Serial killer murdered 300 children and had ‘tea parties’ with bodies | World | News

The whereabouts of one of history’s most evil and prolific serial killers is currently unknown, leaving a trail of unanswered questions in his awful wake. Pedro Alonso López, known as the “Monster of the Andes,” is suspected of murdering more than 300 young girls across South America in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Despite being convicted in Ecuador for 57 murders, he served just 14 years in prison and was released in 1994.

Born on October 5, 1948, in Tolima, Colombia, López had a traumatic childhood marked by sexual abuse and neglect. By the age of eight, he was living on the streets after being evicted by his mother for allegedly abusing his sister. When he was asked what his motivation had been for his horrific crimes, he chillingly said: “I lost my innocence at age of eight. So I decided to do the same to as many girls as I could.”  In 1969, López was sentenced to seven years in prison for motor vehicle theft. López’s killing spree escalated after his release from prison in 1978, primarily targeting girls aged nine to 12 – mainly street children and those from indigenous tribes – luring them with the promise of sweets and money into isolated areas where he would strangle or sexually assault them.

“I walked among the markets searching for a girl with a certain look on her face. A look of innocence and beauty,” the evil killer told a journalist in 1994. “She would be a good girl, always working with her mother. I followed them, sometimes for two or three days, waiting for the moment when she was left alone.”

He would kill on average three girls a week, whose bodies were dumped in shallow graves. He would even dig up some of his victims’ remains and have “tea parties” with their bodies, according to The Mirror.

In Ambato, Ecuador, authorities made a chilling discovery of a mass grave containing 53 victims, aged between eight and 13.

López later admitted to killing at least 110 girls in Ecuador, 100 in Colombia and an unknown number in Peru. He told police that other grave sites existed, but the police never found other bodies.

Arrested in Ecuador in 1980 after a failed abduction, López was sentenced for 57 murders. However, the authorities could only charge him with the murders he had committed in Ecuador, meaning he was sentenced to just 16 years – the maximum sentence length in the country at the time.

He was released two years early for “good behaviour” in 1994 before being deported to his native Colombia. He was briefly committed to a mental hospital, but since then, his location has been unknown.

Declared a fugitive, he was reportedly spotted once in 1999 when he renewed his citizen card – but was never officially found. More murders were uncovered that followed López’s methodology meant an international arrest warrant was issued for him soon after. An unidentified corpse was discovered in 2005, which forensic testing accepted could likely be López’s.

Officially, López’s has not been legally declared dead. If is alive today, he would now be 77 years old.