Luis Garavito: The Most Prolific Serial Killer in History

hello everyone welcome back to another episode of The Casual criminalist as always I'm your host S one of my writers in this case David thank you so much David's written me a script I've never read it before Luis garavito the most prolific serial killer in human history oh this is a great way to ruin my Tuesday afternoon isn't it why can't we just be doing a heist and it said no no no he's he's the most PR how have I never heard of this guy didn't um what's his Shipman David Shipman killed like 160 people or something isn't that like way up there in the the animals of serial killer history how many did this guy people kill how many people did this guy kill have I never heard of him anyway let's jump into it just before we get started with today's episode it's Simon from the future here hello I've got some excellent news in this episode you'll find out that today's protagonist gets eye cancer oh no and guess what since we recorded it he died and you might think that oh that's not very classy Simon that's not very nice of you to say that someone's got eye cancer and died for it well my friend watch this episode and then like me rather than being like Oh no he got ey cancer and died you'll be like oh no he got eye cancer and died what a shame what a giant shame no need to break out a cigar [ __ ] that [Music] guy it was the afternoon of the 7th of November 1998 in pareira Colombia a small City in the foothill of the Andes and part of Colombia's fertile coffee producing region known as the coffee axis how creative a group of local children were playing football in a field at one point a young boy chased the football into the corner of a lopment oh no please no David you did the Pedro Lopez episode didn't you did you write Pedro Lopez David I have a feeling you did why what can't he just be like the most prolific serial killer in history who just killed bad guys like that guy Dexter from the TV show Dexter why can't we just have it like that it's like no no no he murdered children after doing horrible things to them and there goes my monetization for the episode why do I do this to myself hello everyone before we continue with today's video I have something special to share with you and that is our fantastic sponsor sheath underwear sheath creates incredibly ridiculously comfortable box to briefs that I swear by my entire underwear drawer home top left my sock drawers on the right it's a little bit depleted but my underwear drawer is stuffed full of sheet look if you're tired of boxes that are too loose or briefs that are too tight sheath is the perfect Middle Point look I'm wearing sheath right now I've got a pair right here to show you and they are absolutely the best once you got a pair you'll buy one pair and then you'll be like I get it and then you'll order more and then your entire drawer will be filled with sheath underwear and your life will be perfect not a guarantee these box of briefs feature stretchy fabric with moisture wiing 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to today's video by the way I'll say it right here thank you everybody because I didn't even realize that I turned on something called super thanks because my dude at YouTube was like turn on super thanks and I was like okay so he walks me he's like go into settings go on to monetize and click on super thanks and I didn't think much about it I didn't think much about it at all and then I saw this option in YouTube Studio to um see like super thanks people who had given super thanks holy [ __ ] it's a lot of money thank you so much some guy gave me $500 like what the f you Legend thank you I should remember your name but I won't and honestly I won't shout you out although if you're giving a super thanks you want it don't you because it's under your little YouTube name let me just find that if I can find that oh do I have the old version of YouTube Studio installed this dude Mitchell Sanford youing Legend he gave me $499.99 I literally was like oh yeah dollars that must be like I don't know Mexican dollars or whatever so it's actually like 60p but no this guy did amazing thank you so much and it's just endless RS of people giving me money it's crazy thank you at one point a young boy chased a football into the corner of the alotment where he spotted a human's skull when the police arrived they noted it was too small to be a man's and therefore they speculated that the skull was a woman's but as the rest of the skeleton was excavated forensic quickly determined that the bones belonged to a boy who had been on the cusp of puberty between the ages of 11 and 13 oh God here we go David you've done it again haven't you he even sent me an email being like someone brace yourself I know Pedro Lopez stayed with you and this is this is another one and I was like this is the last one I have like a list of casual criminalists I need to record and this one's been sitting on the bottom for ages not because I don't want to do I mean not because I'm not going to like how do I phrase this I love David's writing but oh my God I wasn't really looking forward to this also once in one of my earliest YouTube videos I said skeleton as Skellington and uh for years people would be like ah Skellington ah the death of a child that age was hardly surprising in 1990s Colombia where Decades of Civil War political upheaval and struggles with ruthless drug cartels had created class of homeless Street urchins known as the disposables although half of Colombia's children lived in poverty and 10% of them had no formal education whatsoever the disposables were in The darest Straits of all there were approximately 60,000 disposables in Colombia with 20,000 of them living in the nation's capital of bogatar the rest of them were spread out in other cities across the country the disposables spent their young lives on the streets they got into drugs smoking cheap cocaine residue as young as six both boys and girls got into prostitute at ages as shockingly young as nine the boys ran with gangs they engaged in Street violence and even committed murders of other children usually bludgeoning each other to death with clubs and chains or stabbing each other with knives and broken bottles you know your Society is a complete nut of failure when this is happening right like I mean all societies at some level are a failure they fail some people but when there's this level of failure whereas are what's happening well we've got a class of children that we call disposable and they go around murdering each other and smoking cocaine you'll be like is this in the dystopian future or the far distant past no no no this is the '90s in out Colombia get your together and I think you did right Columbia is now much better than it once was sometimes they were killing each other over nothing more than the best sleeping spots they had no family to claim them or protect them thus they were prime target for adult Predators or gorillas who wish to press gang them as child soldiers or cartels who wish to use them as drug mules if the disposables disappeared or were killed very few people would notice and because these children usually had never visited a dentist a day in their lives their bodies should they ever be found could not even be identified by dental records and so the body of the boy found in a field in Pereira was not assigned a high priority by the police odds are they'd never even learn what his name was yeah and another another sign of a spiled state is where your police are like as a child's skull yeah we're never going to crack that one are we boys back to the donuts but perhaps the police should have paid closer attention lately people across Colombia had become alarmed by a spike in the rate of child disappearances not just of the disposables but children with parents and families too panicked mothers and fathers wondered where their children were in the past year dozens of children have been reported missing from the city of Pereira alone a similar uptick and disappearances had occurred across the country if I if that happened to me and like makes me my skin crauel even just thinking about it I'll be like police all right let's go find some like I just watched that movie knives out last night and I'll be like I'm going to go find my like Raymond Blanc or whatever his name was wait isn't that a chef bertran Blanc or whatever you know um James Bond's character from that movie Daniel Craig I'll be like I'm just going to go find the most expensive one of these people I'm going to hire him and then I'm going to pay him and pay him until he find out what's wrong and then I'm going to give all that information to the police because they didn't want to do their jobs a similar uptic and disappearances had occurred across the country and then on November the 15th 1998 police uncovered a mass grave of 36 children children in Pereira combined with other smaller dump sites the total number of bodies leapt up to 41 over the coming months an additional 27 children were found in a mass grave in CA Valley to the South further reports of dumps sites and mass Graves poured in from other parts of Colombia setting off a Countrywide investigation at first the police entertained the theory that these children's were victims of a satanic Society or a trafficking ring that would make sense if you found this you'd be like gangs gangs what's the Columbia famous for drugs and gangs and there dead children gangs and drugs they're just that's what you'd assume Right But the bottles of lubricant and cheap Brandy invariably found at each burial site convinced police that they were looking at the work of one man a prolific serial killer police considered this might be the handiwork of Pedro Lopez the monster of the Andes who had killed an estimated 200 to 300 children in Colombia Peru and Ecuador in the space of just a few years again fing hell holy my God Lopez had been released from a Colombian mental institution just N9 months earlier on $50 bail on the condition that he continued his psychiatric treatment had reported his activities monthly to a judge Pedro Lopez checks in morning judge hello Pedro how's it going good what you been up to this month oh little bit of child murder nothing big it's just a small little extra bit I did [ __ ] Pedro Lopez yeah there were numerous things about the killings that ruled out Lopez's aspect first of all some of the bodies found in the mass Graves have been there for a while and were obviously killed prior to Lopez's release second Lopez primarily targeted young girls but the bodies in the new Mass Graves were overwhelmingly young boys ages 6 to 13 thirdly the murder operandi did not match Pedro Lopez's Mo primarily consisted of sexual assault and strangulation these new bodies showed signs of intense torture and Grievous bodily harm prior to death along with severe mutilations postmortem oh my God David is this worse than Pedro Lopez David why the victims were beaten bludgeoned burned slashed stabbed impaled disembed castrated and decapitated and that is all the detail that I want to give on the subject yeah it's enough detail oh my God needless to say these boys perished in the most horrific and painful way imaginable this wasn't Lopez it was the work of an entirely new monster and while I don't want to rank monsters because Lopez is the greatest piece of that we've ever covered on this channel although he's got some competition doesn't but this seems worse I will not bury the lead when the perpetrator of these crimes was eventually caught he was tried convicted and sentenced to 1,853 years and 9 days in prison but due to Colombian constitutional constraints at the time which also outlawed the death penalty the man could only serve a maximum of 40 years that like I don't understand like some other countries have this as well where there's like a cap on the most amount of time someone can spend in prison and that's stupid isn't it how about we just throw away that rule for people who've murdered multiple children literally dozens perhaps hundreds the sentence maximum has since been extended to 60 years but only for subsequent convictions meanwhile the man who filled all of those Mass Graves had given a full confession and assisted police in finding even more bodies as a result his sentence was cut down to just 22 years imprisonment he spent the last two decades locked up at lamur the notorious Maximum Security Prison in valadar and kept In Perpetual solitary confinement due to the fact that he would almost certainly be murdered by the inmates if I was a guard in that prison I'll be like oh no oh I let him out I didn't realize he wasn't supposed to go in gen Pop I who would have thought that it'd be killed in 4 seconds the [Music] Beast as he has come to be known applied for early release from prison in 2021 but was denied by the judge on grounds that he could not afford the monetary f find that he still owed for the murders it's not like inmates make much from labor in a Colombian prison but as of 2023 the Beast has reached the end of his sentence and become eligible for release at the time of writing he could be let out of prison at any moment either in late 2023 or sometime in 2024 Honestly though like my favorite theory about Pedro Lopez because he also got out for some reason and then he disappeared is like yo how long do you really think you're going to survive on the outside you've killed hundreds of children someone out there is going to be like yeah well uh I'm going to have him killed because that guy for his part the Beast is eager to get out in public again he's spoken in several interviews over the years of his desire to get married and start a family he also wants to become a religious preacher the Beast is also considering a run for Congress so he can pass laws that help abuse children in the same interviews the Beast has demonstrated next to No Remorse for his crimes and usually finds a way to minimize what he's done blaming it on his own upbringing his mental illnesses the devil and alcohol I don't care I don't care about about your upbringing I don't care about your mental illnesses or the devil or alcohol you should never be released and if that's the only one there that is anything remotely resembling an excuse is mental illness and will obviously wrap the devil into mental illness because the devil is not real and in that case you need to be put in a psychiatric facility for the rest of your life with no release in 2016 he said to a visibly disgusted interviewer John Cy diager that I have committed a series of behaviors that violate criminal laws and moral norms I a human being equal to any other with some flaws but not one that is dangerous are you smoking the crack you're in prison for M multiple murders of children with torture on top with some flaws you're the biggest piece of you ever lived someone should start like a crowdfunding campaign to hire a hitman to kill you as soon as you step out of those prison Gates not that I'd wish death on anyone that's just an interesting thought experiment as you continue to listen to today's episode you can de decide for yourself whether you think this man should ever be released from prison no I already know the answer to that question David the answer is no let him burn