Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos was arrested on April 22, 1999, on the edge of Villavicencio, the capital of Meta, after a man passing by drove him away from a boy he was attacking. He gave the police a false name and was held as Bonifacio Morera Lizcano, a man facing a charge of attempted rape. On July 20, 1999, the CTI, the investigative police of Colombia's Fiscalía General de la Nación, established who he really was. In October 1999, after a long night of questioning, he told prosecutors that he had killed 140 children.
He was 42, born in the coffee town of Génova, Quindío, a drifter who drank heavily and moved between towns and cities. From 1992 to 1999 he traveled through at least eleven Colombian departments and into Ecuador, approaching poor boys, most of them between 8 and 16, with offers of money or small jobs. Colombian courts convicted him in case after case. News reports and the Fiscalía have given the number of convictions as 138, 139 or 143, and the sentences as adding up to 1,853 years and nine days. Colombian law held the time he could serve to 40 years. He died in custody in Valledupar on October 12, 2023, aged 66.
Garavito was born on January 25, 1957, in Génova, Quindío, according to Semana's 1999 profile and El Colombiano's 2023 account. Semana described him as the eldest of seven children of a poor family. He left school after the fifth grade.
What is known of his childhood comes mostly from his own account to prosecutors, psychiatrists and journalists. He described a violent father who drank and beat him and his siblings. He said that around the age of 12 or 13 he was sexually abused and hurt by a man who was a friend of his family; he repeated that account in a 2006 RCN television special and, years later, to the journalist Rafael Poveda. Semana reported in 1999 that witnesses remembered a withdrawn and aggressive adolescent.
All accounts agree that he was put out of the family home while still a teenager, but differ on when and why. Semana's 1999 profile says his father threw him out at 17. El Colombiano and El País of Cali, writing in 2023, say that at 15 he cornered a younger boy, whose screams brought help, and that his father then expelled him, reportedly over his sexuality.
As an adult he was in and out of work. Semana reported in 1999 that he had been treated in two psychiatric hospitals, that he was an alcoholic who attended Alcoholics Anonymous, and that he liked the rural ballads known as música de carrilera. He visited a Pentecostal church, sometimes passed himself off as a priest, and presented himself as a representative of a foundation called "Nuevo Amanecer". Investigators found that he used several names and nicknames, among them "Loco", "Tribilín" and "Conflicto". He told prosecutors in 1999 that he had a partner and a 16-year-old son in Villavicencio and had been looking for a house for them when he was arrested. His partner told investigators that when he drank he talked about his hatred for his family.
There were warnings well before 1999. Semana reported that he had been detained in 1994 in Corinto, Cauca, over the disappearance of a child. The charge was dropped, though he later admitted he had intended to take the boy. In August 1995 he broke his left leg in Bogotá, and the metal plates and screws left in it gave him a limp that witnesses in Tunja would later remember.
Almost all of the children were boys from poor families. In his confession he said his victims were generally between 8 and 16 years old, and the Fiscalía's figures put their ages in the same range. They were the children who worked and waited in public places: boys who sold lottery tickets, newspapers or sweets, who shined shoes, who hung around bus terminals, markets and parks, or who were walking home from public schools. Semana wrote in 1999 that he looked for them near schools, bus stations and parks, used sweets and money, and usually struck in daylight.
Few of the boys' stories have been told in detail, and many of the remains took years to identify. Some that have been reported:
A 14-year-old in Pereira disappeared on October 13, 1998, from the foundation where he was living. Investigators traced his last movements to the area of the bus terminal, where he met a man who asked him to wash a car. His remains were found soon afterward, mixed in a single pit with those of several other children. His mother told El Espectador in 2014 that she had not been told of his disappearance until December 1998, that she called the Fiscalía every three months for years, and that the office returned his remains to her at a public ceremony about 15 years after his death. She said she had received no support or reparation.
In May 2014 El Colombiano reported that the family of a 13-year-old boy had at last been able to bury him, 18 years after he was believed to have been killed by Garavito.
In Chone, in the Ecuadorian province of Manabí, a 14-year-old who had worked since the age of eight selling newspapers and shining shoes disappeared at midday on July 20, 1998, and a 12-year-old disappeared the next day, according to Semana's December 1999 report. His mother reported him missing to the police.
