Case 292: Monster of the Andes

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Speaker 1 Today's episode involves crimes against children and won't be suitable for all listeners.

Speaker 1 On Saturday, May 5, 1979, a shout rang out over the bustling Plaza Urbina Market Square in the Ecuadorian city of Ambato.

Speaker 1 Alarming disappearance of Ecuadorian girls continues.

Speaker 1 The day's newspaper headline was met with dread from passing locals. For several months, girls between the ages of 7 and 14 had been vanishing from the streets of Ecuador.

Speaker 1 A majority of them worked as market vendors, having come from poor families who required them to sell goods to help make ends meet.

Speaker 1 Because of this, the police mostly branded the girls as runaways.

Speaker 1 Some officers believed the girls had fled to bigger cities where they could get jobs as maids. They told worried parents that their daughters were now probably better off.

Speaker 1 Others suggested the girls had fled their homes out of shame for failing their school year.

Speaker 1 Despite being aware of the ever-increasing danger, Many parents couldn't afford to hide their daughters away.

Speaker 1 All they could do was keep a closer eye on their children and warn them them not to go off with strangers.

Speaker 1 It wasn't enough.

Speaker 1 Each week across the country, two to three girls continued to go missing.

Speaker 1 At Plaza Urbina, 11-year-old Hortensia Garcaz held a stack of the newspapers while shouting the horrifying headline, trying to catch the interest of passers-by.

Speaker 1 For Hortensia, selling newspapers was a necessity. She was about to become a big sister and had to help her family provide for the arrival of her brother.

Speaker 1 Hortensia continued shouting as she left Plaza Robina and weaved her way through the city's streets.

Speaker 1 That evening, as darkness set in, Hortensia's family began to worry.

Speaker 1 Hortensia should have sold all of her newspapers hours ago. but she still hadn't returned home.

Speaker 1 Fearing the worst, Hortensia's father ran to Plaza Urbina.

Speaker 1 There was no sign of the 11-year-old anywhere.

Speaker 1 Three days later, the Tuesday edition of the newspaper was released. The headline revealed that Hortensia Garces was the latest girl to go missing without a trace.

Speaker 1 Over the next nine months, an increasing number of young Ecuadorian girls continued to go missing. Investigators could no longer ignore the issue.

Speaker 1 When they finally started looking into the string of disappearances, a distinct geographical pattern emerged.

Speaker 1 The towns and cities from where the girls had vanished were concentrated along the Andes mountain range.

Speaker 1 The northernmost town sat right up against the border with Colombia, while the southernmost town was near the border with Peru.

Speaker 1 To police, this strongly suggested the involvement of human traffickers.

Speaker 1 They theorized that the girls were being hidden in vehicles, funnelled along the Andes ranges and smuggled across the borders.

Speaker 1 The only city not positioned along the Andes was Wayaquil, which sat about 100 kilometers west of the mountains.

Speaker 1 What disturbed the police about this deviation was that Wayaquil was a port city.

Speaker 1 It handled over 90% of the country's shipping container traffic. Police feared that the girls girls were being loaded into these containers and transported by sea.

Speaker 1 Drug trafficking by Colombian gangs had been an increasing problem, and the theory quickly emerged that the criminals had expanded into child trafficking.

Speaker 1 National newspapers reported that the Colombians had recruited a network of on-the-ground members from within Ecuador to procure young girls from the streets.

Speaker 1 They were most likely being transported to another country in South or Central America and sold into domestic or sexual slavery.

Speaker 1 International child trafficking was a problem that had plagued South America for decades, but Ecuador had rarely seen it on such an enormous scale. Citizens were on edge.

Speaker 1 It was well known that members of trafficking organizations weren't limited to the obvious criminal types.

Speaker 1 Anyone could be involved, from business owners to factory workers, local officials and teachers.

Speaker 1 The fact that the girls had been taken without anyone noticing suggested that the abductors could easily blend in with their communities.

Speaker 1 People became increasingly suspicious of their neighbors.

Speaker 1 Across the country, police commenced a coordinated effort to capture anyone involved in the trafficking ring. Officers were posted at airports and bus terminals to identify any suspicious activity.

Speaker 1 Every truck, van and car attempting to cross the border into Colombia or Peru was thoroughly searched.

