Luis Gregorio Ramírez Maestre was convicted in two Colombian courts of killing four young men in separate events: one in Barrancabermeja, in the department of Santander, in May 2012, and three in and around Valledupar, in the department of Cesar, in 2010 and 2011. The Fiscalía and the police have attributed many more killings to him, between 2006 and 2012, across Cesar, Magdalena, Santander and Córdoba. Colombian outlets have given totals of at least 20, about 30, at least 36 and about 60. No verdict covers most of those deaths, and the published figures do not agree with one another.
His case is also an example of how a series of killings can go unrecognized for years. The deaths occurred in different municipalities and under the jurisdiction of different prosecutors, and a link between them was drawn only after a police investigator in the Magdalena Medio region followed the trail of a stolen telephone.
Ramírez Maestre was born on September 30, 1980, according to Vanguardia of Bucaramanga, and was from the Valledupar area. El Heraldo of Barranquilla reported in 2017 that he was born in La Mina, a rural district under Valledupar's jurisdiction, and had lived in Valledupar for several years before moving to Medellín, Bogotá and Santa Marta. He was married and had children, three by most accounts. In his Santa Marta home his wife and children lived with him until his arrest.
Little is on record about his childhood. In an interview with a national outlet he said that relatives had abused him as a child, Vanguardia reported in 2025. He had come to police attention before the killings were linked: El Heraldo reported that he had been arrested twice for motorcycle theft. On February 24, 2010, Santa Marta police stopped him with a stolen motorcycle and booked him for possession of stolen goods. Vanguardia reported in December 2012 that he was released because the authorities did not yet know of any connection to the deaths in Cesar.
Vanguardia also reported, from his own account, that in October 2008 an armed group in Medellín forced him out of the city with his wife and daughters, and that he reported this to the Fiscalía and was told he was entitled to compensation. That is his own statement, and no independent confirmation is on record. Witnesses quoted in December 2012 said he moved to Medellín in mid-2012 with his wife, children and a brother-in-law, and that he owned a succession of motorcycles that he sold and replaced.
The killings for which Ramírez Maestre has been sentenced are four, in two sets.
The first set came to court in Valledupar. On Fiscalía figures reported by El Heraldo, the victims were Carlos Alberto Ramírez Algarín, aged 27, killed on February 6, 2010; Ricardo Alfonso Jácome Carpio, aged 24, killed on March 29, 2011; and Jesús David Montero Rebolledo, aged 19, killed on November 20, 2011, in the Plato and Bosconia area. Other reports spell the first surname Algarina or give Jácome's age as 25. The three deaths occurred on different dates over about twenty-one months, which is why they count as separate events.
The second set is a single death. Jhon Jairo Amador, a young man of 19 (some reports say 18), was killed on May 20, 2012, in the El Centro district of Barrancabermeja, a city in Santander. His case is the one that brought the investigation to Ramírez Maestre. It was the first for which he was sentenced.
Prosecutors in Bucaramanga described several other deaths from 2012 in the same district of Barrancabermeja. Vanguardia's list of December 2012 included killings dated February 3, March 19, May 6, September 17 and, on the list, May 20 of that year. None of those other cases is on record as a conviction.
On December 14, 2012, the day after his arrest was reported, Vanguardia published a list of twenty cases between October 2009 and November 2012 that investigators attributed to him. The places were Valledupar, mainly in the Río Seco district, Patillal and Chiriguaná in Cesar, a rural district called Zarzal, Santa Marta, Montelíbano in Córdoba, El Centro in Barrancabermeja, San Diego in Cesar, and Puerto Wilches in Santander. A later list, published in August 2025, again numbered twenty dated cases, one in 2009, three in 2010, seven in 2011 and nine in 2012, and described Ramírez Maestre as responsible for "at least 30."
Totals grew as the years passed. In January 2013 Semana wrote of about 30 killings linked by police, with Valledupar accounting for eleven. Noticias RCN, in August 2013, wrote of at least twenty over three years in five departments on the northern coast. By 2017 Semana spoke of about 60 deaths over five years, from 2007 to 2012, in five departments (Cesar, Santander, La Guajira, Norte de Santander and Magdalena), on the strength of a review of more than ten years of police records that turned up 60 cases for those years and places. Investigators had identified 23 of the 60 victims, according to Semana. In 2018 Infobae and Pulzo repeated the figure of 60 and said that Ramírez had acknowledged only some of the cases. They gave his admissions as 23, and in one article as six.
Vanguardia's 2025 interview coverage described him as convicted of at least 36 killings from 2006 to 2012 and said he had spoken of a first killing in 2006 in Valledupar. No court or sentence for that count is on record. Other outlets that year described the confirmed figure as 30. The numbers cannot be reconciled, and only the cases listed above have a verdict on record that names the victims.
