Pedro Alonso Lopez was convicted in Ecuador in 1980 of one hundred and ten murders, sentenced to sixteen years, the maximum the country's penal code then allowed for murder, and released after fourteen. He was last reliably seen in 1999. He has been free and unaccounted for longer than he was imprisoned.
He was born in Tolima, Colombia on October 8, 1948, one of thirteen children of a woman who worked as a prostitute. Accounts of why he left home at eight differ: some say his mother put him out, others that he ran. He reached Bogota and lived on the streets among other homeless children. He has said that a man offered him shelter for a night and raped him. At ten an elderly couple took him in and enrolled him at a school for orphaned children.
In 1969 he was convicted of vehicle theft and sentenced to seven years, extended to nine after he killed three men in prison. Men he said had gang-raped him. He was released in 1978.
From then he took girls, mostly between eight and twelve and mostly from poor and Indigenous communities, in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. He approached them in markets and village plazas, led them out of town, and raped and strangled them. He said he killed at dawn because he wanted to see the light leave their eyes, and at the peak claimed he was killing three girls a week. South American reporting called him el monstruo de los Andes, the Monster of the Andes.
In Peru he was caught by villagers in Ayacucho who were preparing to bury him alive. An American missionary intervened, persuaded them to hand him to the authorities, and the authorities deported him. He went on killing.
In April 1980 a flash flood at Ambato in Ecuador exposed the remains of four missing girls. He was arrested in the first week of March that year after approaching a girl in a public plaza. He confessed, and in the following weeks led police to fifty-three bodies in shallow graves across the Andean provinces of Tungurahua, Cotopaxi, Chimborazo, Pichincha and Imbabura. A figure reported at the time by the Associated Press. He put his own total at more than three hundred across the three countries.
He was convicted of one hundred and ten murders. Sixteen years was the ceiling, and he served fourteen of them at the Garcia Moreno prison in Quito, where Daniel Camargo Barbosa was also held. Shortly before his release he gave an interview calling himself the man of the century and arguing that his cooperation had earned him his freedom. He was released on August 31, 1994 for good behaviour.
Ecuador deported him immediately and Colombia detained him on arrival as an illegal immigrant, then on an outstanding warrant for a murder from the late 1970s. Prosecutors could not build a case; much of the Colombian evidence had not been preserved. He was declared insane and committed to a psychiatric hospital in Bogota instead. In 1998 the hospital declared him sane and he was released on bail of between fifty and a hundred dollars, on condition that he report periodically to the authorities. He absconded almost immediately.
He renewed his Colombian citizenship card in 1999 and that is the last confirmed record of him. Interpol issued a notice for his arrest in 2002 in connection with a fresh murder, and deactivated it in 2005. He has been variously reported dead at the hands of vigilantes, alive under another name, and buried anonymously; none of it is established. If he is alive he is in his late seventies.
The number attached to him needs care. One hundred and ten is what a court convicted him of. Fifty-three is what he physically led police to. Three hundred and more is his own account, given while cooperating, and has never been tested. All three figures circulate interchangeably, and only the first two rest on anything.