Pedro Alonso López (born 8 October 1948) is a Colombian serial killer, who was sentenced for killing 80 girls, but who claims to have raped and killed more than 300 girls across Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and potentially other countries.
López became known as the "Monster of the Andes" in 1980, when he led police to 53 graves in Ecuador, the victims all girls around nine to twelve years old. In 1983, he was found guilty of the murder of 110 girls in Ecuador. He further confessed to an additional 240 murders in Peru and Colombia.
López was released from a psychiatric hospital in 1998 for good behavior, after initially being found insane. As of 2018, his whereabouts are unknown.
An A&E Biography documentary reports that he was released from an Ecuadorian prison on 31 August 1994, then rearrested an hour later as an illegal immigrant and handed over to Colombian authorities, who charged him with a 20-year-old murder. He was declared insane and held in the psychiatric wing of a Bogotá hospital. In 1998, he was declared sane and released on $50 bail, subject to certain conditions. He later absconded. The same documentary says that Interpol released an advisory for his rearrest by Colombian authorities over a fresh murder in 2002.
Currently, there is mixed information of his whereabouts, one citation says he is in prison but does not state when and where he is incarcerated. Other articles referenced in the source/citations said his whereabouts are unknown (2017).
López's father, Midardo Reyes, was a member of the Colombian Conservative Party during La Violencia, Colombia's civil war. After an argument with his wife on 28 December 1947, Reyes cheated on her with a prostitute named Benilda López De Casteneda, who soon became pregnant by Reyes. On 4 April 1948, when Benilda was three months pregnant with López, Reyes was killed from a gunshot wound while defending a grocery store from a rebellious mob. Six months later, Pedro was born in Santa Isabel as the seventh of thirteen children.[citation needed]
According to López, witnessing acts of prostitution while growing up had disturbing affects on his psyche. Subsequently, his mother caught him fondling his younger sister in 1957, when he was eight years old, and evicted him from the family home. Following this, Pedro Lopez ran off to Bogotá, Colombia's capital city. He was picked up by a man, taken to a deserted house and repeatedly sodomized. At age twelve, he was taken in by an American family and enrolled in a school for orphans. He ran away after two years because he was allegedly molested by a male teacher. At 18, he stole cars for a living and sold the cars to local chop shops. These actions led to him getting caught by authorities later on in his life.
During his incarceration, he claimed that he was brutally gang-raped in prison and that he hunted down his rapists and killed them all while still incarcerated.
