Garavito’s childhood was diminished, but it was by much more than the pressures of being the oldest.
His father, Manuel Antonio Garavito, a man who should have been willing to lay down his life for his son rather than destroy him, was a rage-filled, aggressive house ruler who crushed his son’s spirit with regular, violent abuse that included rape.
“My dad did not sleep with my mom, he slept with me,” Garavito said. “He bathed me, he stroked me, he touched my private parts. He looked like an executioner.”
And not only did his father rape his son often, he also enlisted his friends to do the same.
Because of the regular assaults, he was seen as vulnerable outside the home as well, and two neighborhood men took advantage of the boy’s weaknesses and repeatedly raped him between the ages of six and 16, a time frame that would later become a key factor in Garavito’s murderous modus operandi.
Brutality beyond belief
Because he suffered regular abuse, Garavito’s childhood was not only fraught with responsibilities that included caring for and attempting to protect his younger siblings, but also with overwhelming physical and emotional pain.
At age 12, one rape was so brutal that Garavito later didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened to him at the hands of the neighborhood pharmacist, who bit his buttocks and penis, burned him with candle wax and tied him to the bed to reenact his favorite scenes from pornographic movies.
Like many rape victims who find this the most horrifying part of the act of violence, Garavito could not help but be aroused by the sexual activity at times, and it had an impact on his burgeoning sexuality.
“I began to feel an attraction towards people of the same sex,” Garavito later said, confessing to casual petting with his younger brothers in the months following his rapes.
And while he did not rape his brothers, later, the boys he encountered would pay for the crimes perpetrated against him in his youth.
“Rape was the key motivator within Garavito’s killing spree, and it is likely that his own experience of sexual abuse played a role in this,” Davies said. “Garavito wanted to put himself on the other side of the experience – he no longer wanted to be the victim or the vulnerable child; he wanted to be the one in control, the one with the power. Of course, not all people who have experienced sexual abuse go on to commit the atrocious acts that Garavito did, but along with his experiences and his biology, the rape he endured manifested into the rape and murder of what he once was – a young boy. In many ways, murdering these boys could have been Garavito’s attempt to ‘murder’ his own trauma.”
Without education, his future was grim
Garavito’s turbulent home life meant he rarely attended school, and he only had five years of education under his belt by the age of 16, when he left home to finally be free from the seemingly endless episodes of sexual assault.
His limited education made it difficult for Garavito as he set out on his own, but he managed to land a job as a store clerk.
Unfortunately, his past followed him, and in order to shut down the horrific memories of abuse that followed him by day and haunted him at night, he, like many others who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, began drinking more heavily to quiet his tumultuous thoughts.
Also unfortunate, Garavito became aggressive and belligerent when he drank, which meant he was never able to keep a job for long.
He developed a reputation as a troublemaker, which spread throughout the cities in which he lived, so he moved on regularly, never really settling down or putting down roots.
He became known as El Loco, meaning the crazy one, and he wandered aimlessly, working as a street vendor, selling prayer cards and other religious items to tourists and devout worshippers.
And this gypsy lifestyle, which kept him on the move and more difficult to track, is what made him so dangerous.
Suicide attempt leads to help
According to police records, a haunted Garavito attempted suicide at least once, which led to five years under the care of psychiatrists who attempted to help him put his childhood demons to rest.
On the surface, the treatment seemed to work.
From the outside looking in, Garavito was living a normal life. He established several long-term relationships with women, although they were likely platonic ones because of Garavito’s predilection for boys, and some of those women had children.
Much to the later surprise of authorities, not only did Garavito’s women friends never report any suspicions of abuse against their children, they said Garavito was gregarious and fun, especially when playing with the kids.
His secrets were so well-kept that none of these women ever knew that Garavito was harboring such dark secrets, or that his mind was filled with fantasies that would soon come terribly to life.
Chapter 2: Sexual sadist on the loose
Garavito’s fantasies began to manifest themselves as soon as he was out on his own, and the images in his head tortured him.
"Many times I saw minors coming to the supermarket to buy something, which gave me a desire, an urge to be with that minor, to stroke, to rape him,” he said.
It was then that he sought psychiatric help, and in 1984 even spent some time in a psychiatric hospital in hopes of squashing his urges, but once released, he learned that nothing at all had changed.
He turned to his father, the man who was ultimately responsible for Garavito’s troubled mind, but he became filled with rage over the things his son shared with him. Despite the origins of his son’s troubles, he tossed him out, again betraying his oldest child.
Garavito found himself in Trujillo, a Colombian city best known for a series of murders perpetrated between 1988 and 1994 by the Cali drug cartel, including the decapitation and castration of Father Tiberio Fernandez, a Jesuit priest. In all, hundreds of people were murdered as a warning to the guerrilla factions attempting to restore harmony in the region and tossed into the Cauca River.
