In the early hours of December 4, 1912, police in Buenos Aires arrested a 16-year-old named Cayetano Santos Godino. The day before, a three-year-old boy had been led away and killed. Within hours of his arrest Godino confessed, and in the days that followed he gave the police and the newspapers an account of other attacks on small children going back to his early childhood. La Nación reported on December 5 that he had confessed to four homicides, seven attempted homicides and seven deliberate fires.
He became known by his neighborhood nickname, El Petiso Orejudo, roughly "the big-eared shorty". The press of 1912 presented him as a specimen for the criminologists of the day; the courts then had to decide whether he could be held responsible at all. Two rulings said he could not. A third, on appeal by the prosecutor, said he could, and he spent the rest of his life in prison, much of it in the penal colony at Ushuaia, at the southern tip of the country, where he died in November 1944.
The historian María Carolina Zapiola titled her 2006 study of the case "Niños asesinos de niños" ("Children who killed children"). More than a century later the case is still retold in Argentine newspapers, novels, plays and a comic, and it has been rewritten three times by the writer María Moreno.
Godino was born in Buenos Aires on October 31, 1896, according to a 2019 account by the journalist Ricardo Rivas in La Nación of Paraguay. His parents were immigrants from Calabria, in southern Italy. Rivas and the Argentine journalist Paulo Kablan, writing in Letra P in 2012, both say they arrived in Buenos Aires in 1884; the Italian journalist Luigi Troiani, writing in La Voce di New York in 2012, gives 1888 and names the family's hometown as San Demetrio Corone, an Albanian-speaking town in the province of Cosenza.
Accounts of the family's size differ. Rivas gives six children; Troiani says Cayetano was the youngest of eight; Kablan says the couple had two children in Italy, one of whom, also named Cayetano, died, and nine more in Buenos Aires, the youngest of whom was given his dead brother's name.
The family was poor and lived in conventillos, the crowded tenement houses of immigrant Buenos Aires, in the neighborhoods of Almagro and Parque Patricios. His father, by Kablan's account a municipal worker who lit the street lamps, is described by Kablan, Troiani and Perfil as a heavy drinker, and by those accounts and Rivas as a man who beat his children; Rivas and Kablan say he beat his wife as well, and Kablan, Troiani and the criminologist quoted by Perfil in 2024 add that he had syphilis. Troiani writes that the boy carried 27 scars on his scalp from those beatings. The criminologist quoted by Perfil described the mother as wholly neglectful.
The boy was small and had large, protruding ears. In the neighborhood he was called "El Oreja" and "El Petiso", Zapiola writes, and the press combined the two into the name that stuck. By the time the journalist Juan José de Soiza Reilly interviewed him in prison in 1933 he still could not read or write.
The earliest incident in the historical record dates from 1904. According to the list of his acts that Zapiola compiled from the 1912 press, Godino, then about eight, attacked a child of 20 months and then took the child to the police station himself, saying he had found the little one. Shortly afterward he attacked a small girl, who survived.
In April 1906 his father went to the police. Rivas, quoting the report, writes that on April 5, 1906, the father denounced his son, then nine years and five months old, to the precinct commissioner, describing him as "absolutamente rebelde a la represión paternal" (translated: "completely defiant of a father's correction"). The boy was held for a little over two months.
In September 1908 there was a cluster of incidents. Zapiola records that on September 7, 1908, he allegedly killed an infant of a few months, a charge that was never proven. Days later, according to Zapiola and Rivas, he attacked a two-year-old boy, who was rescued by a passing man. Soiza Reilly, who heard a version of the episode from a local man, wrote that when the child's mother came running, the boy pretended to be helping her son and was given twenty centavos as a reward. About a week later, by Rivas's account, he attacked a boy of 22 months; the child's mother saw him run away.
After that his parents handed him over to the police again, and he was sent to the Colonia de Menores at Marcos Paz, the reformatory that Zapiola describes as the country's only supposedly modern institution for minors. Kablan and Rivas say he spent three years there; Rivas gives his release date as December 23, 1911, and Zapiola writes that he left in 1912. Perfil's 2024 account gives about two years. Soiza Reilly, writing in 1933, said that in the reformatory he threw cats into the cooking pots.
Kablan also reports that Godino later described killing a small girl named María Rosa when he was about ten. That killing, Kablan writes, could never be proven: her body was never found and her parents went back to Europe.
Godino came home from Marcos Paz around the turn of 1912. Kablan writes that he held a job for three months.
On January 17, 1912, according to Rivas, he set fire to a wine cellar. Both Rivas and Kablan quote him as saying that he liked to watch the firemen, though the two give slightly different wording. Rivas writes that six more fires followed over the year.