in prison Forever Wait he doesn't burn in prison I mean if the prison burned down it wouldn't be the worst thing I mean I'm sure there's lots of innocent people in prison and also people who've just like whated you do little bit of fraud I'm not saying that guy should be burned in prison but this guy it'd be nice if he did and I have observed that some people have been sending their opinions hopefully translated via into Spanish to the Attorney General of Columbia who can be found on Twitter at fiscalia call that's spelled f i s c a l a there is also an official government website with further contact information note to Simon this is probably the last opportunity that we have to plug the history of sex before things get any darker as if that's humanly possible I realize I'm not supposed to be reading this but I'm going to continue it because it's a nice segue into talking about David's book if you haven't already done it to the top of the episode I haven't David the book comes out on October the 5ifth that's 2 days away oh I wrote the I wrote the um I wrote it I don't remember what it's called the forward to this book which may even be past the date of this video's release also here's a purchase link um though the book well that's not going to work in the audio format but let's make sure that is in the link in the description below though the book can order be ordered through Amazon and most other retailers it's called sex by David Baker history of sex by David Baker let me go get it a I just stubbed my toe terribly here it is David you are blameless in the Stow tubbing Affair this is the history of sex two billion years of procreation and procreation procreation procreation and Recreation David Baker with a forward by you know who wrote the last forward David wrote a book uh previously a short history of every no that's Bill Bryson isn't it a short the shortest history of the universe sorry and the previous for was written by John Green bit a step down for this one isn't it DAV it written by Simon Whistler um this is a fantastic book it's a brilliant read I've obviously read it cuz I wrote the forward and I talk about it and support David and get his book all right it's out in two days it'll absolutely be out by the time you see this episode thanks David meet Luis garavito Luis Alfredo garavito kubios was born to Manuel Antonio garavito and Rosa deia Cabos on January the 25th 1957 in case you are wondering at the time of writing this makes the Beast of La tra currently 66 years old if gavito is released in 2023 or 2024 and if the eye cancer he has recently developed doesn't spread and kill him first that would be a great shame wouldn't it Jesus Christ I feel like eye cancer is the sort of where God's punishing you for something it's like we got butt cancer eye cancer it's those ones where it's like oh no eye cancer this is young enough to potentially give gavito a good couple of decades running mock in public before he dies of old age garavito was born in the small country town of Genova located within Colombia's coffee axis the come oh my toe is really painful I really stopped it badly ah the Colombian conflicto broke out in 1964 when the government was challenged by both right and left paramilitary groups in itself a sequel to the violencia period which had tormented the childhood of Pedro Lopez a decade earlier as such the garavito were forced to move to a tiny Hamlet of San in the Cala Valley Luis gito was the eldest son and second born of seven children four boys three girls we are largely dependent on garavito himself for the details of his childhood and there is good reason to believe garavito may have exaggerated some of the negative aspects of his upbringing to provide an excuse for his later criminal behavior however we must also allow for the likely possibility that at least some of his account is truthful since the overwhelming majority of serial killers come from abusive homes lacking an independent Source from this period since no comprehensive and reliable account has been given by his family members we shall never know for certain according to garavito his father Manuel Antonio was a violent alcoholic who regularly beat his children and did not allow them to have friends or associate with people outside of the family which I mean all of this sounds it all sounds and it's like oh yeah he did have a rough upbringing so that's okay then no it's not okay plenty of people have horrible upbringings and they don't murder hundreds of children or however many ends up killing if he said it was the most ever then well maybe it's not our children but there this come on it's not an excuse he also heaped verbal abuse upon his children in particular gavito calling midia a weakling an imbecile and a bastard the last of these insults may have been literal since Manuel and Rosa seemed to have had a fractured relationship almost from the start of their marriage manuell was allegedly an adulterer who never shared a bed with his wife but spent his time having an affairs with other women and sleeping with prostitutes Rosa allegedly retaliated with occasional Affairs of her own but a Catholic marriage in mid 20th century Colombia did not actually leave open much possibility for divorce yes which is a bit silly isn't it so the religion's so stupid sometimes Manuel's physical and verbal abuse was so spontaneous and unrelenting the children often hid from their father who when he got home from work garavito recalls that manuell was so strict and so harsh that there rarely was a day when you could speak play or laugh in his presence without fear of a beating garavito said quote we could not develop in a way that children should furthermore despite never sharing a bed with his wife Manuel would sometimes sleep in the same bed as his children I mean that can be like I sometime I last night I slept in the same bed as my children cuz I'm sleeping in bed and I just wake up and my kid's next to it and it's like oh the other day I was just like oh God I don't want to talk about this cuz it's so like how can you talk about these things so close together but it's I'm just sleeping in bed and it's just the middle of the night and my youngest son he's sleeping in the other room and at some point my wife has gone to like look after him or whatever because he's had a cry or something and then I just wake up in the night and my daughter he's like nearly four years old is just next to me and I wake up and I'm like oh hello and she's like I love you Dad and I'm like oh why are you saying this just now it's so sweet and I give her a hug and we just sleep hugging oh God I don't like talking about this because it's like we're just about to get into something so horrible oh no according to garavito his father may have molested him quote he slept with me and he B me I have a vague memory it was at night and he kind of fondled me and touched my private parts I never loved that man I saw him as an executioner holy Mel and Rosa frequently got into shouting matches throwing around insults of quote unquote High Caliber according to gavito when things turned physical the domestic abuse between Rosen and Manuel was reciprocal with the two adults beating on each other with equal frequency but due to basic sexual dimorphism Rosa often lost the fight garavito claims he was the only one to try and defend her which further provoked spoke to the wrath of his father upon him garavito alleges that at age six or seven when he endeavored to defend his then pregnant mother from being beaten too severely by his father Manuel dragged his son outside strapped him to a tree and flogged the boy repeatedly with the flat side of a machete oh my good Lord according to garavito Rosa was also violent with her children although alcohol was not the source of her aggression she didn't drink Rosa was angry and contemptuous resentful of her lot in life and she took out her frustrations on little kids who couldn't defend themselves according to garavito Rosa generally neglected her children viewed them as an inconvenience and a burden and raised them with quote little affection or care garavito began school at the age of seven after his family had relocated to Sean it proved to be little rest bite from his home life he had to wear glasses for which he was teased by his classmates children are mean he also had the nickname gabato which means squiggle but the hurtfulness of the epithet among children doesn't exactly translate yeah I'm like that doesn't sound like a bad nickname that that sounds kind of fun I'd like the nickname squiggle he played quietly by himself during recess according to garavito teachers he was an attentive student but wasn't too bright and struggled with certain subjects Garett that's the worst way to be I'd always rather be like the bright student who doesn't really pay attention rather than the good student who pays attention but isn't that bright because paying attention is something you can fix brightness is not I was just a student who wasn't particularly bright or paid attention eventually garavito responded to The Bullying with fits of anger often him turning violent sometimes this scared off the other students sometimes it got garavito mercilessly beaten up by a gaggle of them when he wasn't exploding in fits of anger garavito maintained the shy silence that kept him from receiving too many beatings at home in 1967 when garavito was 10 years old he gained the first inkling that he might be same-sex attracted another boy at school innocently touched garavito and he recalled feeling a quote Pleasant sensation he did not understand and a longing to remain at the boy's side there is some ambiguity about whether gavito was homosexual or bisexual gavito insists that he is attracted to women but his fairly sexless relationships with future girlfriends and his Perpetual erecti dysfunction would beg to differ it is possible that being a product of his culture and the times garavito felt pressured to be attracted to women and remains half closeted to this day even so while gavito insists he is attracted to women he is quote much more attracted to men though the use of the term men might be stretching it oh God garavito has stated that the primary objects of his desires throughout his life were early adolescent boys quote if I saw a young man let's say 13 or 14 years old I subconsciously felt but understood that I liked that child and that I wanted to caress him broh your brain is broken my dude it should be noted that gavito did not rule out Children much younger than 13 or 14 in 1968 gavito was taken out of school with only a fifth grade education due to his poor academic performance and because his father wanted to help him earn money for the family as unpleasant as certain aspects of his school life had been this placed him at his father's Mercy almost fulltime but allegedly Manuel was not the only abuser that he had to worry about gavito claims that the age of 12 or 13 he was repeatedly abused by a neighbor the man was allegedly a friend of his father's deeply religious and the owner of a local drugstore the abuse would allegedly happen whenever Manuel took his son there to receive flu shots and medication garavito claims that the neighbor strapped him down to a bed burned him with candle wax cut him with a knife and bit him on the genitals and buttocks during the sexual assaults according to gavito the bites were apparently so hard that they did lasting damage to his penis the sessions were allegedly not isolated that happened with some regularity garavito claims that he did not tell his parents about the ongoing sadistic abuse because they would not have believed him weigh those comments what they are worth yeah I just had a discussion with my wife about this the other day I hate that I keep talking about my children in an episode like this but it's like yeah you got to like we were like well how do you cuz you don't want your kid to be in this situation because it's like obviously if you're telling your parents that something dodg is happening to you you want the kid to feel like completely competent and confident that they can tell you about that stuff and my wife and I were talking about well how do you do that how do you like I'm sure there's there's going to be articles like Google is amazing you just ask Google or chat gbt like how do I do this and it always gives you a great answer like I we were wanting to teach I'm going to stop talking about my children because it's so horrible what's going on the similarity of the alleged assault by the neighbor to gav Vito's latero has led some Criminal psychologists to believe that garavito invented these facts for his own sexual gratification during his sessions with mental health experts instead of garavito relating a chared trauma he was enjoying the impromptu fabrication of erotic fiction others suggest these events may have been genuine shaping garavito view of sexuality and blurring the lines between sex and violence in his mind and thus garavito may have felt compelled to replicate them to achieve sexual gratification in later life garavito claims that the initial insistence of his neighbor's abuse awakened a desire to hurt animals well just like we we're playing serial killer early life bingo today aren't we Jesus quote the only thing I wanted at that moment is to have self-d deleted myself that's a thank you David we can't say that word on YouTube because then we get demonetized which is a bit silly but it's the world we live in I'm sorry for all the podcast listeners podcasting they don't give a you can talk about whatever you want YouTube are like yo yo yo if you say that self- deltion word no money for you fact boy and the reality is I need money cuz these are quite expensive to produce they're quite long then I saw two little birds and I stoned them to death I took the little birds opened them and tore them to pieces that was after my sexual assault I was very sorry I don't know why I did it shortly after the neighbors regular abuse began garavito claims that he as a 12-year-old molested a six-year-old boy garavito also claims that around this time he began to assault his brothers quote my brothers and sisters were very young and I felt something inside that I couldn't explain we all went to bed where I suggested they take off their clothes and I began to fondle them nothing happen neither did my parents fight out nor did my brothers remember also sometimes when they were sleeping I would again take off my brother's clothes and fondle them bruh the drugstore owner's abuse of gavito allegedly continued unabated approximately for 2 years then in 1971 when garavito was 14 the family moved to the town of Trio also in the caucus Valley it was there that garavito claims he was sexually assaulted by another neighbor apparently this man had shown garavito sexual pornography when garavito recoiled in disgust the neighbor allegedly beat the teenager before dragging him outside into the bushes and sodomizing him once again it's unclear whether this incident actually happened or where gavito invented it as both an explanation for his later crimes and as a form of sedom masochistic erotica to titillate himself while he spoke to psychologists garavito is a classic case of antisocial personality disorder he is highly manipulative