Daniel Camargo Barbosa was a Colombian who confessed to killing 71 women and girls in Ecuador between the end of 1984 and 1986. By then he had already served one prison term in Colombia for sexual offenses against girls and had been sent to the island penal colony of Gorgona on a long second sentence. In November 1984 he got off the island, and Colombia declared him dead. He crossed into Ecuador within weeks. For more than a year the bodies of young women and girls were found in empty country around Guayaquil, and Ecuadorian police found no lead. He was caught in Quito in 1986 carrying the bloodied clothing of his latest victim. Ecuadorian law then capped a prison term at 16 years, and that is what he received. He was killed by another prisoner in Quito in November 1994.
The record of his life is thin and contradictory. It comes from Colombian and Ecuadorian newspapers, the magazine Vistazo (which interviewed him), Agence France-Presse dispatches, a university interview with the Colombian researcher Esteban Cruz Niño, and one academic paper, and these often disagree.
Camargo was born on January 22, 1930, in the department of Cundinamarca, in central Colombia. Vistazo and the Cartagena newspaper El Universal give his birthplace as Anolaima; El Tiempo gives La Mesa, a nearby town. Vistazo's own subtitle gives the year as 1931, though its text says 1930.
His mother died when he was about a year old, according to Vistazo. His father remarried, and the stepmother beat him with a leather whip. Vistazo and El Tiempo both report that he was made to dress as a girl, Vistazo adding that this was so in "some versions" of the story. Absalón Jiménez Becerra, a professor and researcher at the Universidad Distrital in Bogotá, told El Tiempo that the stepmother's psychological problems and mistreatment shaped the boy's hostility toward women. El Tiempo also reports that he was thrown out of the family home as a youth and sent to Bogotá.
In an interview with Vistazo he described his father as a man of some means who had taken the money he had saved in a piggy bank as a child and never returned it. "My father was a man with resources; he had no reason to rob a child, his own son," he said, in Vistazo's report. He told the magazine that the episode left him hating his father, his stepmother and a sister he felt was favored.
His schooling is recorded in different ways. El Tiempo says he studied at the León XIII school in Bogotá. Vistazo says that at 12 he attended the Salesian school of San Juan Bosco in Bogotá and left it soon afterward, then worked as a salesman. Semana reported in 2015 that his intelligence quotient had been measured at 116 and that he spoke English and Portuguese.
As a young man he lived with a woman for about seven years and had two children with her, according to Vistazo, and he left after finding her with another man. El Tiempo says he married around 1960 and in 1963 discovered that his wife had been unfaithful, which Jiménez Becerra described as reopening the injuries of his childhood. Semana's 2015 account makes the same link: after learning of a partner's infidelity, it said, he developed what it called an irrational hatred of women.
The first crimes on record were sexual assaults on girls, carried out with the help of a woman. Vistazo reports that Camargo met her when he was about 31 or 32, and that she first refused to help him and then became his accomplice. His first victim, by Vistazo's account, was a 13-year-old girl. The two gave the girls a sedative, Seconal, of the kind used before surgery, and Vistazo puts the number of girls at eight or nine. El Tiempo, drawing on Cruz Niño, describes a variation in which Camargo posed as a shop security guard and accused a girl of theft, while the woman pretended to help; the girls were then drugged and taken to his home.
One of the girls reported them. In Vistazo's account the woman was sentenced to two years and Camargo to six, and he was released after about five years for good behavior. El Tiempo gives a different version: he was identified in 1967 and sentenced to just five years for "acceso carnal violento," the Colombian offense of rape by force. Legal experts quoted by El Tiempo said Colombia did not then have the legal or structural means to investigate and punish such crimes properly, so sentences were short and allowed early release. An academic paper published in Ecuador in 2026, citing a 1994 article in the Quito newspaper Hoy, says he was detained in 1964 and sentenced to eight years. The court, the exact date and the exact counts of this first conviction were not reported.
El Tiempo goes further than the other sources. It reports that between 1963 and 1964 the bodies of girls aged 10 to 14 were found in El Charquito, a rural area west of Soacha in Cundinamarca, 17 bodies in about a year and a half, and that the press called the unknown killer the "Sádico del Charquito," the name later attached to Camargo. El Tiempo presents him as the man responsible. No other report connects him to those deaths, Vistazo's detailed account records no killing before his release from the first sentence, and no conviction for any death at El Charquito has been reported. They remain attributed to him by El Tiempo, not established.
