Pedro Pablo Nakada Ludeña was arrested in Huaral, about 80 kilometers from Lima, on December 28, 2006. Peruvian newspapers later reported that he confessed to killing 25 people and that he told police he had been sent to clean the country of people he called "la escoria," the scum. The press named him "El Apóstol de la Muerte," the Apostle of Death.
His case then took an uneven path through the courts. Judges in the Huaura judicial district first agreed to try him under a special procedure for defendants who may not be criminally responsible, then switched back to an ordinary trial after a panel of state psychiatrists found him sane. In May 2008 a collegiate trial court in Huacho convicted him of aggravated homicide and aggravated robbery, sentenced him to 35 years, and acquitted him on the charges concerning seven of the people named in the indictment. In March 2009 an appeals chamber declared that judgment null. In March 2010 the Supreme Court in Lima confirmed that he had to be tried again in an ordinary trial. Reports from 2015 onward say that he was eventually found not criminally responsible because of paranoid schizophrenia and confined to the psychiatric ward of Lurigancho prison in Lima.
Nakada was born on February 28, 1973, in El Agustino, a district of Lima, according to Trome and El Popular. Trome prints his birth name as Pedro Pablo Masías Ludueña; El Espectador, citing his own statements, gives the original surname as Mesías.
The reports describe a violent home. His father drank and beat his mother, and his mother had a mental illness, according to Trome and El Popular. He told police that his parents fought constantly. In statements reported by El Popular and El Espectador, he described abuse at the hands of older siblings when he was a small child, and humiliation in the street and at school. "No tenía amistad con otros niños. Me molestaban todo el tiempo," he said, according to El Popular: he had no friends among the other children, who tormented him all the time. El Popular reported that he began hurting and killing animals as a child, first cats and dogs. "Yo no olvido lo que viví," he was quoted as saying: he did not forget what he had lived through.
A younger brother, Vayron Jonathan, grew up in the same family. El Comercio reported in 2018 that both parents of that brother had died when he was a child, and that he went to live with an older sister in Mala, south of Lima, before returning to the capital as a teenager.
El Popular reported that in 1990 Nakada joined the army as a volunteer, saying a voice had told him he had a mission on earth, and that he wanted to "eliminar a los enemigos de Dios," to eliminate God's enemies. He was discharged about two months later after an evaluation by army psychiatrists, according to the same report, and a cousin told reporters that he tried to take his own life afterward and needed almost a year to recover. El Espectador gave a different version in 2018: that he had worked for two months as a mechanic in the Peruvian Air Force and was discharged after a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and psychopathic tendencies. El Popular wrote that the Air Force story, long repeated, was not true.
Both El Espectador and Trome reported that he paid 800 soles to a Japanese citizen to adopt him, so that he could take the surname Nakada and seek a way to Japan. Trome dates the change to 2003 and says he never traveled there. His younger brother did go, and lived in Japan for about a decade before 2015, according to EFE and Peru Reports.
By the mid-2000s Nakada was living in Huaral and working in a mechanics workshop there, according to Trome.
Trome's 2024 account lists 17 people as his victims, with dates running from January 1, 2005, to December 27, 2006. The same report says he confessed to 25 killings and that only 17 were taken to court. The people on that list were men and women from their teens to their fifties.
El Popular published the same list in 2022. For most of them the press gave only a name, an age and a date. Trome reported that Nakada said he regretted the death of the youngest person on the list, a 15-year-old girl.
Trome described the first death on the list, that of Carlos Edilberto Merino Aguilar, as a shooting at Chancay on the evening of New Year's Day 2005. Nakada later claimed he had acted in self-defense, according to El Popular, and he was charged with robbing Merino Aguilar as well as with homicide. El Popular also reported an earlier killing he described to police, of a man at Mala, south of Lima; it gave no date, and no charge for it appears in the court record.
The count has never been reported consistently. El Espectador wrote in 2018 that the authorities pursued him for eight murders. EFE and El Comercio reported in 2018 that he had been sentenced for 18 killings; Voz de América, citing El Comercio, gave 17. AFP, citing Peru's identity registry in 2015, wrote that he had been convicted of killing 25 people between 2000 and 2006. The Supreme Court's 2010 ruling does not give a total.
The police and the press reported a single, repeated explanation. He believed, according to police quoted by El Espectador, that he was a messenger of God sent to purify the earth of people he regarded as sinners. "Mi misión es limpiar al Perú de la escoria," he told the Huaral police, according to Trome: his mission was to clean Peru of its scum. "Yo no soy un criminal, soy un limpiador," he said, according to Trome, El Popular and Voz de América: he was not a criminal but a cleaner, and he claimed to have rid society of people he despised. AFP reported that he repeated the claim to television reporters from prison in 2011, saying he had killed 25 people to clean a rotten world.