and a chronic liar you can't rely on a word he says aren't highly manipulative chronic chronic Liars generally quite intelligent cuz it it takes a lot to keep your Li straight and it takes a lot to manipulate people because people are generally not that dim don't you have to be smarter than someone else to really be able to manipulate them or just really excellent at manipulation either way in 1972 gav Vito's personal narrative sees him transformed from a traumatized victim into a relentlessly aggressive Predator especially because at the age of 15 garavito encountered another Pastime that would be crucial to the contortion of his psyche and the flourishing of hiso the demon [Music] drink Alexandre a friend of mine and carismatic star of drunken Ghost Hunters which is a that is a niche reference if you're new to this show I have another show called decoding the unknown and David recently wrote an episode called drunken Ghost Hunters about him and his mate Alexandre and another dude whose name I can't remember I'm sorry other dude and that's the reference that you're missing there oh and said to me David nothing turns a good mind bad and a bad mind worse than liquor 50 minutes later someone allegedly keyed the side of her ex-boyfriend's car in an elaborate swirly pattern and 20 minutes after that Alexandra vomited in the lady's toilets at the local uni bar and needed to be taken home oh my God alcohol was certainly fuel for the already festering mind of lisis garavito because of its depressive agitating and disinhibitory qualities booze is foremost among the mind altering drugs that are capable of exacerbating personality disorders and various forms of melt and illness I was just having a chat with someone the other day about that and like some people like and I've got mates who are like or I don't really like nowadays I'm just I'm I'm a middleaged man we don't drink that much but when I was a kid like we drink and some people like when I'm drunk I just I don't get aggressive I'm just like hey hey woo but like some people they like get into fights and stuff and it's like yeah let's go and I'm like oh my god I've never been in a fight in my life I was drunken in a fight and' be like what are you supposed to do with assistance of a dozen beers or half a bottle of the hard stuff thoughts and impulses that might have stayed buried brought to the Forefront and enacted in real life yes that's true though it's like how many 12 what should we do anything we want except for fighting gavito is not even close to being the first alcoholic serial killer the connection is quite common for instance Jeffrey dmer always needed to get face to throttle the life out of his drugged up and helpless victims e warau sometimes knocked back 20 beers in a sing Le day while she was hitchiking and murdering men on the road and Ted Bundy in his early murders needed to get simile Blotto on Mickey's Big Mouth Malt Liquor to carry out acts of abduction and sexual sadism yeah yeah Jesus these I'm just getting reminded of all the horrible that we've covered on this channel but with Bundy as time were on the impulse got stronger and stronger and the need for a disinhibitory liquid got weaker and weaker gavito on the other hand never lost the need for booze in order to reveal the monster that lay beneath he was a Jackel and hid situation even as an adult he was timid and well-mannered when sober but he turned into a torturer murderer mutilator and necropile while drunk but all that lies ahead so brah quit drinking it's like sometimes you just got it sometimes you just got it I mostly I haven't drunk for like or I drunk more than a glass of wine for like four or five months now because I take a pill for my cholesterol and I went in for like my routine blood checkup to make sure it's not destroying my liver and they were like guess what fact boy it's not doing wonders for your liver and I was like oh God and they're like do you drink and I'm like of course I drink I'm a normal person and they're like no more drinking or like maximum one drink a day I like okay so I just kind of it's hard just to drink one drink a day so I mostly just stop drinking which is weird I don't feel any better for it I just feel normal just like the same as like this is one of my problems it's like I'll eat whatever I want I'll drink as much as I want and it's like I just don't feel any difference so there's no I'm like oh no like obviously if I get super wasted I'm going to wake up with a hang over but only since my 30s and generally it just doesn't affect my like functioning yeah so that's been fun got a blood test next week to see if my liver's back on track as a 15-year-old boy garavito had Early Access to alcohol eventually gravitating toward cheap Brandy since Colombia is the land of the grape rather than the grain his father drank heavily which allowed garavito to sneak a bit of household booze for himself and in the 1970s attitudes towards teenage drinking were more relaxed so a young person could acquire a bottle of liquor from a store more easily provided they'd scrape together the money additionally yeah even when I was a kid in the early 2000s late ' 90s ging alcohol was kind of a challenge it usually had to come from someone's parents house or from some kid who looked particularly old is we always managed though we always found a way life uh finds a way additionally Colombian drinking culture involves more moderate consumption with even pretin sometimes being given small amounts of wine with dinner pre wow okay I mean I'd have small amounts of wine with dinner but I think I was a teenager yeah like my parents would water down some wine and among adults rates of full-blown alcoholism are far lower in Colombia than in North America or northern Europe which meant that teenage bin drinking is not at top of people's concerns at least not compared to hard drug use like lacing a cigarette with cheap cocaine residue garavito also had genetics running against him his father was a drunk and came from a family of drunks and although his mother was a te toer her father was also a Relentless old soak who had died of curosis of the liver and she had two brothers who were also professional Grog guzzlers yeah that's that's not going to be that's not going to be good like I don't know no one in my family is addicted to really anything so and and I'm also like not really an addictive personality I'll do things once or just this it's like yeah with the drinking I was like okay so I'll just stop it wasn't like oh no it was like for a couple of days it was oh man I could really use a glass of wine after work but that quickly passed thus garavito was a budding piss artist from a long igno lineage of piss artists this made an occasional casual constraint Tipple almost impossible for him yeah that's my life now it's like maybe a glass of wine or two once a week and not even a big glass like a tiny little glass it's like ah it still tastes great doesn't I love wine garavito says that after the incident of him failing to become aroused by heterosexual pornography he tried to quote unquote correct the problem by sexually propositioning dozens of older women along with plenty of girls his own age in order to summon up the courage and possibly the will power to do so he first needed to be thoroughly lubricated by alcohol but his forwardness and confidence were counterbalanced by a rather off-putting and creepy drunkenness thus the booze reaking 15-year-old was always and unsurprisingly turned down by every woman he approached drunken carousing however became a permanent fixture in the teenager's life some of this was just for entertainment among his friends but the removal of garavito inhibitions quickly led him toward the real object of his Desires in late 1972 garavito under an extreme state of intoxication it was caught by his mother trying to force himself on a 5-year-old boy oh my what do you do in that situation you're like you got to stop drinking you what the garavito later claimed that this boy's fear and distress first ignited in in him a strong impulse towards sexual sadism it is his brain is so broken it's unclear whether this was the only boy that garavito molested in 1972 it is just the only instance in 1972 where garavito got caught garavito himself claims that the incident was one and according to garavito the ACT disgusted his mother and father and he was thrown out of the house for a week or two but the police were not called and no charges were laid discussed his mother and father what a shocking surprise in 1973 at the age of 16 garavito continued his depredations again the number of victims in this year is unknown but we know there were several he traveled widely possibly to reduce the chances of detection he was arrested at a train station in bogatar 400 km or 250 Mi away from Trio after attempting an assault on a 6-year-old Boy The Assault took place on a train platform and the boy screamed immediately attracting the attention of authorities the Brazen and sloppy nature of the assault could be attributed to garavito state of intoxication at the time garavito was charged with attempted sexual assault on a minor but the case did not go to trial under police questioning garavito denied that he wanted to sodomize the victim but just quote wanted to lightly abuse him um bro if you don't go to prison right now you got to go to prison you got to go to prison you can't be just like oh no officer no I wasn't wanting to sodomize him I was just there for some light abuse just some a like a just a splashing of molestation officer meanwhile the incident led to garavito being permanently thrown out of the house so that's going to solve the problem isn't it according to garavito his father Manuel did not object to the sexual assault in principle holy but the fact that it was homosexual in nature Manuel try son it would be fine just next time assault a woman theck 1970s the uh what's his name's dad Manuel Manuel tried his son for choosing young boys instead of women as his prey or at least that's what garavito later claimed from there the 16-year-old was thrown into the world of Colombia's many homeless young men some of them were recruited by paramilitary groups some of them turned to Crime but most of them were exploited as a source of cheap labor he first found work at a coffee plantation in Trio it was while working at the coffee plantation in 73 that garavito first met Luth Mary aampo Orosco who was then a young woman living with their mother garavito and aampo formed a platonic friendship although garavito later claimed that he immediately fell head over Hills in love with her their friendship was interrupted later that year when a Campo moved the small town of ciria to find work this would not be the last time gavito and D compo would see each other in early 1974 at the age of 17 garavito left Trio looking for better paying work he bounced between the cities of Armenia and Pereira in the coffee axis doing odd jobs until he found a position as a clerk at an insurance company he was steady work and respectable and in 1975 at the age of 18 garavito even began taking night classes in marketing given his rough childhood if garavito was mentally sound and sober this might have been a new lease on life a success story a triumph over adversity how however garavito chronic alcoholism put an end to all of that it Shar to work drunk and aggressive which quickly brought him into conflict with his co-workers and employers even escalating to a few fist fights before he was fired thereupon garavito got a job as an assistant at a department store before he repeated the same pattern and was let go from there garavito drifted back to doing odd jobs in various towns and cities along with begging and selling trinkets on the site occasionally it find a job as a bag boy at a grocery store before his consistent drunkenness got him fired there too in his private life things followed a similar pattern garavito struck up a number of platonic friendships with women and even formed a few romantic attachments when drunk had tried to have sex with his girlfriends and sometime even asked his Ur platonic friends to varying results mingled with trauma shock and horror during the Grim drunken sex actic self he ran into the problem of unremitting erectile dysfunction this doesn't seem to be the result of alcohol oh m is going to be like he said too much booze instead garavito expressed frustration that he didn't not find the women attractive the alcohol was likely an attempt to overcome his lack of Attraction rather than the cause of his sexual malfunctions hence it seems likely garavito was homosexual not bisexual but due to the culture and the times he felt pressured to prove that yes he was a red blooded male like any other and of course due to the fact garavito was drinking around his girlfriends he' quickly turned nasty and commit acts of verbal and physical abuse but when he was sober garavito often seemed full of remorse and his behavior toward his girlfriends was quite caring and tender nevertheless the endless boozing gave these relationships a short shelf life garavito was unable to go more than a few days without getting hammered this meant the women in his life were subject to recurrent threats beatings and drunken Harang after enough of these outrages the women always threw garavito out of the house and spread word of his alcoholism and his abusiveness throughout the community thus garavito regularly wore out his welcome in a neighborhood Village or a town and hit the road again to started all again with strangers the only thing that allowed him to stay in one place for a few months was the fact that he was very quiet and kind when he was sober which bought him a little extra time with people before he was ostracized garavito didn't keep many friends which is unsurprising for an alcoholic with aspd a oh antisocial P personality disorder I was like aspd somewhere Police Department his coest Confidant in life was his sister Esther the only member of his family he spoke to after being tossed out of his childhood home gavita would regularly go back to Trio to visit her but even Esther while sympathetic tried to limit the amount of contact she had with him because of gavito alcoholism yeah he also sounds like and you've been he seems to be a total piece of already so you just be like yeah no I'm not going to hang out with you like we're not friends we're relatives you don't choose your family even she had been on the the receiving end of his drunken aggression as for the rest of his family garavito held a deep animosity towards them a constant refrain whenever garavito was drunk was how he hated his mother and most of his siblings and how he wanted to murder his father he' rant about it to anyone who would listen and while we could never be sure that gavito has told the truth about his childhood whatever he suffered at the hands of his father continued to rankle and fester within him the passer moving to a new town befriending or hooking up with a woman and then using alcohol to burn it all down to ruins and Ashes repeated itself from 1974 to 78 it's unclear how many children gavito assaulted during this time but we know there were quite a few likely into the double digits across the four years garavito insists at