Carlos Eduardo Robledo Puch was 20 when police in Buenos Aires province arrested him in February 1972. Eight years later a three-judge court in San Isidro convicted him of 11 homicides, together with robberies, abductions and sexual offenses, all committed in the northern suburbs of Greater Buenos Aires in a little under a year. The court imposed the heaviest penalty then available, life imprisonment with an added sentence of indefinite detention. Apart from a few days in 1973, when he escaped from a prison in La Plata, he has not been free since. The Buenos Aires provincial prison service has described him as the person held longest in custody in Argentina, and newspapers there routinely call him the worst multiple killer in the country's criminal history.
The press of the 1970s named him "el Ángel de la Muerte," the Angel of Death, and "el Ángel Negro," the Black Angel. Both names came from the contrast between his boyish looks and the crimes. More than fifty years on he denies having killed anyone, and his case has become a long argument in Argentine courts about what a life sentence means.
Robledo Puch was born in January 1952. A 2006 La Nación profile by the writer Alvaro Abós gives the date as January 22, 1952, and the political news site Letra P also marked his 61st birthday on January 22, 2013; reports drawing on the provincial prison service, including La Gaceta, Diario de Cuyo and MDZ, mark his birthday on January 19. According to Abós, his father worked as a technician at General Motors and his mother was the daughter of German immigrants. The family lived first in Tigre and later in a chalet in Villa Adelina, in the north of the Buenos Aires conurbation.
Abós describes a rebellious and violent boy who was expelled from several schools. After he stole a motorcycle, he was sent to a correctional school near La Plata. The investigating judge in the case, quoted in the same profile, described him at the time of the arrest as a 20-year-old who seemed like an ordinary boy from a middle-class family.
At 16 he met Jorge Antonio Ibáñez, who became his first partner in crime. Abós says Ibáñez came from Rosario and had been stealing since he was ten. A former court official who attended the later questioning told La Nación that Ibáñez had an influence over Robledo Puch that bent him to his will, and called Ibáñez the only person Robledo Puch submitted to. Los Andes reports that the two committed a jewelry robbery together in 1970.
The killings began in the spring of 1971 in the riverside suburbs north of the capital. The exact date of the first is reported differently. Los Andes, La Capital, Infocielo and a 2023 La Nación report give the span of the convictions as running from March 15, 1971, to February 3, 1972. A Télam-based report carried by La Gaceta and Diario de Cuyo says the series began in May 1971, and a 2021 La Nación reconstruction treats a May 1971 killing as the start.
On March 15, 1971, according to Los Andes, Robledo Puch and Ibáñez killed two men at a discotheque in Olivos: Pedro Mastronardi, who managed the club, and Manuel Godoy, who worked there. Both were shot dead. Aire de Santa Fe gives the date of this double killing as May 14, 1971.
On May 3, 1971, according to La Nación and Aire de Santa Fe, the two broke into an auto-parts business in Vicente López. They shot the night watchman, José Bianchi. His wife was also shot and survived. La Nación reports that she later told police the gunman was a blond youth with curly hair. The two took cash and left.
Later that month, on May 24, Juan Scattone, a night watchman at a supermarket in Olivos, was shot and killed in another robbery attributed to the pair, according to Aire de Santa Fe and La Nación.
In June 1971 the killings changed character. Two young women were abducted and shot, and their deaths were among the 11 homicides of which he was convicted.
Virginia Rodríguez was 16, according to Los Andes. La Nación describes her as a young woman from Tucumán who was living on her own in Buenos Aires. Aire de Santa Fe dates her death to June 13, 1971. She was shot dead. Under the court's judgment, her killing is part of a conviction for murder, with other charges.
Ana María Dinardo was 23, according to Los Andes. On June 24, 1971, according to Aire de Santa Fe, she was picked up outside a nightclub in Olivos. La Nación reports that Ibáñez sexually assaulted her and that she was then shot by Robledo Puch.
On August 5, 1971, Ibáñez died in a car crash on Avenida Cabildo in the city of Buenos Aires. Robledo Puch was in the car. La Nación's 2021 account, based on the case record, says Robledo Puch was driving a Dodge GTX at high speed after two nights without sleep when it struck a parked taxi. The crash was recorded as a negligent homicide, and La Nación reports that officers at the federal police station that handled it took more than six months to learn who the driver was. Several sources, including Abós, Los Andes and the Télam-based reports, say doubts remained over whether it was an accident. Robledo Puch was never charged with Ibáñez's death, and it is not among the 11 homicides of the conviction. In 2008 he told La Nación that he woke up to find the car destroyed and had survived by chance.
