Pedro López

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Pedro Alonso López (born 8 October 1948 in Santa Isabel, Colombia) is a confessed serial killer from South America, accused of killing more than 300 people. Apart from two brief Associated Press wire reports (see below) the story was originally published in The Worlds Most Infamous Murders by Boar and Blundell - Octopus London 1983, subsequent references are derived from this source and an interview with Ron Laytner of the National Examiner published on January 12, 1999. Despite the lack of any corroborating evidence for his existence, López is mentioned in sources such as the BBC, the New York Times and Pravda.

A basic version of the story is as follows:

López became notorious as the Monster of the Andes. According to López, his mother, a prostitute with 13 children, caught him fondling his younger sister in 1957 when he was eight years old, and evicted him from the family home. He was then picked up by a pedophile, taken to a deserted house and repeatedly sodomized. He was later taken in by an American family and enrolled in a school for orphans. He allegedly ran away either with a teacher from his school or because he was molested by a teacher. At 18, he was gang-raped in prison and, he claimed, killed three of the rapists while still incarcerated. After his jail term he started preying on young girls in Peru. He later claimed that, by 1978, he had killed over than 100 of them. 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 relocated to Colombia and later Ecuador, killing about three girls a week. López later said "“I like the girls in Ecuador, they are more gentle and trusting, more innocent." The authorities had previously believed the disappearance of so many girls was due to white slavery or prostitution. López was arrested when an attempted abuduction went wrong and he was trapped by market traders. He confessed to over 300 murders. The police only believed him when a flash flood uncovered a mass grave of many of his victims.

According to the BBC: [1] "He was arrested in 1980 but was freed by the government in Ecuador at the end of last year [1998] and deported to Colombia. In an interview from his prison cell, Lopez described himself as "the man of the century" and said he was being released for "good behaviour".

[edit] AP wire reports

Two AP wire reports from July 1980 and January 1981 have been reported. [2] The first is a late report of López' arrest in March, and his confession to killing 103 girls, including 53 whose bodies had been found. The second reports that he was convicted three murders, and had confessed to 300 sexual assaults and stranglings.

[edit] External links

• Court TV's Crime Library's account of the López Story, including bibliography
• BBC: World's worst killers
• AP Wire reports

[edit] References

• The Worlds Most Infamous Murders by Roger Boar and Nigel Blundell - Octopus London 1983 ISBN 0600570088 pages 116-118