this time he was praying upon not just young boys but young girls as well this may be true or it may just be another manifestation of gav Vito's case of definitely not being gay he also made use of child sex workers from among the disposables the thousands of impoverished orphans who lined the streets and Alleyways of Colombia and garavito was cruel and rough with them his sadistic streak could had already been Unleashed he would beat them threaten them and torture them but to this point garavito didn't go so far as to kill them that Inferno was yet to come the beast at Heaven's gates in 1978 when garavito was just 21 years old his alcoholism become so pronounced that he fell into a deep depression and frequent thoughts what YouTube obliges us to call self- deltion yeah and it's be like oh the amount of pain and suffering that he would have saved everybody if he just done that would be so high as such gavito joined Alcoholics Anonymous which had spread from the United States to Columbia in 1959 and for putting one's faith in the general notion of a higher power it was just a short skiper to hop to joining more former religion a thoroughly lapsed Catholic garavito was brought by a fellow AA member to some Services held by the Pentecostal Church an internationally widespread Protestant sect with Lively elaborate ceremonies rif with music and repete with miraculous Faith healing and people speaking in tongues like as much as I think like religion is mostly nonsense and like all of this it be like if I had to go to one like do you want to go to the Catholic one which is all I don't know it's very boring it's very long all of this or do you want to go to the one where they speak in tongues and some dude is like and now walk my child then I'll be like I want to go to the one with the tongues I want to I want to go to that one that sounds exciting all of this Showmanship had the effect of reigniting garavito belief in the Divine but the biggest appeal of Pentecostalism to garavito was the concept of being cleansed of one's sins and being born again sure in Catholicism one can confess one's sins to try and gain entry into Heaven by charity and acts of piety but some sins are a bridge too far and ensure damnation oh really I think there was I I knew the one about like murdering the pope or whatever that's like one of the unforgivable sins or whatever like you can go to your Catholic like priest in the box or whatever and father forgive me for I've have sinned I have murdered the pope they'll be like oh sorry mate that's it can't help you you're going to hell for sure the only official requirement for salvation in Pentecostalism is to accept Jesus as your lord and savior and to join the family of God it was thus by a simple Declaration of faith that a sexual sadist and Relentless child predator hope to enter the Gates of Heaven he still thinks he's going to heaven to this day he's not cuz Heaven's not real and also if it was it's not where you're going in addition you're going to the other place the place where the devil and he'll be like constantly removing your skin and you'll be like oh my God finally removed all my skin and then you'll notice that all of your skin is back on your body and he starts to remove it again that's what I'm hoping for you that's why I hope that the afterlife is real because that's what I hope for you in addition to AA and Pentecostalism garavito approached the Colombian Department of Social Services who referred him to a fairly rudimentary counseling service to talk through his depression and alcohol abuse he underwent this counseling on an offer the better part of 5 years oh my God Colombia you've got like people running around on the streets who are called the unrecoverable uh undesirables whatever it was like disposables disposable children but you somehow have it set up so that this guy can receive counseling that's kind of amazing to have that at a time where it's like oh no what are those children doing oh they're running around smoking crack and killing each other like what the nevertheless it should be noted that during this period garavito frequently fell back to the bottle and he did not stop his predatory behavior against children he also did not discuss his attraction to Children much less his crimes against them with any of his counselors probably a good idea and so externally garavito adopted a double life like most serial killers but internally unlike many serial killers who simply wear a facade garavito was torn by a genuine cognitive dissonance where he could not reconcile his hopes for salvation with what he was doing to society's most vulnerable this tangle of piety and self-justification is evident in all of his TV interviews by day gavita would attend church services and was known by other parishioners to beat his chest out of supposed remorse during prayer at night having been cleansed of sin gavito would visit the local parks and Alleyways and solicit the sexual Services of street urchin or lore other more unsuspecting children with parents and happy homes toward quiet isolated areas where they would be at his Mercy not that garavito had any Mercy to give them in 1978 shortly after his conversion to Pentecostalism garavito relocated to the town of sasia where he got a job as a grocery store it was there that he reignited his friendship with Luth Mary aampo or o who worked as a cashier in the same store although their relationship remained platonic garavito claims that his love for aampo continued to burn brightly he managed to say sober around her and was gentle softspoken and kind he told aampo all about his religious conversion and hopes for salvation it was only later that aampo heard from Gitto's sister Esther about just how bad his alcoholism continued to be the same Blissful state of ignorance did not apply to the owners of the grocery store after a few months garavito was fired for absenteeism and occasionally being drunk at work when a camp wasn't there thereupon gavito picked up sticks and moved to the city of Armenia where he got a job working at a local bakery I'm just wondering if I've ever been drunk at work I mean since I worked myself like yeah not like drug drunk but I've had a beer or two at work like if I'm like hanging out with a mate and we're doing some work together or something in the like late afternoon definitely but like when I worked in like stores or like had jobs as a kid I I probably was but only the kind of drun where it's like oh man I was so drunk last night that I'm still drunk now there's a phase that's like struck with me forever like I remember like I don't know why they're stuck with me so much but it's in my first year of University and I go to like a we had these seminars or whatever and there's like eight of us in this room with the lecturer and m i in the class is looking a bit shiny I'm like you're right and he's like yeah man went out last night really drunk I'm still in Disneyland like just that phrase of like being in Disneyland meaning like still drunk the next day like but he made it to this class just still drunk but no I don't think I've ever been drunk at like regular ass work thereupon gavito picked up sticks and moved to the city of Armenia where he got a job working at a local bakery he finally managed to keep things on an even kill at their job he did his drinking off hours but he did not cease his predations against children frequently visiting Valencia Park to solicit disposables who were as young as nine garavito continued working at the bakery until the early 1980s when he showed up drunk and fought with other staff members he was promptly sacked unemployed penniless and soon homeless again garavito fell back into depression and the self delerious but thoughts returned additionally he developed a case of bulimia already a relatively small man only standing at 165 cm or 5'5 in he now became rail thin in the spring of 1980 gavito checked himself into the psychiatric wi of the San Juan dios Hospital in the city of manales there this is where doctors found out that he was also suffering from paranoia and hallucinations he was treated with antis psychotics most notably in one therapy session gavita began to confess to his psychiatrist that he had a desire for children but then he walked that statement back explaining that he meant he wanted to start a family the psychiatrist be like oh what so hey say that again what like with his previous therapists garavito ultimately decided not to De close his pederastic urges he was released after a few weeks and moved back to Armenia where he got a job at another grocery store while there he Charmed a single mother and hair stylist named Claudia he was kind to her and did not interfere with her child oh my God he's such a nice guy he's such a he's really kind he hasn't touched my kids at all what a great dude everyone else is always touching my kids in appropriately garavito has gone on record to say that the first woman's company I actually enjoyed was Claudia's this seems a little at odds with his being in love with Luth a Campo but who can expect consistency from a psychopath a serial killer and a compulsive liar but the relationship did not last long because Claudia had a somewhat mercenary approach towards men and gavito could hardly splash the cash on a stock boy's wage after their break up gavito intensified his predatory behaviors mercenary approach towards men I've not heard it referred to you that way before she was like I hope you've got money during his rather generous 2hour lunch breaks at the grocery store oh my can you imagine taking two hours I have lunch at my desk sometimes I'll go out and it's like 20 minutes like eat as quickly as possible and they go back to my desk 2 hours I be like I wouldn't know what to do he would travel from Armenia to the towns of kimbaya or Kaka which were both within 20 km or 12 miles of the city he drink treat Brandy along the way by the time he arrived gavito would lure one of the poorer children from a Marketplace or Park usually by offering them money to perform an odd job of some kind once they were in an isolated spot garavito would get progressively drunker and then sexually assault them in addition he would beat them and bite them on the limbs necks and genitals echoing the assault garavito claims he experienced at the hands of the pharmacist neighbor as a child by the Autumn of 1980 garavito had taken to torturing his victims with candle ax burning them with a lighter and cutting them with a razor blade in some cases he amputated one of their toes garavito also removed one of his own front teeth so they could according to him bite his victims more quote unquote effectively at this time garavito assaulted and tortured but did not kill his victims so how is he getting away with it for so long if he's doing this all the time is no one come forward are the police just like oh you're a disposable child no one cares about you we don't have time to deal with this we've got other problems to get to like everything from 1980 onward garavito prayed upon an estimated average of between 15 and 25 children per year not counting the so-called disposables whom he solicited for sex and subjected to the same torture um I feel like we should definitely be counting them as well is it just they're uncountable because there were so many that's insane he's going to get out of prison this is insane this should already B life upon life upon life in prison as a result it wasn't long before his victims entered the triple digits and here is a man who one day soon might be released from prison and who is fanatically confident that when he dies he will Ascend to the Gates of Heaven I'm glad you felt the need to repeat that there as well David because it's just wild isn't it agents of [Music] evil in order to minimize his chances of being detected garavito quit his job at the grocery store in Armenia bought a simple wooden sales cart and set out on the road road he sold trinkets religious icons and occasionally fruit he traveled wly across Colombia in order to prevent anyone from recognizing him as a perpetrator or tracking him down furthermore being a street vender allowed him to hang out at marketplaces without drawing suspicion while he was on the prow for victims as for his sales he only needed to make enough to pay for food and for Booze garavito was okay with sleeping rough though periodically throughout the 1980s he would shack up with a woman increasingly selecting single mothers so that he could return to to a place after being on the road and sleep comfortably under a welcoming roof as a result of these tactics garavito was able to sexually assault and tort an estimated 200 to 300 children across Colombia between 1980 and 1992 without being caught that's insane and I know I don't know it's like I feel like all of this stuff should just be caught so much faster but then it's like you still hear about stuff coming out and you're like wait how many people over how long and it's like you think like the Jimmy savle Stu and you're like oh my God how long was this going on for and how many people knew and it just never was dealt with there was no punishment he died before he was punished he had this fancy ass grave and only came out afterwards so he never got any punishment for what he's done which is sick we can trace garavito probable movements in this period by looking at spikes in local reports of child abuse git's cognitive dissonance between his religiosity and his crimes persisted when sober he was frequently depressed about what he was doing several times attemp tempting self deltion at night he would feverishly read the Bible trying to find a stray passage that might somehow justify what he was doing to the children he would also strip naked and hit himself in the chest in Contrition he began asking his victims what their names were so he could record them in a blue notebook which he read while he prayed gavito claims he had frequent Nightmares From which he woke up and cried before bursting into monarchal laughter when he remembered that despite his faith his crimes had given him a great deal of sexual pleasure his contemplations of God the afterlife salvation and his justifications for sin were not abided by the fact that he frequently suffered from psychosis delusions and hallucinations muddling his thoughts and then there was the booze which was omnipresent incapable of quieting any depression or frustration with exaggerated confidence followed by sweet Oblivion when skying the Bible for a justification failed gavito leaned into the idea that he was pure evil a natural First Step was Satanism garavito indulged himself in Black Magic seances to commune with the dead sacrificial rituals to summon dark spirits in the foretelling of the future with tarot cards he visited occultists and fortune tellers until he decided that he knew more about the spiritual underworld than they did gavita began to believe the devil was speaking to him and sending him commands this is not unheard of with serial killers Jeffrey Dharma began to believe something similar it has Twisted form of logic to it if an all powerful evil being is sending you commands then who are you a mere frail mortal to disobey you could then indulge whatever sadistic or depraved activity that gave you