Posted by - Who: Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos (Colombia, 25 January 1957 – Valledupar, 12 October 2023).
- Nicknames: “La Bestia” (The Beast) and “Tribilín” (Goofy).
- Victims: at least 193 children and teenagers killed between 1992 and 1999 in Colombia and Ecuador.
- Sentence: 1,853 years in prison, reduced by law to 40 and then to 22.
- Death: in hospital, of illness, while still in custody.
Luis Alfredo Garavito is one of the most brutal and prolific serial killers in history. He confessed to killing about 140 children, almost all boys aged between 6 and 16, but at least 193 murders have been confirmed and there may have been many more.
His victims were children and teenagers, and out of respect for them I will not describe the abuse they suffered in this article.
Biography of Luis Alfredo Garavito
Luis Alfredo Garavito was born in Colombia on 25 January 1957 into a poor family. The eldest of seven children, he only went to school until the fifth grade, and did poorly: around 1968 his father took him out of school to help support the family.
His classmates often teased him about his surname, very similar to garabato (scribble), and so Luis became more and more isolated.
He also said he grew up in a violent home: he remembered the shouting and insults and above all his father’s violence towards his mother and the children, who hid to escape him.
During questioning he also said he had himself been abused as a child by a neighbour who was a friend of his father’s, and that he never spoke about it for fear of not being believed.
Because of all these problems he became an alcoholic while still a teenager.
The abuse
As a young man Luis worked in a supermarket, where he also met Claudia, a woman with two children, with whom he had a relationship. From 1980 he began attacking children, luring them to isolated places and torturing them. It is estimated that before he began killing he had harmed at least 200 children.
At night, though, he also felt remorse: he would wake up thinking of his victims and cry in despair. Because of this he entered a psychiatric hospital, from which he was discharged 33 days later, declared cured.
But the doctors were wrong, and as soon as he got out he went back to attacking other children.
The murders
On 4 October 1992 he committed his first murder: he saw a boy in a park and, driven by an impulse, bought a knife, a rope and some alcohol. He promised the boy money and got him to follow him to an isolated place, where he said he heard a voice ordering him to kill. And so he did.
He then decided to go home to visit the only sister he was still close to, but on the way he saw another boy and killed him too.
From then until 1999 he killed hundreds of children, mainly in western Colombia, and four in Ecuador in the summer of 1998. He lured them to isolated places with the promise of a little money, then tortured and killed them with extreme ferocity.
Arrest
On 22 April 1999, in Villavicencio, Garavito approached a 12-year-old boy, John Iván Sabogal, who was selling lottery tickets, and took him to an isolated hillside, threatening him with a knife. A homeless 16-year-old heard the struggle and began throwing stones at him, and the two boys managed to escape to a farmhouse. The police, alerted, began a manhunt that ended with Luis’s capture that same evening. Garavito gave a false name, but on 4 July he was identified.
The confession alone was not enough: to link him to the murders police used his glasses, made specially for a rare eye condition and found at a crime scene along with brandy bottles and shoes. So as not to arouse his suspicion they had every inmate in the prison take an eye test, and took his DNA from the pillow in his cell.
On 28 October 1999, after more than twelve hours of questioning, he confessed to his crimes, later helping police find many of the bodies. He was found guilty of 138 of the 172 murders he was charged with.
Sentence and death
He was sentenced to 1,853 years and 9 days in prison, the longest sentence in Colombian history. But the law did not allow more than 40 years in prison and, since he had helped find the bodies, the sentence was reduced to 22 years. Colombia has neither life imprisonment nor the death penalty, and many Colombians called, in vain, for an exception to be made for him.
He was kept in isolation at the maximum-security prison in Valledupar, so that other inmates would not kill him. In 2021 a judge rejected his request for early release for good behaviour, because he had not paid compensation to his victims.
Suffering from eye cancer and leukaemia, by then blind, Luis Alfredo Garavito died in a hospital in Valledupar on 12 October 2023, aged 66, without ever leaving prison.
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