Speaker 1 Uniformed officers were stationed in marketplaces to provide a visible police presence, while undercover officers covertly patrolled these areas, posing as market vendors or customers.

Speaker 1 Round-the-clock surveillance teams watched the docks in Huayaquil, keeping an eye on all of the containers leaving Ecuador.

Speaker 1 Undercover officers posed as dock workers in the hopes of gaining intel about human cargo.

Speaker 1 Despite these actions, not a single missing girl was located, nor a single suspect detained.

Speaker 1 The fact that the police were being continuously outsmarted suggested that the trafficking ring was being run by highly skilled and highly organized criminals.

Speaker 1 By early 1980, 150 girls between the ages of 7 and 14 had been reported missing along the Andes ranges.

Speaker 1 The situation was labeled a national crisis.

Speaker 1 As tensions heightened, the country's president demanded that the police produce results.

Speaker 1 Umbato's police captain, Pastor Cordova, sat at his desk in contemplation.

Speaker 1 The disappearance of 11-year-old Hortensia Garces from Plaza Urbina nine months earlier wasn't the first in his jurisdiction.

Speaker 1 Nearly a dozen girls had been stolen from Ambato on Captain Córdoba's watch.

Speaker 1 Frustrated and unsure what else to do, Captain Cordova began reviewing the rap sheets of Colombian criminals with known links to trafficking or other organized crime.

Speaker 1 Perhaps his officers would get lucky and catch sight of one of these Colombians in Ambato.

Speaker 1 With the right interrogation tactics, they could use this one gang member to break open the entire trafficking operation.

Speaker 1 The captain prayed to find one of these men before another girl went missing.

Speaker 1 On the afternoon of Thursday, February 14, 1980, a well-respected bakery owner named Carlos Yakome entered the Umbato police station and stood before Captain Cordova.

Speaker 1 Carlos was in obvious distress.

Speaker 1 He explained that his nine-year-old daughter Ivanova sometimes brought food to him at the bakery's head office.

Speaker 1 She usually arrived by 11am,

Speaker 1 but on this day she didn't turn up.

Speaker 1 Carlos went home to check that everything was okay, only to find that the house was empty. He and his wife searched for Ivanova but couldn't find her anywhere.

Speaker 1 Captain Cordova considered what Carlos had just told him. Ivanova Yakome was within the preferred age range of the child traffickers, but she didn't fit with the rest of their usual victim profile.

Speaker 1 Ivanova belonged to a wealthy family and didn't work as a market vendor.

Speaker 1 Captain Cordova asked whether Ivanova's route would have taken her anywhere near Plaza Urbina.

Speaker 1 Carlos nodded. The Yakomé family home was right near the Plaza.

Speaker 1 Officers immediately began canvassing the streets between the Yakomi's home and the bakery's head office, asking if anyone had seen a young girl wearing blue overalls and a red apron with white polka dots.

Speaker 1 Carlos and his wife pinned hundreds of missing person posters featuring a smiling picture picture of Ivanova to street lamps and shop windows across Ambato, offering a substantial cash reward for information.

Speaker 1 The investigation turned up nothing.

Speaker 1 Police couldn't even be certain where along the route Ivanova had been abducted.

Speaker 1 Three weeks after Ivanova's disappearance, on the morning of Sunday, March 9, 1980, Plaza Urbina's market vendors huddled together before opening time.

Speaker 1 Carlina Ramon, who ran the hot potato stall and was the president of the Sellers Association, reminded the group that several young girls who worked in or near the plaza had fallen victim to the child trafficking gang.

Speaker 1 She urged everyone to be on the lookout for anything suspicious.

Speaker 1 Those in the crowd nodded in agreement before dispersing towards their stalls.

Speaker 1 Carlina called over her 11-year-old daughter Maria who would be manning a refreshment stand in the plaza that day.

Speaker 1 Carlina embraced Maria and implored her to be extra careful.

Speaker 1 Maria skipped over to her stall and prepared for the day ahead.

Speaker 1 Her friend Asta, not her real name, was also working at a refreshment stand nearby, and the two girls promised to look out for one another.

Speaker 1 The crowds soon poured in, and by 10am, Plaza Urbina was buzzing with activity. Maria looked up as a tall, thin man with wavy brown hair and a toothless smile approached her stand.

