Pedro Alonso López, a Colombian, confessed to killing more than a hundred girls in Ecuador and many more children in Colombia and Peru. He was arrested in early 1980 at a market in Ambato, in the Ecuadorian highlands, while trying to lead a young girl away. Over the following weeks he took police to remote burial sites around Tungurahua province and beyond, and the remains of dozens of girls were recovered. An Ecuadorian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison, the maximum term that Ecuadorian law then allowed.
He was released in 1994 and handed over to Colombia, where prosecutors in his home town of El Espinal, Tolima, accused him of the rape and killing of eleven children in the late 1970s. A Colombian evaluation declared him inimputable, meaning not criminally responsible because of mental disorder, and he was held in a prison psychiatric annex in Bogotá. In 1998 he was declared sound and released on bail. He renewed his identity card in Bogotá on September 22, 1999. That is the last confirmed record of him. Whether he is alive, and where, is not known.
López has been written about for more than four decades, and the sources disagree on many basic facts, including his birth date, his second surname, the year he went to Ecuador, the number of graves found and the number of counts on which he was convicted.
Agence France-Presse, in a 1994 dispatch printed by El Tiempo of Bogotá, called him Pedro López Monsalve. Colombian papers have used Pedro Alonso López. A 1998 El Tiempo report called him Pedro Alfonso López. In Ecuador the press called him "el Monstruo de los Andes," and AFP reported that in Colombia he was called "la bestia del Tolima." In 2018 the Colombian radio network La FM listed him on what it called the "Muro de la Infamia," a list of child killers in Colombia and the region.
The figures attached to him range widely. AFP reported in March 1994 that he had confessed to raping and killing more than 100 Ecuadorian girls and dozens of Colombian children, and that he had buried more than 60 of them at sites he later showed investigators. In November 1994 AFP put the number he killed at about eighty and the number of bodies recovered at about sixty. The freelance writer Ron Laytner, writing in 1992, said López led police to 53 graves and confessed to an undercover detective to 240 more killings of missing girls in Peru and Colombia, and that police said he could have been charged with 350. Semana, the Colombian news magazine, said in 2002 that the authorities estimated about 300 victims in the three countries. El Tiempo reported in 2018 that he led police to 57 bodies and claimed to have attacked at least 110 children in Ecuador and to have committed about 200 more killings in Colombia and Peru. None of the totals above 100 has been tested in court.
El Tiempo reported in 2018 and 2021 that López was born on October 8, 1948, in Venadillo, Tolima, the seventh of thirteen children, and that he spent much of his childhood in El Espinal, a town in the same department. A 2012 El Tiempo report gave the same date but the town of Santa Isabel, Tolima. Semana gave his birth as May 1949. Laytner quoted López as saying he was the seventh of 13 children, born in Tolima.
His mother was a laundress in the San Rafael neighborhood of El Espinal when El Tiempo spoke to her in 1994. El Tiempo's later reports describe her as harsh and say she punished him often and severely; López himself told Laytner that his mother had put him out of the house at the age of eight. Semana, citing his file, said he was abandoned at eight and lived on the streets of several Colombian cities until a man in Ibagué took him in; psychiatrists who later examined him, Semana said, believed that man had abused him. El Tiempo's 2012 report says he left for Bogotá at eight after a fight with his mother and fell into poverty there. In 1994 neighbors in San Rafael told El Tiempo that he had been a playful, good-natured boy until about the age of nine, when he disappeared.
His mother's account was different from his. Speaking to El Tiempo in 1994, she said he was a bad son and that she was not to blame for how he had turned out. She asked the authorities not to release him and said she was afraid of him. She also apologized to the mothers of the children he was accused of harming and said she lit a candle every day asking God to change him.
Experts quoted by El Tiempo in 2018 tied his later conduct in part to the violence of his childhood. The anthropologist Esteban Cruz said López was not born bad, but that nothing excuses such crimes. El Tiempo also cited a study by the psychology department of the Universidad del Rosario suggesting that the abuse he suffered may have bred in him a revulsion toward women and a wish to harm them.
By El Tiempo's account he was living on the streets of Bogotá and stealing cars when he was first imprisoned. He was sentenced in 1969 to seven years for car theft. In prison he was sexually assaulted by three inmates, and he later killed them. Those killings added two years to his sentence, according to El Tiempo's 2018 and 2021 reports; the psychologist and profiler Edwin Olaya told the paper that the abuse, combined with possible psychopathy, drove what he called a compulsion to kill. El Tiempo said court hearings recorded his decision, after the prison attacks, never to be a victim again.