After his release Camargo began to kill. Vistazo reports that he lured a young woman by saying he had money to deliver to an evangelical pastor, then raped and strangled her, and that he used the same story with later victims. El Tiempo says he went to Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast, after fleeing Bogotá and committed crimes there. Semana adds that he moved through Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador. The academic paper, drawing on press accounts, says the killing that brought him his second sentence was the rape and strangling of a nine-year-old girl.
He was held in Barranquilla and Bogotá for about three years, according to Vistazo, and then sent to Gorgona with a sentence of 25 years. El Tiempo says he arrived on the island in 1977 to serve 30 years. Agence France-Presse, in its 1994 dispatch on his death, said he had been serving 24 years on Gorgona "for the rape and death of some twenty women." The academic paper repeats the 25-year figure. The court and the date of that judgment were not reported.
Gorgona is a small island in the Pacific, about two hours by boat from the coastal town of Guapi. AFP put it 55 kilometers off the coast in 2021; Vanguardia, the Bucaramanga newspaper, gave about 35. The Colombian state took the island in the 1960s to build a high-security prison, and Vanguardia dates its operation from 1960 to 1984. In AFP's reconstruction, published in Spanish by Radio Nacional de Colombia, the prison held more than 1,000 men within about two hectares of wire fencing, among them people convicted of homicide and rape and prisoners from Colombia's mid-century political violence. About 120 guards watched them. Prisoners cut down much of the island's forest. The most feared punishment was the "cilindro," a pit 80 centimeters wide in which a man stood for days in water up to his neck. Miguel Darío López, the last director, who took charge in 1981, told AFP that nearly 150 prisoners died there and that he had ended the abuses he found. Pressure from human rights groups, ecologists and scientists closed the prison in 1984, and the island is now a national park.
On Gorgona, Vistazo reports, Camargo worked in the library and planned his escape, studying how boats were built and how the winds and currents moved. El Tiempo says the same: that he studied the tides because sharks were thought to make the island inescapable.
Sources do not agree on how he left. Vistazo gives the date as November 23, 1984, and says he put on a diving suit and special fins, swam underwater to the pier where the weekly boat with food, mail and staff docked, and rode it to the mainland. El Tiempo says he built a wooden canoe and drifted for three days without food or water before reaching Ecuador. AFP, in 2021, wrote only that he escaped in 1984 and that the authorities insisted he had died at sea; its Spanish version, published by Radio Nacional, says he was "given up for dead at sea" before being recaptured in Ecuador. A guide quoted by AFP said that only five or six men ever escaped Gorgona successfully. Vistazo reports that Colombia declared him dead.
He entered Ecuador through Tulcán, on the Colombian border, in December 1984, according to Vistazo, passed through Quito and settled in Guayaquil, the country's largest city. There he sold pens on the street and at first slept in empty stalls at a market. A drunken man he met took him to Quevedo, a town in the coastal lowlands, where, in Vistazo's account, he resumed killing: one of his victims there was a girl of nine or ten whom he drew away with the story of the evangelical pastor. He returned to Guayaquil and went on selling small goods and approaching women.
Bodies were left in the Colinas de Los Ceibos, then undeveloped hills on the western edge of Guayaquil, and along the stretch of road between kilometer 10 and the town of Nobol, Vistazo reports. Camargo himself later told investigators that there were bodies along that stretch. In some cases, Vistazo says, he telephoned the families of missing women and demanded money for their "rescue." Cruz Niño told a Universidad del Rosario interviewer that Camargo asked victims for their addresses and telephone numbers so that he could send their clothing to their families afterward. The killings spread beyond Guayas to Machala, in the south, and to Quito, according to Vistazo. El Tiempo reports that many victims were buried at a place it spells "Duale", which appears to mean Daule, north of Guayaquil.
Most of the victims in Ecuador were young. AFP described those he was accused of killing as women between 12 and 25. El Tiempo says many were girls from Indigenous communities. No victim's name and no list of the dead were reported.
In Guayaquil the remains were examined at the Instituto de Ciencias Forenses of the Universidad de Guayaquil, then directed by the forensic physician Carlos Barcos Velásquez. El Universo reported in 2009 that in 1985, working from the remains of the first victims, Barcos concluded that a single person had killed them all. The pattern of strangulation and of blows to the arms supported his view. He shared the credit with Héctor Soto, a Cuban forensic anthropologist who had come to Ecuador at the request of President León Febres-Cordero.
To put names to the remains, Barcos superimposed photographs of missing young women on the craniometric points of skulls to see whether they matched, his son Mauricio told El Universo. Of the 71 cases later attributed to Camargo, El Universo reported, more than 67 victims were identified and 46 bodies were claimed by their families; others stayed at the institute, and some parents never accepted that the remains they were shown were their daughters'. In 1988 the Colegio de Médicos del Guayas and an association of parents honored Barcos for his work in finding missing young people. AFP's 1994 account gives a smaller count: about 30 women identified and about 20 others who could not be identified because of the condition of their remains.