Speaker 1 He was carrying a jumbled collection of trinkets, including buttons, sewing kits, matches, chains, padlocks, suites and cosmetics.

Speaker 1 The man pulled out a crumpled 100 sucre bill and offered it to Maria.

Speaker 1 It was a significant amount of money and much more than any of the drinks cost.

Speaker 1 Maria eyed the man suspiciously.

Speaker 1 He explained that he was a traveling street vendor who was only passing through town.

Speaker 1 He needed help finding a bus that would take him to Wayakil.

Speaker 1 The man offered to pay Maria the 100 sucres if she took him to the bus stop.

Speaker 1 Maria declined, telling the man she couldn't leave her stand.

Speaker 1 He turned and wandered away.

Speaker 1 Maria called to her friend Esther and explained the strange encounter. They decided it was best to tell Maria's mother Carlina.
and dashed over to her store.

Speaker 1 Carlina followed Maria back to the refreshment stand to see if the suspicious man was still loitering. They scanned the surrounding faces, but he'd disappeared into the crowd.

Speaker 1 A few hours later, as the day's trade began to quieten down, the street vendor reappeared. This time he approached Esther's refreshment stand.

Speaker 1 He repeated the story that he'd told Maria earlier, offering Esther the 100 sucres to be his guide.

Speaker 1 He also offered to buy all of Esther's remaining drinks so that she wouldn't lose out on any money by leaving her stall unattended.

Speaker 1 Esther was immediately mistrustful. She snapped back.

Speaker 1 Why do you just ask little girls? Why not ask an adult, a man?

Speaker 1 Without waiting for his response, Esther grabbed Maria and they hurried to find Carlina.

Speaker 1 Carlina immediately sprung into action. She dashed over to where the girls had last seen the man, but he hadn't waited around.

Speaker 1 Carlina quickly enlisted the help of other Vandors and they spread themselves throughout the plaza on the hunt for the tall, toothless man carrying a collection of trinkets.

Speaker 1 Carlina charged through the labyrinth of stalls until she was certain the whole market had been canvassed.

Speaker 1 Frustrated that he'd managed to escape again. Carlina stopped on the edge of the plaza to catch her breath.

Speaker 1 Just as she was about to return to her potato stand, she spotted someone who fit the description of the man coming out of a butcher's shop across the street.

Speaker 1 One of his abnormally large hands was wrapped around the tiny hand of a nine-year-old girl. He was leading her away from the plaza.

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Speaker 1 Carlina began screaming that the man was kidnapping a child. She ran over to him and grabbed his arm.

Speaker 1 The man tried to wriggle out of Carlina's grasp, but she held on to him with all her strength, continuing to shout for assistance.

Speaker 1 Within seconds, nearly a dozen men pounced on the trinket vendor and held him securely.

Speaker 1 Realizing he couldn't escape, the man stopped struggling. He offered the crowd a toothless smile, saying he was just a simple traveling street vendor trying to make a living.

Speaker 1 He claimed that the young girl was merely showing him the way to the bus station so he could continue his journey.

Speaker 1 To some of the men, this explanation explanation seemed entirely plausible.

Speaker 1 Thinking they may have reacted unfairly, they relaxed their grip. But Carlina didn't believe a word of it.

Speaker 1 She told the crowd that the trinket seller was part of the trafficking ring abducting and selling young girls. He'd earlier tried to lure her own daughter away with money.

Speaker 1 Those in front could see that the confused nine-year-old girl from the butcher's shop was grasping a crumpled 100 sucre bill.

Speaker 1 The crowd was torn.

Speaker 1 Some supported Carlina while others thought she was being hysterical.

Speaker 1 As calls to let the man go began to circulate, police arrived on the scene and took him into custody.

Speaker 1 When Ambato's police captain Pastor Cordova entered the interrogation room, he was furious.

Speaker 1 The detaining officers had tried to extract information from the trinket vendor with violence, and he sat bruised and bloody. The beatings hadn't achieved anything.

Speaker 1 The man insisted he was innocent and knew nothing about the alleged trafficking ring.

Speaker 1 Captain Cordova feared that the officers had squandered any chance to get information from the suspect.

Speaker 1 Instead, he decided to approach with kindness.

Speaker 1 Captain Cordova brought the man a drink and a sandwich and offered him a cigarette.

Speaker 1 The two sat smoking together in silence.

