A Colombian man named Pedro Alonso López left an Ecuadorian prison in 1994 after serving a sentence capped at 16 years, the longest term Ecuadorian law then allowed. He had confessed to killing more than a hundred girls. Colombia, which wanted him for the deaths of eleven children in his native town, declared him not criminally responsible and released him on bail of 80,000 pesos in 1998. On September 22, 1999, he renewed his identity card in Bogotá. That is the last confirmed trace of him.
The cases below run from Guatemala in 1946 to El Salvador in 2023, across eight countries, and in nearly every one the arithmetic of the law shaped the outcome as much as the crimes did: a cap on years served, a frontier, a psychiatric finding, a written trial, a decree passed in a hurry. The press shaped them too, by naming suspects, publishing totals nobody had tested, and in one instance pushing a government to rewrite its procedure.
Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos was arrested on April 22, 1999, in Villavicencio, the capital of Meta department, on a charge involving a boy. He gave the name Bonifacio Morera Lizcano and was held under it for three months. On July 20, 1999, the CTI, the investigative police attached to Colombia’s Fiscalía General, determined who he was. That October he told prosecutors that he had killed 140 children. He was 42, born in the coffee town of Génova, Quindío, a drifter who drank heavily and moved from town to town.
Until his arrest the deaths had not been joined together. Children went missing in one department and were reported dead in another, and each file belonged to a different prosecutor. The CTI had set up a special group in August 1997, according to Semana, and in Villavicencio an inter-agency team of prosecutors, CTI, the DAS security service, the police intelligence unit and the forensic institute Medicina Legal was formed in September 1998. By December of that year the team had concluded that one or two men were responsible for killings across the country. What came out of those separate files, between 1992 and 1999, was a pattern covering at least eleven Colombian departments and a stretch of Ecuador. The victims were boys, mostly between 8 and 16, from poor families.
The count is where the case becomes a study in bookkeeping. In August 2003 he told prosecutors about 28 more people, 23 of them minors, and EFE reported that Colombian courts had by then convicted him in 138 of the 172 cases he had admitted. In 2018 Semana, citing a Fiscalía report, gave 139 convictions in 140 cases. In 2023 El Colombiano gave 143, and El Tiempo wrote of 77 accumulated penalties. The prosecutors' figure for children attributed to him ran to at least 172. El Tiempo gave a range of 142 to 194, and the Associated Press, at his death, wrote that he had confessed to more than 190. The convictions were for aggravated homicide and other offenses against children. The sentences were reported as adding up to 1,853 years and nine days, and Colombian law held the time actually served to 40 years. The first sentence to be reported, in December 1999, was 52 years.
Ecuador sits inside the count. A court in Pereira convicted him on July 6, 2007, of four killings of boys in Ecuador in July 1998, two in Santo Domingo de los Colorados and two in Chone. Ecuador asked Colombia for his extradition in May 2011, according to Semana, and the criminal chamber of Colombia’s Supreme Court issued its opinion on the request on May 23, 2012 (Extradición No. 36997). No outcome has been reported, and he was never sent.
The ceiling meant that release was an open question long before he was old. Semana asked in 2011 when he would go free. In October 2018 it reported that prosecutors were looking for further proceedings that could prevent his release. In 2021 a sentence-enforcement judge in Valledupar refused him conditional release, and on November 1 the prison authority INPEC announced that he would not go free. He was held at La Tramacúa, the high-security prison in Valledupar, and died in custody on October 12, 2023, at a clinic in that city, aged 66. Medicina Legal reported natural causes. He was cremated in Valledupar on December 21, 2023.
Pedro Alonso López was arrested in early 1980 at a market in Ambato, in the Ecuadorian highlands, while trying to take a young girl away, according to Agence France-Presse. The Colombian magazine Semana dates his decisive statement to police to Monday, March 10, 1980. He confessed to killing more than a hundred girls in Ecuador and many more children in Colombia and Peru. An Ecuadorian court sentenced him to 16 years, the legal maximum, though some reports say 15. The number of counts in that judgment has never been settled.
The totals attached to him vary widely and none above 100 has been tested in a court. AFP reported in March 1994 that he had confessed to more than 100 Ecuadorian girls and dozens of Colombian children. Semana said in 2002 that the authorities estimated about 300 victims in the three countries. El Tiempo reported in 2018 that he claimed at least 110 children in Ecuador and about 200 more killings in Colombia and Peru. Nobody reported a Peruvian charge or trial. The Colombian press, AFP reported, called him the beast of Tolima. The Colombian paper printed AFP’s 1994 dispatch under the name Pedro López Monsalve, another reminder of how thin the record is.