Other accounts of this period differ. Semana said that in 1967, at 18, he spent several months in various prisons for minor offenses. El Tiempo's 2012 report said he was jailed at La Modelo in Bogotá at 20 for car theft, killed two inmates there and was freed after about two years. Laytner wrote that at 18, while jailed in Colombia for car theft, he killed three men who had raped him. AFP reported in 1994 that he had escaped from a Colombian prison before going to Ecuador.
He was released, by El Tiempo's account, in 1978. A 1998 El Tiempo report said his criminal record began in El Espinal in 1974, with complaints of statutory sexual offenses against minors.
After his release, according to El Tiempo, López moved through the Andes toward Peru. The forensic expert Luis Jiménez described him to the paper as a nomad whose constant movement across borders made him hard to catch.
What is said about his time in Peru rests on his own statements and on later press accounts; no Peruvian court record of it has been reported. El Tiempo reported in 2018 that in the Ayacucho region he gained the trust of girls aged roughly 8 to 12 from Indigenous communities by offering them work and gifts, took them to isolated places and killed them. The paper said he was caught trying to take a nine-year-old girl in Ayacucho and that members of the community were preparing to bury him alive when the authorities intervened. He was then expelled toward Ecuador. No victim in Peru has been named, and no Peruvian charge or trial has come to light.
Semana gave a different chronology: it said López arrived in Ecuador in 1973, passing himself off as a humble street vendor, and that between 1973 and 1980 the police of Ecuador, Colombia and Peru were all investigating disappearances of girls aged 8 to 13. The police first suspected a trafficking ring. AFP's 1994 report said investigators in Ecuador had no leads and had considered theories such as organ trafficking or the sale of the children abroad. El Tiempo said Ecuadorian authorities were slow to connect the disappearances to one man because gangs engaged in trafficking and sexual exploitation were active at the time.
AFP reported in 1994 that he had killed girls in Ecuador for three years in a row. Laytner wrote that he killed two or sometimes three girls a week over three years. Neither figure was ever verified.
The police and press accounts agree on the general pattern. López approached girls from poor families in markets, plazas and streets, often girls who worked selling goods or newspapers beside their families. He offered them sweets, coins, small gifts such as hand mirrors, or the promise of work, and persuaded them to walk with him to a quiet place outside the town. There he killed them, by strangulation in the accounts of the police and in his own statements, and buried them, AFP reported, with their belongings. El Tiempo said he posed as a street vendor or as a stranger who had lost his way.
Laytner quoted him as saying he followed girls for days before he took them and that he killed only in daylight, at sunrise. El Tiempo quoted from what it described as Ecuadorian police records of his confession, in which he said that the moment of death was thrilling and that one day, when he was free, he would feel it again. He also called the killings his mission.
Very little has been reported about the Ecuadorian victims as individuals. They were girls from poor, often Indigenous, highland families, many of whom worked in the markets alongside their mothers. AFP described the recovered remains as mostly those of girls aged 6 to 9, and gave the full range of the girls he confessed to killing as 5 to 16. Semana said they were 8 to 13. The places named in the confessions included Ibarra and the provinces of Pichincha, Chimborazo, Azuay and Los Ríos, as well as Tungurahua.
One victim appears in Semana's account of the arrest: a ten-year-old girl who sold newspapers and had been reported missing. Her body was exposed when a flood swept through part of Tungurahua. Semana did not give her name. The reliable reporting includes no list of the Ecuadorian victims' names.
The accounts of the arrest differ in their details but agree on the setting: a market in Ambato, a city about 120 kilometers south of Quito.
AFP reported in 1994 that López was arrested in early 1980 at a market there while trying to lure a young girl with sweets. The March 1994 dispatch said the girl was six. Laytner's 1992 story, by contrast, said that in 1979 a river overflowed near Ambato and the bodies of four girls who had been strangled washed up on its banks, and that three days later López was caught trying to take a ten-year-old girl. The girl's mother saw him walking away with her daughter and screamed, and a crowd held him until the police arrived.
Semana's version puts the flood in March 1980. It says the flood exposed the body of the ten-year-old newspaper seller, and that witnesses had seen her with López. A police major, Telmo Tamayo, questioned him as a matter of routine, and the statement López gave on Monday, March 10, 1980, was decisive. In it, according to Semana, he admitted killing the girl and burying her under a bridge, and went on to confess to killing about 200 more girls in Ecuador.