Speaker 1 Eventually, Captain Cordova assured the trinket vendor that he wouldn't receive any more beatings and asked if the two could just talk for a while.

Speaker 1 The man nodded in agreement.

Speaker 1 He said his name was Pedro Alonso Lopez and he was a 31-year-old traveling vendor from Colombia.

Speaker 1 The captain maintained a calm exterior, but internally he was excited, thinking he may have finally caught one of the Colombian gang members.

Speaker 1 Cordova leaned in a little further and said,

Speaker 1 Tell me about yourself.

Speaker 1 Lopez relaxed and started to talk.

Speaker 1 Captain Cordova desperately wanted to ask about the missing girls, but he didn't want to jump into the subject too soon. Instead, he asked Lopez whether he had a criminal past.

Speaker 1 Lopez admitted that when he was 21, he was caught stealing a car in Bogota, the capital city of Colombia.

Speaker 1 He was sent to prison for seven years.

Speaker 1 One night, Four older men entered his cell and raped him.

Speaker 1 Lopez swore revenge.

Speaker 1 Two weeks later, he lured each of the men one by one back into his cell.

Speaker 1 He stabbed three of them to death with a makeshift knife. The fourth managed to escape and raised the alarm.

Speaker 1 The authorities considered the killings to be in self-defense and Lopez wasn't harshly punished.

Speaker 1 Since his release, Lopez made his meagre living as a traveling street vendor.

Speaker 1 He told Captain Cordova that he liked to be continuously on the move between Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

Speaker 1 Recognizing this as an opportunity, the captain suggested to Lopez that a man who traveled so much must have seen many things.

Speaker 1 Lopez agreed.

Speaker 1 Captain Cordova pushed.

Speaker 1 So you must know about the traffickers of the little girls.

Speaker 1 Lopez shook his head.

Speaker 1 He said he didn't know anything about traffickers and wasn't involved with that sort of thing at all.

Speaker 1 Lopez then gave the captain a broad, toothless smile and said,

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I do know about the girls.

Speaker 1 Lopez said the police should forget about chasing down a child trafficking ring. He said there was only one person responsible for the missing girls.
And that person was him.

Speaker 1 Captain Cordova was unconvinced. Over 150 girls had been reported missing over the past year.
and it wasn't possible that one man had kidnapped them all.

Speaker 1 Furthermore, if Pedro Lopez really was responsible, selling the girls would have earned him a lot of money. The man sitting before him was near penniless.

Speaker 1 Regardless, the captain did believe Lopez knew something about what had happened to the missing girls. He asked,

Speaker 1 Where are the girls now?

Speaker 1 Lopez laughed and spoke triumphantly.

Speaker 1 They are all dead, dead and buried along the Andes.

Speaker 1 He flashed another toothless grin and continued,

Speaker 1 I'll show you.

Speaker 1 Within the hour, Captain Cordova and two other officers were in a police car following Lopez's directions.

Speaker 1 They drove north out of Ambato for about 16 kilometers until they reached a rural farming area.

Speaker 1 Lopez directed the police through a number of turns down nondescript dirt roads until he finally signaled for the car to stop.

Speaker 1 Cordova and his officers followed Lopez on foot through scrub until they came to a gap in a fence.

Speaker 1 Lopez slipped through and ran ahead.

Speaker 1 When the officers caught up, Lopez was standing in front of a small wooden box.

Speaker 1 It was roughly 130 centimeters long and 90 centimeters wide and looked like it was intended to be a makeshift beehive.

Speaker 1 A stench hung in the air as Lopez pointed to the box.

Speaker 1 The officers used crowbars to crack open the lid.

Speaker 1 Inside was a dirty mattress.

Speaker 1 On top of the mattress was the naked body of a young girl.

Speaker 1 Captain Cordova immediately knew who she was.

Speaker 1 Tucked alongside her body was a pair of blue overalls and a red apron with white polka dots.

Speaker 1 It was nine-year-old Ivanova Yakome.

Speaker 1 Investigators had assumed that Ivanova had been abducted while walking to deliver food to her father, but according to Lopez, that wasn't the case.

Speaker 1 He explained that on the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1980, he was passing by the Yakomez house when Ivanova poked her head outside the front door.

Speaker 1 She looked up the street before retreating back inside.