Ecuadorian investigators had been slow to connect the deaths of girls to one man. El Tiempo said that trafficking and exploitation gangs were active at the time, and AFP reported that police had considered the sale of children overseas. Press and police were looking for an organization and had a single man.
In 1994 he was released on good-conduct reductions and handed to Colombian authorities. In El Espinal, in Tolima, a court there had a warrant out for him on a complaint about the deaths of eleven children in the late 1970s. The original file had been destroyed by fire around 1991, and the complaint was renewed by the mother of one of the girls in September 1994. AFP reported his transfer to El Espinal that month. A Colombian evaluation declared him inimputable, legally not responsible by reason of mental disorder, and he was held in the psychiatric annex of La Modelo prison in Bogotá. In 1998, according to El Tiempo, he was declared sound and released on bail of 80,000 pesos, with an obligation to report to the court. He did not. Colombia asked Interpol to look for him in October 2002. Vanguardia of Bucaramanga wrote in March 2023 that his whereabouts, and whether he was alive, were unknown.
Daniel Camargo Barbosa’s file is thin and contradictory. Colombian and Ecuadorian papers, the magazine Vistazo, which interviewed him, AFP, and one academic paper disagree about almost every date. They agree on the shape. He served a first prison term in Colombia, reported as five years (El Tiempo), six (Vistazo) or eight (a Quito newspaper cited by the academic paper). He was then sentenced to a second, much longer term, reported as 24, 25 or 30 years, and sent to Gorgona, the island prison in the Pacific that Colombia closed in 1984 and has since turned into a national park. AFP described the second sentence as imposed for the deaths of some twenty women.
On November 23, 1984, according to Vistazo, he got off the island, and Colombia declared him dead. From December 1984 to 1986, on his own account, he killed 71 women and girls in Ecuador, in Guayaquil and other towns. Ecuadorian police, Vistazo wrote, had no lead for more than a year. He was arrested in Quito in 1986. Ecuador gave him 16 years, the same ceiling that had applied to López. The court, the date and the offenses of conviction have not been reported, nor how many of the confessed killings were before the judges. What is reported is the outcome: one 16-year term, whatever the number of deaths. Estimates of his total, never tried, run from more than 150 to about 180. El Tiempo, and no other account, attributes to him the deaths of 17 girls in Cundinamarca in 1963 and 1964; no conviction for them has been reported.
AFP’s 1994 dispatch said that many Ecuadorians thought the sentence unjust and feared he would kill again on release. In the same year AFP, previewing López’s release, described the two Colombians as the prisoners with the most victims of any held in Ecuador. Camargo did not live to the end of his term. He was killed in a Quito prison by a fellow prisoner, identified only by initials in the reports, in November 1994. AFP’s dispatch, printed on November 15, says the day before, and an academic paper gives November 13. El Tiempo and Vistazo describe the other prisoner as a relative of one of Camargo’s victims. Whether he was charged was not reported.
Pedro Pablo Nakada Ludeña was arrested at a workshop in Huaral, about 80 kilometers from Lima, on December 28, 2006. Peruvian newspapers later reported that he told police his mission was to clean Peru of "la escoria," the scum, and that he confessed to 25 killings. The press called him the Apostle of Death. The counts have never been reported consistently: eight in one report, 17 in another, 18 in a third, and, in a 2015 AFP dispatch citing Peru’s identity registry, 25. Trome, in 2024, listed 17 named people killed between January 1, 2005, and December 27, 2006, in and around Huaral and Chancay, and said that only 17 of his confessed killings had been taken to court.
The legal record is the Supreme Court’s cassation ruling of March 12, 2010. The defense had asked for the special procedure for defendants who may not be criminally responsible. A Huaral court refused it in May 2007, a higher chamber in Huaura reversed that in July 2007 on the strength of a psychiatric report that identified signs of paranoid schizophrenia, and then, at the opening of the trial in Huacho on April 23, 2008, the trial court converted the proceeding back into an ordinary one after a commission of state psychiatrists concluded that he had acted with full awareness. On May 9, 2008, that court convicted him of aggravated homicide and aggravated robbery, sentenced him to 35 years and ordered 7,000 nuevos soles in civil reparation. It acquitted him on the charges concerning seven named people. On March 13, 2009, the appeals chamber, by majority, declared the judgment null for insufficient reasoning on guilt, and the Supreme Court confirmed in 2010 that he had to be tried again.