sexual pleasure while acknowledging head-on that it was morally wrong that's a super [ __ ] up justification it didn't need to be rationalized justified and it definitely wasn't your fault the devil made you do it literally in this respect Satanism eliminated the cognitive dissonance garavito had previously felt yeah it's also just such a sign of mental illness like or just an excuse for his shitty behavior and I say cognitive dissonance rather than genuine remorse which is a word that sometimes crops up in accounts of garavito hitting himself praying over the names of his victims and feeling depressed about what he's doing to those children the word remorse is also thrown around quite a bit in statements by gavito himself but it is quite clear from his interviews and published psych evaluations that garavito is a psychopath neurologically incapable of feeling empathy or true remorse instead when we talk about garavito feeling conflicted we're talking about his awareness that what he was doing was against laws and moral Norms being religious in a highly religious country he knew full well the Ten Commandments prohibited murder he knew that Christ preached a compassion that was the polar opposite to hurting and innocent child he knew that hurting a child is illegal he knew that a mob of people would happily kill him for what he was doing his so-called remorse was entirely relative to how he was perceived so in the face of his God and of Colombian Society he tried to justify what he had done and when he couldn't he simply Shrugged his shoulders said that he was a sinner and said quote unquote that he felt bad about it but he didn't actually care about the suffering of those kids in addition to Satanism garavito added Nazism most mostly in connection to the violence it wrought rather than anything ideological or racial he picked up a copy of Mind C various biographies of Hitler and accounts of World War II why garavito connected with the fact that Hitler was once a homeless and impoverished artist in Vienna he admired the fact that Hitler had gone from a situation very similar to his own to being a totalitarian dictator of a country and nearly conquering all of Europe gavit also admired Hitler's particularly ruthless and violent methods he had a particular affection for the idea of shooting large numbers of people in Graves that they had been forced to dig themselves oh my God who looks at like reads books about World War it's like you know what the really nice part about was that people digging their own Graves and then being executed by guns that was so so good it's a really interesting part of World War II that I love like what the what's wrong with your brain garavito also recognized the quote unquote usefulness of keeping Jews Gypsies and political prisoners in concentration camps and was stimulated by the torture and misery inflicted there what did we say that this wasn't um it wasn't in connection to anything like racial or ideological don't know about that sound it sounds a little racial doesn't it of course gavito overlooked the fact that as a same sex attracted person he would have likely wound up in one of those concentration camps as well nor did the Third Reich look kindly on alcoholics whom they consider genetically flawed and whom they imprisoned institutionalized and even euthanized but garavito took no notice of that instead he studied the likely untrue theories of some historians that Hitler was homosexual to garavito mind this brought them even closer together as kind Spirits in similar vein garavito came to idolize Colombian mass murderer Campo Al do gardo an army veteran who got up one day went to the bank cleaned out his saving accounts bought a revolver and 500 rounds of ammunition and then proceeded to shoot stab and burn several of his neighbors before heading to an Italian restaurant having a few drinks and then opening fire on the other customers in total he killed 29 people and injured 12 before the police put a bullet in his brain gavita began to have fantasies about killing people in front of journalists and large crowds he dreamed of of buying a machine gun going to Trio and filling his father full of bullets before gunning down his mother and his other siblings and finally turning the gun on himself all this was wrapped up in garavito feeling that he was entitled to vengeance upon the world and he wanted to take himself out rather than allow himself to be caught he had all of these murderous fantasies before he killed a single child yet harming an adult was something of a daunting Prospect for garavito who was short thin malnourished and rather timid around people when he was sober when the time came to kill garavito ultimately chose more defenseless victims on January the 25th 1984 garavito got drunk fell into a deep psychosis and began to cut himself in public he was locked up in a psych ward and put on medication he was given cognitive behavioral therapy AKA talk therapy for his depression he was kept institutionalized for a month and was released on February the 28th with supposedly a clean bill of health that same day he went to the city of Pereira where he abducted sexually assaulted and tortured two boys garavito went to his sister Esther's house who was then living in Pereira and asked her to store a small clothes bag and Ben to her it contained two identity cards taken from the boys however a few days later the victim spotted garavito in public and pointed him out to adults forcing garavito to flee the city police were not able to identify garavito from witness descriptions and no warrant was circulated garavito continued to seek psychiatric treatment as an outpatient at various Mental Hospitals occasionally being committed after one of his self-d deltion attempts again he never disclosed his crimes or pederastic inclinations to his therapists he was also arrested by released in 1984 on suspicion of petty theft but was released without charge it was 2 years before garavito was bold enough to return to Pereira it was a large enough City that he was fortunate enough not to be recognized by any former Witnesses throughout 1986 garavito continued to ply his trade as a street vendor along with continuing to stalk and assault victims he also shacked up with a single mother named graciella zabaleta having randomly met her after leaving a mental hospital nearby her house garavito approached her and immediately suggested they become boyfriends and girlfriend it's weird and bold although the directness of this approach could have had the exact opposite effect graci was Charmed by gav Vito's confidence and invited him into her home for the next several months gavito paid graciella's bills and groceries with the proceeds of his street sales who was also very kind and seemingly protective of graciella's children erectile dysfunction kept sex off the table but like Luth and Claudia garavito later claims that he was madly in love with grella his relationship with her managed to last longer than some others because he frequently headed out of town stalk victims this prevented graciella from seeing garavito drunk too often for garavito party attempted to stay sober whenever he was in her home however by early 1987 graciella had seen garavito drunk deranged and angry too many times and she asked him to leave garavito hit the road again he began exclusively selling religious iconography pictures of the Pope and various Saints he continued to lure children and assault them diversifying his tactics by dressing up as a priest a beggar or walking with crutches to not arouse suspicion and the world worst was Yet to Come [Music] Slaughter after praying on between 200 and 300 victims in the two decades between 1972 and 1992 gavito claims that he began to feel a quote sense of apathy about carrying out further sexual assaults he also began to have trouble reaching sexual climax during these atrocities the thrill just wasn't what it used to be then in Autumn of 1992 when he was 35 years old garavito claims that he was communing with Spirits VI rigi board when he heard the Devil speak to him the dark lord supposedly asked gavito if he would like to serve him to which gavito answered yes and Satan allegedly replied quote then kill and with killing many rewards may it come to you a few days later on October the 1st 1992 gavito was heavily intoxicated and staggering down the streets of a resort District just north of the city of kahia on the Caribbean coast he spotted a young boy sat on the sidewalk selling sweets andig cigars garavito approached and offered the boy money to come and perform an odd job for him the boy declined because gavito was thoroughly faced he began to get aggressive groped the victim at which point the boy called for help two police officers approached pistol whipped garavito nice and then beat him severely to the point of bleeding nice and dragged him to the local police station police officers they're just like it's like you just beat the out of someone be like now we're arresting you that's how policing works but I don't mind there gavito bribed the officers with his watch a ring and a thousand pesos which is only 50 cents in modern US currency to release him without charge 3 days later on the evening of October the 4th 1992 garavito staggered out of a bar in downtown hundi and began following a 13-year-old boy named Juan Carlos gavito claims that the Moonlight somehow filled him with a desire to kill and he had flashbacks of his childhood and became filled with rage gavito began tailing Juan Carlos through a crowded Market District quietly dipping into a shop to purchase a rope and a butcher's knife then garavito approached the teenager offered him a thousand pesos to do a quick task for him the boy agreed and followed garavito out to a railroad track garavito beat the victim knocking out his front teeth and then tied him up sodomized him and slashed his throat with the butcher's knife postmortem garavito mutilated the victims wrecked him with the knife and castrated the corpse then the drunken murderer passed out garavito claims that when he awoke the next morning he began to weep when he saw the boy's blood stains on his clothes Juan Carlos's body was discovered 3 days later due to the fact that he was poor and such murders were common his death was not assigned a high priority by the police his death was common this sort of murder was common his body was destroyed what the police or what the f Colombia on October the 10th garavito headed to triu to stay a few days with his sister Esther garavito claims that at this time he was trying to suppress his homicidal urges despite having now gotten a taste for it by some twisted drunken logic garavito tried to tame his murderous impulses by keeping constantly obliterated on Brandy thinking he would not fill any rages if he stayed so drunk that he could barely stand well that's not how it works with you is it it seems that you only do these horrible things when you're out off your face of course such a level of intoxication cannot be maintained for more than a few hours and the alcohol merely exacerbated Gitto's mentalness rather than curbing it carito claims that on October 12th 1992 while working in the nearby city of tulula he saw a child walk by in the street and became so angry that he smashed the wooden crates and Clay containers on his sales cart a few hours later garavito spotted 12-year-old Juan Alejandro penia garavito lured him to an isolated spot with Promises of money tied him up sexually assaulted him and stamed him to death in the hopes of making the murder look like a ritual killing committed by some kind of satanic cult garavito sliced off the victim's fingers thumbs and Toes he then dumped the body in the Kaa river which inent entally had the nickname the river of death because of the number of quote unquote disposables commonly found floating in it after the murder of panda on October the 12th 1992 gavito no longer tried to suppress his homicidal urges he was hooked he took up killing fulltime literally he unleashed the sort of Hell upon Colombia that hadn't been seen since the days of Pedro Lopez because of the sheer scale of the violence the failure to identify all of the victims and garavito own failure to remember the precise dates of all of them the record grows a little hazy moving forward but by a rough estimate garavito kills between 45 and 60 children per year that's four or five children per month averaging at least one child per week garavito targeted the disposables and the children of the rural peasantry and urban working class due to the nature of Colombian Society at the time it was only if you murdered a victim in the upper or middle classes that police assigned some priority to the investigation the disposables had no one to report them missing the parent parents of lower class kids did report their children missing but very little was done Pedro Lopez exploited the same situation in Colombia Peru and Ecuador in the 1970s there was also the issue of reporting a child missing if one of the Colombian militias or drug cartels was behind it to do so invited deadly retribution thus it was the classism and inactivity of the police and the poverty and utter chaos of the region that were responsible for how both gavito and Lopez racked up such disgustingly high body counts was Columbia considered a failed state where failed States at this time because when the police is so unfunctional it sounds like just a it sounds like a failed State doesn't it in addition to targeting poor children gabito also had a preference for boys who were slim neotenous neotonus I don't know that word look up neotonus juvenile oh slow developments brilliant with Innocent features essentially the younger and more effeminate looking the better he also preferred to kill children of predominantly European ancestry especially if they blue eyes or light colored hair rather than children with darker features and or native Colombian ancestry that said garavito victim spans the entire spectrum of appearances he ultimately was not fussy garavito murder victims were typically between the ages of six and 13 with one exception being a 16-year-old disabled teenager who had lost the use of his legs garavito also murdered five adults who were accidental Witnesses of his killings he did not torture or sexually assault them or mutilate their bodies due to the fact that many children had no dental records no parents to claim them or otherwise too decomposed when their bodies were found scores and scores of children could not be identified at the time it took elaborate facial reconstruction and years of research to discover their identities and to this day 27 of gavito victims still have not been identified again this is a dude who's going to be released from prison that is insane Colombia get your together do not release this mother or maybe do and just tell everyone where he is at all times just be like hey hey that guy that horrible dude he's right here he's right here anyone what you know unlike the first murder of Juan Carlos gavito generally struck during the daytime preferably in the morning approaching victims in the marketplace or the streets he would also lurk around schoolyards in the afternoons his approaches differed sometimes it appear as a street vender a