Pedro Lopez: The Monster of the Andes

Regardless of Pedro's apparent good fortune, as with everything else in his life, it was not meant to be. In 1963, at the age of 12, a male teacher sexually molested him at his day school. All of Pedro's previous fears were reborn and anger grew within him. Following the incident, he stole money from an office in the school and ran away from home.

Pedro returned to the only safe place he knew — his first true home, the streets of Colombia. The country's civil war was becoming a thing of the past and the cold war was nearly over. The government was reorganizing, and factories, which had been built during the depression, were slowly beginning to reopen. Nonetheless, Pedro had never been skilled in any trades and held only a minimal education. He spent the next six years of his life begging for food and committing petty thefts in order to survive.

By his mid-teens, Pedro began stealing cars to support himself. He had little to lose and local chop shops paid him well for his services. He was a very proficient car thief and was looked up to by younger apprentices of the trade.

In spite of his skills, in 1969, 18-year-old Pedro was arrested by authorities for car theft and sentenced to serve seven years in prison. He served just two days behind bars before being brutally gang-raped by four older inmates. Following this most recent attack, Pedro swore to himself that no one would ever touch him again. In retaliation, he fashioned a crude knife from prison utensils and spent the following two weeks getting his revenge by individually murdering each of the four men that had raped him. Authorities deemed the murders self-defense, and simply added an additional two years to Pedro's initial sentence for the car theft.

Prison time, combined with his previous hardships, did irreparable damage to Pedro's mind and seemed to have pushed him over the edge of what little sanity he still held dear. Due to mental abuse he endured at the hands of his mother during his early years, he had grown fearful of women. He found social intercourse with them impracticable, and fulfilled his desires through pornographic books and magazines. In Pedro's mind, his mother was to blame for all of his life's suffering and heartaches.