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Monster In The Andes

Pedro Lopez is the greatest serial killer in modern times
By David Cocksedge

THE ARMED guards kept their hands on their holstered pistol butts and watched nervously as the steel door to cell 14 was unlocked. For inside was a deadly killer; perhaps the most hated and feared man in South America . There in Ambato Prison, high up in the Andes Mountains in Ecuador , was Pedro Alonzo Lopez, ‘The Monster of the Andes ', a Colombian man who had admitted to murdering over 300 young girls. Inside, cowering in a corner of his cell in the women's section of the prison, was the man himself. He was petrified that he might be burned alive, or castrated by the other inmates or even the guards themselves. Child molesters (pedophiles) and killers of children are detested everywhere in the world. And Lopez has been credited with being the greatest mass murderer in modern times, with the highest tally of victims.

Pedro Lopez was born in Tolmia , Colombia in 1949 during the height of the country's ‘La Violencia' period, when Colombia was hit by riots and unthinkable acts of horror by death squads. The problems had begun in 1948 when the Liberal politician Jorge Eliencer Gaitaan was assassinated, sparking off a bloody civil war that claimed over 200,000 lives in ten years.

The son of a prostitute, Pedro was the seventh of 13 children and his early years were anything but joyous. His mother was an overbearing woman who dominated her children with an ironclad fist, and the young boy was often beaten for minor offences. In 1957, when he was eight years old, his mother caught him fondling a younger sister and he was beaten with a cane and banished onto the mean streets of Tolmia in a country where the crime rate was fifty times higher than all other countries in the world.

An older man soon picked him off the streets, offering him food and a place to stay. But the trusting Pedro soon found that the offer was too good to be true. The man took him to an abandoned building where he raped him several times before tossing him back onto the streets. Pedro now became terrified of strangers, and never walked about in daylight. He slept in alleyways and deserted buildings, venturing out at night in search of food from trash cans and local dumps. “I looked up and if I could see a star, I knew that I was under the protection of God,” he related later. It was almost a year before he built up the courage to travel and eventually hitched to Bogotá. After a few days of begging for food and scavenging dumpsters, a resident American couple took him into their home. Pedro was provided with a free room and board and enrolled in a day school for orphans.

But in 1963, when he was 14 years old, a male teacher at the school sexually molested him. All Pedro's fears were reborn as his anger grew. Following the incident, he stole cash from the school office and ran away from home. He spent the next six years begging and committing petty thefts to survive. By his mid-teens, Pedro had become a very proficient car thief and local chop shops paid him well for his services. Inevitably he was arrested whilst stealing a car in 1969 and went to prison for seven years. He served just two days behind bars before he was brutally gang-raped by four older inmates.

This time he swore revenge and set about carrying it out. He fashioned a crude knife from kitchen utensils and then spent the next two weeks singling out each of the men who had attacked him. He killed three of them, and the fourth ran screaming from his knife, his body streaming blood. Lopez was given an additional two years on his sentence for the murders, which were deemed self-defense when he told his story and it was backed by witnesses. But prison time did irreparable damage to Pedro's mind and pushed him over the edge of what little sanity he still had. Due to mental abuse from his mother, he was fearful of women. But little girls were no threat to him, and he lusted after them.

On his release from prison in 1978, Lopez traveled widely throughout Peru . It was during this time that he claimed to have begun stalking and killing young girls from various Indian tribes throughout the region. It is impossible to verify his claims, but it is known that in October 1979 he was captured by a group of Ayacuchos in northern Peru while he was attempting to kidnap a nine-year-old girl from their tribe. The Indians stripped and tortured Pedro for hours, then buried him alive, with just his head above the ground.

But luck was on his side, because an American female missionary intervened and convinced his captors that murder was ungodly and that they should turn Lopez over to the authorities. The Indians eventually agreed and Pedro was remanded over to local Peruvian police. Not wanting to waste time investigating petty Indian complaints, the Peruvian Government merely deported Pedro back to Ecuador.

Across the border in Ecuador the real killing spree began. “I like the girls in Ecuador ”, Lopez told police. “They are gentle and trusting, and innocent. They are not as suspicious of strangers as Columbian girls.” Pedro would stalk market squares seeking out his victims. In graphic detail he told police how he would first introduce the children to sex, and then strangle them. “I would become very excited watching them die,” he related. “I would stare into their eyes until I saw the light in them go out. The girls never really struggled – they didn't have time. I would bury a girl, then go out immediately and look for another one. I never killed any of them at night, because I wanted to watch them die by daylight.” He claimed that he was averaging three killings a week at this time.