After Ibáñez's death, Robledo Puch took a new partner, Héctor Somoza. Abós identifies him as the son of a baker in Villa Adelina. La Gaceta gives his age as 18; Los Andes says he was 17.
On November 15, 1971, according to La Nación and Aire de Santa Fe, Robledo Puch and Somoza robbed a supermarket in Boulogne and killed the night watchman, Raúl Del Bene (La Nación spells the name Delbene). Two days later, on November 17, they robbed a car dealership and killed its guard, Juan Rozas, whom La Nación names as Juan Carlos Rosas. About a week after that, according to La Nación, they robbed a car agency in Martínez and killed its night watchman, Bienvenido Ferrini, whom La Nación calls Serapio Ferrini; Aire de Santa Fe dates that killing to November 25, 1971. La Nación says the safe there held about one million pesos.
Most of the men who died were night watchmen, known in Argentina as serenos. La Nación's 2021 account says the investigating judge in San Isidro, Víctor Sason, began to see a pattern after the Rosas killing, because of the similarities between the cases.
The last two killings took place on February 3, 1972, at a hardware business in Carupá, in the San Fernando district. Robledo Puch and Somoza killed the night watchman, Manuel Acevedo. Robledo Puch then shot Somoza, according to La Nación and Los Andes. La Nación says the reason was never established. Abós gives the date of this killing as February 1, 1972; the other accounts give February 3.
Robledo Puch was detained within hours or a day. The Télam-based report in La Gaceta and Diario de Cuyo, and Los Andes, say that his identity card was found in Somoza's shirt pocket and became the key to finding him. La Nación's 2021 account says Somoza's family pointed police to him. Most sources, including his own defenders, give the date of arrest as February 3, 1972; La Nación's 2021 account gives February 4. Abós writes that police found money and revolvers hidden in the family piano, and that Robledo Puch at first denied everything and then confessed in detail. A reconstruction of one of the homicides was carried out on February 11, 1972, according to La Nación.
During questioning, according to the former court official who spoke to La Nación, he repeatedly blamed Ibáñez. He also told the forensic doctor Osvaldo Raffo about two more deaths, a woman struck by his car and a neighbor in Boulogne shot at a bus stop, both of which he said Ibáñez had ordered. Neither was proven, and neither is part of the conviction.
While awaiting trial, Robledo Puch was held at Unidad 9, the provincial prison in La Plata. On July 7, 1973, according to La Nación and MDZ, he escaped and was recaptured about 68 hours later in Vicente López. Los Andes says he got out over the roofs of the building where he was held and was caught a couple of days later. The Télam-based reports describe the three days as the only time he has been at liberty since his arrest. Abós's 2006 profile gives a different version, dating the escape to July 7, 1972, from a special unit at Olmos, putting his time at large at 64 hours and his recapture in Olivos.
The case went to trial in San Isidro about eight years after the arrest. According to Los Andes, his lawyers were María Elvira Rodríguez Villar and Jorge Dodero, the hearings were closed to the public, and more than 70 witnesses testified. The defense argued that he was a psychopath. Los Andes says the argument failed, and quotes testimony describing him as a psychopath with full capacity to understand that his acts were criminal.
On November 27, 1980, Sala I of the Cámara de Apelación en lo Penal of San Isidro, composed of Judges José Ignacio Garona, Bernardo Rodríguez Palma and Roberto Borserini, delivered its judgment, according to La Nación. Diario Judicial, summarizing the case record in 2015, lists the convictions as 10 aggravated homicides, one simple homicide, one attempted homicide, 17 robberies, one rape, one attempted rape, one count of abuso deshonesto (indecent assault), two abductions and two thefts. Los Andes gives 16 robberies, and several reports list two counts of abuso deshonesto. A 2016 report on a provincial Supreme Court ruling put the total at 36 offenses.
The sentence was reclusión perpetua, life imprisonment in its harsher form, with the accessory penalty of reclusión por tiempo indeterminado, indefinite detention. Los Andes describes it as the most severe sentence in the Penal Code at the time. La Nación has written that the accessory clause directly shaped how the sentence is served.
At the hearing, according to Los Andes, Robledo Puch called the proceedings a Roman circus and declared that one day he would get out and kill them all.
His accomplices never faced a court. Ibáñez had died in August 1971, and Somoza was among the 11 victims. Ibáñez was never convicted of anything in the case, as La Nación noted in 2021, because he was dead before the investigation reached him.
After his conviction he was moved to Unidad 2 at Sierra Chica, near Olavarría, about 360 kilometers from the capital. The Télam-based reports and MDZ give the year as 1981; a 2016 Perfil report says he had been at Sierra Chica since 1977. He would spend most of the next four decades there.
