutes to die,” he added. “Sometimes I had to kill them all over again. They never screamed because they didn’t expect anything would happen. They were innocent.”

  Innocent, just as he said he was when he was first violated by the man who promised him food and shelter, and instead offered a house of horrors filled with forced sodomy.

  Chapter 4: Lopez hosted post-mortem parties

  After his victims were dead, Lopez played, and like a schoolgirl creating imaginary tea parties, he set up the young girls in a single mass grave for pretend conversations and what could be called nothing short of sick soirees.

  “My little friends liked to have company,” he said. “I often put three or four girls in a single hole and talked to them. It was like having a party, but after a while, because they couldn’t move, I got bored and went looking for new girls.”

  Police noticed the missing persons’ reports, but, like many brokenhearted parents, they believed that the young girls had become victims of sex trafficking and failed to investigate beyond that theory.

  One victim, the sister of Amparo Garces Lozada, was selling newspapers when she encountered Lopez.

  He lured her away from the market, raped her, strangled her and covered her with the newspapers to hide her from passersby.

  Once he realized his girl was missing there was precious little her father could do, because in Colombia the poor had little access to the services of the police.

  Kidnapping draws attention

  A few days later, Lopez snatched the daughter of a prominent baker, which drew attention not only to the abduction of his daughter, but to the other missing girls as well.

  Eventually, the baker’s beautiful daughter was found, severely decomposed, in an abandoned farmhouse on the outskirts of town.

  But it wasn’t until April of 1980, when a flash flood in Ambato, Ecuador, unearthed the remains of four missing girls that police began to consider that something sinister was going on closer to home.

  While the bodies were decomposed enough it was impossible to determine their causes of death, it was clear that the young girls’ bodies had been buried in order to hide any evidence of foul play.

  Chapter 5: A mistake leads to an arrest

  A few days after the flood, Carvina Poveda saw a strange man attempt to kidnap her 12-year-old daughter Marie while the mother and daughter were at a local market. She screamed, causing shoppers to surround Lopez and pin him to the ground before he could flee with the girl.

  Lopez attempted to throw police off with a trick, and he was incoherent when officials arrived to make an arrest.

  He then went silent, refusing to speak during the entire interrogation.

  In frustration, officers used an undercover detective dressed in prison garb as a pawn to coerce a confession from Lopez. Once the two men were in the same cell, Lopez soon enough felt comfortable spilling the beans.

  “For 27 days I hardly slept, afraid I'd be strangled in my sleep,” Pastor Gonzales said, remembering that he slept with a towel wrapped around his throat as protection.

  “But I tricked Lopez into confessing by pretending I was a rapist, too. He boasted to me of murder after murder in Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. It was beyond my wildest nightmares. He told me everything,” Gonzales said in an interview with freelance reporter Ron Laytner.

  Eventually, Gonzales said that Lopez and his stories were so horrific that he asked to be removed from the cell so as not to be forced to hear more of his sordid confessions.

  With confession comes horror

  With his cover blown, Lopez then confessed to police to killing at least 100 girls in Ecuador, 100 in Colombia and more than 100 in Peru, so great was his appetite for murder.

  He then took police on a sordid treasure hunt, revealing the places he had discarded the bodies of the girls he’d killed.

  “Nobody realized it was the criminal who was leading police to the graves. They dressed him up as a policeman and nobody recognized him,” said one witness.

  He led police to one victim, covered with newspapers and branches. Her family identified her bones by the clothes her corpse was wearing.

  “Something that struck me about Pedro Lopez is how cold he was when he was identifying the gravesites,” said one official. “It was as if what he had done was normal.”

  To keep Lopez talking, they plied him with cigarettes and coffee, chicken and beer.

  For his part, Lopez was matter-of-fact about his murders, and even at times saw himself as a benefactor as he took a girl’s life.

  “I would take her to a secret hideaway where prepared graves waited. Sometimes there were bodies of earlier victims there. I cuddled them and then raped them at sunrise,” he said.

