10 Horrifying Serial Killers You've Never Heard Of
1. The Monster Of The Andes
Pedro Alonso López is a South American serial killer, thought to have raped and killed more than 350 girls across Colombia and Peru, but with a particular fondness for Ecuador.
According to Alonso López, he was on the streets by 8 years old and the victim of repeated sexual abuse. As a young man, he was imprisoned for car theft and brutally gang-raped: he would murder every last man who'd attacked him while still inside. Upon his release around 1976, he began the killings that would take over his life for the next few years.
Only active for a few years, López claimed to have raped and killed more than 100 young girls in Peru by 1978. He'd been caught by an Amerindian tribe and was nearly executed they'd buried him up to his neck and were smearing his head with syrup so that ants would eat him alive, when a US missionary stepped in on his behalf, saying she would hand him in to the proper authorities.
For reasons known only to herself, she let him go at the Colombian border, where he'd continue his murderous rampage, killing around three girls a week before moving to Ecuador where his predation would continue.
It was near Ambato in Ecuador in 1979 that a flash flood uncovered the recent grave of four children. Three had been strangled with such rage that their eyes had bulged out of their sockets. Shortly afterwards, with word of the bodies spreading around the town, López was caught approaching a young girl in a market in Ambato and held by market traders until the police arrived.
Confessing everything to an undercover policeman in his cell who claimed to be a fellow rapist, López admitted to the four killings and took police to the graves of another 53 in Ecuador alone, claiming that he'd killed far, far more.
But charging him with murders committed in Peru and Colombia would have been prohibitively expensive: López was convicted of raping and killing 110 young girls in Ecuador, and sentenced to the maximum Ecuadorian jail term of 16 years.
Unbelievably, he was released after serving just 14 years, having had his sentence cut by 2 years for good behaviour. However, he was arrested an hour later as an illegal immigrant and taken over the border back to Colombia. Colombian authorities picked him up shortly afterwards, detaining him over a further murder: he was declared insane and committed, but was released in 1998 on $50 bail, having been declared sane again.
Interpol have apparently issued an advisory for his rearrest since then, over a killing in 2002, but Pedro Alonso López, the Monster Of The Andes, hasn't been seen for seventeen years.