The first of the killings named in the record took place in the same month. Arturo Laurora, a boy of 12 by Zapiola's account and 13 by Rivas's, was lured away and killed by strangulation; Zapiola dates his death to January 26, 1912.
On March 7, 1912, a five-year-old girl, Reina Bonita Wainikoff, was standing in front of a shop window when her dress was set on fire. Zapiola spells her name Wainikoff; Rivas and Kablan write Vainicoff. She died of her burns, after 16 days according to Rivas, who dates her death to March 23; Zapiola writes 20 days, and Kablan two weeks.
In November the attacks came close together. On November 8, according to Zapiola, he attacked a boy of about two and a half; a man came upon them, Godino claimed to have been helping the child, and the police released him provisionally. On November 12 he attacked a two-year-old girl and fled when a guard appeared. On November 20 he led a five-year-old girl away; she hid, and he ran off when two women saw him. All three children survived.
On the afternoon of December 3, 1912, a three-year-old boy was lured away with the promise of sweets. Zapiola gives his first name as Gerardo or Josualdo; Rivas writes Gesualdo; Kablan writes Jesualdo. His surname was Giordano. He was killed by strangulation.
Godino went to the wake that night, according to Rivas and Kablan. By Zapiola's account, the break in the case came from three child witnesses who had seen the boy walking with him. Early on December 4, the investigating judge, Dr. José Antonio de Oro, went with the commissioner and deputy commissioner of the 34th precinct to search near the Giordano family's home, and they arrested Godino at his family's house. Rivas names two of the officers involved, Peire and Ricardo Bassetti, and adds that Bassetti later became a writer of crime stories.
The evidence against him was physical as well as spoken. Zapiola writes that stains on his clothing were later confirmed as blood. At first he said he had only bought the boy some sweets and said goodbye to him at the shop door. Hours later, taken to the morgue while the autopsy was carried out, he confessed.
Over the next days Godino talked at length. Zapiola, using La Nación of December 5, 1912, writes that he admitted four homicides, seven attempted homicides and seven deliberate fires. Kablan writes that he confessed to everything put to him, including acts that could never be proven.
The case filled the papers. Zapiola traced the coverage in La Nación, the socialist daily La Vanguardia and the weekly Caras y Caretas. La Nación ran the story on December 4 under the headline "Horrible crimen. Una criatura asesinada" ("A horrible crime. A small child murdered") and on December 5 called him an "ejemplar extraordinario" of the "fauna criminal" ("an extraordinary specimen of the criminal fauna"); by December 7 its headline was "Un monstruo sanguinario". La Vanguardia called him "la bestia humana" ("the human beast") and described his face as deformed and apelike. Caras y Caretas told its readers that he was clearly "un caso de hombre fiera" ("a case of a man who is a wild beast").
Zapiola argues that the papers borrowed the vocabulary of positivist criminology, the school associated with Cesare Lombroso that read criminal tendencies in the body, but mixed it with common sense and used words such as "sadist" loosely. She notes that most papers praised the judge and the police, even though the police had released Godino weeks earlier, and that La Vanguardia turned its criticism on the Marcos Paz reformatory, which it called a seedbed of criminals. Caras y Caretas, unusually for the time, blamed the mothers.
Judge de Oro appointed a panel of experts. Zapiola lists them: the court physicians Dr. Lucero and Dr. Negri; two specialists in mental illness who directed the country's main asylums, Dr. Domingo Cabred and Dr. Esteves; and two educators, Víctor Mercante and Ernesto Nelson. Troiani, who quotes from the reports, dates Mercante's to February 24, 1913, Nelson's to April 1, and the joint report of Esteves and Cabred to May 29.
Mercante wrote, in the passage Zapiola quotes, that in the boy "los instintos de la vida animal" were active while the social ones were "casi atrofiados" (translated: "the instincts of animal life" were at work while his social instincts were "almost atrophied"). In Troiani's Italian rendering, Mercante also found that reasoning before action was almost absent in him, and that he was unstable through a lack of affection, which Mercante called the fundamental wound of his moral life. Nelson, by the same account, saw a case of degeneration made worse by the social abandonment the boy had suffered.
The asylum doctors went further. Troiani quotes the Esteves and Cabred report as finding him mentally alienated, in the form of incurable imbecility. Kablan, who also quotes Cabred, writes that Cabred called him a "loco moral" (a "moral madman"), a "degenerado hereditario" (a "hereditary degenerate"), and noted that the boy "tiene conciencia y memoria del impulso destructor" (translated: "is aware of, and remembers, the destructive impulse"). Cabred also recorded, Kablan writes, the boy's own account of sudden headaches that he said only killing relieved.
