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. Homeless, terrified of strangers, Pedro slept in alleyways and empty village market stalls, drifting from town to town and living hand-to-mouth on the streets. In Bogota, an American family took Lopez in, providing him with free room and board, enrolling him in a day school for orphans. At age twelve, Pedro ran away after stealing money from the school, his flight allegedly precipitated by a teacher's sexual advances. Six years passed before the future "Monster of the Andes" left another mark on public records, this time charged and sent to prison for the theft of an automobile. On his second day behind bars, 18-year-old Lopez was gang-raped by four older inmates, a risk run by young men in jails the world over. Instead of reporting the crime, Lopez fashioned himself a crude knife and went out for revenge, killing three of his assailants in the next two weeks. Authorities describe the homicides as self-defense, and tacked a token two years onto Pedro's standing sentence. On release from prison, Lopez started stalking young girls with a vengeance; by 1978, the killer estimated he had raped and slain at least 100 in Peru. His specialty appeared to be abducting children from Indian tribes, but the technique backfired when he was captured by a group of Ayachucos, in northern Peru, while attempting to kidnap a nine-year-old girl. Lopez was beaten by his captors, stripped and tortured. The Ayachucos were prepared to bury him alive, when a female American missionary intervened, convincing Pedro's captors that they should deliver him to the police. They grudgingly agreed, and Lopez was deported within days, Peruvian authorities declining to waste valuable time on Indian complaints. Once more at liberty, Lopez began traveling widely through Colombia and Ecuador, selecting victims with impunity. A sudden rash of missing girls in three adjacent nations was ascribed to the activity of slavery or prostitution rings, but the authorities had no firm evidence, no suspects, prior to April 1980, when a flash flood near Ambato, Ecuador, uncovered bodies of four vanished children. Days later, Carvina Poveda observed Lopez leaving the Plaza Rosa marketplace with her 12-year-old daughter, Maria. Summoning help, she pursued him, and Lopez was captured by townspeople, held for police, who began to suspect that they might have a madman in custody. In the face of Pedro's continuing silence, police tried a different stratagem. Dressing a priest, Father Cordoba Gudino, in prison garb, they placed him in a cell with Lopez, leaving Gudino to win the suspect's confidence, swapping stories of real or imagined crimes late into the evening. At length, when the padre had heard enough, Lopez was confronted with the evidence of his own admissions and he broke down, making a full confession . Liaison with authorities in Peru and Colombia substantiated parts of the prisoner's grisly, almost incredible story. According to Pedro's best estimate, he had murdered at least 110 girls in Ecuador, perhaps 100 in Colombia, and "many more than 100" in Peru. "I like the girls in Ecuador," he told police. "They are more gentle and trusting, more innocent. They are not as suspicious of strangers as Colombian girls." In the course of his confessions, Lopez made an effort to invest his crimes with philosophical trappings. "I lost my innocence at age eight," he told interrogators, "so I decided to do the same to as many young girls as I could." Trolling village markets for selected targets with "a certain look of innocence," Lopez first raped his victims, then stared into their eyes as he strangled them, deriving sadistic pleasure from watching them die. Hunting by daylight, so darkness could not hide their death throes, Lopez allegedly sought out one victim immediately after another, his bloodlust becoming insatiable over time. Police were initially skeptical of their suspect's grandiose claims, but doubts evaporated after Lopez led detectives to 53 graves in the vicinity of Ambato, standing by in irons as they unearthed the remains of girls aged eight to twelve. At 28 other sites, searchers came up empty in the wake of raids by predatory animals, but the police were now convinced. Originally charged with 53 murders, Lopez saw the ante boosted to 110 as a result of his detailed confessions. As Major Victor Lascano, director of the Ambato prison, explained: "If someone confesses to 53 you find and hundreds more you don't, you tend to believe what he says." Lascano also told reporters, in response to questions, that "I think his estimate of 300 is very low, because in the beginning he cooperated with us and took us each day to three or four hidden corpses. But then he tired, changed his mind, and stopped helping." The change of heart occurred too late to let the "Monster of the Andes" off the hook. Convicted of murder in Ecuador, Lopez was sentenced to life imprisonment - a penalty that normally amounts to 16 years in custody. With time for good behavior, Lopez could be eligible for parole in 1990, but Colombia is waiting to receive him... and the penalty for murder there is death by firing squad . [ReadOn]