Luis Garavito: The Case File of “La Bestia”

Garavito is often described in superlatives: the worst, the most prolific, the beast. Those labels are not wrong in spirit, but they flatten a case that is, at its core, a list of children who were taken from ordinary places, the people who looked for them, and a justice system that had to process one man’s crimes one case at a time.⁶⁹

This file is built the other way round. It starts with what is on the record: who he was, how he found children, how investigators in different cities came to realise they were chasing the same man, what he confessed, what he was convicted of, and why a man with sentences adding up to more than 1,800 years was held under a 40-year term. Where the record is uncertain, the file says so and names who says what.³¹⁶

The children Garavito took had a great deal in common, and it was that pattern that eventually helped investigators connect killings hundreds of kilometres apart. Colombia’s chief prosecutor, Alfonso Gómez Méndez, said in October 1999 that most were boys from poor families aged between 8 and 16. Many, the BBC reported, were the children of street vendors, often left on their own in parks and at traffic lights while their parents worked.⁶

AP described them as mostly from low-income families. An EFE report from January 2000, citing the Fiscalía, said many of the children worked. El País, writing as the confession became public, put it in one line: all of them humble, almost all of them boys.¹¹²⁸

Some sold newspapers or lottery tickets. Some shined shoes, sold coffee in the street or watched parked motorbikes. These were children who were out in public because their families needed them to be, which is exactly where Garavito went looking.^89101324

In December 1999 Semana reported from Chone, a town in Ecuador’s Manabí province, where two boys had vanished on consecutive days the year before: Abel Gustavo Loor Vélez, 14, on July 20, 1998, and Jimmy Leonardo Palacios Anchundia, 12, on July 21. Abel had sold newspapers and shined shoes since he was eight. His mother, Rosa Candelaria Loor Vélez, told the magazine she had waited with his meal ready and he never came home, and that she was now certain Garavito had taken him. Semana reported that Ecuadorian police had linked both disappearances to him.¹⁰

Colombia’s Supreme Court later recorded that Garavito had confessed in the Colombian proceedings to the deaths of two minors in Ecuador, in Santo Domingo de los Colorados and Chone, giving exact dates and places. The court’s summary, as reported, does not name the children, so this file does not connect those findings to particular names.¹⁷¹⁵

The criminal case against Garavito ended with his death. On the afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023, Colombia’s prison authority, INPEC, announced that he had died at a clinic in Valledupar, the capital of Cesar department, where he had been taken from La Tramacúa, the high-security prison in which he had been held since 2002. He was 66. He had been suffering from leukemia and from cancer in one eye.⁵²⁹³¹

He was never released. INPEC’s statement, as Caracol Radio reported it, was brief: « El señor Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, que estaba recluido en la ciudad de Valledupar, falleció en los últimos minutos »: “Mr. Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, who was being held in the city of Valledupar, died in the last few minutes.”²⁹

There is no one correct figure for how many children Luis Garavito killed, and this file does not print one in its own voice. The numbers in the table above are all real. They are simply answers to different questions: how many bodies had been found, how many killings he admitted, how many cases prosecutors could build, how many ended in a conviction.⁶¹²¹⁶³

The safest statement the record supports is a range with names attached. Colombia’s chief prosecutor said in 1999 that 114 skeletons had been found. By 2012 the Fiscalía counted 138 convictions out of 172 prosecuted cases. Garavito himself, in an interview quoted by BBC News Mundo, put the number of children he killed at « un poquito más de 200 », “a little more than 200.” Every other figure that appears in the press sits somewhere in that span.⁶¹⁶³

Even the outline of the pattern varies by source. Most reports, including the chief prosecutor’s in 1999, AP’s in 2023 and El País’s, describe victims aged 8 to 16; BBC News Mundo wrote 8 to 14. In his confession, as Semana reconstructed it, Garavito himself said all were between 8 and 16. This file uses 8 to 16 and notes that some victims fell outside any summary.⁶¹⁴³¹⁰

