2023-10-13 01:52:58
He killed almost 200 minors and also kidnapped and sexually abused them.
Luis Alfredo Garavito, considered the largest serial killer of children in Colombia, died on Thursday in a hospital, according to the National Penitentiary and Prison Institute. He was 66 years old.
Garavito, nicknamed “The Beast,” confessed to having murdered more than 190 children between the ages of 8 and 16 – mostly low-income – whom he kidnapped and abused by posing as a monk, sick person, homeless person or street vendor.
The National Penitentiary Institute indicated through its press office that Garavito died in Valledupar, northern Colombia, where he remained imprisoned, but did not detail the cause of death.
Garavito was born on January 25, 1957 in Génova, Quindío, and as an adult he toured 11 departments of the country where he abused and killed minors. He also confessed to having murdered four minors in Ecuador in 1998.
According to what Garavito told a Colombian judge, that year he approached a young man of regarding 15 years old who was sitting on a platform in the city of Santo Domingo de los Colorados and then took him to an area covered with high vegetation where he stripped him of his clothes, tied his hands and feet and killed him with a knife.
He said he had done the same thing with another 12-year-old minor who had shined his shoes.
From prison and converted to Christianity, as he said, Garavito gave interviews to various media outlets in which he recounted details of his way of operating.
He used to keep a diary in which he wrote down the dates and places he visited along with a number that corresponded to the age of the minor he murdered. He also kept some newspaper clippings with news of missing children he had killed.
Colombian authorities began to follow their trail when they noticed similarities in the cases of disappearances of minors in Pereira, Armenia and Tunja.
Then they cross-referenced information from different parts of the country and found a record of the capture of Bonifacio Morera Lizcano, as Garavito falsely said his name was, for trying to abuse a minor.
It was when they compared Garavito’s fingerprints with Morera’s and noticed that it was the same subject.
Garavito was captured in April 1999 and in many cases he confessed where the remains of the minors were found. For his crimes, he accumulated more than 50 convictions for violent sexual acts, homicide, simple kidnapping and arson.
The sentences amounted to hundreds of years in prison, however, the maximum allowed sentence of 40 years was imposed.
That same year, Garavito apologized to the families of the victims in a court hearing: “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.”
In recent years, Garavito’s release from prison was considered imminent, following serving three-fifths of his sentence, which allowed him to obtain benefits.
In 2021, then-president Iván Duque (2018-2022) rejected the possibility of him regaining freedom and assured that his government would have to “stay in jail.”
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