Dorangel Vargas was born in 1957 in Tachira state, Venezuela. He had a long history of psychiatric illness and lived in and around the Parque Metropolitano in San Cristobal, in a shelter he built himself under a bridge over the Torbes river.
In 1995 he killed and dismembered a man in the same park, was arrested, was found to be seriously mentally ill, and was released without any provision for his treatment or supervision.
Between 1995 and 1999 he killed at least ten men, all of them living rough or passing through the park, all of them people whose disappearance was not reported. He attacked them with rocks and pipes, butchered the bodies, and ate them, cooking parts with vegetables. He told interviewers afterwards, at some length and quite cheerfully, that he did not eat women or children, and that he had preferences about which parts were worth taking.
He was arrested in February 1999 after remains were found near his shelter. He was examined, found to be suffering from a severe psychotic illness and not criminally responsible, and detained in psychiatric custody. The Venezuelan press called him El Comegente, the people-eater. The case is mainly a record of what happened after 1995, when a man who had killed and eaten someone was released back to the same park because there was nowhere else to put him.