On October 30, 1999, Colombian announced that Luis Alfredo Garavito confessed to raping, torturing and killing 140 children in a five-year killing spree. "Luis Alfredo Garavito has admitted the murder of about 140 children of which we have so far found 114 skeleton," chief prosecutor Alfonso Gomez told a news conference. [ReadOn]

Pedro Lopez was the seventh child of thirteen, born in squalor to a prostitute in the village of Tolima, Colombia. Exiled from the family hovel at age eight, after his mother caught him fondling a younger sister, Pedro was picked up on the streets by a pedophile who offered food, a place to stay. Instead, the boy was taken into a deserted building and there sodomized, a trauma that apparently did lethal damage to his already-twisted psyche. [ReadOn]