  As the sun rose higher into the sky, he would go in for the kill.

  “I put my hands around her throat and I would strangle her. I was very considerate. I would spend a long time with them making sure they were dead. I would mirror to check whether they were still breathing," he said.

  As for his victims alerting anyone of their plights with screams, it was not to be.

  Victims never cried for help

  “They never screamed because they didn't expect anything would happen,” Lopez said. “I like the girls in Ecuador. They are more gentle and trusting, more innocent.”

  Innocent, just as he was when he was thrown out by his mother, raped by the men who promised him compassion, and essentially forced to survive on the streets.

>   But theirs would never get a chance to transform to pure evil.

  The police and Lopez spent six weeks on tour across Ecuador, traveling from gravesite to gravesite.

  He remembered them all, with no remorse.

  Instead, at one site he grabbed up the skull of a victim in hopes of being photographed with his “trophy.”

  Officers quickly took the skull away.

  Lopez took horrified police officers to the graves of 53 of his victims, and then refused to show them more.

  When they returned to the police station, Lopez was charged with 110 counts of murder, based on not only the graves, but also his confessions.

  “If someone confesses to 53 you find, and hundreds more, you tend to believe what he says,” said the director of prison affairs, Victor Lascano, in a press conference after the morbid mission. “I think his estimate of 300 is very low.”

  As police gathered evidence, the bones, skulls, shoes and other items, it began to resemble a miniature holocaust, items left behind from a mass killing that was almost as unbelievable as the German extermination of millions of Jews.

  He blamed it on his past life as a gamine.

  “Perhaps I took it too far because of my past as the low of the low, almost an animal,” he said. “This is what I declare. I am 31 years old, and I have led a backward life, disoriented, that I have been without support and help. But what I mostly needed was support.”

  Playing the blame game

  Eventually, though, he blamed a split personality for the many murders he had committed, the lives he had extinguished much too soon, although it didn’t matter much how or why or how many.

  In Ecuador, the sentence for killing one person or a thousand is the same, no matter how horrific the crimes.

  Lopez was only given a 16-year sentence, and he was released from prison in 1994 on good behavior. He was 45.

  Lopez was driven to the Colombian border. There, officials gave him a bottle of water, newer shoes and a shirt and pants, a small amount of Columbian pesos and a package of food. Then he was set loose.

  Chapter 6: Laws leave families enraged

  At the time of Lopez’s release from prison in Ecuador after serving such a short sentence, Prisons Minister Pablo Faguero explained the law, put in place to prevent the execution of presidents of Ecuador from being killed in the event of a revolution or military coup.

  “Yes it does sound strange, but that is our law. The law of no executions or sentences longer than 20 years was passed over 100 years ago to protect presidents of Ecuador from being killed following revolutions and military coups. In the past they had been executed in horrific ways like being pulled apart by four horses. The law seemed humane,” he said.

  For the families of at least 100, but likely more than 300 girls, drawing and quartering would have been considered a kindness for the crazed killer whose lust for murder robbed so many mothers of seeing their daughters married, so many father from becoming a proud grandparent.

  The families thought vigilante justice was appropriate, given the short sentence.

  “I wanted revenge. I wanted to break him into pieces because he killed my baby,” said one grieving mother.

  A friend of a father who had lost his child gathered wood in hopes of burning him alive like the witches of Salem.

  Eventually, rage over the Lopez case did lead Ecuador to make changes to their laws, and officials there raised the sentence for murder from 16 to 25 years.

  A quick return to confinement

  Outraged families seeking justice would see some, because about an hour after his arrival back in Colombia, Lopez was arrested and charged with a 20-year-old murder.

  Unfortunately, Lopez was declared insane and sent to the psychiatric wing of a Bogotá hospital.

  One would think that this would have been the end of it, that South Americans would never have to think about Lopez again, as he would spend his life locked away much like Wisconsin’s legendary Ed Gein.