In Villavicencio, the boy he was attacking on the day of his arrest was a 12-year-old who sold lottery tickets.
The accounts that came out of the investigation describe a man who changed his appearance to suit the place. He posed as a priest or monk, a street vendor, a homeless man, a charity worker, an old man and a disabled man, according to the Fiscalía's statements reported by Reuters in 1999, AP in 2023 and El Colombiano. He offered money, food or a soft drink, or asked a boy to help him with an errand. Poveda, who interviewed him in prison, said one of his ploys was to ask boys to help him fetch a calf. El Colombiano reported that he also handed out holy cards and holy water to win trust, and that he waited for moments when parents were distracted.
He took the boys out of town, to pastures, cane fields, ravines and empty lots. The Fiscalía chief, Alfonso Gómez Méndez, told reporters in October 1999 that many of the children had apparently been given alcohol. Garavito himself said he drank before every attack. The boys were tied, sexually abused and killed with a knife. Some were buried. Many were left where they died and were found weeks or months later.
He traveled constantly and stayed in cheap lodging houses. Semana reported in 1999 that the rates at the places he stayed rarely exceeded 9,000 pesos a night. He told prosecutors that he killed 11 children in 1993 alone.
In an RCN special broadcast in June 2006, Garavito said that he heard a voice in Cali in October 1992 telling him to go to Jamundí, in Valle del Cauca, and that he killed his first victim there. El País of Cali also dates the first killing he admitted to Jamundí in October 1992. From then on, he told prosecutors, he killed in a long list of places.
The confession reported by Semana in November 1999 named departments from Quindío, Risaralda, Caldas and Antioquia to Cundinamarca, Valle, Cauca, Nariño, Putumayo, Boyacá, Meta, Casanare and Guaviare, and cases in Ecuador and Venezuela; it counted 13 departments in all. The AP and El Tiempo give at least 11 departments, and Poveda's 2023 book puts the figure at 14 of Colombia's 32. Semana's list of places in December 1999 included about four children in the La Victoria neighborhood of Bogotá, four or five in Tuluá, two in Zarzal, one each in Quimbaya and Calarcá in 1993, one in Trujillo and three in Génova, his birthplace. In Pereira the remains of 33 children had been found across the city, and he confessed to other killings there.
Reuters reported in October 1999 that he had lured children in more than 60 towns, and the AP wrote in 2023 that the remains of 114 children had been found in 59 Colombian towns beginning in 1994.
In July 1998 he crossed into Ecuador. A Colombian court later found that he killed four boys there on July 10, 12, 20 and 21, 1998: two in Santo Domingo de los Colorados and two in Chone. A street vendor in Chone recognized his photograph and told investigators that a man with a strong Colombian accent had been seen around the central market in July and August 1998. Police once tried to arrest him near a girls' school, Semana reported, but he got away.
For years the killings were not connected. Children vanished in one department and remains turned up in another, and each case was handled as a separate matter. The CTI set up a special group in August 1997, according to Semana, and by late 1999 it had located 118 sets of skeletal remains and some clothing.
The CTI director, Pablo Elías González, told Semana that the case had obsessed him from the moment he saw the bones of children found at Buga. He ruled out the theory of a satanic sect early on. In Pereira, the investigation was led by the Risaralda prosecutor Ofelia Corzo Delgado. The previous year, Reuters reported, the remains of 25 children had been found in a mass grave in Pereira.
In Villavicencio, the remains of 13 children aged 7 to 16 were found on a lot in June 1998, El Tiempo reported. On September 17, 1998, an inter-agency group of two prosecutors with the CTI, the DAS security service and the police intelligence unit SIJIN, supported by Medicina Legal, was formed there. Three more bodies were found on the same lot in mid-September. By December 1998 the group had concluded that one or two men were behind killings across the country, because of the similarities with the Pereira cases.
Other men were suspected along the way. On December 16, 1998, police in Pereira arrested a street vendor, P.P.R.G., over the deaths of two boys; he was later ruled out as the killer. The CTI put together an album of 25 photographs of possible suspects.