Speaker 1 Lopez stopped in his tracks. He watched the house for a few hours until he was certain that the child was home alone.

Speaker 1 Lopez eventually knocked on the front door, but there was no answer. He called out to Ivanova, saying he was a friend of her father's.

Speaker 1 Ivanova cautiously opened the door.

Speaker 1 Lopez produced 10 sucres and said that Ivanova's parents wanted them to go to the store to buy vegetables.

Speaker 1 Ivanova was hesitant but Lopez said that her parents would be angry if she didn't go with him.

Speaker 1 She took Lopez's hand and the pair walked down the street.

Speaker 1 Lopez Lopez spoke to Ivanova sweetly and distracted her with conversation.

Speaker 1 He guided her out of Ambato and towards the rural countryside.

Speaker 1 After several hours, they were amongst farmlands. By nightfall, Ivanova became tired of walking and started asking for her mother.

Speaker 1 Lopez looked around and spotted the wooden box plus a discarded mattress lying nearby.

Speaker 1 He opened the box and placed the mattress inside.

Speaker 1 All of his friendliness towards Ivanova disappeared and he ordered her to climb inside.

Speaker 1 Lopez subdued Ivanova by punching her twice in the head. He then raped her repeatedly before strangling her to death.

Speaker 1 Lopez slept alongside her body for a while before closing the lid of the box and walking away.

Speaker 1 Captain Pastor Cordova made the heartbreaking call to Ivanova's parents.

Speaker 1 When Carlos Jakome saw his daughter's body, he was unable to speak.

Speaker 1 Ivanova's mother collapsed to the floor.

Speaker 1 An autopsy on Ivanova's body later corroborated Lopez's account of his attack.

Speaker 1 Lopez had more to say.

Speaker 1 He was eager to take police to another of his young victims.

Speaker 1 As they prepared to depart the station, they were met by an angry mob baying for Lopez's blood.

Speaker 1 Captain Cordova tried to appease the crowd, telling them he understood their anger, but this wasn't just about Evanova.

Speaker 1 There were many more missing girls to be found.

Speaker 1 The crowd ignored the captain's pleas to be patient and repeatedly called for Lopez to be lynched.

Speaker 1 Officers were forced to smuggle Lopez through an alternative exit and bundle him into a waiting police vehicle.

Speaker 1 This time, they didn't have to travel far.

Speaker 1 Pedro Lopez directed police to the outskirts of town where the Ficoa Bridge connected central Ambato with the affluent neighborhood of Ficoa.

Speaker 1 He specified a site underneath the bridge on the banks of the Ambato River.

Speaker 1 Officers began digging and it wasn't long before they found something buried underneath.

Speaker 1 It was a stack of newspapers dated May 5, 1979, the day that 11-year-old Hortensia Garces had disappeared.

Speaker 1 Underneath the papers was a small set of skeletal remains.

Speaker 1 News that a second body had been uncovered quickly spread and hundreds of townsfolk gathered on the scene.

Speaker 1 As the remains were lifted out of the dirt, Captain Cordova spotted Ortensia's parents in the crowd and brought them forward.

Speaker 1 The body was too badly decomposed to be identified, but Ortensia's parents recognised her clothes.

Speaker 1 The angry crowd began throwing rocks at Lopez, forcing police to remove him from the scene.

Speaker 1 On their way back to the station, Lopez confessed that he'd approached Hortensia Garces as she was crossing the Fakoa Bridge.

Speaker 1 He took a copy of the newspaper and made a comment about the missing girl's headline.

Speaker 1 He then asked Hortensia to be his guide. offering to pay 10 sucres as well as buy all of her remaining papers.

Speaker 1 Hortensia agreed.

Speaker 1 Lopez led Hortensia into the thick vegetation of the riverbank where he proceeded to repeatedly rape her before strangling her to death.

Speaker 1 He rested alongside Hortensia's corpse for a few hours, then buried her and her newspapers in a nearby ditch.

Speaker 1 Lopez then went in search of another little girl.

Speaker 1 He couldn't find one that day, but he told police that he got lucky the next.

Speaker 1 Over the following weeks, Pedro Lopez led Captain Córdoba and his officers to 110 remote and obscure locations across Ecuador where he claimed to have buried the bodies of his victims.

Speaker 1 None of the sites were marked, yet Lopez recalled each location with precision.