  Instead, López was released in February of 1998 from a psychiatric hospital after a prison psychiatrist declared him sane.

  “It could either be that the psychiatrist just really thought that he was recovered, or that he faked it,” said Jaramillo. “He was smart. He could have faked being better. He could have faked being changed.”

  Mom gets a surprise visit

  The first thing Lopez did upon his release was to make an impromptu visit to his mother.

  “When he arrived, he said, ‘Mother, kneel down so I can bless you,’ and I said, ‘the one who should kneel down is you. A son should kneel before his mother.’ He got down on only one knee,” she remembered.

  He then did something horrible, and asked his mother what she would give him of his inheritance. She pointed out that she had nothing, just a chair and a bed, and he put them on the porch, telling the woman who brought him into the world that if no one bought them, he would light her two sole possessions on fire rather than allow her to keep them.

  A woman came by and purchased the only things Benilda López De Casteneda had in the world. Lopez pocketed the money, and disappeared.

  It was the last time anyone saw him.

  “Someday, when I am released, I will feel that moment again,” he once said. “I will be happy to kill again. It is my mission.”

  “I lost my innocence at age eight,” he added, “so I decided to do the same to as many young girls as I could.”

  Nations’ residents in terror

  Meanwhile, in Columbia, Ecuador and Peru, families who have heard that the Monster has been freed are watching carefully over their young girls.

  Now and then, citizens report sightings in all three of Lopez’s hunting grounds.

  Police carry his photograph in case they spot him.

  Lopez was to see a judge once a month after his release, a feeble attempt to keep him on the straight and narrow, but he immediately melted into the countryside. After that cruel visit to his mother, wiping out her valuables, he simply disappeared.

  “God save the children. He is unreformed and totally remorseless. This whole nightmare may start again,” said Victor Lascano, the warden at the Ecuadorian prison where Lopez was first held.

  While a handful of girls have gone missing, many believe that Lopez is dead, the victim of well-deserved vigilante justice at the hands of some of his victim’s survivors.

  Still, in 2002 police issued an arrest warrant for Lopez when bodies of girls who had been murdered in a manner similar to that favored by Lopez turned up.

  There were no leads, but it again reminded area residents that a madman could still be living in their midst.

  “It will be a kindness to the world for someone to murder this fiend,” said the mother of Maria Poveda, the Ecuadorian girl who was lucky enough to escape capture and helped lead to the arrest of Lopez. “The Monster of the Andes won't last long on the outside. Maybe that is why we haven’t heard of more missing girls. Perhaps someone, even the police in Columbia or Ecuador, have already killed him. If they have, I hope they made him suffer.”

  “I am the man of the century,” Lopez once said in a prison interview with photojournalist Ron Laytner. “No one will ever forget me.”

  NOTABLE: Lopez briefly held the Guinness World Records title of the “most prolific serial killer.”

  Conclusion

  In the United States, Stephanie George was sentenced to life in prison because police found a locked box in her attic filled with cocaine that belonged to her boyfriend. Because of the amount of the drug, and because as the man’s girlfriend she was considered an accomplice, federal law superseded the judge’s opinion that a life sentence was too harsh. As far as we know, Stephanie George never even used cocaine, nor was aware that her boyfriend was a dealer. None of that mattered in the face of mandatory sentencing laws, and at 27, life as she knew it ended.

  Compare that to the lax sentencing in Ecuador or Colombia for the three serial killers who together have likely killed just under 1,000
children during their short-lived sprees.

  Together, their sentences were not equal to a single life sentence, and they erased the chances of hundreds of young people living productive lives, including potentially bringing their families out of poverty.

  Because of such lax sentencing laws when it comes to murder, it seems some South American countries need to take a hard look at how they view murder, and make changes to address multiple murders so that men like Pedro Lopez, Daniel Camargo, and Luis Garavito do not get a chance to find themselves released from prison and able to kill again.

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