Camargo was arrested in Quito in 1986. The exact date was not reported. The accounts of the arrest differ in their details.
AFP, in 1994, said a police officer guarding the residence of an officer near Quito noticed a nervous man in a wooded area. When the officer confronted him, the man ran, and he was caught. He had just killed a 12-year-old girl, AFP said, which was unusual because his victims were usually older. Vistazo says he was arrested on the Avenida de Los Granados in Quito carrying a bag with the bloodied clothing of his latest victim. El Tiempo says he was arrested at a highway checkpoint.
Semana's 2015 account adds an earlier encounter. Weeks before his capture, it said, a patrol stopped him because he looked suspicious walking alone on a road, and let him go even though his bag held women's clothing, a woman's papers and a notebook with newspaper clippings about dead women. Hours later a senior police officer realized that a woman in one of the clippings was the same woman whose identity document Camargo had been carrying, and the search for him began. Semana does not say how much time passed between that stop and the arrest.
In custody he confessed to killing 71 women and girls in Ecuador, the figure given by Vistazo, El Universo and AFP. Vistazo writes that the confession came after he was subjected to electric shocks; the magazine does not say who applied them, and other reports do not mention it. Mauricio Barcos told El Universo that Camargo was very agile and knew exactly where each victim had been buried, and that his father had recorded this.
In his interview with Vistazo, Camargo said he felt no remorse. He said he had acted alone, without accomplices. He claimed to remember almost all of his victims and the places where he had killed them, and he identified them by details such as "the blonde," "the nurse" or "the one in the blue dress." He also argued that if the Colombian authorities had given him proper treatment instead of sending him to Gorgona, his victims in Ecuador would have lived. AFP reported in 1994 that he accepted responsibility for all the crimes, although some Ecuadorians doubted that a man of his slight build had acted without accomplices.
In 1986 an Ecuadorian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison, the maximum then allowed, according to Vistazo and El Tiempo. The academic paper gives the same year and term. The court, the judge, the exact date and the offenses of conviction were not reported, and no report says how many of the confessed killings were before the court. What is reported is the outcome: one 16-year term, whatever the number of deaths.
AFP's 1994 dispatch said many Ecuadorians considered the sentence unjust and feared that he would rape and kill again once released. In March 1994 AFP, writing about the coming release of Pedro Alonso López, another Colombian imprisoned in Ecuador for killing girls, described Camargo as accused of raping and killing at least about 30 women aged 12 to 25 and said he had been in prison since 1986. It called the two men the killers with the most victims of any held in Ecuador.
Vistazo reports that Camargo was guarded day and night by the police while he served his sentence. He did not complete it. He was killed in prison in Quito in November 1994. AFP, in a dispatch printed in El Tiempo on November 15, 1994, said he had been killed "the day before" by an Ecuadorian prisoner, G. N., who had been transferred from the prison in Guayaquil to the capital. El Tiempo and Vistazo describe the attacker as a relative of one of Camargo's victims. The 2026 academic paper gives the date as November 13, 1994, and the place as the Centro de Rehabilitación de Varones No. 2 in Quito; Vistazo calls it Quito prison No. 2. According to Cruz Niño, as reported by El Tiempo, the attack was a stabbing and Camargo bled to death. Whether G. N. was charged or convicted for the killing was not reported.
AFP reported that Camargo had been close to leaving prison when he died. The news brought what AFP called reactions of some satisfaction. One person told the agency he should have suffered before he was killed, and Ecuadorians said, in AFP's words, "Terminó la pesadilla," that the long ordeal was over. Camargo was buried in a common grave at the cemetery of El Batán in Quito, according to Vistazo.
The only figure that comes from Camargo himself is 71 killings in Ecuador. Every other number is an estimate or an attribution, and none was tested in court.
El Universo (2009): 71 women raped and killed in Guayaquil, Nobol, El Oro and other places, with more than 67 identified.
AFP (November 1994): more than 50 young women in Ecuador, about 30 identified and about 20 not; in Colombia, a 24-year sentence for about 20 women.
AFP (March 1994): at least about 30 women.
AFP (2021): 71 young girls admitted in Ecuador, and more than 180 people believed killed in all.
Vistazo (2022), citing Infobae: more than 150 women and girls in Colombia and Ecuador.
Semana (2015): an estimated 157 women over 20 years.
El Universal, Cartagena (2023): 72 "confirmed" girls and women, with many supposing the real number exceeds 150.
