Luis Alfredo Garavito, known as the “Colombian Beast,” said he killed with impunity for more than nine years. A court convicted him of 138 murders, although he claimed the true number of victims exceeded 300. His formal sentence totaled 1,853 years and 9 days, yet in practice he received 22 years and later said that after release he wanted to work to protect children.
Garavito was born on January 25, 1957, in the town of Genova in Colombia’s Quindio department and was the eldest of seven brothers. After his arrest, he said that from age 12 he had been abused by his father and his father’s acquaintances, left home early, and later was diagnosed with depression and psychosis. In court, he claimed the devil had pursued him all his life.
By his own account, the first murder took place in 1992. His victims were usually boys aged 6 to 13 from poor families. He looked for them in markets, bus stations, and town squares, gained their trust, promised small payments for help, and then took them to isolated places, where he tied them up, raped them, and killed them. The crimes were not linked for a long time: in many small Colombian towns, police lacked even computers and a shared database.
A chance arrest
He was arrested almost by accident in April 1999, after a homeless man told police he had seen a boy being sexually assaulted in a forest. The suspect had no documents, gave a false name, and posed as a local politician. But checks on his address book and a box he had left with an acquaintance exposed him: inside were photographs of children, some already found dead or reported missing.
Garavito then began cooperating with investigators, describing 172 murders and dozens of rapes. Not all episodes could be confirmed: in Quindio, after the January 25, 1999 earthquake that killed 1,100 people, some bodies could not be identified. Although the sentence caused public outrage, Colombian law capped prison terms at 40 years, and because of his cooperation the court could not impose more than 22 years.
In an interview broadcast on June 11, 2006 by television host Pirri, he said he might soon be released. Experts confirmed that in 2023 he could indeed seek early release after serving 60 percent of his term and maintaining good behavior. Authorities secured another sentence tied to crimes in different departments, while Ecuador sentenced him in absentia to an additional 22 years. Garavito was held apart from other inmates, and in 2023 he died in a prison hospital at age 66 from eye cancer and leukemia.