Laytner gave a further account of how the confession was obtained. He wrote that the police placed an undercover detective, whom he named as Pastor Gonzales, in López's cell; the detective said he posed as a rapist to win López's trust, barely slept for 27 days, and heard everything. Laytner quoted him as saying the confessions were beyond anything he had imagined. Other accounts give the man a different name and role, and the details remain unconfirmed.
The police did not believe him at first. Semana wrote that they accepted his confession only when he led them to about fifty different places around Tungurahua and the bodies were dug up. AFP said he guided investigators for several weeks to remote sites near several Ecuadorian cities, where more than 60 victims had been buried, and that other bodies were never found because he said he did not remember where he had left them. AFP's November 1994 report said some graves were never found because he did not reveal them.
The number of remains recovered has been given as 53 (Laytner), about 60 or more than 60 (AFP) and 57 (El Tiempo, 2018; El Tiempo, 2012, gave 57 as the number of crimes he confessed to). How many of the recovered girls were identified was not reported.
AFP reported that in the days after his arrest López told investigators he was a messenger of God collecting souls for heaven, and that the girls he killed had gone straight to the kingdom of heaven. He repeated the claim at his trial, AFP said.
López was tried and sentenced in Ecuador, but no court judgment or official Ecuadorian record has been published, and the press accounts do not agree on what the court found.
AFP, in March and November 1994, said he received a 16-year sentence, the maximum under Ecuadorian law, which did not allow sentences for separate crimes to be added together. The only exception at the time, AFP said, was drug trafficking, for which the maximum had been raised to 25 years.
El Tiempo, in a June 1998 report, said that in 1980 an Ecuadorian court sentenced him to 15 years for the rape and murder of several minors, and that during the trial he admitted raping and strangling dozens of poor girls.
El Tiempo's 2012 report said he confessed to 57 crimes in Ecuador and was sentenced to nearly 15 years.
El Tiempo's 2018 and 2021 reports said that after confessing he was sentenced to 16 years, the maximum penalty in Ecuador.
Vanguardia, the Bucaramanga daily, said in 2023 that he was sentenced in Ecuador in 1981 to 16 years for one crime, and that sentences were not cumulative in Ecuador.
Laytner wrote in 1992 that López was found guilty of murdering 110 girls in Ecuador and that, two months after his arrest, he pleaded guilty to 110 counts of murder.
Semana said in 2002 that he was sentenced in Ecuador to 30 years for the murder of 200 girls. That figure conflicts with every other source, including AFP's contemporary reporting on the 16-year limit.
What can be said with confidence is that an Ecuadorian court convicted him of the rape and murder of girls and gave him the longest sentence Ecuadorian law then allowed. The reports do not establish the court, the date of the judgment or the number of counts.
He served his sentence in Quito. Laytner named the prison as the Penal García Moreno; AFP quoted Joel León as director of the old Quito prison where López was held. Laytner also quoted Victor Lascano, whom he described as governor of the Ambato jail where López was first held, as saying that López was unreformed and without remorse.
In his years in prison López gave interviews, and what he said changed. Laytner, who described his 1992 conversation as López's only interview, quoted him as calling himself the man of the century and saying no one would forget him. In interviews with the evening paper Últimas Noticias, reported by AFP in March 1994, he denied killing the girls. He said he had been only an accomplice of a man he named as Pedro Patiño, whom he accused of being the real killer. He told the paper he had thought of suicide early in his sentence, but had decided that life was beautiful; that no one loved him and he did not love himself; that he had wasted his time in prison; and that he might write an autobiography.
He also wrote to the president of Ecuador's Superior Court of Justice asking for supervised release, AFP said, and promised not to repeat the crimes for which he had received the maximum sentence.
Ecuadorian law allowed reductions for good conduct, and López accumulated them. AFP reported in March 1994 that he had earned reductions totaling 599 days and that prison officials expected him to be released before July 20, 1994. In November 1994 AFP said he had served a sentence shortened by almost two years for good conduct. Laytner had reported in 1992 that his release was approaching after slightly more than 12 years, and quoted López as saying he would soon be free on good behavior. Laytner also quoted a prisons minister, Pablo Faguero, as saying that it sounded strange, but that it was the law. Semana's 2002 account, which said he was granted provisional release in 1993 after thirteen years, differs from AFP's contemporary reports.