He was in the prison during the Easter riot of 1996, according to La Nación; Los Andes says he took no part in it. La Capital refers to it as the riot of "Los 12 Apóstoles." Abós and Los Andes both report that he was housed in the wing set aside for gay inmates.
Several episodes from those years reached the press. In 2003, according to La Gaceta and Diario de Cuyo, he set fire to the prison workshop while dressed as Batman and was sent for a time to the neuropsychiatric hospital at Melchor Romero. In 2007, during medical tests at the prison in Azul, he said that once he was free he would succeed Juan Perón. La Nación reported in 2023 that he once refused a semi-liberty regime and asked instead to be allowed to build a house inside Sierra Chica.
In June 2008 La Nación's Gustavo Carabajal interviewed him for nearly three hours at Sierra Chica. He was 56 and had been in custody about 36 years. He declined to be photographed.
He admitted to 32 robberies but denied killing anyone. "I never threatened anyone and I never killed anyone," he said. He called the trial a circus with no evidence against him and argued that the state, in a time of social and economic crisis, had needed a scapegoat. He said he had been tortured and forced to sign another man's confession, and that police had planted the weapons. He said it was Ibáñez and Somoza who carried guns during the robberies, and that on the night Somoza died he had been at home with his mother. He also said, with some irony, that he was paying for ten perfect homicides.
He told La Nación that his mother had died in a neuropsychiatric hospital on July 8, 1993, and his father on December 31, 2005. He argued that his sentence had been fully served on July 12, 1995, and that indefinite detention was meant only for repeat offenders with four prior convictions, which he was not. A judge had rejected that claim and ordered continued psychiatric treatment.
From 2000 onward, according to Diario Judicial, he sought conditional release, and every request was refused. Los Andes lists further requests in 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2015.
In November 2013 he sent the San Isidro appeals court a written request that, if his release continued to be refused, his sentence be changed to death by lethal injection, according to Letra P and Diario Jornada. He also asked to be allowed to hold a press conference. Argentine law does not provide for the death penalty, and the request was refused. His public defender, José Luis María Villada, the defensor general of San Isidro, told reporters the request was a way of pressing for his immediate release. Villada said his client had money in a fixed-term deposit from the sale of properties inherited from his parents, had been offered a place to live in a neighboring country, and that judges were afraid to free him. He added that a court-ordered psychiatric and psychological evaluation, according to the defense, had found no pathology and no danger to himself or others.
The defense took the case to the Supreme Court of Justice of Buenos Aires province (SCBA), seeking release on the ground that the sentence was exhausted and arguing that the indefinite detention penalty was unconstitutional under the national Supreme Court's Gramajo precedent. According to Diario Judicial, the San Isidro appeals court had upheld the enforcement judge's refusal. In the SCBA, a majority of Judges Héctor Negri, Hilda Kogan, Eduardo Pettigiani and Daniel Soria sent the case back to the provincial Court of Cassation, holding that the defense had skipped a required stage of review. Judges Juan Carlos Hitters and Julio Genoud dissented; they would have heard the case directly, warning that so long a detention could expose the state to international responsibility under the American Convention on Human Rights.
On March 27, 2015, Diario Jornada and Diario Judicial reported that the national Supreme Court, Justices Ricardo Lorenzetti, Elena Highton de Nolasco and Juan Carlos Maqueda, had declared his extraordinary appeal inadmissible, leaving the provincial ruling in place. Diario Judicial notes that the national court did not rule on the release request itself.
In February 2016, according to Perfil, he asked the governor of Buenos Aires province, María Eugenia Vidal, for an extraordinary pardon, which was refused. On May 10, 2016, he left prison under heavy guard for the first time in 44 years, taken from Sierra Chica to the forensic medical office of the San Isidro courts for medical tests. He did not speak to the press.
In October 2016 the provincial Supreme Court partly granted his appeal. According to Diario Judicial, the court again refused release on the ground that the sentence was exhausted, but ordered the enforcement judge to move him gradually from a closed setting to a less restrictive one, so that he could advance through the stages of the progressive prison regime. The court relied on Article 13 of the Penal Code and the law on enforcement of sentences, which, as the court read them, mean that a life sentence is not "para siempre," not forever. Earlier refusals, the report notes, had rested on expert reports calling him dangerous, perverse and unable to fit into society. The summary of the ruling published by the legal journal Pensamiento Penal lists the ruling date as November 10, 2016.
