When the police of Huaral arrested Pedro Pablo Nakada Ludeña at the auto repair shop where he worked on December 28, 2006, he had been planning, he told them, to throw a hand grenade into a crowded discotheque on New Year's Eve. He admitted to shooting people across the province for two years, and he asked to be executed. "I ask for a firing squad, something practical, like what I did with the people," he said. "I shot them in the head. If I get out, I'll carry on with my cleansing mission." The police had called the operation that caught him Operación Mesías. His first night in the cells at Carquín, he tried to kill himself by beating his head against the wall.
He was born Pedro Pablo Mesías Ludeña on February 28, 1973, in the José y María settlement of El Agustino, in Lima. His biological father was an alcoholic and his mother had an unspecified mental disorder, and his childhood was one of abuse and violence; he was bullied at school and said the other children pulled his hair and tormented him all the time. He later paid a Japanese man living in Peru eight hundred soles to take the surname Nakada, hoping to go to Japan. He never went, but his younger brother, Vayron Jonathan, did. Pedro joined the army and was expelled at the request of military psychiatrists, who found him a danger. He said he heard the voice of God and believed sinners deserved death. In 2001 he settled in Huaral, north of Lima.
His first victim was Carlos Edilberto Merino Aguilar, twenty-six, shot through the chest and abdomen at around six in the evening on January 1, 2005, on the beach at Chorrito in Chancay. After that, by his own account, he refined his method, killing with a single shot to the back of the head so that his victims would not suffer, then praying a rosary and burying them. He used pistols of several makes and silencers he built himself from internet tutorials. The people he chose were those he said God had told him to remove: drug users, men he took to be gay, women in sex work, drunks and thieves. "I am not a criminal, I am a cleaner," he told interrogators. "I have freed society of homosexuals and vagrants." He gave one victim's drug use as the reason he had killed him.
The court held him responsible for aggravated homicide in the deaths of, among others, Agustín Andrés Maguiña Oropeza, Luis Melgarejo Sáenz, Carlos Edilberto Merino Aguilar, María Verónica Tolentino Pajuelo, Luis Enrique Morán Cervantes, Pedro Omar Carrera Carrera, Enoch Eliseo Félix Zorrilla, Hugo Vílchez Palomino, Widmar Jesús Muñoz Villanueva and Nell Cajaleón Pajuelo. Teresa Cotrina Abad was also among the dead. Reporting at the time also attributed to him the killing of a ten-year-old girl for her bicycle at the Santa Rosa irrigation settlement in Sayán. The written ruling records seventeen murders, though some reports say sixteen; he claimed twenty-five.
His first conviction, to thirty-five years, did not stand. In March 2009 the appeals chamber of the Huaura court unanimously annulled it in its entirety, finding that the trial court had not grounded each charge in the evidence or explained its reasoning beyond noting that he had admitted responsibility. He was tried again and again sentenced to thirty-five years, reported as on July 14, 2010. At trial psychologists described a dissocial disorder rather than schizophrenia, but a psychiatric report later confirmed a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and he was declared not criminally responsible. He was moved from Carquín to the psychiatric ward of Lurigancho prison. "I can no longer carry out God's mission because they caught me," he was quoted as saying. "Now I keep hearing that voice telling me to kill myself." In 2018 a Japanese court sentenced his brother Vayron to death for stabbing six people to death in Kumagaya in 2015; on appeal that was reduced to life imprisonment.