Esteban Cruz Niño (Universidad del Rosario interview): about 180.
El Tiempo (2021): more than 170 crimes recorded in his file between 1974 and 1990, in Cundinamarca, Barranquilla and Guayaquil. El Tiempo does not explain how crimes could be recorded up to 1990.
Several claims about Camargo appear in only one source, or in sources that contradict each other.
The El Charquito deaths. El Tiempo attributes to him 17 deaths of girls at El Charquito in 1963 and 1964. Other reports do not, and no conviction for them was reported.
The first sentence. Five years (El Tiempo, identified 1967), six years (Vistazo), or eight years from a 1964 detention (the academic paper citing Hoy). The offense named by El Tiempo is "acceso carnal violento."
The Gorgona sentence. 24, 25 or 30 years, and for one killing or about twenty.
The escape. Diving suit and fins to the supply boat (Vistazo), or a canoe and three days adrift to Ecuador (El Tiempo).
The arrest. A guard at an officer's residence near Quito (AFP), the Avenida de Los Granados (Vistazo), or a highway checkpoint (El Tiempo); Semana adds an earlier stop in which he was released. The victim's age is 12 in AFP's account.
The confession. Vistazo alone reports that it followed electric shocks.
Witchcraft and hypnosis. Vistazo describes him as an alleged practitioner of witchcraft, sorcery and hypnotism who used hypnosis when someone resisted. No other report supports the claim.
Male remains. Vistazo reports that in its interview he acknowledged male victims among the remains but denied ever raping a man. No other source mentions male victims.
Accomplices. He said he acted alone (Vistazo); AFP reported doubts in Ecuador, on the ground of his slight build.
The date of death. AFP's dispatch printed on November 15, 1994, says "the day before"; the academic paper says November 13, 1994.
The nickname. El Tiempo attaches "Sádico del Charquito" to the Soacha killings of 1963 and 1964, and El Universal to Camargo generally; the Ecuadorian name "monstruo de los manglares" is reported by El Tiempo and by Cruz Niño.
Camargo's case is part of a Colombian debate about how the country recognized and punished repeated violent offenders. Experts quoted by El Tiempo called him the first psychopath to be recognized nationally in twentieth-century Colombia and said the light sentence for his first crimes reflected a legal system without the means to deal with them. Cruz Niño, who teaches at the Universidad del Rosario and wrote about Camargo in his 2013 book on Colombian serial killers, told the university that he considered Camargo the gravest case in the country because of the way he operated, and said that Camargo not only caused harm but wanted to go on causing it.
In Ecuador the case is remembered alongside that of Pedro Alonso López. AFP's dispatch on Camargo's death described the two Colombians as having written the same story of horror in Ecuador, and its March 1994 report on López's expected release named Camargo as the other killer with the most victims held in the country. The forensic work done on the Guayaquil remains, led by Carlos Barcos and Héctor Soto, was remembered by El Universo as pioneering for Ecuadorian forensic medicine.
The Gorgona prison, closed in the year of his escape, is now part of Gorgona National Park. AFP and Radio Nacional cite his escape as one of the few successful breakouts in its history. In 2024 Vanguardia reported that the Colombian government wanted to strengthen the island as a research center.
January 22, 1930: born in Cundinamarca, Colombia (Anolaima or La Mesa; one Vistazo line gives 1931).
About 1960: marries, according to El Tiempo.
1963 to 1964: 17 girls found dead at El Charquito, Soacha; El Tiempo attributes the deaths to him. Not established.
1964: detained and sentenced to eight years, according to an academic paper citing Hoy.
1967: identified and sentenced to five years for "acceso carnal violento," according to El Tiempo. Vistazo gives six years.
After his release: further crimes, including in Barranquilla; held about three years in Barranquilla and Bogotá (Vistazo).
1977: sent to the Gorgona penal colony (El Tiempo), on a sentence reported as 24, 25 or 30 years.
November 23, 1984: escapes Gorgona (Vistazo); declared dead in Colombia. The prison closes the same year.
December 1984: enters Ecuador through Tulcán (Vistazo).
1985: the forensic examiner Carlos Barcos concludes that one person killed the women found around Guayaquil (El Universo).
1986: arrested in Quito; confesses to 71 killings; sentenced to 16 years, the maximum.
1988: Barcos honored for his identification work (El Universo).
March 1994: AFP reports him in prison since 1986, accused of killing at least about 30 women.
November 1994: killed in a Quito prison by a fellow inmate, G. N. (AFP; November 13 per an academic paper). Buried in a common grave at El Batán, Quito.