The director of the old Quito prison, Joel León, told AFP in March 1994 that once López had served his sentence, and once it had been checked that no other proceedings were open against him in Ecuador, he would be deported to Colombia. AFP reported that Ecuadorians doubted he would stop, and noted that he was still in his forties.
By early September 1994 he was in Colombian hands. El Tiempo reported that on September 5 he was brought from Pasto to El Espinal under escort by the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), the Colombian security agency. AFP said in November that he had been handed over to the authorities of his own country about two months earlier and remained in custody there. El Tiempo's later reports describe the handover as an extradition requested by a court in El Espinal, which had a warrant for him.
In El Espinal he was accused of the rape and killing of eleven children about fourteen years earlier. The case file had been destroyed. El Tiempo reported that a fire around 1991 in the building that housed the Juzgado Quinto de Instrucción Criminal, the court handling the investigation, had burned the bulky file. Two of the eleven cases had been identified again by the time he arrived.
Under the law, El Tiempo explained, Prosecutor 52, Fernando Vanegas, had 72 hours to determine López's legal situation, and there was a risk that he would have to be released at the end of that period. Vanegas questioned him for an hour and a half, trying to understand how he thought, what he intended and whether he remembered the accusations. López was then handcuffed, taken to the judicial police and, late in the afternoon, placed in a cell at the town jail.
He told reporters that he owed nothing, because he had already paid what he owed in Ecuador, and that as soon as the prosecutor released him he would go far away. Asked how he would answer for the eleven children, he asked the reporter whether he knew for a fact that the accusation was true. He said he wanted to see his mother and cry with her. She told the paper she did not want to see him.
El Tiempo named two of the children. Diógenes Capera Leal was seven years old. His father, a musician who played serenades, searched for him for 35 days before the boy was found dead in a ditch in El Espinal. Jhon Jairo Arias Suárez was also seven, and died the same way, the paper said. Diógenes's father told El Tiempo that most of the children were girls, that he still held a deep resentment against López, and that a man like that could not be forgiven and had to pay.
Days later another mother came forward. El Tiempo reported on September 8, 1994, that Alba Sánchez went to the justice house in El Espinal to say that her daughter, Flor Alba (Floralba) Sánchez Ospina, had been raped and killed by López fourteen years before. She was the only parent who came to the prosecutor's office to give evidence against him again; the parents of the other children had not come forward. A 2012 El Tiempo report said Flor Alba was 12 and was killed in December 1979.
Because a warrant existed in Flor Alba's case, the prosecutor questioned López about it, and he denied responsibility. About two thousand people gathered outside the justice house on the day of the hearings, El Tiempo reported, many of them demanding a longer sentence. Orlando Ospitia, the regional director of prosecutions, told the paper that the official in charge had five working days to decide. If the evidence was weak, López would go free. If it was strong, he would be held in preventive detention without release, because the case involved homicide. The third possibility was that a psychiatric report would find that he suffered from a mental illness and should be confined in a care facility.
The third outcome is what happened. El Tiempo reported in 2018 that after an evaluation he was declared a "sujeto inimputable" because of mental disorders and sent to a psychiatric annex. Vanguardia identified it as the psychiatric annex of the Cárcel Modelo in Bogotá, the prison where he had been held as a young man. Semana reported in 2002 that the psychiatric opinion attached to his Interpol notice said he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia with severe personality disorders and had a great capacity to deceive. El Tiempo's 2012 report said he had been found to have paranoid schizophrenia.
A finding of inimputability is not a conviction. The criminal lawyer Francisco Bernate explained to El Tiempo that a person is declared inimputable when it is established that, at the time of the acts, he did not understand what he was doing. Because the aim is treatment rather than punishment, Bernate said, the time spent in a psychiatric facility depends on recovery, not on the gravity of the crime. López was therefore never convicted in Colombia of any of the El Espinal killings. A 2012 El Tiempo report described the Flor Alba Sánchez case as his only conviction in Colombia; the same report said he was declared inimputable, and the paper's later reporting describes no conviction.
He was confined for about four years, by El Tiempo's account, or about three, by its 2012 report. El Tiempo's 2012 report said he wrote letters to the judge asking for a psychiatric evaluation and arguing that he was fit to return to society, and that his custodians accepted the argument. A report by the Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal, the paper said, found him cured.