The span of years also differs. Garavito told investigators his first killing was in 1992, and El Espectador dates the series from 1992; EFE’s January 2000 report said 1993 to 1999. El País wrote at the time that the series lasted eight years; Semana, seven; the BBC in 1999, five. The number of departments is given as 11 by AP, El País and El Tiempo, and as 13 by Semana and El Espectador. These are credited where they appear.^1051286149

Officials are named where their role is recorded in the sources. The man who heard the boy’s cries near Villavicencio in April 1999 and drove off the attacker is not named in any source TDSH could find, and the boy himself, a child at the time, is not named here. Garavito’s relatives are not named.⁹

Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos was born on Jan. 25, 1957, in Génova, a small municipality in Quindío, in the coffee-growing region of western Colombia. The date and place are given by AP and El Tiempo, and he confirmed them himself when he was questioned in 1999. He told investigators then that he had gone only as far as the fifth grade of primary school.²²⁸¹⁰

Years later he would be called “the Monster of Génova” after his birthplace, as well as La Bestia, the beast. In the towns he passed through, he picked up other names. Colombia’s chief prosecutor said in 1999 that in some places he was known as El Loco, the crazy one, or El Cura, the priest. El País listed La Bestia, El Loco, Tribilín (the Spanish name for Disney’s Goofy), Conflicto and El Cura.⁴²⁸⁶⁸⁷

El Espectador reported that his conduct went back to the age of 15, when he first harassed a boy while living in Génova, and that he began his series of crimes in 1992, when he was 35. In his October 1999 confession, as Semana reconstructed it, he said the first killing took place that year in Jamundí, in Valle del Cauca, after a night of heavy drinking.⁵¹⁰

Drink runs through every account. A 1999 Reuters report in El País said he apparently acted while drunk; BBC News Mundo wrote that he killed while drunk; and Semana reported that the prosecutors questioning him were working on the theory that most of his crimes were committed under the influence of alcohol. He told them the urge came « cada vez que yo tomaba », “every time I drank.”⁷³¹⁰

He also described an earlier brush with the law. According to Semana, he told investigators he had been detained in Corinto, in Cauca, in 1994 over the disappearance of a child, that the case against him was dropped, and that he had in fact intended to take the boy. No court record of that detention was found for this file, so it is reported only as his statement.¹⁰

Garavito did not snatch children at random. He changed his appearance. On one day, El País reported in 1999, he was a monk; on another he wore an orthopaedic collar and begged on street corners; on another he was a street vendor; and on another, in his best suit, he presented himself as a speaker in school classrooms. Colombia’s chief prosecutor told the BBC he posed as a monk, a charity representative or a street vendor like the children’s parents.⁸⁶

The offers reported were small and ordinary. The chief prosecutor spoke of food and drink. El País listed sweets, money, food and gifts. EFE, citing the Fiscalía in January 2000, mentioned food, sweets or school notebooks. BBC News Mundo said he offered money. In his own account of one killing, as Semana reconstructed it, he told two boys he had sugar cane to cut: an offer of work.^6812310

He told investigators he killed by day, because he was afraid of the dark; that is his statement, as Semana recorded it. More useful to investigators was what he kept. AP and BBC News Mundo both reported that he kept a notebook recording the places he had been and the ages of the children. Searches turned up newspaper cuttings about missing children, the chief prosecutor said in 1999; Semana quoted him as saying he kept them to show his son how horrible life was.¹⁰²³⁶

His habit of keeping cuttings later created a problem of its own. Investigators warned, EFE reported in January 2000, that a man who collected press reports about murdered children might also claim crimes he had not committed. It is one more reason this file does not take his own figures at face value.¹²

Most of what is known about the sequence of Garavito’s movements comes from his own confession, which Semana reconstructed in detail in December 1999. In it he moved through Valle del Cauca, Bogotá, Quindío, Risaralda, Boyacá and Meta, and abroad into Ecuador, describing killings in each. Prosecutors in each place then had to test his account against their own files. The table above marks which entries rest on his word.¹⁰⁹