Here, amid the turmoil and strife, Garavito met a woman in church and reportedly fell in love, although their relationship, like all his others with women, remained strictly platonic.
Still Garavito struggled to crush his feelings and suppress the pain he felt over the injustices of his childhood, turning to the worst possible form of self-medication.
“Garavito seemed to use alcohol to escape feelings of depression and yet it was when drunk that he committed most of his crimes. Alcohol has a tendency to exaggerate the emotion already being experienced – in this case, feelings of depression. This would have made Garavito much more likely to look for other means to escape these dark feelings. When intoxicated, people generally have fewer inhibitions, which is extremely dangerous in situations where the drinker is psychologically damaged,” Davies said.
Unfortunately for the young boys populating the streets of Colombia, alcohol allowed Garavito to turn his fantasies into gruesome reality, and here, in a place already ravaged by death, fear and despair, he began finding demented pleasure in sexually assaulting the boys of his choice.
Garavito was a savage beast
Once he finally began bringing his fantasies to life, Garavito was sadistically cruel.
His favorite movie was “The Silence of the Lambs,” which he watched again and again, and took cues from both the film and his horrific past.
Once he had captured a victim, he reveled in the torturous aspects of his act. He bit the nipples – removing a false tooth to create a bite that couldn’t easily be matched to his own - and burned the buttocks of his victims before brutally raping them, perhaps replaying what had happened to him as a child, perhaps escalating the violence he himself had experienced.
His tool kit included razors, candles and lighters that he used to torture his victims, along with old, dull knives that made shallow, painful but not fatal cuts.
“I felt good,” he said of his torturous routine.
The pain was more satisfying than the sex, it seems, because it was Garavi
to who was in control of his victim’s suffering, giving him an overwhelming sense of power, at least while his victim was still alive.
“They enjoy seeing the pain and suffering of another person, but the pain is just a tool that elicits the suffering that makes them feel godlike, and gives them an ego boost,” according to forensic psychologist Christie Kokonos. “But it’s a temporary fix, something they need to do again and again.”
Enticing his victims
According to authorities, Garavito often persuaded his child victims to walk with him to remote rural areas where he tied them up before torturing and killing them. He often dressed as a priest to generate a sense of trust, so his victims would willingly go with him without fear.
He would tie his victims so that they could move around enough to have hope that they might be able to get away, but escape was not to be.
Instead, he would rape his victims, then torture them until they died. After his victims were dead, he would dismember them and dispose of them, either by burying them or by filling trash bags with parts and weighing them down with stones so they would sink in various bodies of water.
Garavito was a messy, careless killer. At many of his crime scenes, he left behind a calling card or two, including empty bottles of the cheapest brand of local schnapps he could buy. Drunk on alcohol and power, Garavito left the empty bottles just like the corpses, openly at the scene of crime.
Garavito kept a journal chronicling his crimes, writing every detail so he could remember and revisit his torturous rape sessions after he’d finished. His journals also included bible verses, penned during those times when he felt a degree of guilt over his actions.
“They often keep journals about what they do so they can relive the crime and to delight in it again,” Kokonos said. “They may also take notes about what didn’t work and what did work, the exact events that took place, what their victim might have said to them, so they can relive the crime.”
But in the same way a porn addict may begin watching traditional pornography, then find themselves requiring darker, more sadistic sex scenes to experience the same levels of pleasure, the torture Garavito inflicted on his victims soon turned out to be not enough.
It didn’t help that he later confessed that there was a voice inside his head saying, “If you kill, many things will come to you.”
Chapter 3: The first kill
Garavito first began killing in 1992, almost by happenstance, when a young boy named Juan Carlos – who fit the profile that Garavito preferred perfectly - walked past the bar where Garavito was drinking in Santiago de Cali, home to a drug cartel that was considered the most powerful in the world.
It was October 6, 1992, and Carlos’s body was found three days later, tied with rope and brutally raped, his penis removed.
Six days later, the body of 12-year-old John Alexander Penaranda was found in similar fashion, only this time, Garavito cut off his fingers and toes in an attempt to shift suspicions to either a satanic cult or to make Penaranda appear to be the victim of social cleansing, a class-based killing performed to eliminate members of society that others might see as undesirable, including the homeless, criminals, street children, the elderly, and sex workers.
It was easy for Garavito to track down his victims, since the streets of Colombia were filled with boys who were struggling to survive.
“You don’t see many homeless adults in Colombia,” said Mark Chernick, director of Latin American studies at Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown University, in a Discovery Channel documentary. “You see homeless children. There’s a large population of street children. They disappear and no one notices.”
