A story of unthinkable horror is unfolding in Colombia, where a man in police custody may turn out to be one of history's worst serial killers.Known at La Bestia (“The Beast”) Garavito is the world’s most extensive killer, having murdered upwards of as many as 300 victims. Taking advantage of the decades of civil war in Colombia, Garavito would target orphaned, poor, or homeless boys. He preyed mostly on street children (none older than 16) over a period of five years.
All of his alleged victims: children. CBS News correspondent Dave Browde reports.
Prosecutors in Bogota say Luis Garavito has confessed to killing 140 children in a five-year spree.
Garavito, 42, posed as a beggar, a cripple and occasionally a priest, detectives say. What he has confessed to has touched off searches in fields and graveyards all over Colombia.
World Worst Serial Killer Luis Garavito Video
Police say Garavito preyed primarily on the children of poor street vendors, many of whom had been left unattended on street corners and in parks.
For the past year and a half, Colombian police have been looking into disappearances of children all over the country. They say Garavito confessed after being confronted with evidence they describe as overwhelming. Detectives have found 114 bodies so far.
Many of the children's bodies were found tied up with identical nylon rope, with a liquor bottle nearby. Their throats had been cut and 'showing signs of having been tied up and mutilated,' prosecutor Alfonso Gomez told a news conference Friday.
Octopus box samsung cracked cell. Police say Garavito appears to be the worst serial killer in Colombia's history.
Until last November, police had few clues into a multi-year rash of child disappearances. It was then that the remains of 25 boys ages 8 through 16 were found in a ravine and an overgrown lot in Pereira, Gomez said.
That gruesome discovery, initially thought by local authorities to be the work of a satanic cult, prompted authorities to create a nationwide task force that began to encounter similarities between cases across the country, he said.
That effort turned up an arrest warrant for Garavito in a 1996 homicide case of a child in the city of Tunja.
At the time of his arrest in the provincial city of Villavicencio, where he is currently being held, Garavito was living under an assumed name, prosecutors said. He was arrested on suspicion of the attempted rape there in April of a 12-year-old boy.
Garavito moved around the country frequently after the killings began in 1994, and also spent time in Ecuador, where investigations are under way to determine whether he might be linked to child slayings in the neighboring country, the prosecutor said.
In several places where Garavito lived he earned nicknames, including 'Goofy', 'El Loco' and 'The Priest', Gomez said. Garavito was apparently abused as a child, and would undergo extensive psychological examinations, he said.
Colombia's chief prosecutor say Garavito won't actually be charged with the murders until the investigation is complete.
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