In 1998, El Tiempo reported, he was declared "sano," sound of mind, and released on bail of 80,000 pesos, with a promise to appear before the court once a month. The 2012 report dates the release to February 1998. Vanguardia said he was ordered to report periodically to the psychiatric annex of the Cárcel Modelo, that he never did, and that his whereabouts became unknown. Several experts in criminal psychology told El Tiempo that he was a psychopath and could not be rehabilitated.
By June 1998 the Ecuadorian border provinces were in alarm. El Tiempo reported on June 17, 1998, that word had spread that López had left Colombian custody and was in Carchi or Imbabura, in northern Ecuador. Telephone lines at radio newsrooms in Tulcán and Ibarra were jammed by callers asking the police to act. José Rivas, the police commander for Carchi, said López had been seen near El Juncal, on the border between Carchi and Imbabura, the previous Sunday afternoon, but the sighting was never confirmed. The police stepped up checks of vehicles and passengers and sent a telegram with an updated photograph to all twelve police posts in the area. DAS officers in Pasto confirmed that reports placed him in Ecuador.
There was no warrant for him in Ecuador. He had served his sentence there, the paper noted, and he had been deported because he had no document allowing him to stay. He had claimed to be a naturalized Ecuadorian since 1973, but could not prove it, and the police said the claim was false. Ecuadorian authorities reported no unexplained disappearances in the previous two months and no rapes they could link to him. In the border towns, the paper said, the main precaution was to watch students as they left school.
The last confirmed record of López is from Bogotá. El Tiempo reported that on the afternoon of September 22, 1999, he went to an office of the Registraduría Nacional, Colombia's civil registry, and renewed his national identity card, number 80.092.633. A police database check showed no pending matters with the judicial authorities. The paper described him as shabby in appearance.
The journalist Andrés Marín told El Tiempo that López had been using an identity card that belonged to another man. Vanguardia also reported that he had taken another man's identity in Bogotá, which allowed him to move freely, and that he had visited his mother in El Espinal and claimed an inheritance. El Tiempo's account contains both versions, the renewal under his own number and the use of another man's card, and does not reconcile them.
In October 2002, El Tiempo reported, Colombia asked Interpol to issue a notice for his arrest, on suspicion that he was behind the killing of a girl in El Espinal. Semana reported in May 2002 that Colombian authorities feared he was in the country, that Interpol, the police, the Fiscalía and the DAS had him on maximum alert, and that his photograph and details were being circulated in the border regions with Ecuador and Peru. Semana also said that an El Espinal court had issued a warrant in late 1995 for the killing of an 11-year-old girl, that Interpol had held a red notice on him since 1998, and that Peruvian authorities had blamed him for new disappearances of children after his release because the killings matched his methods. None of those Peruvian cases has been described in any detail, and no charge in any of them has been reported.
No arrest followed.
In 2005, El Tiempo reported, his identity number was cancelled and removed from the electoral roll after a positive "necrodactilia" test, a fingerprint identification made on a dead body. Yet the Registraduría, the paper said, still certified the number as valid. Vanguardia reported in 2023 that a body had reportedly arrived at the Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal in 2005. Vanguardia did not say whose body it was, where it was found, or whether the identification was ever confirmed. Marín asked, in El Tiempo, where and in what circumstances López had died if the number had been cancelled, and where his remains were.
His fate is unknown. La FM reported in 2018 that no one could say for certain whether he was alive. El Tiempo's reports of 2018 and 2021 said the experts it consulted thought it plausible that he was still alive. Vanguardia, in March 2023, set out the competing versions: that he died and his body reached Medicina Legal in 2005; that he was living in Lérida or Mariquita, in Tolima; that he was living in destitution in Bogotá; or that relatives of his victims had taken revenge. Reports that he had fled to Ecuador were never confirmed, Vanguardia said. As of March 2023, there was no confirmed evidence that he was alive or dead.
For many in Colombia and Ecuador the case became an example of what a justice system can fail to do. Francisco Bernate told El Tiempo that the more than 300 children were victims of a savage man and of a justice system that found him too late. Vanguardia's 2023 report placed the case in a broader argument about impunity, noting that in both Ecuador and Colombia sentences were not added together.
The case was also cited in the years that followed in Colombian reporting on other killers of children. Semana's 2002 article on the search for him compared him with Luis Alfredo Garavito, captured in Colombia in 1999. AFP's March 1994 dispatch compared him with Daniel Camargo Barbosa, another Colombian, then imprisoned in Ecuador and accused of killing and raping at least 30 women and girls; AFP said the two men had the highest numbers of victims of any killers held in Ecuador.