On May 23, 2019, according to La Nación, he was rushed from Sierra Chica to a hospital in Olavarría with an intestinal obstruction. The Télam-based reports describe the illness as multifocal pneumonia. Five days later he was moved to Unidad 22 at Lisandro Olmos, near La Plata, which houses the provincial prison hospital, and from there to Unidad 26, according to La Gaceta and MDZ. La Gaceta describes Unidad 26 as a prison with a perimeter wire fence rather than walls, holding mostly inmates over 60. In early 2020, according to the same reports, he received no visits and spent his days playing chess with other inmates.
On October 20, 2022, according to El Ancasti, the prison service placed him in a semi-open, broadened regime in Pabellón 1 of Unidad 26. Perfil reported in 2024 that he had good conduct ratings and no disciplinary sanctions.
In October 2022 a new defense lawyer, Jorge Alfonso, asked for his release or for house arrest, according to El Ancasti. In 2022 Robledo Puch told his lawyers he wanted to die free, not as a prisoner, La Nación reported.
The plan depended on two women from San Nicolás, a mother and her daughter, who offered to take him in or to place him in a care home. La Nación reported in June 2023 that investigators were looking into whether the women had hoped to reach the money from the sale of two houses in Villa Adelina that had belonged to his parents, held in a bank account in his name. He refused to accept them as guarantors, saying they had not brought his medicines and had given him food that made his stomach condition worse. He later dismissed Alfonso, whom he called a media lawyer.
On June 7, 2023, Judge Oscar Roberto Quintana of Sala I of the San Isidro appeals court and his secretary, Bernardo Hermida Lozano, visited him at Unidad 26, according to La Capital, which relied on the record of the visit as reported by Télam. He walked in on his own, spoke clearly and complained of intestinal and prostate problems and arthritis. When the judge told him he would need to take part in pre-release programs, he answered that they were a lie and that if he left he would die, because he had no home. The secretary recorded that he grew more and more aggressive, and the interview was ended.
Days later Quintana rejected the request. According to El Ancasti and La Nación, the ruling cited psychological reports describing inconsistent emotions, errors of judgment, paranoid ideas and distrust of anyone who might take him in, and the absence of any critical reflection on his acts. He still maintained his innocence. The judge found that he had no suitable home, no support network outside prison and no care plan for his illnesses. He asked the province's office for older people to report which care institutions could meet his needs, and ordered specialist tests for his gastrointestinal and lung conditions. La Nación noted that he had refused psychiatric and psychological treatment, which the court treats as a condition for any release.
In 2024 his public defender, Patricia Colombo, asked that he be moved to a less restrictive setting. Perfil reports that she argued the state had failed to rehabilitate him. On November 14, 2024, Judge Quintana granted the request. His resolution admitted Robledo Puch to the open detention regime under the province's Casas por Cárceles program, at Unidad 25 of the Buenos Aires prison service in Lisandro Olmos, a unit with no uniformed guards, perimeter walls or bars, according to El Ancasti. The move would take place once a place became free, and only if he consented. The judge directed the defender and prison staff to explain the benefits of the change to him.
Quintana cited the provincial Supreme Court's 2016 order to advance him toward a less strict regime. He noted that Unidad 25 is close to the prison hospital and to the neuropsychiatric center at Melchor Romero, and that it houses other elderly prisoners. He wrote that Robledo Puch had adapted to the prison regime and did not cause conflict among other inmates, according to Perfil and Infocielo.
Prosecutors opposed the move, according to El Ancasti. They relied on a report from the prison service's criminological department calling the change unworkable, and noted that he kept himself apart from other inmates by his own choice, feared being harmed, refused psychological and psychiatric treatment and complained of many physical ailments. The prison service's own report, Infocielo noted, recorded that he had said he did not want to move, though it was not binding on the court.
Much of the press reported the ruling as his release; La Voz de San Justo's headline said he would recover his freedom under an open regime. It was not a release. La Nación explained that under the law he could leave prison only through conditional release, which requires favorable psychiatric and psychological reports, and that a criminological report in the file suggested he would not meet that standard. La Nación also quoted his earlier position, "libertad o nada," freedom or nothing.
He declined the transfer. Perfil reported that he told the prison service's experts, "Estoy acostumbrado a esto," I'm used to this, and that he was afraid of change. La Nación quoted him as saying he did not want something new because he was used to what he had. Infocielo summed up the outcome: his lawyer asked for an open regime, the court granted it, and he did not want it.