Authorities soon began to notice an increase in missing person's cases involving young girls, but quickly concluded that these were due to active South American sex slave rings which had kidnapped many girls in recent years.

In April 1980, a flash flood near Ambato , Ecuador , caused some alarm when the raging waters unearthed the remains of four missing girls. Experts concluded that they had been murdered and their bodies buried.

Just days later a local resident named Carvina Poveda was shopping at a local marketplace with her 12-year-old daughter Marie, when a man attempted to abduct the young girl. Carvina cried out for help as the man tried to flee the market with her daughter in his arms. Local merchants came quickly to her aid and chased the man down before he could get away. They held him down and local police were summoned. Lopez was rambling incoherently when police arrived and arrested him. As they traveled back to headquarters with their suspect in handcuffs, their initial conclusion was that they had a madman in custody.

Lopez refused to co-operate or answer any questions during the following days, and investigators realized that they would have to employ a different strategy in order to get him to talk. A local priest named Father Cordoba Gudino was then dressed in prison garb and placed in a cell with Lopez. The skillful priest got Pedro's confidence and listened to his dreadful litany of child killing. Soon Lopez had revealed such repulsive acts of murder and lust to the padre that he begged prison authorities to remove him from the cell. This was the most horrific confession Father Gudino had ever heard in a lifetime of listening to confessions as part of his calling.

Investigators then confronted Lopez with their newly acquired evidence and he finally broke down. He confessed that he had murdered at least 110 girls in Ecuador , 100 in Colombia and “many more than 100” in Peru . Pedro blamed his crimes on his hard life and lonely adolescence. “I lost my innocence at the age of eight”, he explained, “So I decided to do the same to as many young girls as I could. I was fearful of women, thanks to my whore of a mother, and was afraid to even approach them.” He also stated that he would often act out gruesome tea parties with the bodies of his victims – propping them up and talking to them. At first the authorities were skeptical of his astonishing claims, but after he offered to show them the grave sites of his victims, they soon came to believe him.

Lopez was taken in leg irons so that he could direct a police caravan to the various dump sites. He led them to a secluded area near Ambato where they unearthed the remains of 53 young girls, all aged from 8 to 12 years. Throughout the day, Pedro led them to 28 other sites, but no further bodies were discovered. His investigators concluded that animals had scattered the remains and floods had washed away what little of the bones were left. They now had no reason to doubt Pedro's grisly claims. Here was a serial killer on a truly monstrous scale.

He was quickly charged with 57 counts of murder, and the ante boosted to 110 as a result of his detailed confessions. The director of prison affairs, Victor Lascano, later explained to reporters, “If someone confesses to 53 murder victims that you find and hundreds more that you cannot find, you tend to believe what he says.” He concluded the estimate of 300 murders “was probably very low. This man may have killed more than four hundred.”

Little information is readily available about Pedro Lopez's brief trial, but it is known that in December 1980 he was convicted on multiple counts of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In January 1999 Pedro Lopez gave an exclusive interview to Ron Laytner of the ‘National Examiner'. “I am the man of the century”, Lopez boasted. “No one will ever forget me. 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, often walking with her mother. I would follow one sometimes for two or three days, waiting for when she was left alone. I would give the girl a trinket and promise a present for her mother, if she went with me to secret hideaways where I had graves prepared. Sometimes there were bodies of earlier victims there. I cuddled them and then raped them at sunrise. At the first sign of daylight I would get very excited. I had sex with the girls and then strangled them as the sun rose. I would look into a victim's eyes and see a certain light, a spark, suddenly go out. The moment of death is enthralling and very exciting to me. Only those who have killed and enjoyed it will know what I mean. When I am released I will know that moment again – perhaps a thousand times.”

But he will never be released. Says Lascano, “We can never let him go. He is wanted for multiple murders in Colombia and Peru, and the penalty for murder in Colombia is death by firing squad. Perhaps that is the best way to be rid of him – pack him off for trial in Colombia. But we cannot release him in Ecuador because he will surely kill again. Serial killers like Pedro Lopez do not reform. If he is ever set free, all young girls in South America are in danger.”

The missionary who saved his life in 1979 obviously felt that she was doing a good deed. But ironically there is no doubt that if the Ayacuchos Indians had been allowed to execute Pedro Lopez that day, many young girls who later died at his hands would have grown to be women today.

(Research: crimelibrary.com/serial_killers).

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