"The Monster of the Andes": Pedro Alonso López Murdered Hundreds of Children in South America and Then Disappeared
Colombian-born serial killer Pedro Alonso López grew up on the harsh streets of Bogotá. His years of victimization and abuse turned him into a savage and pitiless killer.
Background
It’s not surprising that a brutal upbringing is likely going to create a brutal human being, especially when one’s innocent hopes and dreams are extinguished at an early age.
But Pedro López didn’t just grow up to be cruel. He grew up to become a monster.
Early Years
Pedro Alonso López’s mother, Benilda López de Castañeda, was a prostitute in a rough part of Colombia who had made poor choices, not only in regard to her profession but generally throughout her life.
When Pedro was born on October 8, 1948, she already had six other children and would go on to have another six in quick succession, with most of them from different fathers.
Megdardo Reyes was Pedro’s father but he was already dead by the time Pedro came into the world, a casualty of the 10-year civil war called La Violencia. Leaving Pedro devoid of any true father figure growing up.
What he did experience was a chaotic and often violent home life where a procession of men meted out discipline to him with a hard slap or a sudden beating for no good reason.
Pedro grew up covered, not with love and affection, but with black and blue bruises.
At the age of eight, he had developed a streak of cruelty that had eclipsed even his older siblings and couldn’t be controlled by his mother unless one of her many male friends was present to try and keep him in check.
Benilda realized that she was incapable of controlling him when she caught him molesting one of his younger sisters.
So, at the age of eight years old, Pedro Alonso López was thrown out of an often violent home to fend for himself on the even more violent streets of Bogotá.
On His Own
No matter your size, age, or gender, being homeless on the streets of Bogotá is going to be a nasty experience.
People up to no good walk in the shadows both during the height of the day and the dead of the night when the streets are at their darkest, watching, waiting, and stalking their next victim.
Unfortunately, for a small eight-year-old child who was new to a life of sleeping in cold alleyways and scrambling for scraps of food, he had helpless victim written all over him.
Too small and weak to defend himself, Pedro was raped multiple times and left broken and battered after every assault. Seeking protection and an end to the abuse that would eventually make him just another statistic, he joined a street gang in order to survive.
His fortunes changed when in 1960, he was adopted by an American immigrant couple who rescued him from a life on the streets of Bogotá.
However, his good fortune didn’t last long.
After being raped by one of his school teachers, Pedro fled back to the only life he really knew and continued with his life of petty crimes in the depths of a city that knew him well but treated him as disposable trash.
Incarcerated
It was one of his street-level crimes, a car theft in 1969, that took him off the streets and threw him directly into a jail cell.
The prison turned out to be even more lawless than the environment he had just come from, but by now Pedro Alonso López was no longer a weak and defenseless eight-year-old boy.
He was a toughened, hardened, and street-wise individual. But even he couldn't fight off three institutionalized hard men when they decided to abuse and take advantage of the new guy.
Unfortunately for them, they had chosen the last guy they should have messed with as he’d reached the point that he just didn’t care anymore, about himself or for anyone else.
First Murders
Pedro had long ago shrugged off the social norms of paying for your crimes and suffering the consequences. His total reason for being was now all about payback.
And he was going to start with these three fools.
He was on a seven-year stretch, and the thought of adding another two years didn’t even cross his mind or cause a moment’s hesitation for what he was about to do.
He waited for the right opportunity when they were each alone, and he could catch them unaware. He killed each of them one by one, as bloody and brutally as he could in order to send a message to the rest of the inmates.
From then on, everyone steered well clear of him, including the prison staff.
Now, if Pedro had been tough and callous when he had first entered prison, by the time he left, he was a monster.
The Monster of the Andes
Freedom finally came in 1978 when the gates swung open, and Pedro reentered society as a new man, not rehabilitated in the slightest but definitely hardened by hate.
Instead of turning back towards the tough streets of Bogotá, he opted to leave Colombia behind and trek across South America.