The geography mattered to the investigation in a simple way. Colombia’s police and prosecutors were organised by region, and in the 1990s, a Fiscalía prosecutor told the Spanish journalist Jon Sistiaga, as BBC News Mundo reported, the country’s investigators were overwhelmed by terrorism, paramilitary and guerrilla violence and high-profile assassinations. The investigation that finally caught him depended on comparing files from different departments, as the next section shows.³

The case that turned scattered disappearances into a national investigation began in Pereira, the largest city in Colombia’s coffee region. El País, writing in October 1999, dated the first discovery to Nov. 7, 1998, when children playing football found a skeleton on waste ground in a working-class neighbourhood; eight days later more remains appeared on another lot. Caracol Radio later reported that the remains of one boy, Carlos Olaya Aristizábal, were found in the Nacederos sector of Pereira on Nov. 10, 1998.⁸¹⁴

Other reports place the start a year earlier. The BBC wrote in October 1999 that police were first alerted to a possible serial killer in 1997, when they discovered remains of 36 bodies in Pereira, and a Reuters report in El País gave the same year. The number of children is also reported differently: 36 by the BBC and El País, 33 by Semana. This file gives both dates and both counts, credited, rather than choosing.⁶⁷¹⁰

Early theories ranged widely. The BBC reported that the grave was first thought to be the work of a satanic cult; El País reported talk of satanic sects, a psychopath and « limpieza social », the killing of street people by vigilantes. What tied the deaths together, El País reported, was what investigators kept finding at the scenes: nylon cord and caps from bottles of liquor. « El asesino es el mismo », they concluded: “The killer is the same.”⁶⁸

On the other side of the Andes, in Villavicencio, the capital of Meta, children’s remains were turning up on a lot on the edge of the city. El Tiempo reported that an inter-agency group was formed on Sept. 17, 1998: two prosecutors, investigators from the Fiscalía’s CTI, the DAS security service and the police intelligence unit SIJIN, supported by the national forensic institute, Medicina Legal. Since June, the paper said, the skeletons of 13 children aged between 7 and 16 had been found on that lot.⁹

By December 1998, according to El Tiempo, the group had concluded that two people were committing the crimes across the country, because similar killings were coming to light in Pereira at the same time. Seven months later that hypothesis would collapse into a single name.⁹

Garavito was caught in the act, and not by detectives. El Tiempo reconstructed the arrest in November 1999. On April 22, a man who happened to be near a stretch of the ring road outside Villavicencio, close to the La Coralina neighbourhood, heard a boy who sold lottery tickets calling for help. He found the boy tied up and being attacked by a man. He threw stones at the attacker, who lunged at him with a knife, missed, and ran into the undergrowth. The rescuer took the boy to a nearby farmhouse, Rosa Blanca, and the police were called. A corporal, Pedro Babativa, and two officers caught the attacker.⁹

The reports describe the rescuer differently: El Tiempo called him a drug user, and a wire report published by La Nación called him a beggar. Neither names him, and neither does this file. The boy is not named in any source TDSH found, and his reported age differs between accounts, so it is not given here.⁹¹¹⁶

Garavito told it differently. In his October confession, as Semana reconstructed it, he said he had come to Villavicencio looking for a house, took the wrong bus, got off at a roundabout where police happened to be running an operation, and was detained. His account leaves out the boy entirely. It is reported here because it shows how he presented himself, not because any source supports it.¹⁰

The questioning that broke the case began on Thursday, Oct. 28, 1999, in Villavicencio. Semana reported that María Lily Naranjo Patiño, a prosecutor from Armenia, had come to question him about the rape and killing of three boys in Génova. In the room were Óscar Armando Díaz Beltrán, a psychiatrist from Medicina Legal who had studied him, and his state-appointed defender, Óscar Fernando Rincón. On a table, Semana wrote, was a briefcase of evidence that Garavito had not yet seen.¹⁰⁹⁸

That morning, Semana reported, he had said he was held only because he was accused of an alleged rape. Later he began to cry, and his own defender told him: « Con las pruebas que hay es mejor que confiese »: “With the evidence there is, it is better that you confess.” He asked for time to pray. El País reported that, cornered by evidence linking him to at least 20 deaths, he admitted those 20, and that by the time the questioning ended in the early hours of Friday the list had reached 140.¹⁰⁸