Trome reported that the reasons he gave for each killing rested on his own judgments about the people he shot. Those judgments do not appear in the court record.
Police in Huaral arrested Nakada on December 28, 2006, at the workshop where he worked, according to Trome. Trome credited the arrest to intelligence work, without naming the officers or the unit involved. El Popular wrote that the search had taken almost two years.
The authorities said at the time that he had been preparing to set off a military grenade in a Huaral discotheque during the New Year celebrations, to finish off people he called "perdidos y corrompidos," the lost and corrupt, according to El Popular and El Espectador. After his arrest he asked to be executed by firing squad and said that if he were ever freed he would continue his "mission of cleansing," Trome reported. Trome also reported that he tried to take his own life more than once.
The prosecutors of the Fiscalía Provincial Penal Corporativa de Huaral handled the case under Peru's new Code of Criminal Procedure, the Nuevo Código Procesal Penal. The Supreme Court's ruling of March 12, 2010, sets out what happened next.
Early in the investigation the defense asked that he be tried under the proceso de seguridad, the procedure for people who may be exempt from criminal responsibility and subject instead to a security measure such as psychiatric confinement. On May 4, 2007, the Primer Juzgado de Investigación Preparatoria de Huaral refused. On July 23, 2007, the Sala Superior Penal Permanente de Huaura reversed that decision. It relied on a psychiatric report that found enough signs of paranoid schizophrenia to support a finding that he was not criminally responsible and to justify a security measure, ordered the ordinary process converted into a security process, and separated the cases.
The prosecutors filed their indictment on August 13, 2007, charging him with homicidio calificado, aggravated homicide, and robo agravado, aggravated robbery. The order sending the case to trial was issued on November 22, 2007.
The trial opened as a security proceeding on April 23, 2008, before the Juzgado Penal Colegiado Transitorio de Huaura in Huacho. At that hearing the court used a power under the new code to convert the security proceeding back into an ordinary criminal trial. It relied on a report by the commission of psychiatrists of the Ministerio Público's forensic clinical examinations division. According to the Supreme Court's summary, that commission found that he had acted with full awareness, that he showed no schizophrenic or psychotic disorder, and that his antisocial behavior did not make him exempt from responsibility.
On May 9, 2008, the court delivered its judgment. It convicted Nakada of aggravated homicide against Agustín Andrés Maguiña Oropeza and others, and of aggravated robbery against Carlos Edilberto Merino Aguilar and others. It sentenced him to 35 years in prison and ordered him to pay 7,000 nuevos soles in civil reparation to the victims' heirs. In the same judgment it acquitted him of the charges concerning Teresa Cotrina Abad, Walter Sandoval Osorio, Gerardo Leonardo Cruz Libia, Carlos Walter Tarazona Toledo, Nazario Julián Tamariz Pérez, Didier Jesús Zapata Dulanto and Nicolás Tolentino Purizaca Gamboa. The Supreme Court's ruling does not list the other victims covered by the words "and others."
Nakada appealed, and the appeal was admitted on May 20, 2008. On March 13, 2009, the superior court chamber in Huaura, by a majority, declared the first-instance judgment null. The majority found the court's reasoning on his guilt insufficient. It treated the security proceeding and the ordinary trial as a single oral trial, and so it also voided everything back to the start of the security proceeding, including the order that had converted the case into an ordinary trial.
One judge dissented. That judge would have rejected the appeal as framed, annulled only the judgment and the ordinary trial, and sent the case to a new trial before a different panel.
The senior prosecutor of Huaura took the case to the Supreme Court in cassation, and the appeal was admitted on June 12, 2009. He argued that the appeals chamber had misread the code: the security process and the ordinary process had different aims, and wiping out the conversion order would reopen settled stages of the case and force a new intermediate stage as well as a new trial.
On March 12, 2010, the Sala Penal Permanente of the Corte Suprema de Justicia de la República, with Judge San Martín Castro as the reporting judge, upheld the prosecutor's appeal in part. The court said the appeals chamber's complaint concerned the reasoning on guilt, a defect it could have corrected, and not the conversion order, which had become final and had nothing to do with the defect. Annulling that order broke the principle of preclusion, a part of due process. The court declared that part of the appellate ruling null and ruled that the nullity of the trial did not reach the order converting the security process into the ordinary one.
The new trial court, the Supreme Court added, was free to decide on the merits whether rules on criminal responsibility and security measures applied, but it could not send the case back to the security process. The other judges on the panel were Lecaros Cornejo, Príncipe Trujillo, Calderón Castillo and Santa María Morillo. The ruling ordered that it be read in a public hearing and that the case file be returned to the court of origin.
