Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos killed boys in Colombia, and probably in Ecuador and Venezuela, between 1992 and 1999. On confirmed victims he is the most prolific convicted murderer in modern records. He died of cancer at a hospital in Valledupar on October 12, 2023, aged sixty-six, still in custody.
He was born in Genova, in the department of Quindio, on January 25, 1957, the eldest of seven children. He attended school for only a few years. He described his father as a womanizer, his parents fought constantly, and he and his siblings were neglected; he was beaten and sexually abused by his father and by several neighbours. As an adult he drifted, worked as a shop assistant and a street vendor of religious images and prayer cards, drank heavily, and had a documented history of psychiatric illness.
He travelled through at least eleven Colombian departments, Valle del Cauca, Boyaca, Meta, Quindio, Risaralda, Cundinamarca, Narino, Huila, Caqueta, Antioquia and Caldas, and killed boys aged mostly between eight and sixteen. Almost all were poor: street children, the sons of itinerant vendors, boys working at bus stations, many living apart from families who could not support them.
His method depended on a costume. He approached boys in disguise, most often as a monk or a priest, which is where one of his Colombian press names, El Cura, comes from, and sometimes as a homeless man or a street vendor. He offered money, food or a drink, and walked them out. He used a knife, a blade, rope and a machete, and mutilated the bodies.
The reason it ran for seven years is a matter of record rather than inference. Colombia in the 1990s had an armed conflict, mass internal displacement and a very large number of missing children. Observers at the time and since have noted that the disappearance of a poor boy from a market town was not investigated, and that his victims were chosen for exactly that.
In 1997 a burial ground containing the bodies of thirty-six boys was found near Pereira, and a nationwide manhunt began. He was arrested on April 22, 1999: not for murder, but for the attempted rape of a twelve-year-old boy, John Ivan Sabogal. He was held on suspicion for months and confessed on October 28, 1999, giving detailed accounts and drawing maps to the graves.
He was convicted of the murder of one hundred and thirty-eight boys in western Colombia; the total across Colombia and Ecuador confirmed against him is at least one hundred and ninety-three. In a further confession in 2003 he described twenty-three more minors and five adults, which would put the figure at two hundred and twenty-one. Some Colombian investigators have suggested as many as four hundred. Only the first two figures rest on court findings.
The sentence is the part that produced a permanent political argument. The court imposed terms totalling 1,853 years and nine days. Colombian law capped time actually served at forty years, and statutory reductions for confessing and for helping locate remains brought it down to roughly twenty-two. By 2021 his release was being described as imminent, having served three-fifths of the term, and President Ivan Duque stated publicly that he would not go free during that administration. Fresh prosecutions for killings not previously tried were used to keep him in.
In prison he was assessed as severely disordered: antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, sexual sadism, chronic alcoholism. He converted publicly to Christianity and spoke of demonic influence, which Colombian commentary treated as self-reinvention rather than remorse. He was held at EPAMS Valledupar, known as La Tramacua, and lived under protection.
The names the Colombian press gave him were La Bestia, the Beast; El Loco; El Cura, the priest; and Tribilin, the Spanish name for Goofy. He was arrested under a false name of his own, Bonifacio Morera Lizcano.