The reports differ on the hour and the length. El País gave 4:30 a.m. as the end and El Tiempo 5 a.m.; BBC News Mundo wrote that he confessed after more than eight hours of questioning, and Semana that the session lasted 10. This file says only that it ended at dawn on Friday, Oct. 29.⁸⁹³¹⁰

On the night of Friday, Oct. 29, the chief prosecutor, Alfonso Gómez Méndez, told the country. « Es el seguimiento investigativo más importante que se haya hecho en Colombia en este tipo de delito », he said, as El País reported: “It is the most important investigative follow-up ever carried out in Colombia for this type of crime.” To the BBC he said: “Luis Alfredo Garavito has admitted the murder of about 140 children. We have so far found 114 skeletons and we’re still investigating the disappearance of other children.”⁸⁶

AP’s account compresses the moment into a single exchange: when an investigating judge asked him whether he was the killer of 114 children whose bodies had been found in 59 Colombian towns, he admitted it and begged forgiveness, then confessed to more. That same year, AP reported, he apologised to victims’ families at a court hearing: « Yo les quiero pedir perdón por todo lo que hice y voy a confesar. Sí, yo los maté y no sólo a esos, maté a otros más »: “I want to ask your forgiveness for everything I did, and I am going to confess. Yes, I killed them, and not only those; I killed others.”¹²

There was never one Garavito trial. Each killing belonged to the prosecutor and court of the place where the body was found, and in November 1999 an investigator told El Tiempo that, at that early stage, the case could not be grouped legally into a single file. The convictions therefore arrived one at a time, from different courts, over years.⁹¹³

The charges reported against him were violent sexual acts, violent carnal access (rape), homicide, simple kidnapping and negligent arson, El Espectador and El País reported. No source TDSH found explains the arson charge, so this file does not speculate about it.⁵⁴²⁹

Garavito’s sentences, added together, came to well over a thousand years. He was never going to serve them. Colombia’s 1991 Constitution prohibits life imprisonment, and the country’s criminal law sets a ceiling on any prison term. The figure reported for him in every account of his death is 40 years, described by El País, Caracol Radio and Noticias Caracol as the maximum Colombian law allowed at the time. BBC News Mundo put it this way: because Colombian justice does not allow life imprisonment and because Garavito cooperated with the authorities, his final sentence was 40 years.³⁷⁴²⁹³

Even 40 years was not a fixed term. El País reported in 2021 that Garavito had taken five years off his sentence through study or work. El Espectador wrote in April 2023 that the sentence would end in 2039, when he would be 82, and that his good conduct, cooperation, early sentencing and confession could all bring further reductions.²²²⁶

Under the original 2000 code, a prisoner could ask for conditional release after serving three-fifths of a sentence. The criminal lawyer Francisco Bernate told El Colombiano, as reported by El Espectador, that the favourability principle gave Garavito the right to be considered at that point. Later laws were harsher, among them a 2006 children’s code that bars conditional release for intentional homicide and sexual crimes against children, but those laws postdate his crimes.³⁰²⁶³⁵

His case also hung over a national argument about life sentences. Congress approved a constitutional amendment in 2020 to allow reviewable life imprisonment for certain crimes against children; in September 2021 the Constitutional Court struck it down, finding it a step backward in the humanisation of punishment. BBC News Mundo wrote that his case was at the heart of that debate.³⁴²²³

On the night of Feb. 2, 1994, in Tuluá, in Valle del Cauca, a boy named Jaime Andrés González Suárez was murdered. He sold « tintos », small cups of black coffee, and the case became known as the case of « el niño de los tintos », the coffee boy. Noticias Caracol reported that he was 11.¹³³⁶