Under the penal code then in force, Zapiola explains, a minor over ten could be tried as an adult if found to have acted with discernment. The experts' reports were therefore central to the outcome.
Judge de Oro acquitted Godino. Zapiola, who cites the judgment as published in 1914 in the Revista de Criminología, Psiquiatría y Medicina Legal, writes that the acquittal rested on the medical and psychiatric reports, and that the Cámara de lo Criminal, the appeals court, also acquitted him. Rivas dates the first-instance ruling to November 1914 and says the judge declared him "penalmente irresponsable" ("not criminally responsible"); Troiani writes that the first court called him a totally degenerate imbecile, acquitted him and committed him to an asylum. Godino was sent to the Hospicio de las Mercedes, one of the country's main mental hospitals, in Zapiola's description.
Zapiola cites a 1913 brief by the prosecutor, Dr. E. Coll. The prosecution appealed again: Zapiola writes that "una segunda apelación del fiscal condujo a que fuera declarado responsable" (translated: "a second appeal by the prosecutor led to his being declared responsible"), and that he was sent first to the Penitenciaría Nacional, the national penitentiary in Buenos Aires, and then to the prison at Ushuaia. Troiani places the final ruling two years after the first and writes that the higher court found him not wholly incapable and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Kablan likewise writes that, because he was a minor, he was spared the death penalty and given a life term in the penitentiary as "irredimible" (beyond reform). Neither gives the date of the ruling or the name of the court.
Zapiola reads the sequence as evidence that the courts, in the end, turned their backs on the scientific experts they had called in. The doctors had found an incurable, irresponsible patient; the final ruling treated him as a prisoner.
The writer María Moreno, interviewed by La Gaceta of Tucumán in 2021, put it more briefly: the diagnosis of non-responsibility "no pudo imponerse" ("could not prevail"), for reasons her book sets out. The reviewer S. Regazzoni, writing about the Italian edition of that book in 2025, wrote that within a few years the police, forensic and psychiatric authorities changed their verdicts and finally sentenced him to prison at Ushuaia.
Little is recorded about Godino's years in the Buenos Aires penitentiary. Soiza Reilly wrote in 1933 that he was moved there from the reformatory system once he came of age; Diego Galeano and Javier Sinay, writing in Página/12 in 2012, list the same order of institutions: Marcos Paz, the Penitenciaría Nacional and Ushuaia. Kablan places the Hospicio de las Mercedes before the penitentiary. A 2006 essay on the Derecho Penal Online site says his conduct there was exemplary, but it cites no sources for the case.
The Presidio y Cárcel de Reincidentes at Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego, was the prison Argentina used for repeat offenders, known in the press as the prison at the end of the world. Julián Varsavsky, writing in Página/12 in 2014, traces it to a proposal by General Roca to the Senate in 1883 for a penal colony in the far south, and records that Perón ordered it closed in 1947. The building is now a museum.
The date of Godino's transfer there is uncertain. Varsavsky writes that he was confined in Ushuaia in 1915. Rivas and Troiani both give 1923.
In 1933 Soiza Reilly published a series of chronicles from the Ushuaia prison in Caras y Caretas, which ran from March to May of that year, according to Tiempo Argentino; the piece that includes Godino ran in issue 1805, dated May 6, 1933, according to Galeano and Sinay, and was reprinted in the criminology journal Cuestiones Criminales of the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes in 2018. It is the fullest first-hand description of him as an adult.
Soiza Reilly found a man of 36 who had spent 21 years in custody and was still illiterate. Godino told him that he had a mental illness in his head ("Tengo una enfermedad mental en la cabeza," in the words Galeano and Sinay quote) and claimed gaps in his memory. Yet he could recite from memory the articles of the penal code that might shorten his sentence, citing Articles 52, 53 and 59, and he hoped for a reduction. The doctors, Soiza Reilly wrote, had called Godino "un loco"; the journalist disagreed, writing that he acted "con la astucia de un cuerdo" ("with the cunning of a sane man"), and he predicted, with disapproval, that the code would soon let him out.
The same article records an episode that later grew into legend. The prisoners had raised two kittens, and Godino killed them. The other inmates beat him so badly that he spent twenty days in the prison hospital. Varsavsky gives a version in which Godino threw the prison's much-loved cat into the heating furnace in 1933 and was nearly beaten to death for it.