Evidence built up in separate files. A prosecutor in Palmira found a boy's body in a pasture in March 1998, and near it a shoe, glasses, documents and money. A morphologist in Buga analyzed the worn shoe. In Génova, investigators found caps from bottles of brandy at several crime scenes and traced them to a farm near the town where Garavito had stayed and drunk the same brand. In Tunja, witnesses remembered a man who limped. The Villavicencio prosecutor Fernando Aya Galeano found a notebook of telephone numbers that matched the cities where children had been found dead. Investigators Harold Mauricio Sánchez and Aldemar Durán worked the Génova cases.
On the afternoon of April 22, 1999, a call reached the La Esperanza police station in Villavicencio from a country house called Rosa Blanca on the Anillo Vial ring road, near the La Coralina neighborhood, according to El Tiempo's reconstruction. A drug user nearby had heard a boy calling for help, found a man holding and attacking him, and thrown stones at the attacker, who swung a knife at him and fled into the brush. The man took the boy to the house and the police were called. Corporal Pedro Babativa and two officers arrived and arrested the suspect, who said his name was Bonifacio Morera Lizcano.
Semana's account differs in its details. It says the arrest was made at 7 p.m. by CTI agents, that the man and the boy had been seen hours earlier in Los Centauros park, where a taxi driver confirmed dropping them, and that a homeless man intervened so the boy could escape. Other accounts say he was caught after boarding the wrong bus and running into a police checkpoint at a roundabout, or that security guards saw him dragging a child. All agree on the date and that he was held under the false name, on a charge of attempted rape.
Among his things, Semana reported, was a pink and black wool backpack holding dark glasses, chance tickets and bus tickets that showed he had been in Urabá along with nylon cord. Searches turned up videotapes and newspaper clippings about missing children, which he said he kept to show his son how terrible life was.
In June 1999 a multidisciplinary group of the Fiscalía, the DAS, the SIJIN and a Medicina Legal psychiatrist was formed, El País of Cali reported. From July 14 to 17, 1999, investigators from different regions met in Pereira and compared their files. The exchange, El Tiempo wrote, showed that the man arrested in Villavicencio in April was the one they were looking for. On Tuesday, July 20, 1999, the CTI's criminalistics unit fully identified the prisoner as Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, and searches and evidence gathering followed across the country.
On August 26, 1999, the sixth prosecutor of Villavicencio exhumed the three bodies found in September 1998 to compare their wounds with those of other victims. The findings were consistent. A sheet of brown kraft paper turned up in a box kept by a fellow member of Alcoholics Anonymous, Semana reported; it listed the initials of towns and numbers of victims and accounted for 27 cases. Noticias RCN reported that he had marked each victim with a stroke on a sheet of paper.
By the time he was questioned, the Fiscalía had DNA from strands of hair, a shoe, eyeglasses, travel and hotel receipts, and nylon rope that matched the rope used on the victims, the Fiscalía chief told Reuters. One investigator told Semana that Garavito might have thrown them off, but did not count on how much evidence they had.
The questioning, his formal indagatoria, began on Thursday, October 28, 1999, according to El Tiempo and El País of Cali, and was led by María Lily Naranjo Patiño, the eighth prosecutor of Armenia, who had come to Villavicencio to investigate the killings of three children in Génova. Present were the Medicina Legal forensic psychiatrist Oscar Armando Díaz Beltrán and a court-appointed defense lawyer from Meta, Oscar Fernando Rincón, who urged him to confess given the evidence. The investigator Aldemar Durán also took part, El País reported. Accounts of the length of the session differ: five hours (Reuters), more than nine (El País), about ten (Semana, December 1999) or twelve (Semana, November 1999).
At first he was cold and denied everything. He did not know that a briefcase of evidence sat in the room, Semana reported. Toward dawn on Friday, October 29, he asked for time to pray. Then, according to Reuters, he said that he wanted to ask forgiveness for everything he had done and was going to confess, and that he had killed the children he was asked about and others besides. He asked forgiveness of God, of many people, of society and of the courts. He said he committed the crimes when drinking, that something inside him drove him, and that afterward he felt ashamed. He told the officials he did not want to be seen as something less than human; he was a human being, he said. The session produced nearly 50 pages of testimony.