That sad part of Colombian culture meant it would take much longer for Garavito’s crimes to be noticed.
“These were poor kids that nobody cares about, and that is why this went on for so long before they did anything about it,” said street vendor Norma Garzon Duque, who was among those who did begin to notice that there were fewer young boys begging on the street corners. “'If it had been rich kids disappearing like that, the cops would have been on top of the case from the beginning.”
Garavito on the move
As soon as he began killing in 1992, Garavito moved frequently in an attempt to go unnoticed, and spent time in both Colombia and Ecuador.
It was while he was living as a vagabond that he found the women he established relationships with, living with them and caring for their children as a father figure, often sending money that he earned while traveling to at least one of those girlfriends.
So how was he able to turn off his urge to kill?
In general, serial killers have a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde personality, and there is a cooling off period between murders when they live completely normal lives with no urges to kill.
That allows them to live at times in relative peace and harmony, and suggests why Garavito, who was able to kill when traveling for work, was able to return home to women who were completely unsuspecting of his double life.
Escalating madness
Garavito had been cruel to his victims from the start, but as his fantasies grew more detailed, his crime scenes became more gruesome as well.
By 1993, he was developing a sordid signature that involved rape and the sadistic practice of disemboweling his victims before they died. He then decapitated them before disposing of the bodies.
According to experts, Garavito was such a prolific serial killer because he never quite got it right, and he continued to kill in search of creating what would be for him the perfect crime.
“His victim choice of young boys clearly points to the fact that he had a fantasy of becoming involved with young boys, and that he needed to become intimately involved with these young boys,” said Kokonos, who said that the method of binding and the disembowelments were ritualistic, and ultimately would serve as a way for authorities to not only link the crimes, but also help profile the killer. “This is someone who needs to feel godlike.”
But for Garavito, the actions of his victims, the way the sex or the torture was carried out, the dismembering of the bodies, usually didn’t work out exactly as he’d planned.
“The problem is, the fantasy is always perfect,” said forensic psychologist Kokonos. “You can fantasize it, and you will have it go down exactly the way you want, but in reality, it doesn’t work that way. In reality, the crime doesn’t quite meet the fantasy, so they have to commit the crime again.”
Chapter 4: The first crime scene
But despite his escalating depravity, Garavito was able to hide fairly well because he had established a detailed collection of disguises including the priest that allowed him to trick the young boys who most appealed to his deviant side.
In addition to pretending to be a man of the cloth, he would also lure his victims by offering them money or alcohol or a tasty treat from one of the local shops.
Garavito preferred light-skinned children, and he would often ask boys who fit his type to help him with various projects or odd jobs, including carrying crates of fruit, rounding up livestock or harvesting sugar cane, as a ruse.
He would tell them, “I have a small calves and I need help. I offered to pay them a thousand or five hundred pesos. Children believed me and went with me.”
This particular method gave him a chance to size his victims up, to see if they fulfilled the fantasy he had carefully crafted in his head.
Once he had gained their trust, he would seek out “remote places, inaccessible, wooded, that were away from home. Always away from home,” he said.
This way, there was a less likely chance that anyone would hear a child scream or cry or their frantic attempts to escape from what would inevitably end in rape and murder.
Garavito was sexually motivated, a trait that is common among serial killers, according to FBI profiler Robert Ressler, founder of the FBI’s behavioral science unit, which has since transformed the way authorities handle crime scenes and track killers.
“Sexual
elements are always involved,” added psychologist Dr. David Abrahamson. “All of what we call senseless or aimless violence, there is always a strong sexual element.”
A close call, then a grisly find
A few days after the boys from the sweet shop had disappeared, the body of another boy, a youngster named Ronald Delgado Quintero, was found, and a witness described a suspect who looked a lot like Garavito.
Police questioned him, but using his psychopathic charm, Garavito was amazingly able to convince police that he was being singled out because he was a handicapped street vendor, and officers eventually let him go.
By the end of 1996, Garavito’s list of victims – kept in a small black notebook as markings, a small slash for each one – had grown to 100, and he had no inclination to slow things down.
But in November of 1997, in Pereira, a city also known for its coffee trade as well as being Garavito’s hometown, children were caught playing with a skull, leading police to uncover a mass grave containing the bones of 36 victims, a grisly find that made headlines across Colombia.
A week later, another site was discovered, this one in a ravine alongside a river.
Police were hoping clues at the sites would help lead them to what they believed had to be several killers, and the ravine where police had found the second mass grave site did hold a few of them, including wax that initially had them thinking that the murders were the workings of a satanic cult.
The victims were hidden amid dense, thick terrain, so it was no surprise that Garavito was able to carry out his crimes unseen.
As the news of similar cases began pouring in, authorities realized the magnitude of the problem.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 41