In March 2025 the América TV program DDM aired recordings he had sent to a journalist, as reported by La Capital and Canal 26. He said he was suffering terribly and was "destroyed," and listed four hernias, prostate trouble, cataracts, arthritis, asthma, loss of muscle and pain in his back, hip and waist. He said all he wanted was to be put in a clinic, sedated and given a lethal injection. Asked about freedom, he said they would never let him go anywhere. Canal 26 reported that the journalist Martín Candalaft said on the program that Robledo Puch had turned down the open regime because he was already used to prison.
On January 19, 2026, his 74th birthday by that report's count, MDZ reported that he was still held at Unidad 26 in Olmos and described him as the man held longest in prison in Argentina, 53 years. It reported no court developments after the November 2024 ruling.
The journalist Rodolfo Palacios published a book on the case, Ángel Negro, in 2008, according to Los Andes. Luis Ortega's feature film El Ángel, starring Lorenzo Ferro in his first film role, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 11, 2018, according to La Gaceta and Diario de Cuyo. Abós's 2006 profile drew on accounts of the case in books by Osvaldo Soriano, Osvaldo Aguirre and Rolando Barbano.
His guilt. He has denied every killing since at least 2008, saying he was tortured, forced to sign a confession, and framed with planted weapons, and that his accomplices carried the guns. The 1980 conviction is final and has not been reopened; no court has accepted his claims.
Ibáñez's death. He was never charged. La Nación's 2021 account says he was at the wheel and that the crash was recorded as a negligent homicide. Abós, Los Andes and the Télam-based reports say doubts remained over whether it was an accident. No court has found that it was anything other than a crash.
Two further deaths. He described a woman run down by his car and a neighbor in Boulogne shot at a bus stop to the forensic doctor Osvaldo Raffo, according to La Nación. Neither was proven or charged.
The number of victims. Abós wrote that there were eleven deaths in a year, "perhaps more." The court record is 11 homicides.
Dates. The first killing is dated March 15, 1971, in most sources and May 1971 in others; the escape is dated July 7, 1973, by La Nación and MDZ and July 7, 1972, by Abós; the arrest is February 3, 1972, in most sources and February 4 in La Nación's 2021 account; and his birthday is given as January 19 or January 22.
His mental state. Trial testimony quoted by Los Andes described him as fully able to understand that his acts were criminal. Later expert reports cited by courts called him dangerous, and in 2023 described paranoid ideas; a 2013 evaluation described by his defender found no pathology.
January 1952: born (January 22 per La Nación, 2006, and Letra P; January 19 per prison-service-based reports).
1970: commits a jewelry robbery with Jorge Antonio Ibáñez (Los Andes).
March 15, 1971: Pedro Mastronardi and Manuel Godoy killed in Olivos (date per Los Andes; May 14 per Aire de Santa Fe).
May 3, 1971: José Bianchi killed in Vicente López; his wife shot and survives.
May 24, 1971: Juan Scattone killed in Olivos.
June 13, 1971: Virginia Rodríguez, 16, killed.
June 24, 1971: Ana María Dinardo, 23, abducted in Olivos and killed.
August 5, 1971: Ibáñez dies in a car crash on Avenida Cabildo, Buenos Aires.
November 15, 1971: Raúl Del Bene killed in Boulogne.
November 17, 1971: Juan Rozas killed.
Late November 1971: Bienvenido Ferrini killed in Martínez.
February 3, 1972: Manuel Acevedo and Héctor Somoza killed in Carupá; Robledo Puch arrested (February 4 per La Nación, 2021).
February 11, 1972: reconstruction of one of the homicides.
July 7, 1973: escapes from Unidad 9, La Plata; recaptured about 68 hours later in Vicente López.
November 27, 1980: convicted by Sala I of the San Isidro appeals court; reclusión perpetua with indefinite detention.
1981: moved to Unidad 2, Sierra Chica (1977 per Perfil).
1996: Easter riot at Sierra Chica; he takes no part.
2003: workshop fire; sent to Melchor Romero for a time.
June 2008: La Nación interview; denies all the killings.
November 2013: asks for a lethal injection if release is refused.
March 2015: national Supreme Court declares his appeal inadmissible.
February 2016: pardon request to Governor Vidal refused.
May 10, 2016: first trip outside prison in 44 years, for medical tests in San Isidro.
October 2016: provincial Supreme Court orders gradual progression to a less restrictive regime.
May 2019: hospitalized in Olavarría; moved to Olmos (Unidad 22, then Unidad 26).
October 20, 2022: semi-open regime within Unidad 26.
June 2023: Judge Quintana refuses release and house arrest.
November 14, 2024: open regime granted, subject to his consent; he declines.
March 2025: recordings aired on América TV.
January 19, 2026: still in Unidad 26, Olmos (MDZ).