He confessed to the killings in Génova and to a killing in Palmira, and described others in Tunja and Villavicencio, El País reported. The figure he gave was 140 children over about seven years. On Sunday, October 31, he testified before a Pereira prosecutor about the deaths in that city, and in the following days he was to face prosecutors from other regions. Over the following months he led investigators to burial sites, and his statements were checked against the remains and the evidence.
Officials feared for his life. A judicial official told Reuters that he had been moved because he would be lynched if left in an ordinary prison, and that he was under a round-the-clock suicide watch. The national police chief, General Rosso José Serrano, cited the case as a reason for Colombia, which has no death penalty, to adopt one. Semana reported that Amnesty International, the European Parliament and the United Nations sent observers to follow the case. On November 25, 1999, he made a public confession, Semana reported.
The cases could not be gathered into a single file. Each killing had been investigated by the prosecutor's office in the place where it happened, and each went before the local court.
The first judgment reported came in December 1999. A wire report printed by La Nación of Costa Rica on December 17, 1999, said the fifth criminal court of Tunja had sentenced him to 52 years and six months for aggravated homicide in the case of a boy killed in Tunja and for attempted rape in the case of the boy in Villavicencio. The report said he had first faced 60 years and that his state-appointed lawyer won the reduction by asking for early sentencing. At the time, prosecutors believed he might have killed about 50 more children than he had admitted, and dozens of other cases, most of them in Pereira, were pending.
Other courts followed. El Tiempo reported in 2020 that the Juzgado Segundo Penal of Florencia, Caquetá, sentenced him to 32 years. Semana and El País of Cali date the main accumulated sentence to 2001.
As the judgments accumulated, the sentences were reported as adding up to 1,853 years and nine days of prison, a figure given by EFE in 2003 and by Semana in 2023. Colombian law capped the time a prisoner could serve at 40 years, and that was the sentence he served, El Colombiano explained in 2023. El Tiempo described it in 2021 as an accumulated sentence of 40 years, or 480 months.
The number of cases behind the total is reported in several ways:
EFE reported in August 2003 that the 1,853 years covered 138 of the 172 crimes he had then admitted.
A Fiscalía report cited by Semana in October 2018 said he had admitted responsibility for 140 rapes and killings of children, 139 of which had ended in convictions.
El Colombiano wrote in October 2023 that Colombian courts had convicted him of the sexual abuse and killing of 143 children and adolescents, with 29 more cases still in court.
El Tiempo reported in 2021 and 2023 that he had accumulated 77 penalties for aggravated homicide and sexual crimes.
Semana reported in July 2011 that more than 50 Colombian courts had opened cases against him.
The offenses named in the judgments, as listed by Semana, El Tiempo and El Colombiano in 2023, were acto sexual violento, homicide, acceso carnal violento, simple kidnapping and negligent arson.
His count kept rising after the first confession. In August 2003 judicial sources told EFE that he had admitted 28 more killings: 23 of minors and five of adults, among them a shoeshine worker and four adults aged 30 to 40 in Bogotá and the coffee region. The new admissions included killings of children in Pereira, Balboa and Marsella in Risaralda and in towns of southern and southwestern Colombia.
The figures attributed to him since then vary widely:
140 child victims in his October 1999 confession (El Tiempo, Reuters, Semana).
168 minors, with 81 identified and 86 not, according to Colombian investigators cited by Semana in July 2011; INPEC gave 168 in the same year.
At least 172 children, the figure most often attributed to the Fiscalía (Semana and El País of Cali, 2023).
Between 142 and 194 children in 11 departments (El Tiempo, 2023, worded as an allegation).
About 182 children, confessed during his Tunja case (El Colombiano, October 13, 2023).
More than 190 children, confessed (AP, 2023).
In March 2016 La FM reported that the Fiscalía had concluded he had lied about some crimes and had not disclosed others, and that the CTI was following reports of missing children on the Atlantic coast and in Nariño.