Godino's ears were the feature on which the press, and the criminology of the time, fixed. Soiza Reilly reported in 1933 that a doctor had reduced their size by cosmetic surgery. Varsavsky dates the operation to 1927 and links it to the pseudoscientific ideas of Lombroso. Kablan writes that a medical team sent and paid for by the government reshaped his ears because its members believed they were the cause of his cruelty. Rivas places the operation five years after his arrival at Ushuaia. A 2021 study published in the Revista Pensamiento Penal by Fritner Poma Ruiz notes that in Godino's case the Lombrosian marker in question was the ears, not the skull.
Kablan reports that Godino's request for release was rejected in 1936 on the ground that he could not be rehabilitated, and quotes a medical report describing him as "un imbécil o un degenerado hereditario, perverso instintivo, extremadamente peligroso para quienes lo rodean" (translated: "an imbecile or a hereditary degenerate, instinctively perverse, extremely dangerous to those around him"). No other report gives the date.
Godino died at Ushuaia on November 15, 1944, according to Varsavsky, Rivas and Kablan. Rivas gives his age as 48, as do Galeano and Sinay; La Gaceta's 2021 interview gives 50. The recorded cause was an internal hemorrhage from a gastroduodenal ulcer.
The suspicion that other prisoners killed him has never been settled. Varsavsky writes that it is suspected his fellow prisoners killed him. Rivas presents the same idea as street lore and quotes a former prisoner, Santiago Vaca, who told the press in 2004 that Godino was killed because he informed for the guards. Kablan links his death to beatings by other inmates who resented his killing of the prison cats. The criminologist interviewed by Perfil in 2024 likewise said he died after a severe beating by other inmates. Galeano and Sinay, on the other hand, write that the popular story of a fatal beating over the kittens is wrong: he died eleven years after that beating, of an ulcer, never having left the prison.
He was buried in the prison cemetery, Rivas writes, which closed three years after his death; when the grave was later cleared, it was empty. Kablan repeats the popular account that his bones were missing when the cemetery was cleared in 1947. In 2016, according to Rivas, a claim that one of his bones was being kept as an object was denied by Carlos Pedro Vairo, the director of the Museo Marítimo y del Presidio de Ushuaia.
The Godino case is often described as having shaped how Argentina dealt with dangerous children. Zapiola tested that claim and found little support for it. The 1919 law on the state guardianship of minors, the Ley de Patronato de Menores, which stayed in force until 2005, was debated in Congress between 1914 and 1919, and in those debates, she writes, Godino was never mentioned. She also disputes the idea that the case was read at the time as a failure of the state: most newspapers praised the judge and the police, and the sharpest criticism, from La Vanguardia, was aimed at the reformatory at Marcos Paz, which the paper described as badly run, poorly taught and abusive. Officials later criticized the reformatory harshly too, she notes.
Her broader conclusion is that positivist criminology had less direct influence on how Buenos Aires handled violent crime than historians once assumed. The experts in the Godino case wrote at length and agreed that he was not responsible; the courts, after two acquittals, set their findings aside.
Galeano and Sinay called Godino the only criminal in Argentine history whose name had passed from generation to generation, and Regazzoni wrote that he became the country's most famous criminal and part of its folklore. In his cell at the former Ushuaia prison stands a life-size plaster figure of him, which visitors photograph, Galeano and Sinay write; Poma Ruiz reproduces a mural of him in Ushuaia. In 2024 Perfil described the case as a turning point in Argentine criminology, and the criminologist it interviewed described the boy as the product of poverty and neglect.
The writer María Moreno has returned to the case three times. Regazzoni, reviewing the Italian edition, lists a first version in 1976, a second in 1994 in the collection Memoria del crimen, and a third, expanded version in 2021 that adds dialogues, poems and popular voices. Galeano and Sinay give Planeta as the publisher of the Memoria del crimen collection; La Gaceta gives Tusquets as the publisher of the 2021 book. La Gaceta reports that the first version was lost and that the 1994 version, also published in Página/12, reopened the case. Moreno told La Gaceta that she wanted to avoid both the colorful police chronicle and a moral crusade against the killing of children ("No quise caer en la crónica de color ni en una cruzada moral contra el infanticidio"), and that she had tried to take apart the myth through long research. She described the figure she wrote about as torn apart by the medical and political discourses of his time. In the book, La Gaceta's reviewer writes, Godino speaks of himself as a sick man who cannot be blamed, asking "¿qué culpa tengo yo si no puedo sujetarme?" ("how is it my fault if I cannot hold myself back?"). Moreno's book was translated into Italian by Francesca Lazzarato and published in 2024 as L'atroce storia di Santos Godino.
