It’s a history worth briefly examining to understand how consecutive serial killers could “operate in secrecy”.Ĭolombia achieved independence from Spain in 1810 but never truly achieved political stability. What Aldemar is referring to is the way violence had been almost normalised in Colombian society. It meant that we could not identify, stop, capture or construct a body of evidence around their cases.” “In Colombia, we have endured many types of violence: political violence, armed conflict violence, and so in some ways allowed certain characters to operate in secrecy. “We were more interested in investigating massacres and events that were causing national shock,” he recalls. When Detective Aldemar took his evidence to his seniors and explained his serial killer theory, they responded with incredulity not because the violence was unusual, but because it wasn’t the type they were used to. He had 71 confirmed victims, which placed him at number five on this rather ugly Wikipedia page titled “list of serial killers by number of victims”. And then there was Daniel Camargo Barbosa, who throughout a similar period as López, had strangled young girls in Colombia and Ecuador. When he finally confessed to his crimes in 1999, he was attributed an official kill-count of 138, making him the world’s most prolific murderer-a record he still holds today*īut that wasn't a whole lot more than Pedro López, a fellow Colombian who’d killed some 110 young girls, just 20 years earlier and today still claims the number two world record. Garavito would befriend young boys and lure them into isolation by offering them small jobs, only to torture, rape and kill them. When Aldemar and his team found the killer, he turned out to be a 42-year old drifter named Luis Garavito. Because not only had Colombia dealt with serial killers before, they had also hosted some of the world’s most prolific. This case was a turning point for both the Colombian Police’s ability to identify the signs of serial homicide, but to also realise that the country had a unique problem. We never imagined we had serial killers in Colombia.”įor any westerner who has grown up in a culture that has mythologised serial killers since the 1970s, the notion that a police department could find such a pattern of murders and not suspect the worst seems absurd. “For us, 20 years ago, a case with these criminal characteristics was something like out of a soap opera, or a film. “Our directors did not believe or imagine that there could be a serial killer here,” Aldemar tells VICE News over the phone, recalling several frustrating meetings with his director. In total, 13 of Colombia’s 32 states had at least one case that matched the profile, which seemed like fairly compelling evidence that the country was dealing with a serial killer.Īnd yet, somehow, Aldemar’s seniors disagreed. From there, Aldemar expanded the search to neighbouring states to discover that the bodies of young boys had been appearing on Colombia’s forested hills since at least 1992. All bodies of various poor and destitute boys were found with knife wounds to the neck, chest and groin, and many showing evidence of sexual assault. On a whim, he checked the state’s records for similar cases and found an additional 13 unsolved cases stretching back years. His body was found Monday.īack in 1998, Duran Saavedra Aldemar was a 31-year-old criminal investigator with the Fiscalía General de la Nación-the Colombian version of the attorney general’s office-in the state of Quindio. Excited, he had left mid-morning on Friday. The most disquieting detail came from one of the boys’ mothers, who said that her son had rushed home on the day he’d disappeared, claiming he’d been offered work from a man who needed help transporting cattle. It soon emerged that the three boys were poor, aged between 11 and 13, and had been good friends.
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