Speaker 1 At some sites, multiple bodies had been callously thrown on top of one another.

Speaker 1 At others, no bodies could be found, the remains presumably destroyed by animals, weather and time.

Speaker 1 Construction work had since been conducted at several locations, entombing any remains under concrete.

Speaker 1 Every time a body was discovered, Lopez explained how the girl came to be there.

Speaker 1 The story was more or less always the same.

Speaker 1 Lopez would befriend his young victim and then lead her to a secluded location before raping and killing her.

Speaker 1 Eventually, Lopez told Captain Córdoba,

Speaker 1 No more, I have proven enough that I am the one responsible for all the girls.

Speaker 1 In all, the bodies of 80 Ecuadorian girls were uncovered.

Speaker 1 But, by Lopez's own admissions, police believed he was responsible for over over 100 murders in the country.

Speaker 1 The people of Ecuador weren't suffering alone.

Speaker 1 Lopez had happily admitted that he'd done the same in Colombia and Peru.

Speaker 1 Across the three countries, he claimed to have taken at least 300 lives.

Speaker 1 The realization dawned on Captain Cordova.

Speaker 1 Pedro Lopez was one of the most prolific serial killers ever known.

Speaker 1 Casefile will be back shortly. Thank you for supporting us by listening to this episode's sponsors.

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Speaker 1 While in custody awaiting trial, Pedro Lopez was permitted to participate in media interviews. He delighted in the attention and took pleasure in detailing his story to anyone who would listen.

Speaker 1 Explaining how he chose his victims, he said,

Speaker 1 I would walk among the markets looking for a girl with a certain look on her face, a look of innocence and beauty. I like the girls of Ecuador.

Speaker 1 They are more gentle, more innocent and trusting than the girls of Colombia, who are too suspicious of strangers.

Speaker 1 Lopez admitted that the girls he targeted were victims of convenience. He had often followed fair-haired children of tourists, but his opportunity to strike never arose as, quote,

Speaker 1 their parents were too watchful.

Speaker 1 According to Lopez, it all started in the mid-1970s following his release from prison.

Speaker 1 He spent a lot of time wandering through the mountains near the picturesque Tekundama Falls, about 30 kilometers southwest of Bogota.

Speaker 1 During one journey, he came across a young girl walking down a dirt road.

Speaker 1 She became Lopez's first child victim, and the Tekandama Falls area became a burial ground for a number of young girls thereafter.

Speaker 1 Lopez eventually made his way down to Peru, where the rapes and murders continued.

Speaker 1 In 1978, Lopez was traveling through a small village in the Yayocucho region of southern Peru.

Speaker 1 He managed to convince a nine-year-old indigenous girl to accompany him for a walk.

Speaker 1 but several villagers saw what he was doing and quickly realized that Lopez was responsible for the spade of missing girls in the area.

Speaker 1 The community decided they would punish Lopez according to their native customs. He was stripped naked and hogtied.

Speaker 1 Honey was poured all over his body and he was thrown into a large hole.

Speaker 1 The villagers were planning to first torture Lopez with live ants and to then bury him alive.

Speaker 1 Just as they were about to release the ants, an American woman stepped forward. She was a Christian missionary who had been promoting her faith in the village.

Speaker 1 The woman begged the villagers not to go through with their plan. She urged them to let her deliver Lopez to the Peruvian authorities instead.

Speaker 1 The villagers agreed.

Speaker 1 Lopez was hauled into the woman's jeep and driven to the region's police station.

Speaker 1 But the Peruvian police were apathetic to the plight of indigenous communities, and they had no interest in investigating Lopez's involvement with the missing girls.

Speaker 1 Without so much as questioning him, they escorted Lopez across the border and released him back into Colombia.

Speaker 1 Lopez estimated that by the time he left Peru in 1978, he had murdered over 100 girls there.

Speaker 1 He claimed to have spent the next year traveling along the Andes mountain range between Colombia and Ecuador, abducting, raping, and strangling young girls with impunity.

Speaker 1 Based on the number of burial locations that Pedro Lopez had pinpointed to Ecuadorian police, he was eventually charged with the rape and murder of 110 girls.

Speaker 1 In July 1981, 14 months after his capture, Lopez Lopez faced the judge.

Speaker 1 Despite his previous confessions, and for reasons unknown, he pleaded guilty to only 57 of those charges.