priest a beggar a school teacher a disabled [ __ ] hobbling on crutches and even disguised himself as an old man in Trio garavito took care to gain a reputation in the local community as a charity worker who was fond of kids a facade that he was able to carry off very effectively when he was soft spoken and sober it sounds like he should never have moved from Catholicism to be honest he would have fit right in there due to garavito large lwh hanging years the children affectionately gave him the nickname goofy after the Disney character the charity work gained him access to orphanages and other children's charitable organizations again I know this is completely unrealistic for the time period but yo if you're working for Charities with children they should police check you first you should have that background check and make sure you're not on on one of those you know lists of weirdos regardless of the covery used garavito would then make up an excuse Del lure a child to a secluded spot usually a job for money if the child seemed hesitant to go with him gavita would increase the amount that usually clinched things other times garavito would offer sweets or gifts and in some cases it offer drugs to Street children who were addicted to smoking that cocaine residue once on the morning after Halloween garavito lured a victim by offering to help him find the candy the boy had lost the night before once he had convinced his victim by whatever means garavito would then walk a very long distance with the child until they were too tired to resist then garavito would strike the attacks were sudden but not quick with prolonged torture that could last the better part of an hour in 1993 garavito escalated the brutality of the killings he resumed the atrocities of his previous non-lethal attacks the burning the cutting the biting in addition garavito began disemboweling his victims while they were alive and he was in the middle of sexually assaulting them it became something of a gr grotesque signature of his such was the Fate experienced by eight school boys between the ages of 9 and 11 that garavito brazenly lured to a secluded area and bound with rope in the town of lav Victoria he moved from one victim to the next while the others watched after it was over garavito severed the victim's toes postmortem and took them as trophies along with their pictures cut out of their identity cards garavito soon dumped the toes however for fear of being detected by sniffer dogs he would instead document the killings in a little notebook take photographs of the victim's bodies cut out any newspaper reports of the killings and keep the receipts and bus tickets of his journeys between towns he kept these momentos in a black cotton bag at his sister ester's house sounds like he's not just writing down his crimes he's documenting his crimes after the mass murder in La Victoria gavito traveled an hour north and used the same mode as operandi to torture and murder 11 more victims in bogatar this time killed one by one he then departed for tul lulur and found more victims and spent the rest of 1993 hopping between Pereira kimaya Armenia and 54 other towns and Villages taking the lives of dozens of victims by the end of the year garavito began removing a victim's vital organs post [ __ ] and taking them with him from the scene he did not keep them as trophies but soon discarded them at a second location due to Rapid rates of decomposition and interference from Wildlife the viscera was almost never found in 1994 garavito added the torture method of flaying the skin off the victim's buttocks with a razor blade that he held between his fingers on February the 4th in bogatar garavito lured 13-year-old Jamie Gonzalez from the Plaza bolevard on a long track to a sugarcane field garavito was already extremely intoxicated having just been thrown out of a bath of flying into a junken rage over the quality of the food he continued to drink from a cheap bottle of brandy once they reached the field after garavito murdered Gonzalez he caught sight of a nearby crucifix which triggered his latent fear of God garavito panicked buried his knife and prayed for absolution then dug up the knife again and went to a hotel where he paced naked around the room for the next several hours flogging himself and reciting Palm 57 be merciful unto me oh God for my soul trusteth in thee in the shadow of thy wings I will take my refuge until these calamities be overpassed he shall send from heaven and save me from the reproach of him that would swallow me up my soul is among lions and I lie even among them that are set on fire even the sons of men whose teeth are Spears and arrows and their tongue a sharp sword the fact that GAR chose Palm 57 indicates his narcissism and lack of accountability for his actions the passage features King David calling upon God to rescue him from the evils of the world including the slander of other people gavito also saw himself beset by the evils of the world and beseeched God to rescue him instead of recognizing that it was he garavito himself who was the greatest evil of all while still in bogatar garavito spotted a 12-year-old boy sleeping on a bus he pled him with Brandy and lured his now intoxicated victim into a ravine there garavito stripped off the victim's clothes and began to bind him with rope when garavito detected the smell of Rotting Flesh he soon discovered that they were standing next to a mass grave not one of garavito this was Colombia as garavito recoiled from the smell the boy seized his chance and grabbed garavito knife the boy slashed the blade of the older man slicing the tendons in garavito left hand as he raised his arms to protect himself ultimately however garavito managed to overpower the victim and murdered him the killing blow was usually a deep cut across the throat while gavito climaxed oh my God too much also postmortem garavito would castrate the corpse when feeling particularly enranged and venomous gavito would place the genitals in the kaba's mouth only two known victims out of hundreds after garavito murder spree began in 1992 wounds up being luckier in their escape attempts bran Fernie Bernal Alvarez was a 16-year-old who worked for his father running a [ __ ] fighting business garavito approached the victim didn't try to lure him but immediately threatened Alvarez with a knife garavito marched him into the forest and bound the victim with rope he stabbed Alvarez seven times with a screwdriver during the sexual assault however Alvarez was able to break fre of the ropes and run away before garavito could kill him in sasia garavito approached a 10-year-old boy named Carlos Alberto garavito offered the victim 200 pesos roughly 10 cents in modern US currency along with some small gifts and lured him to a secluded tree covered Hillside the usual modus operandi ensued at one point garavito asked the victim if he was enjoying it the boy hoping to mify his abductor responded Yes and so garavito let the boy go without killing him saying quote that's how you like it that's how I like it see you next week Jesus how is he not getting caught he's just let or one person escaped and one has been let go is this it's just in insane police incompetence and insane failed State situation where it's like the police still don't catch him after he's had jesz Jesus by 1995 there were enough unexplained corpses of children turning up in the town of Armenia for the Local District Attorney's office to set up a four-man task force excellent let's go the team began asking for reports of similar discoveries from across Colombia hundreds of reports flooded in however many of the children had not been identified nor were detailed descriptions of their injuries given making it impossible to tie the bodies matching garavito Mo to one man in that same year police discovered the bodies of four children in varying states of decomposition in a hillside in the AR Valley they were all from the lower classes between the ages of 8 and 10 and two of them were cousins all of them had disappeared before noon with the cousins disappearing on the same day and the two other children disappearing on different days it appeared that once the killer found a decent spot he would lure subsequent victims there as well quickly subduing and binding them once they saw the previous corpses police also Jesus Christ that's got to be terrifying you just be like okay but then you got to fight right that's it that's all you got you know you're going to die so like you might as well go for it police also found several empty bottles of cheap Brandy and a bottle of lubricant at the scene this is one of the earliest connections Authority made of a killer of children stalking the region the bodies all showed similar signs of injury and the same cause of death a slash across the throat the killer had also added the torture method of inserting a knife into their rectums DNA found on the bodies indicated that they've been sexually assaulted but police didn't know whether this had been done pre- or postmortem indeed garavito usual emmo was to assault his victims while they were alive but sometimes when the victim expired too soon garavito engaged in necrophilia of course he did why wouldn't heing psycho State of [Music] Decay in 1996 garavito was arrested in the town of tuner Under Suspicion of the murder of a 12-year-old boy named renal dardo cantero garavito had been identified by a store owner and several local sex workers who had seen garavito lure the boy away from a crowded Market place however police had no other evidence and it was Gitto's word against the eyewitnesses some after some smooth talking and coming off as as harmless as possible gavito managed to be released without charge he immediately modified his appearance and traveled 450 km or 280 Mi west of Pereira where he promptly murdered 10-year-old Jorge Ramirez after arriving Jesus Christ you're this close to getting caught how is that not I I know iwitness testimony as like super unreliable but can we at least keep a super close eye on this dude now police come on on the 8th of June 1996 garavito was in the town of boaka and approached a group of boys in a shop and bought them all sweets he then managed to lure one of the boys away for an odd job with the boy following him on his bike the victim's mutilated remains were found 5 days later garavito was still in boaka at the time was identified by the other boys garavito was arrested and under police interrogation he admitted to buying the boy suets but claimed that he left them alone after that again if you're arrested and it's like you you were buying children's sweets put you on a list not the big public list where you've been like publicly convicted of a sex crime or whatever but some secret police list that they just share with other police officers and share around the place and be like yeah that guy we don't have much on him but we think he's a sicko so let's just you know eyes on chaps police showed poor judgment and released him 4 days later garavito again traveled to Pera where he immediately tortured and murdered a 13-year-old boy then in late June garavito moved to sasia where he ran into Luth Mar aampo Orosco whom he had first met in 1973 and worked with at the grocery store in 1978 garavito said he always loved aampo she was now a school teacher and a single mother of a 15-year-old son garavito told her that he no longer worked for grocery stores but for the past several years have been a street vendor and was now a Salesman of air fresheners to schools across Colombia but because the school year was now finished garavito complained that he was out of work he asked aampo if he could stay with her she consented garavito began selling fruit from a cart in the marketplace and paid a Campo money in exchange for for room and bought but his stay didn't last long due to his alcoholism locals in sasia began to call him by the nickname conflicto because he was frequently drunk and aggressive by the end of July a compo was eager to be rid of him and garavito moved out in August 1996 while in bogatar garavito broke his leg now it's unclear whether this was from a drunken fo which is quite common with chronic alcoholics or whether it was from a physical confrontation with an adult or an injury sustained while he was trying to kill another victim either way it placed gavito on crutches with a neck brace for the next month during that time garavito briefly stayed with the male friend before returning to C room begging Luther Campo to let him stay again she cautiously said yes oh no Luth what are you doing don't be like that he you had to kick him out because he was conflicto he spent his days begging on the streets no longer able to work or kill any victims he gave the proceeds of his pan handling over to aampo in mid-september when garavito was sufficiently recovered he went out and bought a Campo a television and paid for it in installments two weeks later in October garavito was drunk again and he got into a a physical altercation with a campo's teenage son because garavito wanted to put on the local news while the kid was watching something else aampo kicked garavito out of the house and had to assume paying the installments for the television herself bro you can't do that it's like oh yeah I got this debt and I gave it to you it's like well I don't want it I don't want it it's not my debt why would you have to pay for that it's like so I bought you a car oh awesome yeah yeah you got to pay the monthly payments it's like well you didn't buy me a car then did you you got me a lease like what the [ __ ] two months later on Christmas Day a Campo had a male friend visit her and give her a Christmas present garavito must have been watching the house because that evening he made a drunken phone call to a camp where he called the male friend a gaser and said that he didn't like him visiting Campo responded by telling gavito that he was banned from ever staying with her again he like gavito guess what it's none of your business I've kicked you out of my house twice gavita I was very generous don't tell me what I can and cannot do and please don't murder me or myself Son thank you at 6:00 a.m. the next morning garavito turned up at ao's house still drunk from the night before shouting threats and peppering her with obscene insults garavito then attempted to strangle AO she and her son fled and took refuge in her neighbor's house garavito trashed ao's Place stayed there several more hours sobering up writing aampo an apology note and then departing aampo never saw him again shortly thereafter in the second week of January 1997 gabarito murdered three victims all between the ages of 6 and 8 in need of a new place to stay gavito rekindled relations with graciella zabaleta a single mother in Pereira with whom he had first formed a romantic relationship in 1986 the two had been periodically in contact since then garavito paid her a visit in early 1997 and swe talked her into moving in again he used the place as a base of operations while continuing to travel across the country killing victims thus she didn't see him often which might explain the relative longevity of a stay with her the gavito was also active in Pereira for instance on October the 1st 199 7 he murdered two boys at a bus terminal