The case has also been taken up in fiction and on stage. Regazzoni names Laura Pariani's 2007 Italian novel Dio non ama i bambini and Mariana Enríquez's short piece "Pablito clavó un clavito: Una evocación del Petiso Orejudo," in her 2016 collection Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego. Galeano and Sinay mention Julio Ordano's play El Petiso Orejudo, directed by Adrián Cardoso, and Osvaldo Aguirre's book Enemigos públicos, which describes Godino as the criminal whom many doctors, criminologists, journalists and statesmen wanted to study. In 2022 Tiempo Argentino reviewed La cárcel del fin del mundo, a comic by Santiago Sánchez Kutica and the artist Kundo Krunch that adapts Soiza Reilly's 1933 prison chronicles and includes Godino among its eight prisoners.
How many children he killed. La Nación reported in December 1912 that he confessed to four homicides, and Galeano and Sinay repeat that figure. Only three killings are named and dated in the reports: Arturo Laurora, Reina Bonita Wainikoff and the Giordano boy, all in 1912. The fourth confession concerned an earlier killing of a small child that was never proven. Zapiola describes the September 1908 case of an infant of a few months as alleged and unproven; Kablan describes the killing of a girl named María Rosa, which Godino said he committed at about ten, as never proven because no body was found and her parents left the country. Whether these are the same case is unclear. La Gaceta's 2021 review counts three murders and eight attempted murders, and Regazzoni writes that he was accused of eleven crimes.
The Laurora killing. In 2024 the criminologist interviewed by Perfil, identified there only as Torre, said he believed Laurora's death was probably the work of another person and had been wrongly attributed to Godino. Perfil's account of the case contains several errors of date and order, and the view is Torre's alone.
Who decided the case. Zapiola, citing the published 1914 judgment, names the trial judge as José Antonio de Oro. Rivas writes that Godino confessed before a Judge Ramos Mejía. The sources agree that the first-instance ruling was an acquittal on the ground that he was not responsible.
The date of the move to Ushuaia: 1915 (Varsavsky) or 1923 (Rivas, Troiani).
How he died. The official cause was internal bleeding from an ulcer. That fellow prisoners beat him to death, or caused the illness that killed him, is a persistent story that has not been confirmed; Galeano and Sinay reject the version that ties his death to the 1933 beating.
His remains. The empty grave is reported by Rivas, and as popular history by Kablan. Claims about the fate of his bones are unconfirmed, and the one Rivas mentions was denied by the museum's director.
October 31, 1896: born in Buenos Aires to Calabrian immigrant parents (Rivas).
1904: at about eight, attacks a child of 20 months; the first incident in the record (Zapiola).
April 5, 1906: his father denounces him to the police; held for a little over two months (Rivas).
September 1908: an unproven allegation of the killing of an infant (Zapiola); days later, attacks on two toddlers, who survived.
1908 to 1911: Colonia de Menores at Marcos Paz; released December 23, 1911 (Rivas) or in 1912 (Zapiola).
January 17, 1912: sets fire to a wine cellar (Rivas).
January 26, 1912: Arturo Laurora, 12 or 13, killed (Zapiola).
March 7, 1912: Reina Bonita Wainikoff, 5, fatally burned; she dies weeks later (Zapiola; Rivas dates her death to March 23).
November 8, 12 and 20, 1912: attacks on three small children, all of whom survive (Zapiola).
December 3, 1912: the three-year-old Giordano boy killed.
December 4, 1912: Godino, 16, arrested; confesses at the morgue the same day.
December 4 to 7, 1912: La Nación, La Vanguardia and Caras y Caretas cover the case.
February to May 1913: reports by Mercante, Nelson, and Esteves and Cabred (Troiani).
1914: Judge José Antonio de Oro acquits him (November 1914, according to Rivas); the Cámara de lo Criminal also acquits; he is sent to the Hospicio de las Mercedes.
Later: on a second appeal by the prosecutor he is declared responsible and sent to the Penitenciaría Nacional (Zapiola); reported as a life term (Troiani, Kablan).
1915 or 1923: transferred to the prison at Ushuaia.
1927: ear surgery (Varsavsky).
1933: beaten by other prisoners after killing the prison's kittens; interviewed by Soiza Reilly for Caras y Caretas (issue of May 6, 1933).
1936: release refused (Kablan).
November 15, 1944: dies at Ushuaia; official cause internal bleeding from a gastroduodenal ulcer.
1947: the Ushuaia prison is closed on Perón's orders (Varsavsky).
1976, 1994 and 2021: María Moreno's three versions of the case.