The date and terms of the decision that followed the new trial have not been reported. Voz de América, citing El Comercio, reported in 2018 that he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2009, was therefore considered not criminally responsible, and was moved to the psychiatric ward of Lurigancho prison in Lima. EFE reported the same year that he had later been committed to a psychiatric institution because of paranoid schizophrenia. Peru Reports wrote that he had been declared not culpable after the diagnosis and was serving 35 years in the psychiatric ward at Lurigancho.
Trome wrote in August 2024 that a psychiatric report had diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, that the finding made him legally not accountable, that he had been moved to a ward for mentally ill prisoners, and that he remained confined there. El Popular reported in 2022 that he was held in the psychiatry pavilion of Lurigancho.
AFP and the South China Morning Post reported in September 2015 that he was being held in a psychiatric prison near Lima and had been since 2007, that he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and that he had attempted suicide.
In September 2015 Nakada's name reached the international press through his younger brother. Vayron Jonathan Nakada Ludeña, then 30, was arrested in Kumagaya, Saitama Prefecture, north of Tokyo, after six people were killed in three houses there between September 14 and 16, 2015. AFP and the South China Morning Post reported that Peruvian identity records identified him as Pedro Pablo's younger brother. The South China Morning Post, with reporting from Kyodo, wrote that police had questioned him at the Kumagaya police station and lost track of him after letting him step outside to smoke. He was seriously injured when he fell from a second-floor window as police closed in.
The six people killed were Minoru Tasaki and his wife, Misae; Kazuyo Shirai, 84; and Miwako Kato, 41, and her daughters, Misaki, 10, and Haruka, 7, according to El Comercio and EFE. On March 9, 2018, the Saitama District Court sentenced Vayron Nakada to death for robbery and murder, as prosecutors had asked, Voz de América and EFE reported. His defense argued that he had schizophrenia; a prosecution evaluation had found no mental disorder, and Judge Naoto Sasaki said the evidence showed that he had intended to rob and kill and understood what he was doing. Trome reported in 2024 that the sentence was later changed to indefinite imprisonment.
Peru Reports, citing La República, wrote in 2015 that the younger brother also had paranoid schizophrenia, as did a sister.
The number of dead. Press figures range from 8 (El Espectador) to 17 (Trome, Voz de América), 18 (EFE, El Comercio) and 25 (his own confession, as reported by Trome, El Popular and AFP). The 2008 judgment that convicted him named only two people specifically, each with "and others," and acquitted him on seven named counts. That conviction was annulled in 2009.
The years. AFP and the South China Morning Post placed the killings between 2000 and 2006; Trome's list runs from January 2005 to December 2006, and Peru Reports wrote 2005 to 2006.
The date of sentence. EFE and El Comercio dated his 35-year sentence to 2007, and Peru Reports wrote that he killed 17 people in 2007. The court record gives the first sentence as May 9, 2008.
His military service. El Popular says he volunteered for the army in 1990 and was discharged after about two months; El Espectador says he spent two months as an Air Force mechanic.
The killing at Mala, which El Popular reported from his account, does not appear among the charges in the court record.
February 28, 1973: born in El Agustino, Lima (Trome, El Popular).
1990: joins the army as a volunteer and is discharged about two months later, according to El Popular.
2003: takes the surname Nakada, according to Trome.
January 1, 2005: first death on Trome's list, at Chancay.
May 31 to December 27, 2006: dates of the other deaths on Trome's list.
December 28, 2006: arrested at his workplace in Huaral.
May 4, 2007: Huaral investigating judge refuses to move the case to a security proceeding.
July 23, 2007: Huaura appeals chamber orders a security proceeding, citing indications of paranoid schizophrenia.
August 13, 2007: indictment for aggravated homicide and aggravated robbery.
November 22, 2007: order sending the case to trial.
April 23, 2008: trial opens in Huacho; the court converts it to an ordinary trial after a Ministerio Público psychiatric commission finds no psychotic disorder.
May 9, 2008: convicted at first instance and sentenced to 35 years; acquitted on seven named counts.
March 13, 2009: appeals chamber, by majority, declares the judgment null.
March 12, 2010: Supreme Court (Casación 16-2009 Huaura) upholds the prosecutor's appeal in part and orders a new ordinary trial.
September 2015: his brother is arrested in Kumagaya, Japan; AFP reports Pedro Pablo held in a psychiatric prison near Lima.
March 9, 2018: Saitama District Court sentences the brother to death.
November 2022: El Popular reports him held in the psychiatry pavilion of Lurigancho.
August 31, 2024: Trome reports that he remains confined in a ward for mentally ill prisoners.