Press reports from 2015 to 2024 say that he was finally declared not criminally responsible because of paranoid schizophrenia and confined in the psychiatric ward of Lurigancho prison in Lima, where Trome said in August 2024 that he remained. That last step is known only from press reports.
Juana Barraza Samperio was arrested in Mexico City on January 25, 2006. She was 48, a former professional wrestler who had fought as La Dama del Silencio, the Lady of Silence. The next day the city attorney general announced that she was the person the press had for two years called "la Mataviejitas," and that fingerprints linked her to at least ten earlier deaths of elderly women.
Her case belongs here for what came before it. Susana Vargas Cervantes, a scholar who has studied the case, calls it the first search for a serial offender in Mexico. La Jornada, counting from the prosecutor’s records the day after Barraza’s arrest, reported 49 killings of elderly women from 1998 through 2005. On November 17, 2005, the deputy attorney general Renato Sales Heredia said that a single person could have committed 24 of the 32 killings recorded since 2003. Investigators told the public that the culprit was most likely a man dressed as a woman. In late October 2005 police held between 38 and 50 people and took their fingerprints on that theory. None matched. Vek Lewis, writing in 2008, tied the profile to a television soap opera that had aired a similar storyline. The fingerprints finally matched a woman.
Her trial ended on March 31, 2008, with a conviction on 16 homicides and 12 aggravated robberies of elderly people and a sentence of 759 years and 17 days; Mexico City law then capped time served at 50 years. She called the sentence unjust. She has said since that she killed one woman and confessed to the rest under threats. In April 2006 the attorney general had already told La Jornada that fingerprints cleared another man, who had been charged in 2004, of one of the killings now attributed to her, and that the file would be corrected. As of September 14, 2026, she was in prison, now 68, and had been seen in a wheelchair in a video from the Tepepan women’s prison.
In August 2014 the Polícia Civil of Goiás formed a task force to look into the shootings of women and girls in Goiânia, the state capital. Over 70 days, police told the press in October 2014, 25 police chiefs, 95 agents and 30 clerks reviewed more than 150 hours of camera footage, 576 suspect license plates and 50,000 traffic-fine photographs, followed 150 anonymous tips and commissioned 71 forensic reports. On the night of October 14, 2014, officers detained Tiago Henrique Gomes da Rocha, a 26-year-old security guard who had been hired by a security company two months earlier. The company said he had passed its checks, including a certificate showing no criminal record. Police said he confessed to 39 homicides going back to 2011 and that the total could reach 40.
Brazilian procedure then did what it does with homicide: it tried each death separately, before a jury. The first verdict came on February 16, 2016, 20 years for the killing of a 15-year-old student. Rota Jurídica, which reproduced the court’s own bulletins, counted the running total as the trials went on: more than 240 years after the tenth jury in June 2016, 403 years in September, 524 years and four months in November. By June 2018 juries had convicted him of 28 homicides and acquitted him of three; Jornal Opção reported the 28th that month, 20 years for the death of a man. Rota Jurídica put the sum at 662 years before a trial in September 2018. After 32 trials, O Hoje reported in October 2026, it stood at 619 years, a figure that does not agree with the earlier one; the difference has not been explained. He had also been convicted, in May 2015, of illegal possession of a firearm and was charged with robbery.
Each jury imposed between 19 years six months and 30 years for a death. Brazilian law, as it stood when the crimes were committed, held the time served to 30 years, so the hundreds of years in the totals were a ledger and not a sentence anyone could serve. The convictions concerned killings from November 2012 to August 2014. The victims were men and women, and, from late 2013, mostly women and girls; the youngest named in a conviction was 13. As of October 2026 he was still in custody.
In the first weeks of 1979 three women in Buenos Aires who had given Yiya Murano their savings died one after another. Murano, a lawyer’s wife who lived in the Monserrat district, had been taking money from friends, neighbors and relatives on the promise of high returns, and signing promissory notes for it. In the climate of easy money under Argentina’s military government, Infobae described what she ran as one of the first pyramid schemes in the country. Each death was first certified as natural. After the third, a daughter went to the police, a judge ordered inquiries, and on April 27, 1979, the Federal Police arrested Murano in Monserrat. She was 49. Investigators at the time spoke of ten or more possible victims, Infobae reported, though only three cases were ever brought. The press called her the poisoner of Monserrat, and the Buenos Aires Herald wrote that "Yiya" is still an Argentine byword for the crime.
