The Monster of the Andes

Pedro Alonso López was born in 1948 in Tolima, Colombia, and said he was thrown out of the family home as a small boy. By his own account he began killing girls in Peru in the late 1970s, then moved through Colombia and Ecuador, taking children from markets and roadsides.

In March 1980, in the Ecuadorian market town of Ambato, a vendor screamed when she saw a stranger leading her daughter, about ten, away from the stalls, and the crowd held him for police. Soon afterward floodwater near the town exposed the bodies of four girls. López said nothing until officers planted an undercover policeman in his cell for weeks; he then boasted of murders in three countries and offered to show them the graves. He led them to the remains of 53 girls, and claimed over 300 in all. Ecuador’s maximum sentence then was 16 years, and that is what he got.

Released in August 1994 after 14 years, López was handed to Colombia to face a charge over a child’s murder. A court found him not criminally responsible and committed him to a psychiatric hospital. In February 1998 doctors declared him sane, and he walked out after posting a small bond. He renewed his identity card in Bogotá in 1999. In 2002 Colombia sought him through Interpol over another child’s death. No confirmed sighting has been reported since.