Quick Facts
Biography
Pedro Alonso López (born 8 October 1948) is a Colombian serial killer, who was sentenced for killing 80 girls, but who claims to have raped and killed more than 300 girls across his native country, then Peru and Ecuador, and possibly other countries. Aside from uncited local accounts, López’s crimes first received international attention from an interview conducted by Ron Laytner, a longtime freelance photojournalist who reported interviewing López in his Ambato prison cell in 1980.
Laytner’s interviews were widely published, first in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, 13 July 1980, then in the Toronto Sun and The Sacramento Bee on 21 July 1980, and over the years in many other North American papers and foreign publications, including the National Enquirer. Apart from Laytner’s account and two brief Associated Press wire reports, the story was published in The World's Most Infamous Murders by Boar and Blundell, and has found its way into many serial murder anthologies, both in print and on-line.
According to Laytner’s story, López became known as the "Monster of the Andes" in 1980, when he led police to 53 graves in Ecuador, the victims all girls around nine to twelve years old. In 1983, he was found guilty of the murder of 110 girls in Ecuador. He further confessed to an additional 240 murders in Peru and Colombia.
López was released from a psychiatric hospital in 1998 for good behaviour, after initially being found insane. His whereabouts are currently unknown.
Biography
López's father, Midardo Reyes, was a member of the Colombian Conservative Party during La Violencia, Colombia's civil war. After an argument with his wife on 28 December 1947, Reyes cheated with a prostitute named Benilda López De Casteneda, who soon became pregnant by Reyes. On 4 April 1948, when Benilda was three months pregnant with López, Reyes was killed from a gunshot wound while defending a grocery store from a rebellious mob. Six months later, Pedro was born in Santa Isabel as the seventh of thirteen children.
According to López, growing up to witness acts of prostitution had disturbing affects on his psyche, subsequently, his mother caught him fondling his younger sister in 1957, when he was eight years old, and evicted him from the family home. Following this, Pedro Lopez ran off to Bogotá, Colombia's capital city. He was picked up by a man, taken to a deserted house and repeatedly sodomized. At age twelve, he was taken in by an American family and enrolled in a school for orphans. He ran away after two years because he was allegedly molested by a male teacher. At 18, he stole cars for a living and sold the cars to local chop shops. These actions led to his getting caught by authorities later on in his life. During his incarceration, he claimed that he was brutally gang-raped in prison and that he hunted down his rapists and killed them all while still incarcerated.
López said that after his jail term, he started murdering young girls in Peru. He claimed that, by 1978, he had killed over 100 of them and that he had been caught by a native tribe, who were preparing to execute him, when an American missionary intervened and persuaded them to hand him over to the state police. The police soon released him. He said he moved to Colombia and later Ecuador, killing about three girls a week. López said: "I like the girls in Ecuador, they are more gentle and trusting, more innocent."
López was arrested when an attempted abduction failed and he was trapped by market traders. He confessed to over three hundred murders. The police only believed him when a flash flood uncovered a mass grave containing many of his victims. According to the BBC: "He was arrested in 1980, but was freed by the government in Ecuador at the end of [1998]." In an interview from his prison cell, López described himself as "the man of the century" and said he was being released for "good behaviour".
An A&E Biography documentary reports that he was released from an Ecuadorian prison on 31 August 1994, then rearrested an hour later as an illegal immigrant and handed over to Colombian authorities, who charged him with a 20-year-old murder. He was declared insane and held in the psychiatric wing of a Bogotá hospital. In 1998, he was declared sane and released on $50 bail, subject to certain conditions. He later absconded. The same documentary says that Interpol released an advisory for his rearrest by Colombian authorities over a fresh murder in 2002.
Currently there is mixed information of his whereabouts, one citation says he is in prison but does not state when and where he is incarcerated. Other articles referenced in the source/citations said his whereabouts are unknown (2017).
Coverage
Lopez has been written about mainly in articles written by Ron Laytner and in serial killer encyclopaedias. There was an English language documentary made by A&E better known as the Biography Channel.
Guinness World Records briefly credited Lopez as being the "most prolific serial killer".
AP wire reports
Two Associated Press (AP) wire reports from July 1980 and January 1981 are extant. The first is a late report of López's arrest in March, and his confession to killing 103 girls, including 53 whose bodies had been found. The second reports that he was convicted of three murders, and had confessed to three hundred sexual assaults and stranglings.