Carlos Eduardo Robledo Puch was nineteen when he began killing, and he has now spent more than fifty years in prison, longer than anyone else in Argentina. He was born in Buenos Aires on January 19, 1952, into an ordinary middle-class family, and when he was arrested at twenty, blond and boyish, the press named him el Ángel de la Muerte, the Angel of Death, and also the Unisex, after his looks. His case has never left the country's memory.
Between March 1971 and February 1972 he and a childhood friend, Jorge Antonio Ibáñez, robbed nightclubs, shops and houses in the northern suburbs of Greater Buenos Aires. The first killings were at a club in Olivos, where he shot the owner and the night watchman while they slept. Nine men and two women died in all. Seventeen robberies, eleven murders, one attempted murder, two kidnappings, a rape and two thefts were eventually proved against him. Ibáñez died in a car crash before the arrest, which came in early February 1972; accounts give February 3 or February 4.
In 1973 he escaped from the prison at La Plata and was recaptured sixty-eight hours later. He was tried at San Isidro and convicted in November 1980, and received reclusión perpetua, the heaviest penalty in Argentine law, with the added sentence of indefinite detention, which means he can leave only after passing through every stage of the prison regime. He told the court the trial was a Roman circus and shouted that he would come out one day and kill them all.
He spent most of the following decades in the maximum-security prison at Sierra Chica, near Olavarría, which he came to call his home; he once asked to be allowed to build a house inside its grounds with money from a family inheritance, and was refused. In 2019, after treatment for multifocal pneumonia in the prison hospital at Olmos, he was moved to Unidad 26 at Olmos, near La Plata. Argentine courts have held that a life sentence is not literally for life, and his lawyers have repeatedly sought his release, but the psychiatric and psychological assessments that conditional release requires have never been favorable. In 2013 he asked instead to be executed by lethal injection, which Argentine law does not allow; both requests were refused. His position, he has said, is freedom or nothing.
On November 14, 2024, on an application by the public defender Patricia Colombo, Judge Oscar Roberto Quintana of the San Isidro appeals court ordered that he be admitted to an open regime under the provincial prison service's Casas por Cárceles program at Unidad 25, once a place was available and provided he consented, noting that he had adapted to prison and did not cause conflict. The ruling was widely reported as his release. It was not, and he declined it: "I don't want something new, because I'm used to this," he said. Conditional release would still require favorable expert reports. He is seventy-four and in poor health, with asthma, chronic lung disease and impaired mobility.