Criminal trials in Buenos Aires were then conducted in writing, without oral hearings, Minuto Uno noted, and appeals were handled in near secrecy. On June 15, 1982, according to C5N, Judge Ángel Mercado acquitted her of homicide and fraud for lack of proof, and she walked out of prison. The source of the cyanide was never settled. La Gaceta noted that it would have taken a professional’s signature on a prescription to buy, and that no one ever learned how she obtained it.
The prosecution appealed, and the third chamber of the national criminal appeals court overturned the acquittal. It sentenced her to life imprisonment for three aggravated homicides by poisoning, of Nilda Adelina Gamba, Lelia Elida Formisano de Ayala and Carmen Zulema del Giorgio de Venturini, and for fraud. Minuto Uno pointed out that the Penal Code gives homicide by poisoning only one possible penalty, life. The date of the ruling differs: C5N gives May 16, 1985, and other reports June 28, 1985, which Minuto Uno describes as the day the chamber notified its final decision. The sentence was later commuted by President Carlos Menem and reduced, with the credit for pretrial custody that Argentine law then allowed, and most reports say she was released in November 1995. She spent the rest of her life giving interviews and appearing on television, in which, according to the reports, she maintained her innocence. She died in a nursing facility in Belgrano in 2014. The date is given as April 26 or June 23.
On July 18, 1946, hundreds of people gathered outside the wall of the Cementerio General in Guatemala City to watch a firing squad execute José María Miculax Bux. He was 21, a day laborer from Patzicía, Chimaltenango. Less than three months earlier he had been arrested and accused of the killings of boys and adolescents reported around the capital, in Mixco and near Antigua Guatemala since early in the year. To try him the Congress of Guatemala passed Decree 235, which shortened the procedure for crimes that caused public alarm. In popular use the law is known by his name, the Ley Miculax.
The case came under the government of President Juan José Arévalo, which followed the revolution of 1944. Guatemalan outlets call it the first serial case in the country’s records. The number of children and adolescents killed is given as 15 by most reports and as more than 14 by Prensa Libre in 2023. The ages vary by source: El Heraldo and the Diario La Voz give 11 to 15, República 10 to 18. República reported that the death sentence itself rested on two of the 15 killings proven against him.
He was arrested on April 26, 1946, after an elderly woman described to police a man she had seen. Some reports give April 27. His cousin Mariano Macú Miculax was arrested in Antigua Guatemala the next day. According to Soy502 and the Diario La Voz, Miculax confessed before a justice of the peace court in the capital and named his cousin as an accomplice. Mariano denied it. República reported that the parents of the victims wrote to the president asking that both men be executed in public, and Relato.gt reported a petition from residents of Antigua Guatemala demanding the death penalty.
On June 18, 1946, a court sentenced Miculax to death for murder, with other charges. His cousin, sentenced as an accomplice, received 30 years. The judge has not been named, and no appeal was reported. A month later, at the execution, Miculax said that he had killed only four and that his cousin had done the rest; the Diario La Voz reported his complaint that his cousin had been spared. No report shows the claim was ever tested. His last wishes, according to Emisoras Unidas and República, were to wear a suit and a hat and to be given two measures of cane liquor and spiritual assistance.
On the night of May 7, 2021, Mirna Cruz Lima, 57, and her daughter Jacquelinne Palomo Lima, 26, died in Chalchuapa, a town in Santa Ana department in western El Salvador. Neighbors called the police, and Hugo Ernesto Osorio Chávez, a former officer of the National Civil Police, was arrested. He had joined the force in 1997 and left it in 2005, and the police chief, Mauricio Arriaza, told the press that he had been removed after a criminal conviction and had served a five-year sentence. On May 12, 2021, he was charged with two femicides, and two homicide counts were added later, according to wire reports.
His arrest opened a larger case. Forensic teams worked on the property from May to July 2021, and in October 2021 authorities returned the dead of 12 people to their families. Estimates of how many more people might have died there ran from about 30, the figure a prosecutor gave, to more than 40, a figure attributed to Osorio in local press reports and one the attorney general called unproven. The justice minister, Gustavo Villatoro, called Osorio a psychopath, and by May 20 a court in Chalchuapa had ordered provisional detention for 11 people linked to him.
On June 10, 2022, a specialized court in Santa Ana for cases of violence against women convicted Osorio of both femicides. The prosecution had asked for 50 years for each, the maximum. The court imposed 35 years for each woman, 70 in all, and, according to Diario El Mundo, tied the figure to the life expectancy of 70 years for Salvadorans in United Nations Development Programme data. On November 11, 2022, he was convicted in a separate case and given 18 more years. He followed both hearings by video link from the maximum-security prison at Zacatecoluca.
