The bad was beaten into him from an early age one blow at a time
Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos was as heartless as it’s possible to be and as depraved as it’s possible to become.
He wasn’t a particularly menacing looking individual, wasn’t someone you would immediately find physically threatening as he sauntered by on the street during daylight hours. But a look into his eyes when the sun went down and the shadows came out would make the blood in your veins turn cold and send a chill down your spine.
He was, to put it simply, evil.
He was the first child of 7 born to Manuel Antonio Garavito and Rosa Delia Cubillos on 25 January 1957. They were not good parents.
Life in Colombia was far from easy in the late 50s, poverty and a 10-year armed conflict between the Colombian Conservative party and the Colombian Liberal party took its toll on everyone within earshot of guns going off constantly. It was mainly fought in the countryside, peasants pitted against peasants, and being peasants, his parents were constantly caught up in the melee.
Both drank heavily, were violent, the father adulterous, uncaring, the mother lacking any vestiges of affection to show any of her kids.
On one occasion while trying to defend his drunken, pregnant mother from being beaten by his even drunker father, he ended up being tied to a tree at the age of 6 and beaten raw with a ragged branch.
Life at home was hard, life at school wasn’t any easier. He hated the bullying, which happened on a daily basis, enjoyed the studying, while it lasted. His father pulled him out of school in 1968 before he could finish the fifth grade so he could work and bring some money into the household.
It was this choice made by his father that was going to set the young Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos on the gruesome road to becoming The Beast.
It started innocently enough with his father finding him a job working in a hardware store owned by a neighbor. This neighbor was a longtime friend, this neighbor was adept at hiding his true self from the outside world.
For the following 3 years, the neighbor not only sexually molested Alfredo but physically tied him up, burnt him, bit him, and cut him with a razor blade, inflicting physical wounds and mental scars that would turn a mild manner child into a heartless adult.
Bringing this abuse to the attention of his parents would have been a waste of time, their ears closed, their eyes shut, and their mouths open only to hurl abuse at their kids or to drain a bottle dry.
The abuse only stopped when the family moved away in 1971 to Trujillo — but the damage was seared into his psyche and was beyond repair, his soul scarred way too deep.
A new town should have brought a respite, but the new town only brought a new neighbor who inflicted the same old abuse on the already damaged 15-year-old who, when he expressed his disgust at seeing heterosexual porn for the first time, was thrown to the ground and raped.
It was from that point that he fell into the bottom of every bottle he could find, every swig burning away years of shame, of revulsion, and changing him from the abused into the abuser.
In 1972 he attempted to rape a 5-year-old boy, failed, tried again the following year, and perhaps would have succeeded if the child hadn’t screamed out in terror. He was arrested for attempted rape and when his father found out he scolded him for not having the wits to at least sexually assault a woman.
It wasn’t long before Garavito, his parents ashamed of him, was kicked out and had to fend for himself. He tried various types of jobs, tried heterosexual relationships, and attempted to fit into society. He failed at all of them.
In the 1980s, suicidal thoughts forced him to seek psychiatric help and attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but neither helped in the slightest, his feelings of worthlessness persisting and his need to drink a bottle dry overwhelming.
When sober he was an okay human being, blind drunk he was anything but.
One thing Garavito neglected to do was inform his therapist that he was a pedophile, neglected to tell the church where he prayed for forgiveness that he was a child molester, and hid from his coworkers that he frequented an area in the city known for child prostitution. Or that during his lunch breaks he would occasionally tie up, rape, and torture young children, just as had been inflicted upon him as a child.
With any woman, he had tried to have a relationship with he had found it impossible to get sexually aroused. The only way he could satisfy his needs was by forcibly restraining, torturing, and raping young children.
Over the following years, Garavito ruined the lives of over 100 children, their names recorded in a ledger, partly in shame that he was the same as the men who had abused him throughout his life, but also as a reminder of how much pleasure he derived from his loathsome crimes.
He was a conflicted individual, suffering from regular nightmares and hating himself, yet unable to stop at the same time.
