In March 1980, in a crowded market in Ambato, in the Ecuadorian highlands, a woman saw a stranger walking away with her daughter, ten years old in most accounts and twelve in some, and screamed. Market vendors caught the man and held him until the police came. He gave his name as Pedro Alonso López. For days he said nothing. Then a police officer, Pastor Córdova Gudiño, was placed in his cell posing as a fellow prisoner, and López began to talk. He described killing girls across three countries, and he led investigators to shallow graves in the hills around Ambato and beyond. He said he had killed more than three hundred.
Before his arrest, Ecuador's police had been seeing a rise in missing girls in the highland provinces, and had largely attributed the disappearances to human trafficking. A flood near Ambato had exposed the remains of several of them; accounts differ on whether that happened in late 1979 or in 1980. The arrest was formally recorded on March 9, 1980.
López was born in the Tolima region of Colombia in October 1948, the seventh of thirteen children of a poor woman who worked as a prostitute in a one-room house; accounts give his birth date as October 5 or October 8 and his birthplace as Santa Isabel or Venadillo. His father, Medardo Reyes, is said to have been killed in La Violencia, the political bloodshed of the period, before he was born. At eight or nine he was put out of the house, by the usual account after his mother caught him molesting a younger sister, and he lived on the streets of Bogotá. He said a man who offered him shelter raped him. Around the age of ten or twelve he was taken in by a couple, American by some accounts, who sent him to a school for orphans, and he ran away again after, he said, a teacher molested him.
In 1969 he was sentenced to seven years in Colombia for car theft. He said he was gang-raped in prison and killed three of the men responsible, and his sentence was extended to nine years. After his release he began traveling through Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. He approached girls, most of them between about eight and twelve and many from poor and Indigenous families, in markets and village squares, led them away, raped them and strangled them. He said he preferred to kill in daylight so that he could see their faces. In Peru, by his account and those of others, he was caught by villagers in the Ayacucho region who meant to kill him, and an American missionary persuaded them to hand him over to the police, who deported him. In Ecuador he said he was killing as many as three girls a week.
After his confession, López took the police to the bodies of some fifty-three girls, a figure reported by the Associated Press at the time; some later accounts give fifty-seven. He was charged in Ecuador with 110 murders on the strength of his confessions and the recovered remains. The record of the conviction itself is confused. It is most often reported that he pleaded guilty to all 110, but some accounts say his plea, in July 1981, covered the fifty-seven cases with physical evidence. Either way he was sentenced to sixteen years, the maximum Ecuadorian law then allowed for murder.
He served his sentence at the García Moreno prison in Quito. Shortly before his release he gave an interview in which he called himself "the man of the century" and said he was being freed for good behavior. On August 31, 1994, after fourteen years, he was released and immediately deported to Colombia, where he was detained as an illegal immigrant and then held on an old murder warrant. Colombian prosecutors could not make a case, and he was declared insane and confined to a psychiatric hospital in Bogotá. In February 1998 doctors declared him sane, and he was released on bail of about fifty to seventy dollars on condition that he report to the authorities. He did not. His elderly mother later said he came to her asking for his inheritance and, told she had nothing, sold her only bed and chair to people in the street.
The last confirmed record of him dates from September 22, 1999, when he renewed his Colombian identity card in Bogotá. Interpol later issued a notice seeking him in connection with a new murder in Colombia, in 2002. There have been reports that he was killed by vigilantes and reports that he was living under another name, and none has been confirmed. If he is alive he is in his late seventies. The girls he killed are known only in part: the fifty-odd whose remains he led police to, and the many more he said were buried across three countries, most of whose names have never been attached to him.