the next month in November police uncovered a dump site of four victims in a Countryside Ravine in the risaralda region not far from periro where gavito is based the gruesome Discovery set off a blizzard of police investigation and media coverage which alarmed gabarito ultimately however the investigation stalled for lack of suspects then in February 1998 100 kilm 60 Mi to the South police discovered the bodies of three boys lying on a hillside just outside of the town of Genova one of them had been impaled on a pike so thoroughly that the sharp end had come out of the victim's mouth oh my God you doing some vad the Impaler now this sparked another flurry of media retention again alarming garavito in the coming months he followed the news stories of other victims being discovered in various fields and forests across Colombia in July 1998 graci elizabeta had finally grown tired of Gitto's drunk and abusive Behavior whenever he was home and politely asked him to leave gavito departed peaceably but got graciella to keep another black cotton bag at her house is no one looking in these cotton bags and being like why are all these boys ID card photos in here what are these toes meanwhile garavito was convinced that he should move his murderous activities abroad for a while so he bought a forged passport with the name of bonacio morera and flew to Ecuador he spent the next two months begging for money locals immediately marked him out as a foreigner due to his heavy Colombian accent in Late July garavito murdered a 14-year-old boy and then a 12-year-old boy in the town of chony Ecuador then garavito moved onto the city of Santo Domingo where people made complaints to authorities about him lurking around a school unsurprisingly given his usual victim profile it's worth noting that this was a school for girls which means either gavito was branching out or deliberately trying to modify his killing pattern or else he was actually bisexual after all it's also possible that garavito was lurking around boys schools but it was only his presence at the girls school that had triggered local alarm either way Santa Domingo police set up a sting operation to catch gavito in the act of either molestation or abduction EX excellent uh where was this Ecuador Ecuador yeah Ecuador's police got it together let's go as he arrives he's immediately caught that' be brilliant it's kind of Shame Colombia a little bit wouldn't it however gavita must have caught wind of it because he fled the country surely thereafter Ecuadorian authorities discovered the corpse of a boy and a girl both of whom had been killed with gabarito usual Mo it's possible that the girl was an intended victim or she was an opportunistic one because she had been the company of the boy gavito claims that from Ecuador he flew to Venezuela where he killed another victim before returning to Colombia in late August now unwelcome at graciella's Place garavito regularly began sleeping rough as he traveled across Colombia and then in November 1998 a mass grave of 36 victims was uncovered reports of other killings and mass Graves began to flood in from across the country a national task force was set up to coordinate the investigation finally after years of police in action the hunt was on and all I can say to that is it's about time let's go needle in a cane [Music] stack on the morning of February the 6th 1999 gavito murdered three children in a sugarcan field just outside in the city Pala in the CCO Valley the usual modus operandi was observed but garavito was Far drunker than usual really he can get more drunk than usual wasn't he always just face out of his Minds he had stripped off his shorts and underwear and was in the middle of performing an act of necrofilia on one of the corpses when when he passed out on top of the body he had a lit cigarette in his left hand the sugarcane around him caught fire the Flames began to Scorch his left side causing second and third degree burns down his left arm leg and side when garavito awoke he panicked and flared abandoning his glasses shoes underwear shorts and some money that was in his pockets a veritable Treasure Trove of forensic evidence he also left behind the usual empty bottle of cheap Brandy garavito ran along across the countryside with his ARs and genitals exposed hiding from people until he was able to discreetly steal a pair of trousers from a clothes line he then hit hitchhiked Barefoot and with his Burns untreated 190 km or 120 Mi North from palir to Pereira to put some distance between himself and then now smoldering Carnage yeah you just got to you got to be praying that that fire was strong enough to burn all that evidence that you left behind like your glasses in your wallet like that's uh they're going to find you arriving in the early evening garavito staggered into a local drugstore and got some basic first date he then disappeared without telling the shopkeeper his name or what had happened garavito did not dare go to hospital back in pal the fire was put out by a local farmer and he discovered two of the three bodies in the process police found the third body the next day February 7th along with items that gavito had left behind oh please put it together police please please please he's killed so many people I just can't believe that it's gone on this long the bodies showed injuries consistent with all other victims that have been found across Colombia the number of which had now passed into the triple digits the money found at the scene was discovered to have been printed and circulated in EA Al a town 485 km or 300 Mi to the south of paly on the Ecuadorian border this implied the murderer of the three victims in Pala likely traveled widely same as the serial killer sought by the national task force more concrete was the information derived from the glasses and shoes the glasses had a left lens designed for a person with a specific type of astigmatism in his left eye oh I have an astigmatism in my left eye it was a condition that only occurred in people between ages 40 and 60 years old okay maybe I don't ever say stigmatism in my left eye isn't an a stigmatism isn't that the thing where your eyeballs like my ey left eyeballs a slightly wonky shape so my vision's not very good in my left eye which is why I wear glasses my right eye is pretty good but it'd be weird to wear a monocle garavito was 42 at the time why is it a stigmatism I really thought that's what it was called look up is due to a rotational symmetry in the eyes refractive power that does sound like what I've got okay never mind the arms of the glasses were bent downward suggesting the wearer had unusually placed ears garavito had earned the nickname Goofy from the children of Trio for this reason the shoes meanwhile had usual patterns of wear and tear on them firstly there was no erosion at the tip of the shoe implying that the suspect had a foot smaller than the size of the shoe second and most crucially the circular wear patterns in the middle and heel of the right shoe suggested that the suspect had a limp slightly rotating his foot as he walked indeed gavito had broken his leg in August 1996 and it had healed badly moreover examination of the footprints found at the scene in indicated that the suspect was between 5'4 and 5'6 in tall again gavito was 5'5 and I mean this is a lot of evidence but unless they're doing the DNA thing there's still a lot of people who are going to fit all of these conditions maybe not actually with stigmatism a limp still of all around the country it's going to be really hard to pin that down this information was relayed to the National task force they pulled files from The Archives of all suspects implicated in criminal activities involved and thanks to YouTube censorship a word that the first of was p in the next four syllables are ofilia since 1989 5,000 suspects came up detectives immediately filtered out the cases involving female victims all the victims found in Colombia were boys they had not yet connected to the killer the one girl found in Ecuador yeah it's a different country like what are the odds and he's traveling under a false passport anyway this reduced the number of cases to 1500 next the investigators excluded subjects that were under the age of 40 this drastically and shockingly reduced the number of suspects down to just 95 people my God it would appear that 70% of the atrocities on file in Columbia were perpetrated against young girls and that 94% of the Suspects on file who acted out against young boys were below the age of 40 God damn that's a statistic is that it's very like very odd when detectives filtered suspects for the height range of 5'4 to 5' 6 the number was further reduced to 45 people okay cool now we're getting somewhere this is pretty great it's good detective work finally detectives focused on the suspects who had been implicated in sex crimes in the areas where the majority of the mass Graves and dumps sites have been found namely the area around Bo guitar and the various towns and Villages of the coffee axis this reduced the list of 25 names Louis garavito was on that list the suspect names were circulated to local law enforcement across Colombia can't we just when is this the '90s can't we just sample all of them for DNA and then take the DNA from the scene and be like boom easy it's gavito lock him up hang him do they oh they don't have death penalty do they because we know he's been released which I totally forgot about cuz this episode is really long one such investigator was aldemar Duran lead detective on the February 1998 case of three boys who were murdered in gav's birth town of Genova Duran worked so tirelessly on the case never taking time off and barely sleeping that his colleagues nicknamed him the Killer's Shadow sounds like a right Legend to be honest when the case exploded into a national investigation in November Duran quickly matched the victim's injury specific type of rope fire and the cheap brandy bottle left at the scene to the other cases since Columbia had no forensic psychologist who had worked on a serial killer case before Duran contacted the FBI in the United States for insights on how to build a profile for a serial killer that's cool that's cool that they can do that they can just be like reach out to the FBI and be like what's up what do you think of this and the FBI do this that's cool he then got to know every snippet of information in the dozens and dozens of murders in Intimate detail and attempted to put himself in the mind of the killer Durant suspected that the man traveled around the country as a vagrant and so placed undercover officers in homeless communities up and down Colombia paying no attention to jurisdiction good it's time to ignore that jurisdiction and catch this face Duran started researching the 25 Suspects on the list circulated by the national task force when looking into Luis garavito he found that he'd been arrested in the town of tunja in 1996 Under Suspicion of the murder of Ronald delgardo Cano Witnesses had seen gavito walking off with the victim but garavito had been released due to a lack of evidence but when he was arrested garavito had filled out some paperwork and listed his place of residence as Trio where he had spent the final years of his childhood before being thrown out of his home Duran found this interesting because Mass Graves had also been found on the outskirts of that town shortly after making these discoveries Duran found out that garavito had been arrested for a second time in 1996 this time Under Suspicion of murdering a victim in the town of baka oh this is it you know you got your guy you're looking there's only 25 people that you're considering just go and get that DNA swap why aren't they doing the DNA thing yet I guess they got to have like probable cause or something like to go and get a DNA sample but it feels like just go and ask them and then some are going to give it and even if that just knocks out like 10 who are just giving it because they're like well I don't want to be in trouble for this they'll give it it could even knock out 15 or 20 and then you're just left with a few people and then just watch them again he was released feeling certain that garavito was the killer the nation was looking for Duran departed for trio to see if he could track down anyone who knew gavito meanwhile close scrutiny was being placed on the city of Pereira because it was the first place where police had found a mass grave they were conducting house toh house searches but found nothing however another name on the list of 25 suspects resided there one Pedro Pablo Ramirez Garcia he had a criminal record related to Pediatric activity pederastic pederastic pediatric pediat not pediatric pederastic activities going far back as 1980 what is more he was 44 years old was 5'6 and walked with a limp in his right leg you really there's to I guess the only thing that's remarkable there is the limp but of the 25 people two of them have a limp he was also a street vendor and have been selling honey contained in Old bottles of Brandy oh my the same type of Brandy that was found in a majority of the crime scenes oh my God Pedro you are looking guilty as [ __ ] my dude even though we know it's not you although you still sound like a terrible person so whatever this was all quite compelling circumstantial evidence Garcia was already a suspect in the murder of two victims at a bus terminal in Pereira on October the 1st 1997 turns out those boys had also been killed by garavito then another boy in Pereira identified Garcia as the man who had tried to assault him this was enough for police to hunt Garcia down and toss him in a Cell however Garcia denied any involvement in the killings nevertheless police were sure that they had their man that is until garavito killed four more victims in bogatar employing his usual the police were troubled by this development but they kep kep Garcia imprisoned as a precaution anyway and because the allegations by the Pereira boy hadn't been resolved that attempted assault had not been done by garavito meanwhile detective aldemar Duran was busy in Trio he had managed to track down gavito sister Esther during questioning Esther revealed that garavito had left a black cotton bag with her for safekeeping uhoh dude they've already got you and this is just going to be the cherry on top for putting you away for what turns out to not be be ever but just be 20 years and now you're going to like be free which is insane I hope you listen to this and realize that everyone thinks you're a horrible piece of and you should still be in prison or dead she turned it over to police the bag contained documents receipts photographs postcards and various Souvenirs of garavito travels between 1992 and 1994 dran also found a box of notebooks in Esther's home which contained a long list of children's names among the papers was a receipt for a money order while to a woman who lived in Pereira named graciella zabaleta danan immediately made tracks to Pereira where he interviewed graciella she turned over yet another black cotton bag containing even more evidence documents receipts photos lottery tickets bus tickets and newspaper clippings about the killings but the bag contained something else synthetic fibers from ropes that matched those