10 Serial Killers Who Got Away With It
9. Pedro Lopez
Number of murders: 300 upwards
Dates active: 1969-2002
Across Columbia, Peru, and Ecuador over a span of thirty years, Pedro Lopez abducted, sexually assaulted and killed over 300 young girls.
Lopez endured an early life of violence, homelessness, and sexual assault, which ultimately led him to be arrested for car theft when he was 21 years old. His first two murders were not in fact children; he killed two fully grown men with a makeshift knife, who had apparently sexually assaulted Lopez while in prison.
Upon his release, he turned his attention to little girls, luring them to remote areas and leaving their remains covered in newspaper or branches. At the peak of his killing spree in the 1970s he is said to have been slaughtering three children a week.
You might ask how can someone murder that many people and get away with it? Well, Lopez was actually arrested in 1980 after trying to lure a nine-year-old away from her mother. Over the following week, he led police to 53 graves - all of girls aged nine to twelve - and a flash flood revealed a remote mass grave uncovering many more bodies. He even posed for a camera with a skull of one of the children.
Horrifyingly, after only being locked up for 14 years, in 1998, he was released for ‘good behaviour’, aged 45, with a £50 bail, and deported to Columbia.
He is still out there today, and a warrant was actually issued in 2002 for Lopez's arrest in connection with a new murder that police linked to him, but he remains at large.