Speaker 1 Lopez labeled himself the man of the century, while the people of Ecuador called him the monster of the Andes.

Speaker 1 The general consensus was that Lopez deserved nothing short of execution, but the death penalty had been abolished in Ecuador 70 years prior.

Speaker 1 The revulsion against Lopez's crimes was so great that a mass protest was staged in Ambato.

Speaker 1 The families of the young victims petitioned the president to allow the death penalty in this instance, commenting,

Speaker 1 Our hearts are bloodied and our hands are raised to heaven imploring justice.

Speaker 1 The president acknowledged the pain that the families and all Ecuadorians were feeling, but rejected the request.

Speaker 1 Instead, he asked them to put their trust in the justice system, assuring that Lopez would be punished to the full extent of the law.

Speaker 1 Ecuador's criminal code did not permit sentences for murder to run consecutively.

Speaker 1 Accordingly, Pedro Lopez would only be sentenced for one murder, not the dozens he had pleaded guilty to, nor the potential hundreds he was responsible for.

Speaker 1 Lopez was given the maximum penalty for murder that was in force in Ecuador at the time.

Speaker 1 16 years.

Speaker 1 Just over 13 years later, on Wednesday, August 31, 1994, Pedro Lopez was released from prison early on account of good behavior.

Speaker 1 He was 45 years old.

Speaker 1 However, Lopez was considered an illegal immigrant in Ecuador. As soon as he was released, he was immediately taken into custody by immigration officials.

Speaker 1 The following day, he was escorted across the border and delivered to the Colombian authorities.

Speaker 1 It was the moment they'd been waiting for for 14 years.

Speaker 1 In late December 1979, two months prior to Lopez's capture in Ecuador, a nine-year-old girl named Flor Sanchez went missing from the Colombian town of El Espinal.

Speaker 1 Shortly after, Flor's body was discovered. She had been raped and strangled.

Speaker 1 Over the following weeks, the bodies of four more girls were discovered in Andean towns leading south and back towards Ecuador.

Speaker 1 At the time, Colombian authorities had no idea who was responsible for the murders.

Speaker 1 After Pedro Lopez was captured in Ecuador, the reality became clear.

Speaker 1 El Espinal was Lopez's hometown.

Speaker 1 Flor Sanchez had gone missing the day after Pedro Lopez arrived for a visit there.

Speaker 1 He left town a few days later, traveling his usual route south along the Andes.

Speaker 1 In media interviews following his capture, Lopez boasted about committing many murders in El Espinal.

Speaker 1 He was amused that the police hadn't found more bodies.

Speaker 1 With Pedro Lopez back on Colombian soil, authorities were finally able to charge him with the murder of Flor Sanchez.

Speaker 1 In Colombia, the maximum penalty for murder was 60 years.

Speaker 1 Given Lopez was 45, 60 years would effectively be a life sentence.

Speaker 1 This gave comfort to the families of Lopez's victims who felt cheated by the leniency of Ecuador's justice system.

Speaker 1 But such comfort was short-lived.

Speaker 1 As part of the pre-trial procedures, Lopez was subjected to a psychiatric examination.

Speaker 1 He was deemed mentally ill and therefore not criminally responsible for his actions.

Speaker 1 Lopez had consistently described a childhood of abuse and trauma.

Speaker 1 He claimed that his mother was a sex worker, that he never knew his own father, and that all of his siblings were fathered by different men.

Speaker 1 As a child, Lopez claimed that his mother was violent and abusive towards him, kicking him out of the family home when he was just eight years old.

Speaker 1 He spent the rest of his childhood on the streets.

Speaker 1 Lopez recalled he'd once been taken in by a seemingly kind man who turned out to be a pedophile.

Speaker 1 He escaped and returned to the streets.

Speaker 1 A few years later, when Lopez was 12, an American couple took pity on him.

Speaker 1 They gave him food and clothes and enrolled him in school. There, Lopez claimed he was sexually abused by one of the teachers.

Speaker 1 According to Lopez, the rapes and murders he committed were in retaliation for his own childhood. He told the media,

Speaker 1 I lost my innocence at the age of eight and I decided to do the same to as many young girls as possible.

Speaker 1 I am not sorry for what I did.