Ecuador opened its own case. The Colombian Supreme Court's record shows that Ecuadorian judicial police reported on the killings in January 2001; that the Juzgado 11 Penal of Pichincha opened proceedings and ordered his preventive detention in February 2001; that a Pichincha judge issued an order for his imprisonment on February 8, 2007; and that the Juzgado 17 Penal of Pichincha, in case 48-2008, opened the trial stage on September 2, 2008. The Ecuadorian charge was asesinato, aggravated murder, of boys killed in Santo Domingo de los Colorados in July 1998.
In Colombia, meanwhile, the Fiscalía 22 of Pereira's homicide unit had charged him on October 23, 2006, with the four killings in Ecuador, two in Santo Domingo de los Colorados and two in Chone, and the Juzgado 6 Penal del Circuito of Pereira convicted him on July 6, 2007, of aggravated homicide and aggravated sexual acts. The sentence was 266 months and 20 days in prison; it became final that September. Semana described this in 2018 as a 22-year sentence for the four Ecuadorian cases.
Ecuador asked for his extradition by diplomatic note on May 12, 2011, to try him after he finished his Colombian sentence. Semana reported that the Fiscalía ordered his arrest for extradition purposes and that Ecuador's ambassador, Raúl Vallejo, welcomed the step. On May 23, 2012, the Criminal Cassation Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, with José Leonidas Bustos Martínez as reporting magistrate, issued an unfavorable concept. It found the formal requirements met but held that the acts were res judicata under the 1911 Bolivarian Extradition Agreement, since Colombia had already tried him for them.
Some later reports date the refusal to 1999 or describe an Ecuadorian conviction. El Comercio of Quito reported that a court in Ecuador had sentenced him to 22 years. The Supreme Court record describes the Ecuadorian proceeding only up to the opening of trial in 2008 and records no Ecuadorian judgment.
He served his sentence in the maximum-security prison in Valledupar, Cesar, known as La Tramacúa. El País of Cali and El Tiempo date his arrival to September 2002; another El Tiempo report gives December 9, 2002. He was held in pavilion six, El País reported, and El Tiempo described in 2018 a cell at the end of a row of 20 in a rear block, closed off by bars from the rest. He did not go out into the sun, for his own safety. He made bracelets, earrings and necklaces, and that work, with study, earned him reductions of sentence. Doctors usually examined him in his cell; when he had to go to the infirmary, every other prisoner was locked in first. He told El Tiempo he feared for his safety if anyone saw him outside his cell.
A Medicina Legal psychiatric report, described by El Tiempo in 2021, diagnosed antisocial personality disorder and an alcohol use disorder in remission. It said no drug or psychotherapy treats the core symptoms of antisocial personality disorder, and recommended continued psychiatric follow-up and tests for a possible neurocognitive disorder. The forensic psychiatrist Heydy Luz Chica Urzola, interviewed by Infobae after his death, described him as a predator who sought power and control and identified pedophilia.
Academic work has used the case to study offender profiling. A 2020 essay in the journal Salud UIS by Richard Larrotta-Castillo and colleagues compared him with another Colombian offender and described him as a traveling serial offender whose movement from place to place made him harder to identify.
In 2020 Rafael Poveda, host of the program Testigo Directo, spent about 20 hours with him in his cell. Poveda described him as clear, focused and coherent, an actor and manipulator, and said the interviews were very hard to sit through. His book, Tras la sombra de Garavito, was presented at the Bogotá book fair in April 2023.
The 40-year sentence, the reductions and the rule that allowed conditional release after three-fifths of a sentence kept the question of his release in the news.
In May 2011 a Colombian senator, Gilma Jiménez, said he might leave prison within four to six years. She told Semana that the 40-year sentence had been cut to 24 for helping to locate remains and that study could reduce it further. She reported conflicting figures from the courts and INPEC and asked the Fiscalía to identify 76 unnamed children who might be his victims. The director of INPEC, Gustavo Ricaurte, said that the Fiscalía still had 25 cases pending against him and dismissed fears of an early release. Semana reported that each time talk of his release surfaced, the Fiscalía brought a new case and a new detention order.
In October 2018 Semana reported that he had served 20 years and that a letter from the office of the deputy prosecutor general, María Paulina Riveros, had asked for every pending case against him to be found and its status checked.
