On December 3, 1912, Cayetano Santos Godino, sixteen, promised three-year-old Gesualdo Giordano sweets and chocolate and led him into an abandoned country house in Buenos Aires, the building that is now the Bernasconi Institute. The boy fought hard when Godino tried to strangle him with a cord. Godino tied his hands and feet and went outside to find something to kill him with, and met the boy's father, who asked whether he had seen his son. Godino said he had not and suggested he look nearby. When the father had gone, Godino went back inside and drove a ten-centimeter nail into the boy's temple. The body was found quickly, and the funeral was held that night. Godino came to it and left in tears after seeing that the nail had been taken out. Two investigators at the funeral noticed him and connected him to the other cases, and in the early hours of December 4 police raided his home and arrested him.
He was born in Buenos Aires on October 31, 1896, one of ten children of Fiore Godino and Lucía Raffo, who had emigrated from Calabria in the 1880s. Both parents drank heavily, and his father had contracted syphilis before he was born. The father beat him savagely, and his older brother Antonio joined in. He grew up in the streets of Almagro and Parque Patricios, barely went to school and was expelled from most of the ones he attended. He was small, with large ears, which gave him the name the Argentine press used, El Petiso Orejudo, the big-eared runt.
He started young. He killed cats and small birds, and on September 28, 1904, at seven, he took two-year-old Miguel Depaola to an empty lot, beat him and threw him into a thorn bush. A passing policeman took both boys to the station, and their mothers fetched them. In 1905 he beat eighteen-month-old Ana Neri on the head with a rock, was caught by another officer and released that night because of his age. On March 29, 1906, at nine, he lured three-year-old María Rosa Face to a vacant lot, strangled her with a cord, buried her alive and threw empty cans over her. Her body was never found; after his arrest in 1912 he led police to the lot, which by then had an apartment building on it. Two weeks after that killing his father caught him strangling chickens, found a box of dead birds under his bed and took him to the police, and a judge sent him to a reformatory for two months.
On September 9, 1908, at eleven, he pushed two-year-old Severino González Caló into a horse trough in a wine cellar and put a lid on it; the owner arrived in time. Godino blamed a woman in black. Six days later he burned the eyelids of twenty-two-month-old Julio Botte with a cigarette. His parents handed him to the police again, and he spent three years in the juvenile reformatory at Marcos Paz, where he learned to read and write. He came home soon after his fourteenth birthday, at his parents' request. He held a factory job for three months, then began drinking and roaming again, and later described headaches that he connected with a growing urge to kill.
In 1912 he killed three children and attacked more. On January 17 he set fire to a cellar on Avenida Corrientes and enjoyed watching the firefighters. On January 26 police found Arturo Laurora, thirteen, reported missing the day before, half-naked in an empty house for rent with a cord around his neck. On March 7 he set fire to the dress of five-year-old Reyna Bonita Vaínicoff; she died of her burns sixteen days later at the Pedro de Elizalde hospital. He set more fires and stabbed a mare to death at a country house where he worked. On November 8 a construction worker caught him trying to strangle two-year-old Roberto Russo, whose feet he had tied; Godino said he had been trying to free the boy and was let go. On November 16 a passerby saved a three-year-old girl from him, and on November 20 a neighbor heard five-year-old Catalina Naulener screaming and rescued her. Two weeks later he killed Gesualdo Giordano.
In custody he confessed to the four killings and many attempts, and told doctors he did not understand what remorse meant and had enjoyed killing children. He was never tried. Judge Ramos Mejía found him unfit to stand trial and not guilty by reason of insanity, and ordered him committed indefinitely. At the Hospital Borda he attacked two helpless patients, one bedridden and one in a wheelchair, and the appeals court unanimously sent him to prison instead. He was held at the National Penitentiary in Buenos Aires until 1923 and then at the prison at Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, known as the prison at the end of the world. Some doctors there, following Cesare Lombroso, believed his ears were the source of his evil, and in 1927 he had surgery to make them smaller, with no effect on his behavior. He was refused parole in 1936 by doctors who called him perverse, degenerate and dangerous.
In 1933 other inmates beat him for throwing a pet cat into a burning stove, and he spent twenty days in the prison hospital. He never had a visit or a letter and never showed remorse. He died on November 15, 1944, at forty-eight, officially of a peptic ulcer that was later attributed to repeated beatings and sexual assaults by other prisoners; guards said his cellmates killed him over the cat. The prison closed in 1947, and his remains were never found. The writer María Moreno has read the case against the fears of the time, when affluent Argentines saw in him the danger they attributed to the new wave of poor immigrants.