A man named Nelson Bonilla Garzón, described by Noticias Caracol as a humble vendor, was convicted of the killing. On Dec. 2, 1994, the Seventh Criminal Circuit Court of Tuluá sentenced him to 40 years for aggravated homicide, and on Feb. 1, 1995, the Superior Court of Buga upheld the sentence in full. In March 2003 it was readjusted, on favourability grounds, to 25 years. According to the petition the Constitutional Court summarised, he had been in custody since Feb. 19, 1994.¹³²³

Bonilla’s request for release went back and forth. The Supreme Court’s criminal chamber said the question belonged to the sentence-enforcement judge in Popayán; that judge said it belonged to the Supreme Court. On June 23, 2005, Colombia’s Constitutional Court ended the loop. In ruling T-659 of 2005, written by Justice Clara Inés Vargas Hernández, it found that keeping a man in prison while a revision was pending, when another person had acknowledged sole responsibility for the same acts, was a disproportionate measure that served no legitimate constitutional end.¹³

The court wrote that Bonilla « continúa injustamente privado de su libertad por un crimen que el Estado colombiano consideró que había cometido Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos »: he “remains unjustly deprived of his liberty for a crime that the Colombian state considered to have been committed by Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos.” It ordered his release within 48 hours, as a temporary measure until the Supreme Court decided his revision.¹³

Bonilla was not the only man whose case Garavito’s confessions touched. In January 2000, EFE reported, citing the Fiscalía, that Garavito had claimed eight killings for which five other men had been blamed; four had been sentenced to prison terms of up to 50 years, and one, held in pre-trial detention, had been killed by fellow inmates. The Fiscalía said then that it had not yet been able to establish that those men were innocent, and that it had sent a report to the judges so the cases could be reviewed.¹²

This file names only Nelson Bonilla Garzón, whose case was decided in a published ruling. TDSH found no court record of what became of the other men’s cases, and naming them would repeat accusations whose outcome is not known.¹²¹³

Garavito confessed to killing four children in Ecuador in 1998, AP and EFE reported. Colombia’s chief prosecutor said in October 1999 that Colombian authorities were cooperating with police in Ecuador, where Garavito had lived. In Chone, in Manabí province, Semana reported, traders in the central market recognised him as a man with a strong Colombian accent who had hung around the market in July and August 1998 and sometimes asked for money (the two boys who disappeared from Chone are named in §01).²¹⁵⁶¹⁰

The places do not line up neatly. Semana reported in 1999 that Ecuadorian police had ruled out early speculation about two killings in Santo Domingo de los Colorados, because no child had been reported missing there. But AP reported that Garavito described to a Colombian judge a killing in Santo Domingo de los Colorados, and Colombia’s Supreme Court recorded in 2012 that he had confessed to the deaths of two minors in Santo Domingo de los Colorados and Chone.^1021715

In May 2012 the criminal chamber of Colombia’s Supreme Court of Justice issued a negative opinion on the extradition. Its reasoning, as quoted by EFE and AFP, was that the events for which Ecuador wanted him « constituyen cosa juzgada », were res judicata, already decided, because the specific acts had been investigated and tried by Colombian courts. That, the court wrote, « inhibe la realización de un nuevo juicio y torna improcedente la extradición »: it barred a new trial and made extradition inadmissible. EFE identified the judge who wrote the opinion as José Leonidas Bustos Martínez. The principle is the familiar one: no one may be tried twice for the same crime.^15181716

The text of the 2012 ruling was not available to TDSH when this file was checked; the quotations above are as published by the two news agencies.¹⁵¹⁸

On May 14, 2021, the director of the high-security prison in Valledupar where Garavito was held, Maj. César Fernando Caraballo Quiroga, sent a letter to Camilo Manrique Serrano, the first sentence-enforcement judge of Valledupar, El Tiempo reported. It forwarded Garavito’s file so the judge could study « lo concerniente a la concesión o no del subrogado de libertad condicional », whether or not to grant conditional release. Attached was a prison resolution, number 0445 of April 23, 2021, recording that Garavito’s conduct had been good throughout his detention and rated « Ejemplar », exemplary, in the latest period.¹⁹