In 2020, while the Senate approved a constitutional amendment allowing life imprisonment for those who rape and kill children, lawyers told Semana it could not be applied to him, because a punishment that severe cannot be imposed after the fact on someone already sentenced.
On May 14, 2021, the management of La Tramacúa sent the documents on his time served and reductions to the Juzgado Primero de Ejecución de Penas y Medidas de Seguridad of Valledupar, as procedure requires for every prisoner who reaches three-fifths of a sentence, INPEC said. In a ten-page decision of May 21, 2021, the court counted 328 months, 9 days and 15 hours served, including five years of reductions, and found he had met the formal three-fifths requirement. But it found that he had given no information about where he would live or his ties outside, and that he had not repaired the harm to the victims, and ruled he must stay in prison. The decision became public on November 1, 2021, after the Caracol program Los Informantes reported the request.
INPEC issued a bulletin that day headed "Luis Alfredo Garavito NO saldrá en libertad", saying it had no power to grant penal benefits and that only the sentence enforcement judge could do so. President Iván Duque, speaking from Glasgow, said he was deeply indignant, called Garavito "a bandit, a criminal, a stinking rat", and said he would have to stay in prison. A former director of La Tramacúa, César Fernando Caraballo Quiroga, told Blu Radio that Garavito did not want to leave prison and was waiting for more cases to be added to his sentence. El Colombiano reported in 2023 that the release date under his sentence was 2039.
On March 10, 2020, he was taken from the prison to a medical center with fatigue and weakness. What was first thought to be anemia was diagnosed as leukemia, El Tiempo reported; Semana described it as chronic leukemia and El Tiempo in 2023 as chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He returned to the prison on April 3, 2020, and after a relapse in May was moved to the Hospital Rosario Pumarejo de López in Valledupar. By November 2020 he was being treated in the prison's health unit. Cancer in his left eye socket cost him the eye. In his last months he refused outside care and signed waivers to stay in the prison infirmary, El Tiempo reported. Ciro Pérez Escalante of the Valledupar Personería, the municipal human rights office, said he did not go out into the sun, did not want contact with other prisoners, and had expressed remorse and contacted some people to apologize.
On October 12, 2023, guards took him from the prison to a clinic in Valledupar at 11:45 a.m. with complications. He died there that afternoon, about 1 p.m. according to El Colombiano and Semana, 1:20 p.m. according to El Tiempo. INPEC confirmed the death and named the place as the Clínica Nueva Santo Tomás del Caribe. He was 66. Pérez Escalante said medical staff's preliminary account was cardiorespiratory arrest. The CTI inspected the body and sent it to Medicina Legal, and the Fiscalía said it would ask the courts to close the cases still open against him.
The body stayed at Medicina Legal in Valledupar for weeks. A cremation planned for October 17 was put off because the papers needed to prove kinship were missing. A cemetery then refused to cremate the body while the autopsy result was still pending. In December 2023 Medicina Legal's final necropsy, after histopathological analysis, found that he had died of natural causes, El Tiempo reported. His family said it could not pay, and the mayor of Valledupar, Mello Castro, paid for the cremation, which took place at the Jardines del Recuerdo cemetery on December 21, 2023, after the body had been held for 69 days, Radio Nacional reported. The ashes were to go to relatives in Trujillo, Valle del Cauca.
His death ended the criminal cases still open, but not the families' search. El Colombiano wrote that many families never learned what had happened to their children. Investigators had said in 2011 that dozens of the children linked to him were still unidentified, and the remains of some were returned to their families only after 15 years or more.
The case is regularly cited in Colombia in debates over the punishment of crimes against children. El Colombiano and El País of Cali reported in 2023 that it helped bring heavier penalties for such crimes and an end to sentence reductions for those who commit them. The press called him "La Bestia" (the Beast) and "Monstruo de Génova".
Proven by final judgment: the homicides and sexual crimes against children in the cases on which Colombian courts convicted him, among them the Tunja homicide and the Villavicencio attempted rape (December 1999) and the four Ecuadorian killings tried in Pereira (July 2007). The number of convictions has never been settled: 138 (EFE, 2003), 139 (Fiscalía report cited by Semana, 2018), 143 (El Colombiano, 2023) and "77 accumulated penalties" (El Tiempo, 2021 and 2023).