Speaker 1 After Lopez's psychological assessment was handed down in Colombia, the psychiatric community debated his mental state.

Speaker 1 Some believed that Lopez was turned into a rapist and killer by his childhood experiences. Others believed he was a born psychopath, incapable of remorse or rehabilitation.

Speaker 1 Instead of a life behind bars, he was sent to a mental health facility for ongoing treatment.

Speaker 1 Just over three years later, in February 1998, Pedro Lopez was declared cured and sane.

Speaker 1 At the age of 49 years, he walked out of the facility a free man.

Speaker 1 The first thing Lopez did was travel to El Espinal to see his mother, Bernilda.

Speaker 1 In the years since Lopez had been captured, Bernilda had been interviewed several times.

Speaker 1 She rejected her son's claims of child abuse, saying that although their family was poor and life wasn't easy, theirs had always been a loving home.

Speaker 1 Bernilda claimed she made her living as a laundress, not a sex worker.

Speaker 1 She clarified that Lopez's father had died six months before Lopez was born, having been killed during Colombia's civil violence.

Speaker 1 According to Benilda, Lopez grew angry and resentful after she remarried and had children with her new husband. He wasn't kicked out of home, but had left on his own accord.

Speaker 1 He returned at the age of 18, at which point Benilda caught him inappropriately touching his younger sisters and kicked him out.

Speaker 1 Benilda said her son was a disgrace to society. If she had known what he was capable of, she said she would have killed him herself to save humanity from his crimes.

Speaker 1 She expressed her deep apologies to the families of his victims, whom she lit a candle for every day.

Speaker 1 Benilda had no desire to see her son again.

Speaker 1 When Lopez arrived at her door after being released from the mental health facility, it wasn't for a family reunion.

Speaker 1 He wanted money.

Speaker 1 Benilda was still very poor and had nothing to give.

Speaker 1 Instead, Lopez took some of her furniture and sold it for a meagre amount of cash.

Speaker 1 He left El Espinal and faded back into the Andes.

Speaker 1 In the years that followed, other young girls between the ages of 7 and 14 went missing along the mountain range.

Speaker 1 Of those who were found deceased, some had suffered the same fate as Pedro Lopez's previous victims.

Speaker 1 He immediately became a suspect.

Speaker 1 Not only did the crimes fit his MO, there were serious doubts that he could ever be rehabilitated.

Speaker 1 Lopez had been proud of his crimes, and at no point had he ever shown a hint of remorse.

Speaker 1 Lopez had once told the Ecuadorian police, quote,

Speaker 1 The moment of death is passionate and exciting. Someday, when I'm free, I'll feel that moment again.

Speaker 1 I will be happy to kill again.

Speaker 1 It is my mission.

Speaker 1 In 2002, Interpol issued a warrant for Pedro Lopez's arrest, but he couldn't be located.

Speaker 1 Family members of his victims had been vocal about their desire for revenge. Some had threatened to shoot Lopez, others to burn him alive.

Speaker 1 The mother of one young victim had told reporters,

Speaker 1 I wanted to break him into pieces because he killed my baby.

Speaker 1 Carlina Ramon, the market vendor who captured Lopez near Plaza Rubina, supported the intention, stating,

Speaker 1 It would be a kindness to the world for someone to murder this fiend.

Speaker 1 Many believe that someone did just that.

Speaker 1 As of mid-2023, Pedro Lopez has never been found alive. If he is still alive, Lopez would be in his mid-70s.

Speaker 1 Back in 1980, when Pedro Lopez led Ecuadorian police to his burial sites, the remains of his victims were transported to the Ambato Police Headquarters.

Speaker 1 Parents of missing girls traveled from across the country to view one corpse after another.

Speaker 1 For many, a visual identification wasn't possible.

Speaker 1 Instead, grief-stricken mothers and fathers clutched familiar items of clothing and wept over bones.

Speaker 1 Some mothers screamed and passed out, while anguished fathers punched walls. Captain Pastor Cordova would never forget watching the heartbreaking procession of grieving parents.

Speaker 1 Years later, he described it as, the most painful thing I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 1 Nearly half of the victims uncovered by police could not be identified. If Lopez's confessions are to be relied on, potentially hundreds more in Colombia and Peru remain lost and buried.

Speaker 1 The true number and identities of the missing girls of the Andes will likely never be known.

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