On May 21, 2021, the judge denied release. He told the television programme Los Informantes that Garavito had served three-fifths of his sentence but did not meet all the legal requirements, chief among them that he had not paid compensation to the families of the children he killed. AP put the unpaid amount at about US$41,500. El País of Cali reported that the judge left open the possibility of release if the requirements were later met.^19362120

For the families, the episode reopened everything. In Florencia, Nelly Cuéllar Méndez, the mother of Javier Mauricio Ordóñez, told Noticias Caracol that her son had been raped, murdered and badly beaten, and was found on the outskirts of Morelia with other children. She called on other parents to join forces « si toca volver a demandar », even if it meant going back to court, to keep him in prison.²⁴²⁵

Noticias Caracol drew a contrast with Nelson Bonilla, the man imprisoned for a crime Garavito confessed (see §13): INPEC, the broadcaster reported, had never sought conditional release for him. Garavito remained in La Tramacúa. He was never released.³⁶²

From Sept. 12, 2002, Garavito was held in the high- and medium-security prison of Valledupar, in Cesar, known as La Tramacúa. El Tiempo reported that he was kept apart from other prisoners for his own safety, because of the hostility he provoked among them. He was there for 21 years.²⁸⁵

Garavito spoke a great deal over 24 years, and much of what he said contradicts something else he said: that he acted out of revenge, that he acted while drunk, that the devil made him do it, that he was not dangerous, that his punishment was too little. The people who dealt with him described a man who presented different personalities as it suited him. This file quotes him where his words are part of the record, and attributes every one.⁸¹⁰³

Luis Alfredo Garavito died on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023, at the age of 66, in the Nueva Clínica Santo Tomás in Valledupar, INPEC announced. El Espectador reported that he died at about 1 p.m., and, citing sources close to INPEC, that he had been rushed to the clinic that day with severe pain. He had leukaemia and cancer in his left eye, which had cost him the sight of that eye.^1252927

He was still a prisoner. INPEC’s brief statement, as quoted by Caracol Radio, said that « el señor Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, que estaba recluido en la ciudad de Valledupar, falleció en los últimos minutos »: Garavito, who was held in Valledupar, had died in the last few minutes.²⁹

His death ended the question that had hung over Colombia since 2021: he would not walk out of prison. BBC News Mundo wrote that it closed a painful chapter not only for the victims’ families but for a country that had feared his release. It did not settle how many children he killed, which of them remain unnamed, or what became of the other men whose cases his confessions touched. Those questions are set out in §02 and §20.³

« En todo el país se hicieron allanamientos y se recaudaron más pruebas y el martes 20 de julio, Criminalística del CTI logró establecer la identificación plena de Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos. »⁹

Translation: “Searches were carried out across the country and more evidence was gathered, and on Tuesday, July 20, the CTI’s forensic unit succeeded in establishing the full identity of Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos.”

« Aunque Garavito fue sentenciado a una pena de 60 años de cárcel, la más alta establecida en Colombia, su abogado asignado por el Estado, obtuvo una rebaja al pedir la “sentencia anticipada”, mecanismo que agiliza el proceso. »¹¹

Translation: “Although Garavito was sentenced to 60 years in prison, the highest established in Colombia, his state-appointed lawyer obtained a reduction by requesting ‘early sentencing,’ a mechanism that speeds up the process.”

« De tal suerte que, el Señor Bonilla continúa injustamente privado de su libertad por un crimen que el Estado colombiano consideró que había cometido Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos. »¹³

Translation: “So it is that Mr. Bonilla remains unjustly deprived of his liberty for a crime that the Colombian state considered to have been committed by Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos.”

« Los sucesos por los cuales es requerido el señor (Luis Alfredo) Garavito Cubillos en el Ecuador constituyen cosa juzgada, teniendo en cuenta que los específicos hechos que allí se le imputan, fueron objeto de investigación y juzgamiento por parte de las autoridades judiciales de Colombia. »¹⁵

Translation: “The events for which Mr. (Luis Alfredo) Garavito Cubillos is sought in Ecuador are res judicata, given that the specific acts attributed to him there were investigated and tried by the judicial authorities of Colombia.”