Confessed or attributed but never tried, or not shown in any reported judgment: the remainder of the 140 killings he confessed in 1999; the 28 further killings, including five adults, he admitted in 2003 (EFE); the totals of 172, 182, 194 and more than 190 attributed to him by different sources; and killings in Venezuela, which he claimed in 1999 but whose investigation has not been reported.
Accounts differ on several details:
The arrest: El Tiempo's 1999 account credits police officers called to a country house; Semana's credits CTI agents at 7 p.m.; other accounts mention a bus and a police checkpoint, or security guards.
The length of the October 1999 questioning: five, nine, ten or twelve hours.
The age at which he was put out of the family home: 15 (El Colombiano, El País of Cali, 2023) or 17 (Semana, 1999).
The departments: 11 (AP, El Tiempo), 13 (Semana, 1999) or 14 (Poveda).
The Ecuadorian killings: Semana's 1999 report placed both boys it described in Chone and said Ecuadorian police had ruled out Santo Domingo de los Colorados; the 2007 Colombian judgment, as summarized by the Supreme Court, places two killings in each town.
The extradition: refused in 1999 (Semana, El País of Cali, 2023) or by the Supreme Court's concept of May 23, 2012, on a request made in 2011 (court record). Whether an Ecuadorian court ever sentenced him (El Comercio says 22 years) is not shown in the Supreme Court record.
The sentence reduction: "cut to 24 years" for cooperation (Semana, 2011, citing Senator Jiménez; El Comercio) or "halved" (Semana English edition, 2011). The 2021 court decision treated the sentence as 40 years, with three-fifths served.
The cause of death: complications of leukemia (Semana), cancer (Noticias RCN, El País of Cali), cardiorespiratory arrest (preliminary, Personería) and natural causes (Medicina Legal's final finding).
January 25, 1957: born in Génova, Quindío.
October 1992: by his own account, kills his first victim in Jamundí, Valle del Cauca.
1994: detained in Corinto, Cauca, over a child's disappearance; the charge is dropped.
August 1995: breaks his left leg in Bogotá.
August 1997: the CTI forms a special group on the killings of children.
March 1998: a boy's body is found in a pasture in Palmira, with a shoe and glasses nearby.
June 1998: the remains of 13 children are found on a lot in Villavicencio.
July 10 to 21, 1998: four boys are killed in Santo Domingo de los Colorados and Chone, Ecuador.
September 17, 1998: an inter-agency group is formed in Villavicencio.
October 13, 1998: a 14-year-old disappears in Pereira.
December 16, 1998: another man is arrested in Pereira and later ruled out.
April 22, 1999: arrested in Villavicencio under the name Bonifacio Morera Lizcano.
July 14 to 17, 1999: investigators meet in Pereira and compare files.
July 20, 1999: the CTI identifies him as Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos.
October 28 to 29, 1999: confesses to killing 140 children.
November 25, 1999: public confession.
December 1999: the fifth criminal court of Tunja sentences him to 52 years and six months.
2001: the accumulated sentence is reported as 1,853 years and nine days, held to 40 years.
February 2001: an Ecuadorian court opens proceedings and orders his preventive detention.
2002: transferred to La Tramacúa, Valledupar.
August 2003: admits 28 more killings.
June 2006: RCN broadcasts a television special with his interview.
October 23, 2006: charged in Pereira with the four Ecuadorian killings.
July 6, 2007: convicted by the Juzgado 6 Penal del Circuito of Pereira; 266 months and 20 days.
May 12, 2011: Ecuador requests extradition.
May 23, 2012: the Supreme Court issues an unfavorable concept on the extradition.
October 2018: the Fiscalía orders a search for pending cases against him.
March 10, 2020: diagnosed with leukemia.
May 21, 2021: conditional release refused by a Valledupar sentence enforcement court.
November 1, 2021: INPEC states he will not be released; President Duque speaks against release.
April 2023: Poveda's book is presented in Bogotá.
October 12, 2023: dies in custody at a Valledupar clinic, aged 66.
December 13, 2023: Medicina Legal's final finding of natural causes is reported.
December 21, 2023: cremated in Valledupar.