found at murd sites as well as razor blades with blood on them a couple of bottles of lubricant that match the brown found at many of the crime scenes it was pretty damning stuff police had a new Prime Suspect Pedro Garcia his attempted assault charge being dropped was now released the question what was where was garavito neither Esther nor graciella had seen him in months graciella's little back bag had led the police to the house garavito was renting in Pereira but when they arrived they found the property had been vacated and Duran's undercover officers in the homeless Community had not found him either it was as if he had simply disappeared which is honestly very smart thing to do because it's all coming crashing down for you isn't it then in the early evening of April 22nd 1999 in the city of villa vieno Luis garavito struck again he had been getting drunk all afternoon on the bottle of brandy when he saw 12-year-old Juan Ivon Sabal selling lottery tickets on the street garavito did not waste time tried to con the boy and immediately threatened him with a knife he threw his arms around Sabal in a pretend gesture of affection and dragged him into a taxi telling Sabal to keep his mouth shut or it kill him the taxi drove them to the outskirts of town where they got out and gavito forced Sabal to climb over a barbed wire fence then garavito ordered Sabal to walk until the they reached an isolated area at the top of the hill garavito forced abigal to his knees and tied his hands with a rope while repeatedly asking him am I a sadist am I a sadist am I a sadist garavito then proceeded to hurl insults at the victim and wave his knife under his face laughing the boy's abject fear garavito then took out his penis and began to masturbate it was then that a 16-year-old homeless boy spotted garavito and Sabal immediately recognizing the younger boy was in danger the 16-year-old began throwing rocks at garavito Legend aagal seized his opportunity got to his feet and ran in the direction of the 16-year-old gavito chased both of them his knife out and at the ready but due to the limp in his gamy leg the two boys managed to lose him if this isn't it for you mate I don't understand what would be they passed by a local Farmhouse and were spotted by a 12-year-old girl garavito wasn't far behind saw the girl and demanded aggressively that she say where the two boys went the girl misled garavito and pointed in the direction of the woods where he got lost meanwhile the homeless boy and Sabal made it to a local car garage the 16-year-old entrusted Sabal to a mechanic working there and immediately departed not wanting to be involved any further the mechanic called the police at 7:15 p.m. by that point Sabal had been reported missing and the police brought his mother to the garage to identify him the police were in the process of driving the boy and his mother down to the police station to make a statement when Sabal spotted garavito from the car window walking by the side of the road Sabal pointed him out and the police pulled over and immediately arrested garavito fing yes don't let him slip out look were what 80% of the way through 90% of the way through today's episode that's got to be this has got to be it right this is the end showing no emotion garavito identified himself as bonacio morera and denied having anything to do with sabal's Abduction the police did not believe him and took him down to the station while this man named bonao merera was being processed police noticed that his signature was different on every piece of paper that had signed under questioning the man continued to claim evidence due to the fact that the suspect fit the description of the palir killer 5'5 glasses and O limp the right leg the national task force was alerted the suspect also had burns down his left side which would been consistent with the runes the pyra killer might have sustained from the sugarcane fire there's so much evidence you just know you've got your dude don't you this guy the national task force circulated the bugshot of the man who called himself bonasio marera to law enforcement across the country when detective aldemar Duran saw the photo he identified him as Luis Alfredo gavito but the man himself denied this and continued to identify himself as morera garavito was detained at lrua the notorious maximum C security prison in Val I dupa for the kidnapping sexual assault and attempted murder of Juan Sabal Duran meanwhile tracked down one of git's platonic female friends Maria Umar Toro and convinced her to visit garavito in prison while wearing a wire during the discussion gavito told her that yet on the black bag of documents dashed away which she had instructed the wife of another prisoner in L Mara to retrieve while she was visiting police located the woman and seized the bag it contained more receipts bus tickets and children's photographs there's also a piece of paper in the bag that later turned out to be gav Vito's tally of victims for that year next police arranged for garavito to have an eye exam to confirm that he had a stigmatism in his left eye consistent with the lens of the charred glasses found in the sugarcane field in Palmyra in order not to raise garavito suspicions prompting him to cheat on the test skewing the results investigators got every inmate in the prison to take the test while garavito was out of his cell police entered and retrieved garavito hair and samples of his DNA excellent that's going to lock it down I mean the eye test is fantastic and all of that but you've got enough circumstantial stuff just get that DNA test done and work out how many people he's killed and then work out how to execute him or don't and Let Live out after 20 years because apparently you're insane both came back as a perfect match for hairs and DNA found a multiple crime scenes next police used the evidence in the black bags along with police records and independent sources to comile a history of gavito movement since 1992 it was was an exhaustive process that took weeks but the findings were that wherever police had a record of garavito location in the past 7 years there were murders at the same location all of this took from late April to early July of 1999 it was then that the police decided to confront garavito with evidence in order to extract a confession on July the 2nd gavito was subjected to 9 hours of questioning he denied everything including the fact that he was gavito so police sent for adamar Duran the Killer's Shadow who knew the gito case in Intimate detail and made some attempt to understand the Killer's psychology Duran sat with garavito for 18 hours of questioning going over every scrap of information and piece of evidence reconstructing the scenes of dozens of killings in gruesome detail in short Duran forced garavito to relive the murders which had a profound impact on him arousal anger even shame eventually gavito broke down in tears and began repeatedly screaming why why at the top of his lungs in the early hours of July 4th garavito began confessing to the murder of dozens of children in Colombia between 1992 and 1999 providing the dates and locations the number of murders that he admitted to during his initial confession reached a total of 140 but that's not the total number not by a long [Music] shot Triumph and tragedy All Things Considered despite years of police in action and disorganization it was a clever bit of policing that got garavito court much of the credit belongs the work of Alamar Duran for identifying him and extracting his confession but there's also a slick bit of police work performed by others like the forensic analysts who pieced together the evidence left in the sugarcan field in Palmyra the national task force coordinated with local law enforcement fairly effectively and imported experts and cuttingedge Technologies from America the UK the Netherlands and Russia got the job done but here's where the justice system began to fail the grieving mothers and fathers of Colombia or once more Luis garavito went to trial in 2001 charged with killing 172 children of which he was convicted of 138 neither of these numbers come close to the total we now suspect garavito was sentenced to 1,853 years and 9 days in prison now as mentioned at the outset due to a constitutional constraint Colombian prisoners could only serve a maximum of 40 Years of these sentences furthermore due to the fact that gavito confessed and continues to cooperate with authorities and locating more bodies and the fact that garavito continues to maintain good behavior while in prison his sentence was ultimately reduced to 22 years for perspective that means gavy oh he's going to give us David's going to give us like a number of months in prison or days or whatever it is for per number of victims for each victim which is going to be crazy for perspective Ive that means garavito got roughly two months imprisonment for the sexual assault torture and murder of each of the 138 children he was convicted for and roughly 3 weeks imprisonment for each of the children gavito is estimated to have actually killed and if we add into the equation the estimated number of victims garavito SE sexually assaulted and tortured but did not kill between 1972 and 1992 gavita got roughly 10 days in prison for each one of his victims what 22 years of imprisonment means is that garavito is due to be released in 2023 or 2024 at the age of 66 or 67 he currently has advanced eye cancer for which he's receiving chemotherapy and It ultimately May kill him but it is unlikely to do so in the months before he is released therefore it is encumber on the Colombian authorities to negate the reward for his good behavior and the assistance he gave police or to come up with a mental health or Public Safety reason to keep gav to imprisons I can think of several mental health and public safety reasons one he's probably going to kill people and and two he's like not right in the head but the ability and the willingness of the Colombian Attorney General's office and the relevant courts to do so is open to speculation if gavo is released he says he wants to start a family he wants to become a religious preacher and he wants to go into politics to work with abused children you should never be working with children ever let alone abuse children you should never be able to look at a child again you should be kept in a small solitary room which you can never leave or just execute it it is likely that if he is released gavita come under intense police and public scrutiny but here's the problem with having a mentally ill Psychopathic sexual sadist and a word beginning with p and ending with file running a mock all it takes is one slip of vigilance or one instigating incident and there might be another victim or series of victims left behind in his wake the final possibility is that garavito meets the fate of Pedro Lopez who disappeared only a few months after his release and like in the case of Pedro Lopez that disappearance probably won't be created by the Killer's flight since men like gavito and Lopez aren't able to stop kill killing and would leave a trail of bodies wherever they went but rather someone in Colombia taking the lore into their own hands and disposing of the Killer's body where no one will ever find him and that would be a terrible thing wouldn't it I'm sure the police will be all over solving that one be like oh no we'll get right on that tomorrow maybe the sort of vigilante justice that prevails whenever the rule of law fails and the rule of law has definitely failed the people of Colombia including those hundreds of children who suffered and died at the hands of monster a man of incalculable evil who may one day soon walk free and who to this day still believes he is entitled to pass through the Gates of Heaven it's just ridiculous dismember [Music] dependes at the time of writing 193 cases have now been definitively proven against Lis garavito meanwhile after his conviction gavito continued to make additional confessions at present the number of these confessions well surpass his 200 victims and he isn't just making this stuff up his confessions have sufficient details dates times and locations to make investigators think that most if not all of these confessions are genuine meanwhile in the past two decades investigators have continued their work independently following up on additional murder and disappearance cases the total number of these cases exceeds 300 victims number two in terms of the number of confirmed proven victims 193 Louis garavito is the most prolific serial killer in modern history something worsen by the fact that the overwhelming majority of his victims were children the next runner up is Pedro Lopez with 110 confirmed victims in terms of unconfirmed victims garavito and Lopez are neck and neck with totals that both exceed 300 children the other serial killers on that list don't even come close such were the conditions in Colombia in the latter half of the 20th century that allowed these monsters to thrive three as mentioned at the beginning I've observed quite a bit of social media activity reaching out to the Colombian government through various channels urging them not to release gavito from prison I cannot explicitly advocate for any such Communications myself but I am raising my eyebrows suggestively while I point out the fact that these communications are ongoing yes yes what's that maybe you could be a touch wait why can't we encourage that is that against the rules or something number four no fully comprehensive secondary source on Lis garavito exists in English or Spanish so this particular episode was rather difficult to research cobbling things together from news articles psych reports academic papers trial records and so forth some of which are in English some of which had to be slaughtered into a translator many of the accounts are flawed and inconsistent but I've done my best to verify the correct version of events here meanwhile if anyone is itching to write the first big definitive not pulp [ __ ] version of a true crime book about Luis garavito there's a niche open for you it is startling it hasn't been done already since garavito is arguably the world's worst serial killer but in the field of True Crime we tend to overlook stories that come from the developing world and focus on the bundies and the gayy yeah but these this is just so much worse I don't like ranking people I don't like ranking Bundy and gayy up against this guy but he killed he's possibly killed 300 children in the worst ways number five as a coroller of that no major Hollywood production has even attempted to depict gavito like movies have done with other serial killers and given the nature of his crimes i' probably say that's for the best and that's where we end today's episode thanks for being here [Music]

Channel: The Casual Criminalist

Views: 353,157

Keywords: true crime, serial killer documentary, worst serial killer, serial killer documentaries, serial killer, real crime stories, luis garavito, worst killer ever, true scary story, real stories, thisismonsters, making a monster, the disturbing truth, real horror, true horror, true stories, murder doc

Id: PwoZeqp3Ijw

Length: 111min 31sec (6691 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2023