On February 26, 1986, two police officers on patrol along the Avenida Los Granados in Quito noticed an older man who seemed nervous. When they approached him he tried to run, and after a short chase they caught him. In his bag they found the bloodstained clothing of a nine-year-old girl named Elizabeth, killed only minutes earlier, and a copy of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. He said his name was Manuel Bulgarín Solís. He was taken to Guayaquil, where a young woman he had raped and who had got away from him identified him, and his real name came out: Daniel Camargo Barbosa, a Colombian who had supposedly drowned escaping from an island prison fifteen months before. He confessed, calmly, to killing girls in Ecuador since then, seventy-one of them in some accounts and seventy-two in others, and he led investigators to the places where the bodies not yet found had been left.
He was born in Anolaima, in the Colombian Andes of Cundinamarca, on January 22, 1930, to a local businessman, Daniel Camargo Briceño, and his second wife, Teresa Barbosa. His mother died when he was very young; accounts put it before his first or his second birthday. His father, distant and overbearing, married again, to a woman named Dioselina Fernández who could not have children of her own, and by every account she beat and humiliated the boy, dressing him as a girl and sending him to school that way to be mocked by his classmates. He did well anyway. At the León XIII school in Bogotá he stood out as a student, with a reported IQ of 116, until he was taken out of school to help support the family.
His first arrest was in Bogotá on May 24, 1958, for petty theft, and the police photograph taken then is the earliest known picture of him. He lived in a common-law union with a woman named Alcira and had two children with her. Around 1962 he became engaged to another woman, Esperanza, then twenty-eight, and learned that she was not a virgin. Accounts of the case treat that discovery as the root of everything that followed. The two made an arrangement: he would stay with her if she helped him find virgin girls. Esperanza lured girls to an apartment on false pretenses and drugged them with Seconal sleeping pills, and Camargo raped them. There were five. None was killed, and the fifth went to the police. Both were arrested and sent to separate prisons. He was convicted of sexual assault on April 10, 1964. The first judge gave him three years, and he swore he would reform; the case then passed to a second judge, who made it eight. He served the full term.
In 1973 he was arrested in Brazil for being in the country without papers. His criminal record was slow to arrive from Colombia, and he was deported and let go under a false identity. Back in Colombia he worked the streets of Barranquilla selling television monitors. Passing a school one day, he took a nine-year-old girl, raped her, and killed her so that she could not go to the police as his last victim had. It was the first killing attributed to him. On May 3, 1974, he was arrested in Barranquilla when he went back to the scene for the television screens he had left beside her body. Colombian investigators came to believe he had killed many more girls in the country, and some accounts put the figure above eighty, but the one murder was the only one he was tried for. He was sentenced to thirty years, reduced to twenty-five, and on December 24, 1977, he was sent to the penal colony on Gorgona, an island off the Pacific coast known as Colombia's Alcatraz. The press called him the Sadist of El Charquito.
In November 1984, after studying the ocean currents, he escaped from Gorgona in a makeshift boat. The authorities assumed he had died at sea, and newspapers reported that sharks had taken him. He reached the mainland and crossed into Ecuador, went first to Quito, and on December 5 or 6, 1984, took a bus to Guayaquil. On December 18 he abducted a nine-year-old girl in Quevedo, in Los Ríos province. The next day a ten-year-old girl disappeared there as well.
For the next fourteen months he lived on the streets of Guayaquil, sleeping rough and reselling ballpoint pens, and sometimes selling the clothing and small belongings of the girls he killed. He chose girls from poor families who were looking for work. He would approach one as a foreigner who needed to find a Protestant pastor at a church on the edge of town, show her a large sum of money he said he had to deliver, and offer her a reward to show him the way, hinting that there might be a job at a factory as well. Nobody looked twice at an old man walking with a girl who could have been his granddaughter. He led them out past the city into woods, plantations and mangrove swamps, saying he knew a shortcut, and if a girl grew suspicious and turned back he let her go. The ones who went on he raped and strangled, stabbing those who fought, and he left their bodies where they fell. Killings were attributed to him across five provinces, Guayas, Pichincha, Tungurahua, El Oro and Los Ríos, at least fifty-four of them in and around Guayaquil. The police at first believed a gang was responsible, unable to credit that one man could have killed so many, and the Ecuadorian press named the unknown killer the Monster of the Mangroves.
After his arrest he described the killings to Ecuadorian investigators without any show of remorse. The bodies had been cut apart, and he said he had used a machete on them after the rapes. He said he chose virgins "because they cried," and that he killed to take revenge on women for their unfaithfulness. In June 1986 Francisco Febres Cordero, a journalist for the Quito newspaper Hoy, got in to see him. The police had blocked all access, and Camargo himself was demanding a large fee to talk; Febres Cordero joined a group of psychologists who had been allowed in, and questioned him without Camargo realizing who he was.
He was convicted in Ecuador and sentenced to sixteen years, the maximum Ecuadorian law then allowed; most accounts date the conviction to 1989, and some to 1988. The length of the sentence caused public outrage. He was held at the García Moreno prison in Quito, where Pedro Alonso López, the Monster of the Andes, was also serving time, and he said he had converted to Christianity.
On November 13, 1994, at the age of sixty-four, Camargo was stabbed to death in prison by a fellow inmate described as the nephew of one of the girls he had killed. The killer is named in most accounts as Geovanny Noguera, given in full in some as Giovanny Arcesio Noguera Jaramillo, and in one as Luis Masache Narváez. Most accounts place the killing in Quito, and some in Guayaquil. Two days later Hoy published a chronology of his crimes.
He was convicted of two murders, one in Colombia and one in Ecuador. His own confession accounts for seventy-one or seventy-two in Ecuador, and estimates of his total across both countries run from seventy-two to about a hundred and eighty. Almost none of those killings was ever tried.