On a hillside outside Pereira, on Nov. 7, 1998, boys kicking a ball across the grass turned up a child’s skeleton.
Then came the rest. Across the slopes of Risaralda, diggers pulled child after child out of the ground: 25 by one contemporaneous count, 36 by another.
Although the towns differed, the bodies showed the same modus operandi: nylon rope, the same knots, a liquor bottle pitched a few feet off, the throat cut.
In the CBS News report of Oct. 30, 1999, Prosecutor Alfonso Gómez described corpses “showing signs of having been tied up and mutilated.” The official language of a nightmare.
The man who left the bodies rode buses for a living. He carried a monk’s habit, a street vendor’s tray, a crutch he didn’t need, and charity credentials in his satchel. Alongside the costumes was a notebook. It wasn’t a diary, but rather an inventory of every boy he killed, including their age and location (details that would help investigators unearth his victims years later).
Colombia learned his name that summer: Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos.
In Colombian papers he’d been dubbed La Bestia — the Beast.
In the end he confessed to 140 murders “in a five-year spree,” Bogotá prosecutors told CBS News. Later, the Fiscalía upped the number to 190 with cases he never volunteered. He died blind and leukemic at 66 years old, 24 years into his 1,853-year sentence. Even then, Colombia couldn’t be rid of him as his corpse sat in a morgue for 70 days.
A Costume For Every Neighborhood
Garavito hunted working boys, 8 to 16, the kind peddling lottery tickets, watching parked motorcycles, running errands at bus terminals. For a few pesos, he’d offer them a job and walk them out of town.
Poverty created the perfect storm. These were kids who could vanish for days before anyone noticed.
His disguises included a monk, a disabled man, a candy vendor, and a charity worker, all jobs that implied trustworthiness.
According to him, alcohol drove him:
“Every time I drank, I’d get the urge to go find a child and do to him what they did to me, and then kill him.”
The Eyeglasses In The Risaralda Fire
For years, the bodies appeared across Eje Cafetero, with nobody putting the pattern together. Finally, a Bogotá task force formed, and the killings read at last as one man’s work.
It was a pair of eyeglasses that cracked the case. They were recovered from a pile of burned belongings, reportedly ground for an unusual astigmatism in the left eye.
How many men in rural Risaralda wore a prescription like that? The lenses were the beginning of the end.
The Boy With The Lottery Ticket
On April 22, 1999, in Villavicencio, he dragged off a 12-year-old named John Iván Sabogal. A homeless teenager heard the struggle, swore at him, and threw rocks until he ran.
Cornered, Garavito gave the name Bonifacio Morera Lizcano. Not until July 4, 1999, did anyone match the man in the cell to the man in the file, which left the most prolific child killer in Latin America sitting in the clear for ten weeks on an attempted-rape charge.
I Don’t Want Them To Look At Me Like A Monster
Between Oct. 26 and Oct. 29, 1999 he talked for hours in front of Eighth Prosecutor María Lily Naranjo Patiño.
Since the transcript runs in Spanish, every line that follows is a translation:
“The first time was in ’92, in Jamundí, Valle. I don’t know who the boy was — he walked past, and I was in a bar drinking a lot of beer,” he began.
“I felt an impulse. I never planned a thing like that. It all happened suddenly,” he said. He wept through parts of it. “Don’t cry any more, you get nothing out of it,” his own attorney, Óscar Fernando Rincón, told him.
Then, the apology: “I ask forgiveness of God, of many people, of society and of justice.” And then the line he’d be remembered by. “I don’t want them to look at me like a monster,” he said. “I’m a human being.”
In court, per The Associated Press, he put it flatly: “I want to ask for forgiveness for everything I did and I am going to confess. Yes, I killed them and not only those, I killed others.”
Since Colombia bars life sentences, he was sentenced to 1,853 years, which was actually discounted for all the help he gave locating bodies.
Seventy Days In A Valledupar Morgue
His death was confirmed by Colombia’s National Penitentiary and Prison Institute on Oct. 12, 2023, with no cause listed. As can be expected, nobody came for the body.
Twelve days in, Valledupar’s ombudsman Silvio Cuello told Infobae the obvious. “It’s causing a nuisance for the staff at Medicina Legal,” he said. “Even though he’s in an intermediate cooler, the cold doesn’t hold.”
Eventually a nephew turned up.
They could never settle on his total number of victims. “A little more than 200,” he told an interviewer. Officially, the Fiscalía has verified between 190 and 200. And investigators never called the list finished: in 59 municipalities, families who filed a missing-child report in the 1990s still wait on a name, a grave, a date.