The rest of the dead were tried against other people. Osorio, under a cooperation arrangement, became the prosecution’s witness against nine defendants. In May 2023 a judge acquitted all nine after finding his testimony unreliable, and the prosecution called her partial. The appeals chamber annulled the acquittals in August 2023, and at the retrial in October six were convicted and three acquitted. No charges against Osorio himself for those deaths have been reported. His two convictions cover one event on one night. The house where he lived, owned by a third party, was forfeited to the state in May 2023.
Counting is the first problem, and it is a problem of procedure before it is a problem of crime. Garavito’s convictions run from 138 to 143, Nakada’s victims from 8 to 25, Camargo’s from 71 to about 180, and none of the largest numbers for López has ever been before a court. In Brazil the count is the verdicts, and in Mexico City it is the 16 homicides and 12 robberies of the sentence. The bigger the number, the more it depends on who is counting and why.
Second, caps decided what a sentence meant. Ecuador’s 16 years let two men who had confessed to killing dozens of girls and women face release within their own lifetimes, and the first of them, López, went free in Colombia on bail. Colombia’s 40 years, Brazil’s 30, Mexico City’s 50 and El Salvador’s 35 for each of two women all turned very long arithmetic into a fixed horizon, and in Garavito’s case the public argument about release outlasted the man.
Third, borders produced gaps. Camargo left a Colombian island, was declared dead, and surfaced as a case in Ecuador. López was handed from one country’s prison to another’s psychiatric annex. Garavito was convicted in Colombia of killings in Ecuador, which asked for his extradition; no answer has been reported. Peru and Nakada show the other kind of gap, between a psychiatric finding at one stage and a different one at the next.
Last, the press and the state each wrote the case before the courts did. Mexico City spent two years looking for a man in women’s clothes. Guatemala changed a law for one defendant and shot him within a month of the sentence. Goiânia’s juries reached the same man 32 times. Murano was acquitted by a written trial in 1982 and condemned by an appeals chamber in 1985 on essentially the same file. In none of these countries did a verdict settle every question about what had happened, and in López’s case it did not settle where the man himself was.
• 1946, April 26: José María Miculax Bux arrested in Guatemala (some reports give April 27).
• 1946, June 18: Miculax sentenced to death; July 18, 1946: executed outside the Cementerio General, Guatemala City.
• 1979, April 27: Yiya Murano arrested in Buenos Aires.
• 1980, early: Pedro Alonso López arrested in Ambato, Ecuador (decisive statement dated March 10, 1980 by Semana).
• 1982, June: Murano acquitted for lack of proof; 1985: life sentence on appeal; November 1995: released (most reports).
• 1984, November 23: Daniel Camargo Barbosa leaves Gorgona prison island, Colombia; declared dead.
• 1986: Camargo arrested in Quito and sentenced to 16 years.
• 1994: López released in Ecuador and handed to Colombia; November 1994: Camargo killed by a fellow prisoner in Quito.
• 1998: López released on bail in Colombia; September 22, 1999: renews his identity card in Bogotá.
• 1999, April 22: Luis Alfredo Garavito arrested in Villavicencio; July 20: identified; October: confesses to 140 child victims.
• 2005, October to November: Mexico City police fingerprint dozens of people in the hunt for the old-women killer; November 17: 24 of 32 killings linked.
• 2006, January 25: Juana Barraza arrested in Mexico City; December 28: Pedro Pablo Nakada Ludeña arrested in Huaral.
• 2007, July 6: Garavito convicted in Pereira of four killings in Ecuador.
• 2008, March 31: Barraza sentenced to 759 years and 17 days; May 9: Nakada convicted at first instance and sentenced to 35 years.
• 2009, March 13: Nakada’s judgment declared null; 2010, March 12: Supreme Court orders a new trial.
• 2014, October 14: Tiago Henrique Gomes da Rocha detained in Goiânia; 2016, February 16: first jury conviction; June 2018: 28 convictions.
• 2021, May 7: deaths of Mirna Cruz Lima and Jacquelinne Palomo Lima in Chalchuapa; 2022, June 10: Hugo Osorio sentenced to 70 years; 2023, October: retrial of nine defendants ends in six convictions.
• 2023, October 12: Garavito dies in custody in Valledupar.
• 2026, September 14: Barraza in custody, seen in a wheelchair.