A brief spell in 1984 in another psychiatric facility for depression, helped not at all. The following month he was out, traveled to Pereira, and continued to lure new victims into his degradation
It was only a matter of time before the escalation occurred when rape and torture weren’t enough to satisfy him fully, when murder was the next natural progression.
The year was 1992 and by this time his tally of victims was close to 200.
His first attempt at killing a young street boy ended in failure, a beating from the police and the confiscation of his watch, his ring, and 100,000 pesos, all taken by the police for their trouble and for not keeping him locked up.
Amply rewarded, they set him free, not caring what evils he inflicted onto others as long as their pockets were full.
Three days later, on 4 October 1992, he succeeded in luring a young boy, 13-year-old Juan Carlos, to a secluded area with the promise of paid work. Once there, Garavito used the butcher knife he had recently purchased to slice the boy’s throat and cut off his genitals.
The next morning he woke up repentant, splattered with dried blood, mortified at what he had done.
But he had turned a corner.
The Beast within him was now fully unleashed. Any shame that he felt after his next 50 murders was quickly squashed as he felt the unstoppable compulsion to find a new victim to torture, to kill, even before the previous one had turned cold.
The bodies piled high over the next few years, discovered frequently by the authorities in secluded areas, in hotel rooms, some minus toes that were collected as trophies, many gutted after being raped.
Because he selected his prey at random, it was hard for the authorities to catch him. Because he wore disguises and moved around a lot, he was a ghost in the night.
He was free to kill as he pleased. When he pleased. Whoever he pleased.
But it was too easy. And after a while, he fantasized about killing even more people, of committing mass murder.
The idea appealed to his warped mind enormously and he worked on his plans to carry it out. At the same time, he carried on as normal with his regular killing spree, luring unsuspecting young boys to a grisly end at the tip of a sharp knife.
Young John Ivan Sabogal, on 22 April 1999, was going to be his undoing.
At 12 years old, he fought back bravely when Garavito tied him up, tortured and raped him. He was only saved when a passerby heard his cries for help, threw rocks at the attacker, and got brutally stabbed for his efforts.
Luckily, the two near victims evaded further harm and managed to escape alive.
Garavito was promptly caught and brought in for questioning, the police not initially convinced of his guilt. But the more they questioned him, the fewer straight answers they were getting. They probed further, looking into his past, his whereabouts whenever there had been a spike in sexual assaults and murders.
Over the 7 months that he was incarcerated the evidence began to mount against him, evidence that convinced the police that maybe, just maybe they had finally captured The Beast that they had been hunting since 1992.
What tied him undeniably to many of the killings was the DNA found on some of the corpses that were matched to the DNA taken from strands of hair in his cell, and a pair of unique glasses that not many people wore. On top of that the lead detective on the case, Aldemar Duran, interviewed Garavito’s last known girlfriend — and she gave him the suitcase that contained all the evidence he would ever need.
Inside, were photos of Garavito’s victims, a journal of his rapes and kills, and trophies.
On 28 October 1999, Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos, confessed to torturing, raping, and killing 172 victims across Colombia. He also confessed to crimes outside the country, and to some murders that they knew nothing about.
He was handed down the longest sentence in the history of Colombia, 1,853 years and 9 days, by a horrified judge and jury. This was further reduced to 40 years, then 22 when Garavito disclosed the whereabouts of some of his victims, those that he could remember, that is, there were so many.
In total, his spree of wanton sexual assault, mutilation, rape, and murder encompassed 221 souls.
Imprisoned within Valledupar, the maximum-security prison where he was incarcerated, his life was, unsurprisingly, in constant danger. He had to be separated from the other prisoners or he would be killed, serial rapists, and serial killers loathed by the other inmates.
But despite his crimes, The Beast would be eligible for parole in 2023.
He could be freed to start a new life or return to his old one. Either way, surely, The Beast was too wild a predatory animal to be unleashed upon the public, the risk too great.
To protect the public, it was imperative that Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubillos should be kept in a cage until his dying day.
If there was ever a good bone in the body of The Beast, it had been beaten out of him a long time ago, and nothing could be gained in releasing him into an unsuspecting population to go on the hunt ever again.