-“Why did you get into crime?”, asked a boy to Juan Fernando Hermosa Suarez in a video made in jail following his capture.
– “Because I wanted to experience things outside the home”, he answered coldly The “Terror Child”the youngest serial killer in the history of Ecuador.
Over the course of three months, until his capture in January 1992, the young killed 23 people, mostly taxi drivers and homosexuals. A string of deaths that spread panic in Quito and for which he was murdered under mysterious circumstances.
Adoption, mistreatment of animals and the beginnings of crime
Hermosa was born into a very humble family. The situation of poverty was such that her biological parents decided to give him up for adoption. That was how Olivo Hermosa Fonseca, a soldier, and his wife Zoila Amada Suárez, a housewife who suffered from deafness, made him his son and raised him in Quito.
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According to Ecuadorian media, it was when he found out that he had been adopted, in early adolescence, that Juan Hermosa began to be violent. Their first victims were animals from the neighborhood, whom he killed.
Hermosa I was only 15 years old when he committed his first murder. It was on November 22, 1991, following leaving a bowling alley. The thin-faced, dark-skinned, curly-haired young man was already leading a group of teenagers who they lived off robberies and frequented clubs, bars and nightclubs: the “Gang of terror”. That night, she got into a taxi with some friends and in the middle of the ride took out a 9mm pistol and executed the driver, Jorge Aguirre Zambrano, with two shots to the head.
They left the body on a road, where it was found hours later by the Police.
Juan Fernando Hermosa sowed terror in Quito at the beginning of the ’90s. (Photo: Twitter/@Soastibrothers).
“With the gang we stole and had money without having to kill anyone. But when Hermosa arrived and we saw a dead body for the first time, the next day we went to drink and many of us cry from the impression”, recalled years later one of the gang members, Milton Vidal, in an interview with the newspaper Trade.
His second victim was not a stranger like the taxi driver, quite the opposite. Her name was Charlie and she was a transvestite who used to cut his hair and that day she invited him to drink alcohol at his house with his friends. The gathering ended in a discussion that Hermosa settled with bullets.
In less than three months, killed 8 taxi drivers, 11 homosexuals, a truck driver and his assistant and another person, although the authorities believe that there might be more victims. Most of his crimes occurred on weekends and were committed with the same 9mm pistol, which he would have bought from a police officer. There was one night, December 14, when he killed three taxi drivers.
How they captured the “Terror Child”
Such was the commotion caused by Hermosa that the Ecuadorian Police created a special group to achieve his capture, the Intelligence Operations Center (IOC). He was finally one of the members of his gang, arrested for a robbery, who finally betrayed him and revealed that the teenager was the murderer of taxi drivers and gays.
The police set up a fence around the young man and on January 16, 1992, an operation took place in the middle of the night that resulted in his capture and the death of the young murderer’s mother.
Juan Fernando Hermosa during the reconstruction of one of his crimes. (Photo: Twitter/@soastibrothers).
The agents decided to enter through a skylight that led to Juan’s room, but the teenager was sleeping in another room. He heard the noise he grabbed his gun and started shooting once morest the police. He even threw a grenade at themwhich knocked down a wall and injured two officers.
In the midst of the shooting, the young man’s mother died following receiving eleven bullets in a extrajudicial execution that reached the courts 23 years later.
The young serial killer was finally caught when tried to escape through a window. “I want to make it clear that my name is Juan Fernando Hermosa Suárez and that I will be 16 years old on February 28,” he told police when he was taken to the barracks.
Hermosa’s arrest caused a strong media outcry, particularly due to the surprising press conferences in which she participated. “It is the whole truth, as my companions say, I murdered, I killed”, recognized Hermosa in one of them.
Juan Fernando Hemosa mainly murdered taxi drivers and homosexuals. (Photo: video capture).
When asked why he was killing taxi drivers, he said it was because “they are abusive” and he alleged that many times they wanted to charge him more for the trips. It is still unknown why he attacked homosexuals. According to him, he said, the main motive for his crimes it was the robbery.
“I had no intention of killing, I asked the victims not to move, that nothing would happen to them, but by not paying attention I ended up killing them,” he said.
In other statements, he assured that he said that the murders of drivers had been commissioned by a retired military man who wanted to avenge the rape and death of his daughter by a taxi driver, although he later retracted it and in another interview said that there was no military man.
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Sentenced to four years in prison
Despite the number of his crimes, he was sentenced to the maximum sentence that the law allowed in Ecuador for a minor: four years in prison. He completed it at the Virgilio Guerrero juvenile rehabilitation center. Experts noted that Hermosa had a high IQ, suffered from chronic social resentment, and suffered from “psychopathy”depending on the site culturing.
Juan Fernando Hermosa was sentenced to four years in prison for his crimes. (Photo: video capture).
According to the documentary JF Hermosa Behind the shadows of the child of terrorthe young man I feared being poisoned in jail and at each meal time he requested the presence of a senior police officer to eat together and from the same plate. “Let’s eat half, my major,” he would have said according to witnesses.
Before serving half his sentence, Beautiful escaped from jail thanks to a gun that his girlfriend had managed to pass on to him. In the escape, which he starred in along with ten other inmates, killed a policeman with five shots.
Crossed the border into Colombia and he arrived in Bogotá, where he dedicated himself to stealing to survive, although he was finally arrested by the police.
Murdered on his birthday
Hermosa was released following serving his sentence in 1996 and he went to live with his dad in Nueva Loja, in the province of Sucumbios, in eastern Ecuador.
The day he turned 20, regarding five hooded men kidnapped him from a bar. They found him dead on the banks of the Aguarico river, with a bullet to the head and others to the body, hands tied with wire, signs of torture and a disfigured face. They identified him thanks to his documents.
“I’m going to the morgue, he was smeared all over with mud, nothing was recognized. The belt, on the one hand, the shoes, on the other, he was wearing only one stocking. Shots here and here, and they had hit him with the tires of the car in front of him, ”his father said in an interview. The investigation did not prosper. It was never known who killed the “Terror Child”, but everyone believes it was for revenge.