The investigation began with deaths that did not seem connected. Noticias Caracol reported in 2025 that a police investigator, Juan Carlos Sánchez, noticed a common pattern across cases in 2010, three years after what the program treated as the first of the series, and that similar cases then appeared in Magdalena and Santander, leading the national police to form a special group. Semana reported in 2013 that an officer of the Sijin judicial police in the Magdalena Medio region followed a victim's phone to link the cases. Its 2017 report said the same officer concluded the cases were the work of one offender and brought in the national police's criminal-profiling group and Interpol, and that investigators used behavioral analysis and phone-record tracking, with techniques it described as drawn from the FBI.
What led to him was a telephone. After the killing in Barrancabermeja in May 2012, the victim's phone stayed in use. Infobae reported that Ramírez had changed the SIM card but kept the handset. Noticias Caracol wrote that calls made from the phone activated a line in Medellín and that interception of those calls pointed to him.
Semana reported on January 26, 2013 that the police and the Fiscalía arrested Ramírez on December 13, 2012, in Santa Marta, the city on the Magdalena coast where his wife and children lived. Noticias Caracol gave the same date and place. The accounts differ on other points. Vanguardia reported in 2025 that he was captured in Medellín, and gave December 12, 2012 as the date of detention in another article that year.
Investigators recovered identity cards, driving licenses and other papers belonging to victims, according to Semana and Vanguardia. One of the papers belonged to a man named Luis Enrique Méndez, whom the Fiscalía listed among the 2012 cases in Barrancabermeja.
The Fiscalía charged him in the Amador killing. Vanguardia's report of June 30, 2013 gave December 11 as the date of the charge, two days before the arrest date given by Semana. Vanguardia's report of December 14, 2012 said he accepted the charge at a hearing before a control judge in Barrancabermeja, which ordered him held, and sent him to the Cárcel Modelo in Bucaramanga. The charges were aggravated homicide in heterogeneous and successive concurrence with torture, and aggravated qualified theft. Prosecutors said they would bring further cases on the same charges, using what had been taken from the house, and were trying to establish whether he had acted alone.
Ramírez was then 32, and was held at the medium-security prison at Palogordo in Girón. At a hearing in the Centro de Servicios Judiciales in Bucaramanga in June 2013 he apologized to relatives of victims who had come to listen. He also said that he would be willing to confess only if the justice system gave him the guarantees he needed to explain why he had killed. Relatives of victims who attended told Vanguardia that they thought he had not acted alone and hoped he would say more.
On the afternoon of August 9, 2013, Juzgado Primero Penal del Circuito Especializado in Bucaramanga sentenced him to 34 years and six months in prison for the killing of Jhon Jairo Amador. Vanguardia and Noticias RCN reported the verdict the same day or the next. He had accepted the charges, which brought a reduction of about 40 percent from a starting sentence of 57 years and six months. He was convicted of aggravated homicide and of aggravated qualified theft, the latter for what was taken from the victim.
The court acquitted him on the count of torture. The judge held that the conduct, though cruel, did not meet the definition of that offense. The Fiscalía, the family's lawyer and the defense all announced appeals, the prosecutors against the acquittal on torture and the defense against the length of the sentence. The judge also asked the Fiscalía to investigate whether he had acted with others or with criminal organizations.
The outcome of those appeals is not on record. Later articles describe the sentence as 34 years: El Heraldo in 2017, Infobae in 2018, Vanguardia in 2023 and 2025. Whether the appeal changed the first-instance figure of 34 years and six months is not on record.
In March 2019 a second set of cases came to judgment in Valledupar. El Heraldo reported on March 14, 2019 that Juzgado Quinto Penal del Circuito de Valledupar, sitting for trial, had sentenced Ramírez Maestre to 20 years in prison on the previous day, under a plea agreement with the Fiscalía. The sentence combined 18 years for the first homicide with one additional year for each of the other two. The victims were Carlos Alberto Ramírez Algarín, Ricardo Alfonso Jácome Carpio and Jesús David Montero Rebolledo.
He had told the court he took part as an accomplice. The judge found him responsible as the author of all three. The judge also warned the Fiscalía to examine similar plea negotiations more carefully, observing that 20 years for three aggravated homicides could leave an impression of inadequate justice. A sister of Jácome told El Heraldo that the relatives disagreed with the sentence and that he should receive the penalty he deserved.
El Heraldo had reported in November 2017 that three homicide charges were pending against him in Valledupar, two in the city and one in the Bosconia and Plato area, and that a pre-agreement with the Fiscalía was under study. The 2019 verdict matches those charges.
