In November 1997, near the city of Pereira in western Colombia, investigators uncovered a burial ground holding the remains of thirty-six boys. The discovery forced the creation of a national task force, which began to connect cases that had been treated for years as isolated tragedies: boys who had vanished from markets, bus stations and town squares in one department after another. In February 1999 a man fled a burning sugarcane field where a boy had been attacked, leaving behind belongings that included his glasses, and investigators used them to build a profile. Two months later, on the afternoon of April 22, 1999, on the rural edge of Villavicencio in Meta, a homeless man heard a boy screaming for help, found a man attacking him, drove the attacker off with stones and carried the boy, John Iván Sabogal, twelve, to a house where someone called the police. Officers in patrol cars, taxis and private cars searched the area, and hours later a man walked out of the brush and the boy identified him. At the police station he said he was Bonifacio Morera Lizcano, a street vendor, and he was held under that name on a charge of attempted rape. In June an investigative team drawn from nine departments, working from a suspect profile built in Armenia under Álvaro Vivas Botero, from the analysis of the morphologist Carlos Hernán Herrera Jaramillo in Buga and from the Villavicencio prosecutor Fernando Aya's account of the Morera Lizcano case, established that the prisoner they already had was the man they were looking for. He was Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos.
Garavito was born in Génova, in the department of Quindío, on January 25, 1957, the eldest son and second of the seven children of Manuel Antonio Garavito and Rosa Delia Cubillos. Before he started school the family moved, because of the armed conflict, to Ceilán in Valle del Cauca, where he got as far as the fifth grade before leaving around 1968. By his own account his father drank, was unfaithful and beat him, once tying him to a tree and hitting him with a machete, and his mother was violent and cold. He said he was sexually abused in 1969 by a pharmacy owner and by a devout neighbor who was a close friend of his father's, and raped by another neighbor after the family moved to Trujillo in 1971; experts who later interviewed him questioned how much of that account to believe. He himself began abusing younger boys as a teenager. In 1972 his mother caught him trying to rape a five-year-old and he was put out of the house, and in 1973 he was arrested at a railway station in Bogotá after trying to assault a six-year-old. As an adult he worked in a shop chain and at a coffee plantation, sold religious images in the street, drank heavily, joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1978, converted to Pentecostalism, and saw psychiatrists from time to time, and in Armenia he would go from church and AA meetings to Valencia park to pay child prostitutes. The women he lived with described a man who was kind to their children when he was sober and violent, jealous and controlling when he drank.
The first killing he admitted was of a boy in Jamundí, Valle del Cauca, in October 1992. From then until April 1999 he traveled through at least eleven Colombian departments, among them Valle del Cauca, Risaralda, Quindío, Boyacá, Meta, Cundinamarca, Nariño, Huila, Caquetá, Antioquia and Caldas, and killed boys aged mostly between eight and sixteen. Almost all were poor: street children, sons of itinerant vendors, boys who worked at bus terminals, many living apart from families who could not support them. He approached them disguised as a priest, a monk, a vendor or a homeless man, offered money, food or a drink, and led them out of town. He tied them, raped and tortured them, cut their throats and mutilated the bodies. Before each killing he drank, from a mouthful to half a bottle of aguardiente or brandy. In Tunja in 1996 he posed as a disabled man on crutches and in glasses to lure Ronald Delgado Quintero, eleven. In one of his confessions he described taking a boy named Julián Pinto, who was selling coffee near a market, into a cane field, and afterward, he said, hearing a voice call him a wretch. In 1998 he also killed boys in Ecuador, among them Abel Gustavo Loor Vélez, fourteen, in Chone, and he said he had killed in Venezuela as well. A few survived him, among them William Trujillo, John Iván Sabogal and Brand Ferney Álvarez.
He could kill for so long because of who his victims were. Colombia in the 1990s was absorbed by armed conflict and the drug war, with mass displacement and very large numbers of missing children, and the disappearance of a poor boy from a market town rarely led to an investigation.
Garavito did not know the investigation had closed in on him until October 28, 1999, when the prosecutor Lily Naranjo and the investigator Aldemar Durán questioned him for eight or nine hours about other cases. He confessed to the killings he was asked about, among them the three boys of Génova and cases in Palmira, Tunja and Villavicencio, and in the following months gave detailed accounts and drew maps to the graves. He admitted about 140 killings at first, and investigators opened 172 cases. Forensic evidence, including the glasses and traces on liquor bottles left at the scenes, supported the confessions. In mid-August 2003 he admitted twenty-eight more killings, twenty-three of children and five of adults, one of them a shoeshine man. The figure most often cited for the killings attributed to him in Colombia and Ecuador is at least 193, and some Colombian investigators believe the true number may have been as high as four hundred.
The attorney general's office recorded 172 child victims, with 138 cases ending in convictions and the rest under investigation or on appeal. On November 3, 2001, the sentences were added up to 1,853 years and nine days, the longest in Colombian history. The law in force when he killed capped a prison term at forty years, and the term was set there; English-language accounts often give twenty-two years, which is the sentence an Ecuadorian court later imposed for raping and killing two boys there in 1998. Ecuador sought his extradition, to follow his Colombian term. As the date of possible release drew nearer, public anger grew. A court document indicated that one of his sentences had been served by November 25, 2011, but some twenty other cases, and by one count forty-eight convictions, still stood in the way, and a judge refused his release that month. When the possibility of conditional release arose again in 2021, President Iván Duque called him a bandit and "a stinking rat" and said the government would not support it, and it was denied. Colombia approved life imprisonment for the killers and rapists of children on July 6, 2021, too late to apply to him. The case led to a national register of missing children and to heavier penalties for crimes against minors.
A study by university psychologists described antisocial personality disorder, sadism and pedophilia. In prison at the maximum-security Valledupar prison known as La Tramacúa he was baptized into the United Pentecostal Church of Colombia on August 18, 2003, and in a 2006 television interview with the journalist Pirry he denied raping his victims, said the devil had ordered the killings, spoke of being rehabilitated and of one day sitting in Congress. He was diagnosed with leukemia on March 10, 2020, and also had cancer of the eye. He died at 1 p.m. on October 12, 2023, at the Nueva Santo Tomás del Caribe clinic in Valledupar, at sixty-six, still in custody. The Colombian press called him La Bestia, the Beast, the Monster of Génova, and Tribilín, the Spanish name for Goofy. Few of the boys' names were ever widely published.