In El Espinal, the families of the children he was accused of killing did not see a trial. The file on the eleven children had burned before he returned, and only one mother, Alba Sánchez, came forward in 1994 to renew her complaint. In Ecuador, the families of the girls whose remains he showed to police saw him convicted, but under a law that capped his punishment at 16 years.
The total number of his victims. The figures of 110 in Ecuador, about 200 in Colombia and Peru, and more than 300 overall come from his own statements and from police and press estimates. None was tested in a court. The number of remains recovered in Ecuador, the firmest figure, is reported as 53, 57, about 60 or more than 60, depending on the source.
The Ecuadorian conviction. Accounts give the sentence as 15 or 16 years and the year as 1980 or 1981, and they differ on the counts: 110 counts on a guilty plea (Laytner), the rape and murder of several minors (El Tiempo, 1998), 57 crimes (El Tiempo, 2012), one crime (Vanguardia, 2023). Semana's 30 years for 200 killings conflicts with all of them.
The arrest. Laytner put the flood in 1979 and said the girl's mother raised the alarm; Semana put it in March 1980 and credited the questioning to a police major, Telmo Tamayo; AFP said only that he was caught at a market in early 1980 trying to lure a young girl, whom it described as six. The undercover officer Laytner named as Pastor Gonzales is not confirmed in other reliable reporting.
His age and birth. El Tiempo gives October 8, 1948, but differs on the town (Venadillo or Santa Isabel). Semana gives May 1949. Laytner gave his age as 41 in March 1992; AFP gave it as 46 in March 1994.
Peru. His own claim of about 100 killings in Ayacucho and the story that villagers there nearly buried him alive appear in later Colombian press accounts. No Peruvian record of them is known.
The El Espinal cases. The 1994 accusation covered eleven children. Only two were identified again by September 1994, and Flor Alba Sánchez's case was the one in which a warrant existed. López denied responsibility. He was declared inimputable, not convicted.
His claim of innocence. In 1994 he told Últimas Noticias that a man he called Pedro Patiño was the real killer and that he had been only an accomplice. No evidence for this has been reported.
Whether he is dead. A cancelled identity number and a body reported at Medicina Legal in 2005 suggest that someone identified a body as his. Yet the number was later certified as valid, and no confirmed identification has been published.
1948: Born October 8 in Tolima, Colombia, according to El Tiempo (Semana gives May 1949).
Childhood: Leaves home at about eight, by his own account and Semana's.
1969: Sentenced in Bogotá to seven years for car theft; kills inmates who assaulted him; two years added to his sentence (El Tiempo).
1974: Complaints of sexual offenses against minors filed in El Espinal, according to El Tiempo (1998).
1978: Released from prison in Colombia (El Tiempo).
1978 to 1980: Travels through the Andes to Peru and Ecuador; killings attributed to him in all three countries.
December 1979: Flor Alba Sánchez Ospina, 12, killed in El Espinal (El Tiempo, 2012).
Early 1980: Arrested at a market in Ambato, Ecuador.
March 10, 1980: Gives the statement Semana describes as decisive.
1980: Leads police to burial sites; the remains of dozens of girls are recovered.
1980 or 1981: Sentenced in Ecuador to the 16-year maximum (some reports say 15).
About 1991: Fire destroys the El Espinal case file on eleven children.
March 22, 1992: Laytner's interview published, reporting that release is approaching.
March 1994: AFP reports 599 days of sentence reductions and an expected release before July 20.
1994: Released in Ecuador and handed to Colombian authorities.
September 5, 1994: Brought from Pasto to El Espinal under DAS escort.
September 1994: Alba Sánchez renews her complaint over her daughter's death; about 2,000 people gather outside the justice house.
1994 to 1998: Declared inimputable and held in the psychiatric annex of La Modelo, Bogotá.
1998: Declared sound; released on bail of 80,000 pesos (February 1998, per El Tiempo, 2012).
June 1998: Unconfirmed sighting near El Juncal, northern Ecuador; alarm in Carchi and Imbabura.
September 22, 1999: Renews his identity card in Bogotá; last confirmed record.
May 2002: Semana reports a nationwide alert for him in Colombia.
October 2002: Colombia requests an Interpol notice over the killing of a girl in El Espinal.
2005: His identity number cancelled after a positive post-mortem fingerprint test; the Registraduría later certifies it as still valid.
March 26, 2023: Vanguardia reports his fate still unresolved.