A serial killer who left a trail of destruction in his path disappeared without a trace after serving a short prison sentence and was never found
One of the most prolific serial killers and rapists of all time might be proof that monsters are not born, but made.
The haunting crimes of the murderer spanned decades, with the killer leaving a devastating trail of destruction in his path – with more than 100 murders officially recognised as being carried out by his hand.
The killer would lure his young victims away from busy streets, rape and murder them, with many of the corpses found bearing marks of torture. He would even dig up some of his victims’ remains and have “tea parties” with their bodies.
Pedro Alonso Lopez was dubbed the “Monster of the Andes” and is believed to have murdered 300 children and young people as he travelled through Latin America. From 1969 until 1980, he had a nomadic existence through Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador, with a terrifying modus operandi that saw young girls lose their lives in the most horrifying of circumstances.
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Lopez was smart. He knew that to get away with murder, to target the most vulnerable young girls, including street children, and many from indigenous communities, whose disappearances were likely to be ignored by the authorities. In part, this is how he managed to get away with his horrifying crime spree for so long.
The vast majority of his victims were aged between nine and 12, and he would lure them away from safety with the promise of sweets, money, asking them to act as a guide to the local area, or to help him find somewhere like a bus stop.
“I walked among the markets searching for a girl with a certain look on her face. A look of innocence and beauty,” the sinister murderer told a journalist in 1994. “She would be a good girl, always working with her mother. I followed them, sometimes for two or three days, waiting for the moment when she was left alone.”
Once he had convinced the children to follow him, he would rape and murder them, hiding their bodies – with only a fraction of his estimated victims, which some believe to be as many as 450, ever found. Lopez had a large scar on his face and was missing his upper front teeth, so he stood out physically, and would reportedly listen to newspaper sellers describing his crimes in marketplaces with a “crooked smile” on his face, despite all of this, he managed avoid getting caught for more than 10 years.
After averaging three victims a week, who were promptly dumped in shallow graves, Lopez was eventually arrested in Ecuador in 1980. While held in prison, an undercover detective was moved into his cell, and Lopez confessed to a shocking number of murders and violent crimes during the time they spent together. He claimed to have killed 110 people in Ecuador, 100 in Colombia, and even more in Peru.
At first, because of the sheer volume of confessions he made, the police were sceptical about whether he was telling the truth, so Lopez told them some of the sites he had buried his child victims, leading to the discovery of one mass grave, with the remains of 53 girls inside it, aged between eight and 13.
Lopez told them about many other sites, but the police never found other bodies, assuming that they had been disrupted by animals and the remains scavenged and scattered.
However, the authorities could only charge him with the murders he had committed in Ecuador, and he was sentenced to just 16 years, because that was the maximum length in the country at the time.
He was released two years early for “good behaviour” before being deported to his native Colombia, where there had been wide coverage of his brutal killing spree, and he was under threat from a mob of vigilantes upon his return.
Lopez was convicted of more crimes back in his home country, but he was declared as having “unhealthy personality traits,” which meant he served more time in a psychiatric ward. In 1998, he was found to be sane and let go – and swiftly disappeared without a trace.
Declared a fugitive, he was reportedly spotted once in 1999 when he renewed his citizen card – but was never officially found. More murders that followed his exact modus operandi meant an international arrest warrant was issued for Lopez in the years that followed.
An unidentified corpse was discovered in 2005, which forensic testing accepted could likely be Lopez, but he remains officially of fugitive status and has not been legally declared dead. If he is still alive somewhere, he would now be 77 years old.
When he was asked what his motivation had been for his horrifying crime spree, he reportedly said: “I lost my innocence at age of eight. So I decided to do the same to as many girls as I could.”
By all accounts, Lopez’s childhood was a difficult one. He did not have a good relationship with his mother – a laundry worked – and accused her of being a “prostitute” saying that she and his stepfather often had sexual relations in front of him, with his biological father violently murdered before he was born.
Lopez claimed that his mother kicked him out of the family home when he was eight – after he was caught groping his sister, and that as a homeless child, a man offered him shelter and safety, luring the young boy to a property where he was raped.
However, his mother has a different version of events, claiming that Lopez hated her from a young age and ran away when he was eight because he didn’t like living with her.
At 10, Lopez is said to have moved to one of the largest cities in Colombia, Bogota, which was nearly 150km away from his family’s town of El Espinal.
He joined with fellow street children to form a gang, and began abusing drugs, cannabis and basuco – the coca paste that is the base of cocaine – to try and avoid the constant sense of hunger that plagued them on the streets.
Lopez claims that as a homeless child, he was sexually assaulted repeatedly whilst begging – though he was briefly taken in by an American couple, he ran away again within a year, said to be unable to trust their interest in taking care of him.
In 1969, aged 21, he was arrested for stealing a car, and in prison was subjected to a brutal gang rape by four men. This traumatic attack would be the incident that acted as a catalyst for Lopez to become a murderer: killing three of the rapists with a makeshift knife within a week of their attack on him.
University of New Mexico professor Dirk Gibson to Nine News that his violent and traumatic childhood was a common thread shared by many who would go on to become serial killers, fitting the profile of someone who commits such extreme violence.