Eventually, he arrived in Peru, but along the journey, he was apprehended by an indigenous tribe who suspected him of trying to abduct a nine-year-old girl. If not for an American missionary, they probably would have killed him.
As it was, he was released after an all-too-brief investigation by the police who decided to deport him rather than arrest him.
Little did they know, as they escorted him to the border, that Pedro was earning his soon-to-be nickname of the Monster of the Andes by leaving a trail of dead and broken bodies behind him.
Those bodies belonged to street urchins who were defenseless, vulnerable, and too weak to fight him off. He beat them, raped them, killed them, and felt nothing as he threw them aside and moved on.
At this murderous stage of his spree, there were at least 100 bodies littered behind him. As he continued his trek across South America, there would be more to come, a lot more.
Investigation and Arrest
In April 1980, a flash flood in Ecuador washed away the topsoil of an area in the Andean Valley revealing dozens of bodies. They were all young girls who had been reported missing around the time that Pedro had been in the area.
Numerous missing persons and unsolved murder cases were reopened, spurring unprecedented cross-border cooperation to catch the vicious serial killer who had been operating in each of their districts with no fear of being captured.
The name Pedro Alonso López was a name that appeared in all their files, but they had no idea where he was and not even enough evidence to conclusively tie him to any of the hundreds of murders.
The opportunity finally came to question him after his arrest for an attempted kidnapping in an Ecuador marketplace.
The police interrogated López, however, he denied any knowledge of or involvement in any of the murders.
Fearing that he was going to walk free again, authorities placed police Captain Pastor Cordova undercover in his cell and waited.
The Captain stroked his ego, bided his time, and soon Pedro just couldn’t help but open up, finally having someone to share his secrets with, and boast about the young girls he had killed, how he had killed them, and even where and how he had buried them.
Cordova made sure to squeeze every last drop of information out of him so dates matched disappearances, sites could be identified where bodies were buried, and make sure that Pedro dug his own grave.
The next time he was interrogated, Pedro was shocked by the amount of accurate information he was confronted with, and had no other option but to confess to a shocking 200 hundred murders in Ecuador alone and even more across South America.
He even went as far as directing the authorities to 53 gravesites that were previously unknown to them, and as a result, he was subsequently brought to trial and sentenced to life in prison.
Slap on the Wrist
In 1980, the maximum life term for murder in Ecuador was just 16 years. With good behavior, Pedro was let out two years early, at the age of 46.
He was still young enough and strong enough to carry on killing.
Deportation and Disappearance
No sooner was he released on August 31, 1994, than he was deported directly to a prison facility in Colombia to be charged with multiple murders that he was suspected of committing
After failing to prosecute him due to a lack of witnesses and sufficient evidence, the authorities instead declared him insane and committed him to an asylum for a term of four years.
After that time expired, he either regained his sanity or fooled them convincingly enough that they released him on a bond of just $70 with the proviso that he regularly reported in.
Inside, he must have been laughing to himself. As soon as his feet hit the ground, he turned the corner and was gone. a ghost who completely vanished into the underbelly of the rough streets that he knew so well.
And just like that, he was never seen again.
Despite the intense manhunt launched by Interpol and other agencies, and despite the occasional body unearthed in barren, inhospitable regions of South America over the next few years, Pedro López has never been located.
At one stage during his incarceration, Pedro Alonso López, the Monster of the Andes, had been asked why he killed young street urchins.
"I lost my innocence at the age of eight,” he had confessed. “So I decided to do the same to as many girls as I could."
The response had been matter-of-fact, scary, and more than chilling from a serial killer who had murdered more than 300 people with his bare hands, and was now at large once again.
Sources:
Wikipedia Last edited March 14, 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_López_(serial_killer) . Accessed March 29, 2024
Biography Updated: Oct 3, 2023 https://www.biography.com/crime/pedro-alonso-lopez . Accessed March 30, 2024