Daniel Camargo Barbosa raped and murdered young girls in Colombia and Ecuador over roughly twelve years. He confessed to seventy-one killings in Ecuador alone; estimates across both countries run from seventy-two to about a hundred and eighty. He was convicted of two murders, one in each country. He was stabbed to death in prison on November 13, 1994.
He was born in Anolaima, in the Colombian Andes, on January 22, 1930, to a local businessman, Daniel Camargo Briceno, and his second wife Teresa Barbosa. His mother died before he was two. His father remarried a woman named Dioselina Fernandez, who could not have children of her own, and by every account of his childhood she beat him and humiliated him: including stripping him and sending him to school dressed as a girl, where his classmates did the rest.
He was first arrested in Bogota on May 24, 1958 for petty theft. He lived with a woman named Alcira and had two children with her. In 1962 he became engaged to another woman, Esperanza, and discovered she was not a virgin. Accounts of the case treat that as the point his fixation formed, and record an arrangement between them: he would stay if she helped him find virgin girls. Asked years later by an interviewer why he chose virgins, he said it was because they cried.
He was convicted of sexual assault after a fifth victim identified him, sentenced to three years and given eight on appeal. He is reported to have said then that if he offended again he would kill, so as to leave no witness. He was apprehended on May 3, 1974 for the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl and sentenced to twenty-five years on the prison island of Gorgona, known in Colombia as the country's Alcatraz.
In November 1984 he escaped from Gorgona in a makeshift boat, having studied the ocean currents first. The authorities concluded he had drowned and the press reported that sharks had taken him. He reached the mainland, crossed into Ecuador, and travelled by bus to Guayaquil on about December 5 or 6, 1984. On December 18 he abducted a nine-year-old girl in Quevedo, in Los Rios province. Another, aged ten, disappeared the following day.
Over the next fourteen months he killed at least fifty-four girls in and around Guayaquil, and by his own count seventy-one. He slept on the streets and lived by reselling ballpoint pens. His method was consistent: he approached girls in markets and on the street as a bewildered, grieving old man who needed help finding a church, walked them out of the city, and killed them in the plantations and mangroves. Police initially believed the deaths were the work of a gang, on the reasoning that one man could not have killed so many. Ecuadorean reporting called him the Monster of the Mangroves; in Colombia he had been the Sadist of El Charquito.
He was arrested in Quito on February 26, 1986, carrying a suitcase containing clothing taken from his last victim and a copy of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, acquired at Gorgona. He gave a false name, Manuel Bulgarin Solis, and was identified by a woman who had survived an attack and recognised the description. He then confessed calmly to seventy-one killings and led investigators to the bodies that had not been found.
He was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to sixteen years, the maximum available for murder in Ecuador at the time, which caused public outrage. He was held at the Garcia Moreno prison, where Pedro Lopez was also imprisoned. Two of the most prolific offenders on record in the same institution. He claimed to have converted to Christianity. In June 1986 a journalist from the newspaper Hoy, Francisco Febres Cordero, got in to interview him by posing as one of a group of psychologists, police having blocked access.
On November 13, 1994 a fellow inmate, a young man related to one of the girls he had killed, entered his cell and stabbed him to death. Sources differ on the man's name and on which prison it happened in, and the archive does not resolve either.
The reason his total is impossible to fix is that almost none of it was ever tried. Two convictions stand against a confession of seventy-one and estimates running to a hundred and eighty, and the confession is the only source for most of the number. It should be read as a claim he made rather than a figure a court established.