Several outlets report a further conviction whose court is not on record. Noticias Caracol wrote that in October 2016 a judge in Valledupar sentenced him to 30 years for six murders, a term extended to 60 years, the legal maximum, and that his sentences added up to more than 80 years. Infobae, Pulzo and Diario Panorama in April 2018 repeated that he had been sentenced in 2016 for six homicides, giving the term as 30 years in the text and 36 years in the page description; Pulzo wrote 36 years for 23 murders. Semana's report of October 28, 2017 said that a court in Valledupar had convicted him in the preceding week, after hearings at the Valledupar Palace of Justice, and gave "more than 30 years" in one passage and 36 in another. Semana's date, October 2017, is a year later than Caracol's, and the 2017 El Heraldo article says charges were still pending in Valledupar in November of that year. Whether these describe one judgment or two is not on record, and the court, the case number and the victims are not named.
After sentencing he was held at Palogordo in Girón, Santander, and El Heraldo reported in 2017 that he was at the high- and maximum-security penitentiary in Girón. Semana reported in October 2017 that he was held in a high-security wing of the maximum-security prison in Valledupar, where the only other prisoner in the pavilion was Luis Alfredo Garavito, another convicted killer. Infobae reported in November 2018 that he was at La Tramacúa, in Valledupar, in a treatment unit with psychological care. Vanguardia in 2023 and Noticias Caracol in 2025 also placed him at La Tramacúa; a photograph caption in Vanguardia's August 2025 coverage said he remained at Palogordo.
Vanguardia reported in 2023 that he might become eligible for house arrest or parole in 2032, after serving twenty years, when he would be 52. That is the newspaper's estimate. In the 2025 interview coverage, he said that by his own reckoning he could be released in about eight years after serving three-fifths of his sentence, and the families of victims said they rejected any release.
Ramírez gave interviews in prison. In 2018 Pulzo reported on a televised interview in which the interviewer questioned his account and suggested that he acted alone and had enjoyed what he did; Ramírez rejected the description of himself as a psychopath, said no one had ever examined him medically, and said that anyone calling him a serial killer was lying. In the same period reports said he claimed to have received orders from an armed group, which he described as a paramilitary body carrying out "social cleansing." Vanguardia's 2025 podcast interview repeated that claim and added that he accepted that some of those killed were innocent and that he sometimes chose people at random. He said he had killed his first victim in 2006.
None of these statements has been tested in court. Pulzo reported that he had cooperated little with the Fiscalía and believed he would receive a sentence reduction for good behavior. A psychologist quoted by Vanguardia in 2026 described him as self-centered and suggested psychopathic traits; the view is the expert's, not a clinical finding.
The figure for victims is the largest open question. Convictions with named victims cover four deaths. A fifth set, six deaths, is reported without a court. Beyond those, many further deaths have been attributed to him by police and press. The tallies of 20, 30, 36 and 60 differ and sometimes contradict one another, and several lists of named victims differ in dates and spellings.
The place of arrest is also disputed: Santa Marta (Semana, Noticias Caracol, Vanguardia in 2012 and 2013) against Medellín (Vanguardia in 2025). The start of the series is given as 2006 (his own statement, Vanguardia 2025), 2007 (Semana 2017, Noticias Caracol) and 2009 (Vanguardia's lists). The outcome of the appeals in the first case and the legal basis of the 60-year figure reported by Noticias Caracol are not on record.
His statement that others gave him orders and that those he killed were criminals sits against his own concession that some victims were innocent. The Bucaramanga judge asked the Fiscalía to investigate whether he acted with accomplices, and no result is on record.
September 30, 1980: Born, according to Vanguardia, in the Valledupar area.
2006 to 2012: Period of the killings attributed to him; the start year is disputed.
February 6, 2010: Carlos Alberto Ramírez Algarín killed in Valledupar (2019 conviction).
February 24, 2010: Stopped by police in Santa Marta with a stolen motorcycle, booked and released.
March 29, 2011: Ricardo Alfonso Jácome Carpio killed in Valledupar (2019 conviction).
November 20, 2011: Jesús David Montero Rebolledo killed (2019 conviction).
May 20, 2012: Jhon Jairo Amador killed in El Centro, Barrancabermeja (2013 conviction).
December 13, 2012: Arrested in Santa Marta, according to Semana and Noticias Caracol.
December 2012: Accepts the charge in the Amador case at a hearing in Barrancabermeja and is held in Bucaramanga.
June 2013: Apologizes to relatives of victims at a Bucaramanga hearing.
August 9, 2013: Sentenced to 34 years and six months in Bucaramanga; acquitted of torture; appeals announced.
October 2016 or October 2017: Valledupar conviction for six killings reported by several outlets, without a named court.
March 13, 2019: Sentenced to 20 years in Valledupar for three homicides under a plea agreement (reported March 14).
August 2025: Interviewed for a podcast; reported held in prison.
April 2026: Vanguardia revisits the case.