Pedro Alonso López’s Childhood
López was born in October 1948 during La Violencia period in Colombia, a 10-year civil war marked by extreme violence and an estimated 200,000 deaths.
López was one of 13 children of an impoverished prostitute, and like many serial killers, he claimed he experienced abuse and violence at the hands of his mother growing up. His mother denied this in A&E’s The Monster of the Andes: Pedro Lopez.
But he had already become the abuser at a young age. By the time he was 8, his mother tossed him on the streets for sexually assaulting one of his sisters, though in The Monster of the Andes: Pedro Lopez, his mother claimed he ran away.
While on the streets with other homeless children known as “gamines,” López got some support from an American missionary couple when he was 10. They helped him enroll in a school for orphans, where Lopez says he was molested by a teacher at age 12. He ran away and lived out his teenage years committing crimes just to survive. He was in and out of jail for theft and assault.
By the time he was 18, he was serving a four-year sentence in Modelo Prison in Bogotá for stealing a car. While in prison, López killed two inmates who raped him; the killings were deemed self-defense.
His difficult childhood helped set the stage for his descent into murder.
“López’s childhood traumas, dysfunctional household and itinerancy align with those of many other prolific serial sexual murderers,” Michael Arntfield, criminologist and professor at the University of Western Ontario, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
Arntfield says in López’s case, other factors played a role, including the social and political unrest in Colombia at the time, plus how he learned human sexual behavior and desires. “How he saw himself in the world and cultivated fantasies would have been shaped by these forces and led him to place great erotic value on violent and degrading acts,” Arntfield explains. “Examples of these criminal paraphilias include necrophilia, pedophilia and sadism. López exhibited all three.”
A 3-Year Killing Spree
Once López was released from Modelo Prison in 1978, he was in his 20s and began roaming throughout Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. He claimed to authorities it was between 1978 and 1980 that he kidnapped, raped and killed at least 100 young girls throughout the regions. López told Laytner he looked for girls “with a certain look on her face—a look of innocence and beauty."
“He went after a certain type," Dustin Dobbyn, a decorated U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran and retired law enforcement officer, tells A&E Crime + Investigation.
López lured his victims away from rural communities and marketplaces with small gifts and trinkets. He exploited their poverty and the weak child protection systems in isolated communities. He then took his victims to hidden spots with graves or shallow pits he’d already dug. Some contained the bodies of his other young victims.
There he would rape and kill them—mostly by strangulation. Sometimes he’d even prop up their lifeless bodies around the graves acting out macabre tea parties and talking to them until he “got bored and went out looking for new girls.”
“López was concealing his crimes, experimenting with different M.O.s, objectifying and ritualizing his victims as ‘dollies’ and then gleefully boasting of his crimes,” he says. “These are all in keeping with the tactics of a sexual psychopath and homicidal sexual sadist.”
López's horrific crimes came to light in 1980 after a flash flood in Ambato, Ecuador, caused a river to overflow. The bodies of four missing girls washed up on the riverbank. Three had been strangled.
A few days after the flood, a 12-year-old girl was with her mother at a local market when a man tried to abduct her. Her mother saw the man with her daughter and yelled for help. Locals chased the man down and held him until authorities arrived under suspicion for the murders of the missing girls.
Pedro Alonso López Confesses
While in custody in Ecuador in March 1980, López initially refused to cooperate, but he eventually confessed to investigators that he’d killed at least 110 girls in Ecuador, 100 in Colombia and “many more than 100” in Peru.
“I lost my innocence at age 8,” he told authorities, “so I decided to do the same to as many young girls as I could.”
Police were initially suspicious of López’s confessions. “It's very clear that he was narcissistic when he was caught; he was very proud of what he did,” Dobbyn says. “He was so narcissistic that they almost didn't believe him.” But López eventually took investigators to the graves of 53 of his victims.
López pled guilty to the murders of 110 girls in July 1980. He was sentenced to just 16 years in prison—the maximum sentence allowed by Ecuadorian law at the time. López was released from the Garcia Moreno prison in 1994 on good behavior after he served 14 years.
Why Pedro Alonso López Targeted His Victims
López likely selected these children because they were physically vulnerable, easier to manipulate and less capable of reporting abuse. Young victims also allowed him to maintain a sense of dominance and control.
“López knew that this vulnerable population was recurringly available under the social conditions, and that their disappearances wouldn’t immediately draw attention,” Arntfield says.
Most of the girls he targeted were from poor and Indigenous populations in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru where human trafficking took place, and child disappearances often received little to no attention from law enforcement.
“It comes down to the culture and the economy,” Dobbyn says. “Many people just thought the missing girls had been abducted and sex trafficked.”
Authorities in these countries also lacked the resources to track down a killer like López. He was a nomadic serial killer, moving across three countries, and investigators acknowledged that they struggled to share information, which delayed his detection.
Where Is Pedro Alonso López Now?
After his release in August 1994, López was extradited to Colombia because of an outstanding arrest warrant for an alleged murder from the late 1970s. Once in Bogotá, he was sent to the psychiatric hospital for a forensic psychological report. He stayed there for four years until he was deemed sane and was released in 1998 after paying a small bond of less than $100.
Then López largely vanished. His last reported sighting was a year later when renewed his citizenship card in Colombia. Interpol issued a warrant for López's arrest in 2002, but it was deactivated in 2005. Some investigators believe he may have died, though others suspect he could still be alive. López remains a fugitive.
“He may be protected by cartels or trafficking rings. He may have fled the country,” Dobbyn theorizes. “As narcissistic as he is, [if he’s still alive] it's very unlikely that he stopped because he had been caught and released so early, and that would only feed into his narcissistic behavior.”
